Books

In this foundational study, Friedrich Steinle compares the influential work of Ampere and Faraday to reveal the prominent role of exploratory experimentation in the development of science. Focusing on Ampere’s and Faraday’s research practices, reconstructed from previously unknown archival materials, this book considers both the historic and epistemological basis of exploratory experimentation—and its importance to scientific development.

Rosenberg explores Latin American artistic production concerned with the possibility of justice after the establishment, rise, and ebb of the human rights narrative around the turn of the last century. He grounds his study in discussions of literature, film, and visual art (novels of political refoundations, fictions of truth and reconciliation, visual arts based on cases of disappearance, films about police violence, artistic collaborations with police forces, and judicial documentaries). In doing so, he provides a highly original examination of the paradoxical demands on current artistic works to produce both capital value and foster human dignity.

City on Fire is a chronicle of progress and danger, that integrates urban environmental history with histories of technology, science, and medicine to reveal how Mexico City changed in response to the growing threat of fire in the urban center.

This volume reassesses the field of Chicana/o literary studies in light of the rise of Latina/o studies, the recovery of a large body of early literature by Mexican Americans, and the “transnational turn” in American studies. The chapters reveal how “Chicano” defines a literary critical sensibility as well as a political one, and show how this view can yield new insights about the status of Mexican Americans, the legacies of colonialism, and the ongoing prospects for social justice.

Castilho offers original perspectives on the political upheaval surrounding the process of slave emancipation in postcolonial Brazil. He shows how the abolition debates in Pernambuco transformed the practices of political citizenship and marked the first instance of a mass national political mobilization.

Based on a detailed examination of Kyrgyzstan, Johan Engvall goes well beyond the case of this single country to elaborate a broad theory of economic corruption in developing post-Soviet states regionally—as a rational form of investment market for political elites. He reveals how would-be officials invest in offices to obtain access to income streams associated with those offices. Drawing on extensive fieldwork Engvall details how these systems work and the major implications for political and economic development in the region.

In 1937 the Soviet Union sponsored a huge celebration on the centenary of Pushkin’s death, marking the turn toward a renewed Russian nationalism that would become full-blown a few years later.This is the first study of this major cultural event, and examines Soviet representations of Pushkin’s legacy in prose, poetry, drama, theater, painting, sculpture, film, the educational system and in the political realm.

The century from 1750 to 1850 was a period of dramatic transformations in world history, fostering revolutionary change beyond the political landscape. It was an era of rapidly expanding scientific investigation—and profound changes in scientific knowledge and practice also took place. In this volume, an esteemed group of international historians examines key elements of science in societies across Spanish America, Europe, West Africa, India, and Asia as they overlapped each other increasingly.

This edited volume offers new perspectives on the important work of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616), one of the first Latin American writers to present an intellectual analysis of pre-Columbian history and culture and the ensuing colonial period. To the contributors, Inca Garcilaso presented an early counter-hegemonic discourse and a reframing of the history of native cultures that undermined the colonial rhetoric of his time and the geopolitical divisions it purported.

A Negotiated Landscape examines the transformation of San Francisco’s iconic waterfront from the eve of its decline in 1950 to the turn of the millennium.

The 161 letters in this volume encompass a period of dramatic change for the young John Tyndall, who would become one of Victorian Britain’s most famous physicists. They begin in September 1843, in the midst of a fiery public conflict with the Ordnance Survey of England, and end in December 1849 with him as a doctoral student of mathematics and experimental science at the University of Marburg, Germany.

The 230 letters in this inaugural volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall chart Tyndall’s emergence into early adulthood, spanning from his arrival in Youghal in May 1840 as a civil assistant with just a year’s experience working on the Irish Ordnance Survey to his pseudonymous authorship of an open letter to the prime minister, Robert Peel, protesting the pay and conditions on the English Survey in August 1843.

Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley’s twenty previous collections, 1980-2014. Buckley’s poetry is unique in its use of current science and cosmology, recent facts and theories mixed in with a lyrical underpinning.

Despite Cultures examines the strategies and realities of the Soviet state-building project in Tajikistan during the 1920s and 1930s. As Kassymbekova reveals, the local ruling system was built upon an intricate network of individuals, whose stated loyalty to Communism was monitored through a chain of command that stretched from Moscow through Tashkent to Dushanbe/Stalinabad.

Winner of The 2015 Donald Hall Prize for PoetrySelected by Crystal Ann Williams

Hour of the Ox examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.