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Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self
Ernst Van Alphen
Harvard University Press

Since his death in April 12 Francis Bacon has been acclaimed as one of the very greatest of modern painters. Yet most analyses of Bacon actually neutralize his work by discussing it as an existential expression and as the horrifying communication of an isolated individual—which simply transfers the pain in the paintings back to Bacon himself. This study is the first attempt to account for the pain of the viewer.

It is also, most challengingly, an explanation of what Bacon’s art tells us about ourselves as individuals. For, during this very personal investigation, the author comes to realize that the effect of Bacon’s work is founded upon the way that each of us carves our identity, our “self,” from the inchoate evidence of our senses, using the conventions of representation as tools. It is in his warping of these conventions of the senses, rather than in the superficial distortion of his images, that Bacon most radically confronts “art,” and ourselves as individuals.

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Staging the Archive
Art and Photography in the Age of New Media
Ernst van Alphen
Reaktion Books, 2014
Dedicated to art practices that mobilize the model of the archive, Staging the Archive demonstrates the ways in which such “archival artworks” probe the possibilities of what art is and what it can do. Through a variety of media, methodologies and perspectives, the artists surveyed here also challenge the principles on which the notions of organization, evidence, and documentation are built. The earliest examples of the modern archival artwork were made in the 1930s, but only since the 1960s have artists really embraced archival principles to inform, structure, and shape their works. This includes practices that consist of archive construction, archaeological investigation, record keeping, and the use of archived materials, but also interrogations of the principles, claims, and effects of the archive.

Staging the Archive shows how artists read the concept of the archive against the grain, questioning not only what the archive is and can be but what materials, images, or ideas can be archived. Ernst van Alphen examines these archival artists and artworks in detail, setting them within their social, political, and aesthetic contexts. Exploring the works of Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Broodthaers, Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Fiona Tan, and Sophie Calle, among others, he reveals how modern and contemporary artists have used and contested the notion of the archive to establish new relationships to history, information, and data.
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Freedom and Tenure in the Academy
William W. Van Alstyne
Duke University Press, 1993
Questions of academic freedom--from hate speech to the tenure structure—continue to be of great urgency and perennial debate in American higher education. Originally published as a special issue of Law and Contemporary Problems (Summer 1990), this volume draws together leading scholars of law, philosophy, and higher education to offer a fresh assessment of the founding principles of academic freedom and to define this crucial topic for the 1990s.
The original 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which has been influential in determining institutional practices for the last half century, has required continual redefinition since its initial declaration. The volume begins with two overview articles: the most complete examination of the 1940 Statement ever provided (shedding light on some of its most troublesome clauses) and a historical review of the extent to which academic freedom has been accepted into domestic constitutional law. Subsequent articles address a range of issues related to academic freedom: the relationship between tenure and academic freedom; tenure and labor law; ideology and faculty selection; freedom of expression and the arts on campus; the boundaries defining hate speech and offensive expression; the clash between institutional and individual claims of academic freedom; and the practices of religious colleges in the United States.

Contributors. Ralph S. Brown, Matthew W. Finkin, Jordan E. Kurland, Michael W. McConnell, Walter P. Metzger, Robert M. O'Neil, David M. Rabban, Rodney A, Smolla, Janet Sinder, Judith Jarvis Thomson, William W. Van Alstyne

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Wild West Frisia
The Role of Domestic and Wild Resource Exploitation in Bronze Age Subsistence
Yvonne F. van Amerongen
Leiden University Press, 2017
Wild West Frisia reconstructs the daily lives of Bronze Age farmers and analyzes the separate components comprising Bronze Age subsistence (i.e. crop and animal husbandry, hunting and gathering) rather innovatively. Instead of summarizing the known data for each subsistence strategy and drawing conclusions solely based on these observations, this study first determines what may have been present yet perhaps is no longer visible. In doing so, the author learns that the exploitation of wild resources was perhaps just as important as crop domestication for those living in the Bronze Age.
 
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Dealing with Disasters from Early Modern to Modern Times
Cultural Responses to Catastrophes
Hanneke van Asperen
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
Disasters are as much cultural as natural phenomena. For centuries, news about catastrophic events has been disseminated through media such as chronicles, pamphlets, newspapers, poems, drawings, and prints. Nowadays, we are overwhelmed with news about the cataclysmic effects of recent forest fires, floods, and storms. Due to the ongoing climate crisis, extreme weather events will likely have ever greater impacts on our lives. This volume addresses cultural representations of catastrophes such as floods, epidemics, and earthquakes over the centuries. In the past as now, artists and authors try to make sense of disasters, grasp their impact, and communicate moral, religious, or political messages. These creations reflect and shape how people learn and think about disasters that occur nearby or far away, both in time and space. The parallels between past and present underline how this book contributes to modern debates about cultural and creative strategies in response to disasters.
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With Honor
Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics
Dale Van Atta
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
In 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, centrist Congressman Melvin Laird (R-WI) agreed to serve as Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense. It was not, Laird knew, a move likely to endear him to the American public—but as he later said, “Nixon couldn’t find anybody else who wanted the damn job.” For the next four years, Laird deftly navigated the morass of the war he had inherited. Lampooned as a “missile head,” but decisive in crafting an exit strategy, he doggedly pursued his program of Vietnamization, initiating the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel and gradually ceding combat responsibilities to South Vietnam. In fighting to bring the troops home faster, pressing for more humane treatment of POWs, and helping to end the draft, Laird employed a powerful blend of disarming Midwestern candor and Washington savvy, as he sought a high moral road bent on Nixon’s oft-stated (and politically instrumental) goal of peace with honor.
            The first book ever to focus on Laird’s legacy, this authorized biography reveals his central and often unrecognized role in managing the crisis of national identity sparked by the Vietnam War—and the challenges, ethical and political, that confronted him along the way. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Laird, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, and numerous others, author Dale Van Atta offers a sympathetic portrait of a man striving for open government in an atmosphere fraught with secrecy. Van Atta illuminates the inner workings of high politics: Laird’s behind-the-scenes sparring with Kissinger over policy, his decisions to ignore Nixon’s wilder directives, his formative impact on arms control and health care, his key role in the selection of Ford for vice president, his frustration with the country’s abandonment of Vietnamization, and, in later years, his unheeded warning to Donald Rumsfeld that “it’s a helluva lot easier to get into a war than to get out of one.”
 
Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
 
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Post-Passage Politics
Bicameral Resolution in Congress
Stephen D. Van Beek
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995

“Megabills” that package scores of legislative proposals into House and Senate bills are a phenomenon of the congressional reforms of the 1970s and the agenda changes of the 1980s. These bills generate unprecedented disagreements between the House and Senate, requiring congressional leaders, the president, committee chairs, and junior members to play new roles in this struggle for resolution.

Conference committees of hundreds of members, informal negotiations among party leaders, and preconference strategizing and behavior are among the new realities of bicameralism that are viewed in this study. These conferences are vital because they generally are the last arenas in which large-scale changes can be made in legislation.

Van Beek uses a case study approach that investigates the legislative histories of recent bills on the savings and loan bailout, the major trade bill of the late 1980s, and several budget reconciliation bills. His research is brought to life through personal experience as a legislative aide, direct observation of Congress at work, and interviews with members, staff and lobbyists.

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The Forge and the Funeral
The Smith in Kapsiki/Higi Culture
Walter E. A. van Beek
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Throughout Africa one craft among many stands out: that of the blacksmith. In many African cultures, smiths occupy a significant position, not just as artisans engaging in a difficult craft but also as special people. Often they perform other crafts, as well, and make up a somewhat separate group inside society. The Forge and the Funeral describes the position of the smith in the culture of the Kapsiki/Higi of northern Cameroon and northeastern Nigeria. Situated in the Mandara Mountains and straddling the border of these two countries, Kapsiki culture forms a specific and highly relevant example of the phenomenon of the smith in Africa. As an endogamous group of about 5 percent of the population, Kapsiki smiths perform an impressive array of crafts and specializations, combining magico-religious functions with metalwork, in particular as funeral directors, as well as with music and healing. The Forge and the Funeral gives an intimate description and analysis of this group, based upon the author’s four decades–long involvement with the Kapsiki/Higi. Description and analysis are set within the more general scholarly debates about the dynamics of professional closure—including the notions of caste and guild—and also consider the deep history of iron and brass in Africa.
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Exploring Logical Dynamics
Johan van Benthem
CSLI, 1996
This book is an exploration of current trends in logical theories of information flow across various fields, such as belief revision in computer science or dynamic semantics in linguistics. It provides one mathematical perspective encompassing all of these. This framework generates a new agenda of questions concerning dynamic inference and dynamic operators. The result is a mathematical theory of process models, simulations between these, and modal languages over them, which is developed in quite some detail. New results include theorems on expressive completeness, representation of styles of inference, and new kinds of decidable remodeling for standard logics. This theory is also confronted with practice in computer science, linguistics and philosophy.
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Modal Logic for Open Minds
Johan van Benthem
CSLI, 2010

In Modal Logic for Open Minds, Johan van Benthem provides an up-to-date introduction to the field of modal logic, outlining its major ideas and exploring the numerous ways in which various academic fields have adopted it. Van Benthem begins with the basic theories of modal logic, semantics, bisimulation, and axiomatics, and also covers more advanced topics, such as expressive power and computational complexity. The book then moves to a wide range of applications, including new developments in information flow, intelligent agency, and games. Taken together, the chapters show modal logic at the crossroads of philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, computer science, and economics. Most of the chapters are followed by exercises, making this volume ideal for undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy, computer science, symbolic systems, cognitive science, and linguistics.

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A Manual of Intensional Logic
2nd Edition
Johan van Benthem
CSLI, 1988
Intensional logic, as understood here, is based on the broad presupposition that so-called "intensional contexts" in natural language can be explained semantically by the idea of multiple reference. The text reviews tense, modality, and conditionals, then presents developments in intensional theory, including partiality and generalized quantifiers. JOHAN van BENTHEM is professor of mathematical logic at the University of Amsterdam.
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Interactive Logic
Selected Papers from the 7th Augustus de Morgan Workshop, London
Johan van Benthem
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
Traditionally, logic has dealt with notions of truth and reasoning. In the past several decades, however, research focus in logic has shifted to the vast field of interactive logic—the domain of logics for both communication and interaction. The main applications of this move are logical approaches to games and social software; the wealth of these applications was the focus of the seventh Augustus de Morgan Workshop in November 2005. This collection of papers from the workshop serves as the initial volume in the new series Texts in Logics and Games—touching on research in logic, mathematics, computer science, and game theory.
 
“A wonderful demonstration of contemporary topics in logic.”—Wiebe van der Hoek, University of Liverpool
 
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Knowledge and Culture in the Early Dutch Republic
Isaac Beeckman in Context
Klaas van Berkel
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The Dutch Republic around 1600 was a laboratory of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Here conditions were favourable for the development of new ways of knowing nature and the natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who was born in Middelburg in 1588, was a seminal figure in this context. He laid the groundwork for the strictly mechanical philosophy that is at the heart of the new science. Descartes and others could build on what they learned, directly or indirectly, from Beeckman. As previous studies have mainly dealt with the scientific content of Beeckman’s thinking, this volume also explores the wider social, scientific and cultural context of his work. Beeckman was both a craftsman and a scholar and fruitfully combined artisanal ways of knowing with international scholarly traditions. Beeckman’s extensive private notebook offers a unique perspective on the cultures of knowledge that emerged in this crucial period in intellectual history.
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The Laboratory Revolution and the Creation of the Modern University, 1830-1940
Klaas van Berkel
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
The modern research university originated in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, largely due to the creation and expansion of the teaching and research laboratory. The universities and the sciences underwent a laboratory revolution that fundamentally changed the nature of both. This revolutionary development began in chemistry, where Justus Liebig is credited with systematically employing his students in his ongoing research during the 1830s. Later, this development spread to other fields, including the social sciences and the humanities. The consequences for the universities were colossal. The expansion of the laboratories demanded extensive new building programs, reshaping the outlook of the university. The social structure of the university also diversified because of this laboratory expansion, while what it meant to be a scientist changed dramatically. This volume explores the spatial, social, and cultural dimensions of the rise of the modern research laboratory within universities and their consequent reshaping.
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The University of Groningen in the World
A Concise History
Klaas van Berkel
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
The University of Groningen has been an international university since its foundation in 1614. The first professors formed a rich international community, and many students came from outside the Netherlands, especially from areas now belonging to Germany. Internationalization, a popular slogan nowadays, is therefore nothing new, but its meaning has changed over time. How did the University of Groningen grow from a provincial institution established for religious reasons into a top-100 university with 36,000 students, of whom 25% come from abroad and almost half of the academic staff is of foreign descent? What is the identity of this four-century-old university that is still strongly anchored in the northern part of the Netherlands but that also has a mind that is open to the world? The history of the university, as told by Klaas van Berkel and Guus Termeer, ends with a short paragraph on the impact of the corona crisis.
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Inconvenient Heritage
Colonial Collections and Restitution in the Netherlands and Belgium
Jos van Beurden
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The discussion about objects, human remains and archives from former colonial territories is becoming increasingly heated. Over the centuries, a multitude of items – including a cannon of the King of Kandy, power-objects from DR Congo, Benin bronzes, Javanese temple statues, M.ori heads and strategic documents – has ended up in museums and private collections in Belgium and the Netherlands by improper means. Since gaining independence, former colonies have been calling for the return of their lost heritage. As continued possession of these objects only grows more uncomfortable, governments and museums must decide what to do. How did these objects get here? Are they all looted, and how can we find out? How does restitution work in practice? Are there any appealing examples? How do other former colonial powers deal with restitution? Do former colonies trust their intentions? The answers to these questions are far from unambiguous, but indispensable for a balanced discussion.
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Authentically African
Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture
Sarah Van Beurden
Ohio University Press, 2015

Together, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaire (IMNZ) in the Congo have defined and marketed Congolese art and culture. In Authentically African, Sarah Van Beurden traces the relationship between the possession, definition, and display of art and the construction of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy from the late colonial until the postcolonial era. Her study of the interconnected histories of these two institutions is the first history of an art museum in Africa, and the only work of its kind in English.

Drawing on Flemish-language sources other scholars have been unable to access, Van Beurden illuminates the politics of museum collections, showing how the IMNZ became a showpiece in Mobutu’s effort to revive “authentic” African culture. She reconstructs debates between Belgian and Congolese museum professionals, revealing how the dynamics of decolonization played out in the fields of the museum and international heritage conservation. Finally, she casts light on the art market, showing how the traveling displays put on by the IMNZ helped intensify collectors’ interest and generate an international market for Congolese art.

The book contributes to the fields of history, art history, museum studies, and anthropology and challenges existing narratives of Congo’s decolonization. It tells a new history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities.

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Regulating Political Parties
European Democracies in Comparative Perspective
Ingrid van Biezen
Amsterdam University Press
Regulating Political Parties provides a novel and valuable contribution to the existing literature on political parties by discussing the various dimensions of party law and regulation, in Europe and other regions of the world. To what extent are political parties legitimate objects of state regulation? What are the dilemmas of regulating political finance? To what extent are parties accorded a formal constitutional status? What are the consequences of legal bans on political parties? How do legal arrangements affect parties representing ethnic minorities? These and related questions are discussed and examined from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. By bringing together international experts from the disciplines of law and political science, this volume thus addresses from an interdisciplinary and comparative point of view what has long been a notable lacuna in the study of political parties.
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The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past
Curating Heritage, Art and Activism
Emma van Bijnen
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
Institutions across the globe are increasingly questioned on how their foundations are rooted in colonialism and how they aim to ‘decolonize’. The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices. It also explores possible futures: What can heritage institutions learn from (international) best practices regarding the ‘decolonization’ of museums? And what role can contemporary artistic practices take in these processes? Through a variety of essays, interventions, interviews, and a roundtable conversation, scholars and cultural practitioners address these complex questions.
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Global Games
Maarten Van Bottenburg
University of Illinois Press, 2001
Why is soccer the sport of choice in South America while baseball soared to popularity in the Caribbean? How did cricket become India's national sport? Why is China a stronghold of table tennis?

Maarten Van Bottenburg asserts that a hidden competition of social and international relations, rather than the particular qualities of a given sport, explains who plays what sport and why. Looking at Britain, Germany, the United States, and Japan, Van Bottenburg discusses how individual sports developed, what institutions and groups spread them to other nations, and why certain sports and not others found an international audience. As he shows, the nature of the relationship between the country of origin and the adopting country help determine how successfully a sport takes hold and to what degree new practitioners modify it. Other key factors include which groups dominated and promoted the various sports in their countries of origin, which groups appropriated them elsewhere, and the latter's positions within their society's class structure.

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The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons
Erica van Boven
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Departing from the present need for cultural models within the public debate, this volume offers a new contribution to the study of cultural icons. From the traditional religious icon to the modern mass media icon, from the recognizable visual icon to the complex entanglement of image and collective narratives: The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons offers an overview of existing theories, compares different definitions and proposes a comprehensive view on the icon and the iconic. Focusing in particular on the making of iconic representations and their changing social-cultural meanings through time, scholars from cultural memory studies, art history and literary studies present concrete operationalizations of the ways different types of cultural icons can be studied.
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Crossing Borders
Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-place of Cultures
Piet van Boxel
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2010

Crossing Borders tells the intriguing but largely unfamiliar story of the exchange of culture and knowledge between Jews and non-Jews in the Muslim and Christian worlds during the late Middle Ages as part of the preparation of Hebrew manuscripts.  The book is composed of ten narratives, each of which brings to light a different aspect of Jewish life in a non-Jewish medieval society—highlighting the practical cooperation, social interaction, and religious toleration that was surprisingly common between the groups involved in the early enterprise of book production.

            Alongside the narratives, Crossing Borders is beautifully illustrated with images from the Hebrew holdings at the Bodleian Library—one of the largest and most important collections of Hebrew manuscripts worldwide. The art includes Christian codex fragments from the third century, a copy of Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah signed by Maimonides himself, a thirteenth century German Jewish prayer book, and lavishly illuminated Spanish Bible manuscripts from the fifteenth century. This exquisitely illustrated book takes a fascinating look at the often-ignored role of Jews in the written transmission of culture and science throughout medieval Europe.

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Devotion of These Women
Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network
Deborah B. Van Broekhoven
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
During the 1830s, the small state of Rhode Island flourished as a center of radical abolitionism. Inspired by William Lloyd Garrison's call for immediate emancipation, some twenty-five anti-slavery societies were formed under the leadership of the African American communities in Providence and Newport, several energetic Baptist and Congregational clergymen, and the wealthy elder statesman of the New England Friends, Moses Brown.

Despite the efforts of these groups, by 1842 the antislavery movement in Rhode Island was nearly moribund, the unified hopes of earlier years having fallen victim to political wrangling. A year later the largest auxiliary in the state, the Providence Antislavery Society, turned its funds over to Amarancy Paine, who in concert with other women not only revived the abolitionist movement in the state but kept it running for another ten years.

This detailed study explores how and why women like Paine emerged from the background to resuscitate and lead the antislavery cause in Rhode Island. It suggests that women more than men were accustomed to working behind the scenes, informally and without much public recognition.

The crumbling of the male-centered organization revealed a previously invisible female-based structure of personal ties on which leaders were able to build the Rhode Island State Anti-Slavery Society. Because these informal ties crossed traditional racial, geographic, and gender-role boundaries, they were often tenuous and fragile. Nevertheless, by developing this network among themselves and then extending it to national leaders, a few dedicated women managed to continue a program of antislavery petitioning, meetings, and literature circulation.
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Eva
A Novel
Carry van Bruggen
University College London, 2019
“I let these years slip through my fingers like a stream of dry, glinting sand.” Eva is a coming-of-age story told in fluid, stream-of-consciousness prose that takes readers through the eponymous main character’s orthodox Jewish girlhood to marriage to, finally, independence and sexual freedom. Originally published in 1927 by Dutch writer Carry van Bruggen (1881–1932), the experimental novel expresses Eva’s dawning sense of self and expanding subjectivity. Burdened all of her life by feelings of shame, Eva overcomes this legacy of her upbringing at the end of the novel and declares that it is “bodily desire that makes love acceptable.”

For the first time, Jane Fenoulhet has made this important, modernist novel accessible to English-language readers, her deft translation capturing the rich expressiveness of van Bruggen’s original Dutch. In insightful accompanying commentary, Fenoulhet describes how, just as the novel depicts the becoming of both Eva and her creator, so too can the translation be seen as the translator’s own becoming. Fenoulhet also describes the challenges of translating van Bruggen’s dynamic, intense narrative, which necessitated deep personal engagement with the novel.
 
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Architecture and Society
Selected Essays of Henry Van Brunt
Henry Van Brunt
Harvard University Press
William A. Coles has assembled many hitherto overlooked essays of Henry Van Brunt (1832–1903), one of the most scholarly and distinguished architects of the late nineteenth century. The editor presents the first full-scale introduction to Van Brunt's life and thought, developing particularly his theory that the classical tradition was much more forceful than was felt by contemporaries such as Louis Sullivan and Montgomery Schuyler. More than two hundred photographs and drawings illustrate buildings and designs mentioned in the monograph and in the twenty-two essays, providing a rich panorama of the architecture of the period.
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Communication and Discourse Theory
Collected Works of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group
Leen Van Brussel
Intellect Books, 2019
This volume gathers the work of the Brussels Discourse Theory Group, a group of critical media and communication scholars that deploy discourse theory as theoretical backbone and analytical research perspective. Drawing on a variety of case studies, ranging from the politics of reality TV to the representation of populism, Communication and Discourse Theory highlights both the radical contingent nature and the hegemonic workings of media and communication practices. The book shows the value and applicability of discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA) within the field of media and communication studies.
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The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata
J. A. B. van Buitenen
University of Chicago Press, 1981
No other Sanskrit work approaches the Bhagavadgita in the influence it has exerted in the West. Philosophers such as Emerson and the other New England Transcendentalists were deeply affected by its insights, a dozen or more scholars, including Annie Besant and Mahatma Gandhi, have attempted its translation, and thousands of individuals struggling with the problems divided loyalties have found comfort and wisdom in its pages.

The Bhagavadgita ("Song of the Lord") tells of the young and virtuous Prince Arjuna who is driven to lead his forces into battle against an opposing army composed of close relatives and others whom he loves. The Lord Krsna, appearing in the poem as Arjuna's friend and charioteer, persuades him that he must do battle, and we see Arjuna changing from revulsion at the thought of killing members of his family to resignation and awareness of duty, to manly acceptance of his role as warrior and defender of his kingdom.

The Bhagavadgita is a self-contained episode in the Mahabharata, a vast collection of epics, legends, romances, theology, and metaphysical doctrine that reflects the history and culture of the whole of Hindu civilization. The present edition forms a part of J. A. B. van Buitenen's widely acclaimed translation of this great work. Here English and Sanskrit are printed on facing pages, enabling those with some knowledge of Sanskrit to appreciate van Buitenen's accurate rendering of the intimate, familial tone and directness of the original poem.

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The Mahabharata, Volume 1
Book 1: The Book of the Beginning
J. A. B. van Buitenen
University of Chicago Press, 1973
The Mahabharata, an ancient and vast Sanskrit poem, is a remarkable collection of epics, legends, romances, theology, and ethical and metaphysical doctrine. The core of this great work is the epic struggle between five heroic brothers, the Pandavas, and their one hundred contentious cousins for rule of the land. This is the first volume in what will ultimately become a multi volume edition encompassing all eighteen books.
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The Mahabharata, Volume 2
Book 2: The Book of Assembly; Book 3: The Book of the Forest
J. A. B. van Buitenen
University of Chicago Press, 1975
The Mahabharata, an ancient and vast Sanskrit poem, is a remarkable collection of epics, legends, romances, theology, and ethical and metaphysical doctrine. The core of this great work is the epic struggle between five heroic brothers, the Pandavas, and their one hundred contentious cousins for rule of the land. This is the second volume of van Buitenen's acclaimed translation of the definitive Poona edition of the text. Book two, The Book of the Assembly Hall, is an epic dramatization of the Vedic ritual of consecration that is central to the book. Book three, The Book of the Forest, traces the further episodes of the heroes during their years in exile. Also included are the famous story of Nala, dealing with the theme of love in separation, and the story of Rama, the subject of the other great Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, as well as other colorful tales.
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The Mahabharata, Volume 3
Book 4: The Book of the Virata; Book 5: The Book of the Effort
J. A. B. van Buitenen
University of Chicago Press, 1978
The Mahabharata, an ancient and vast Sanskrit poem, is a remarkable collection of epics, legends, romances, theology, and ethical and metaphysical doctrine. The core of this great work is the epic struggle between five heroic brothers, the Pandavas, and their one hundred contentious cousins for rule of the land. This is the third volume of van Buitenen's acclaimed translation of the definitive Poona edition of the text. Book 4, The Book of Virata, begins as a burlesque, but the mood soon darkens amid molestation, raids, and Arjuna's battle with the principal heroes of the enemy. Book 5, The Book of the Effort, relates the attempts of the Pandavas to negotiate the return of their patrimony. They are refused so much as a "pinprick of land," and both parties finally march to battle.
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Tales of Ancient India
J. A. B. van Buitenen
University of Chicago Press, 1969
"This admirably produced and well-translated volume of stories from the Sanskrit takes the Western reader into one of the Golden Ages of India. . . . The world in which the tales are set is one which placed a premium upon slickness and guile as aids to success. . . . Merchants, aristocrats, Brahmins, thieves and courtesans mingle with vampires, demi-gods and the hierarchy of heaven in a series of lively or passionate adventures. The sources of the individual stories are clearly indicated; the whole treatment is scholarly without being arid."—The Times Literary Supplement

"Fourteen tales from India, newly translated with a terse and vibrant effectiveness. These tales will appeal to any reader who enjoys action, suspense, characterization, and suspension of disbelief in the supernatural."—The Personalist
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Silver “Thieves," Tin Barons, and Conquistadors
Small-Scale Mineral Production in Southern Bolivia
Mary Van Buren
University of Arizona Press, 2024
The Spanish conquest of Peru was motivated by the quest for precious metals, a search that resulted in the discovery of massive silver deposits in what is now southern Bolivia. The enormous flow of specie into the world economy is usually attributed to the Spanish imposition of a forced labor system on the Indigenous population as well as the introduction of European technology. This narrative omits the role played by thousands of independent miners, often working illegally, who at different points in history generated up to 30 percent of the silver produced in the region. In this work, Mary Van Buren examines the long-term history of these workers, the technology they used, and their relationship to successive large-scale mining.

The methods of historian Bertell Ollman, particularly a dialectical approach and “doing history backwards,” are used to examine small-scale mineral production in Porco, Bolivia. The research is based on nine seasons of archaeological fieldwork and historical research, with a particular focus on labor and technology. Van Buren argues that artisanal mineral production must be understood in relation to large-scale mining rather than as a traditional practice and that the Bolivian case is a culturally specific instantiation of a broader economic phenomenon that began under colonial regimes.
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Woody Plants of Utah
A Field Guide with Identification Keys to Native and Naturalized Trees, Shrubs, Cacti, and Vines
Renee Van Buren
Utah State University Press, 2011

A comprehensive guide that includes a vast range of species and plant communities and employs thorough, original keys. Based primarily on vegetative characteristics, the keys don't require that flowers or other reproductive features be present, like many plant guides. And this guide's attention to woody plants as a whole allows one to identify a much greater variety of plants. That especially suits an arid region such as Utah with less diverse native trees. Woody plants are those that have stems that persist above ground even through seasons that don't favor growth, due to low precipitation or temperatures.

Woody Plants of Utah employs dichotomous identification keys that are comparable to a game of twenty questions. They work through a process of elimination by choosing sequential alternatives.

Detailed, illustrated plant descriptions complement the keys and provide additional botanical and environmental information in relation to a useful introductory categorization of Utah plant communities. Supplementary tools include photos, distribution maps, and an illustrated glossary.

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Master Drawings of the Italian Renaissance
Claire Van Cleave
Harvard University Press, 2007

A beautifully designed selection of the finest Italian Renaissance drawings from the British Museum, the Louvre and other French public collections, giving remarkable insight into the creative processes of some of the greatest artists in history.

This book features masterpieces of Italian Renaissance drawings from the British Museum, the Louvre and other French public collections in Lille, Rennes and Chantilly.

Beginning with an examination of drawing as part of the creative process, and showing how it reveals the artist's mind at work, the author explains in detail the materials and techniques used in Renaissance drawings. It also considers how drawings were used, how they changed stylistically through the period and how they varied in different regions of Italy. It concludes with a brief look at connoisseurship and collecting.

The main body of the book showcases 112 of the finest drawings by more than 40 Italian Renaissance masters, including Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, accompanied by a concise sketch of the life and work of each artist. Arranged chronologically, they reveal stylistic and geographical trends as well as personal interactions between the artists themselves, and provide an extraordinary insight in to the artistic world of Renaissance Italy.

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City of the Big Shoulders
An Anthology of Chicago Poetry
Ryan G. Van Cleave
University of Iowa Press, 2012
Chicago has served as touchstone and muse to generations of writers and artists defined by their relationship to the city’s history, lore, inhabitants, landmarks, joys and sorrows, pride and shame. The poetic conversations inspired by Chicago have long been a vital part of America’s literary landscape, from Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks to experimental writers and today’s slam poets. The one hundred contributors to this vibrant collection take their materials and their inspirations from the city itself in a way that continues this energetic dialogue.

The cultural, ethnic, and aesthetic diversity in this gathering of poems springs from a variety of viewpoints, styles, and voices as multifaceted and energetic as the city itself. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz: “I want to eat / in a city smart enough to know that if you / are going to have that heart attack, you might / as well have the pleasure of knowing // you’ve really earned it”; Renny Golden: “In the heat of May 1937, my grandfather / sits in the spring grass of an industrial park / with hundreds of striking steelworkers”; Joey Nicoletti: “The wind pulls a muscle / as fans yell the vine off the outfield wall, / mustard-stained shirts, hot dog smiles, and all.”

The combined energies of these poems reveal the mystery and beauty that is Second City, the City by the Lake, New Gotham, Paris on the Prairie, the Windy City, the Heart of America, and Sandburg’s iconic City of the Big Shoulders.

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A Slaveholders' Union
Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic
George William Van Cleve
University of Chicago Press, 2010

After its early introduction into the English colonies in North America, slavery in the United States lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.  But increasingly during the contested politics of the early republic, abolitionists cried out that the Constitution itself was a slaveowners’ document, produced to protect and further their rights. A Slaveholders’ Union furthers this unsettling claim by demonstrating once and for all that slavery was indeed an essential part of the foundation of the nascent republic.

In this powerful book, George William Van Cleve demonstrates that the Constitution was pro-slavery in its politics, its economics, and its law. He convincingly shows that the Constitutional provisions protecting slavery were much more than mere “political” compromises—they were integral to the principles of the new nation. By the late 1780s, a majority of Americans wanted to create a strong federal republic that would be capable of expanding into a continental empire. In order for America to become an empire on such a scale, Van Cleve argues, the Southern states had to be willing partners in the endeavor, and the cost of their allegiance was the deliberate long-term protection of slavery by America’s leaders through the nation’s early expansion. Reconsidering the role played by the gradual abolition of slavery in the North, Van Cleve also shows that abolition there was much less progressive in its origins—and had much less influence on slavery’s expansion—than previously thought.

Deftly interweaving historical and political analyses, A Slaveholders’ Union will likely become the definitive explanation of slavery’s persistence and growth—and of its influence on American constitutional development—from the Revolutionary War through the Missouri Compromise of 1821.

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We Have Not a Government
The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution
George William Van Cleve
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In 1783, as the Revolutionary War came to a close, Alexander Hamilton resigned in disgust from the Continental Congress after it refused to consider a fundamental reform of the Articles of Confederation. Just four years later, that same government collapsed, and Congress grudgingly agreed to support the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, which altered the Articles beyond recognition. What occurred during this remarkably brief interval to cause the Confederation to lose public confidence and inspire Americans to replace it with a dramatically more flexible and powerful government? We Have Not a Government is the story of this contentious moment in American history.

In George William Van Cleve’s book, we encounter a sharply divided America. The Confederation faced massive war debts with virtually no authority to compel its members to pay them. It experienced punishing trade restrictions and strong resistance to American territorial expansion from powerful European governments. Bitter sectional divisions that deadlocked the Continental Congress arose from exploding western settlement. And a deep, long-lasting recession led to sharp controversies and social unrest across the country amid roiling debates over greatly increased taxes, debt relief, and paper money. Van Cleve shows how these remarkable stresses transformed the Confederation into a stalemate government and eventually led previously conflicting states, sections, and interest groups to advocate for a union powerful enough to govern a continental empire.

Touching on the stories of a wide-ranging cast of characters—including John Adams, Patrick Henry, Daniel Shays, George Washington, and Thayendanegea—Van Cleve makes clear that it was the Confederation’s failures that created a political crisis and led to the 1787 Constitution. Clearly argued and superbly written, We Have Not a Government is a must-read history of this crucial period in our nation’s early life.
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The Deaf History Reader
John Vickrey Van Cleve
Gallaudet University Press, 2007

The Deaf History Reader presents nine masterful chapters that bring together a remarkably vivid depiction of the varied Deaf experience in America. This collection features the finest scholarship from a noteworthy group of historians, including Reginald Boyd, Barry A. Crouch, Mary French, Brian H. Greenwald, Harlan Lane, Harry G. Lang, Kent R. Olney, Richard Pillard, Jill Hendricks Porco, Michael Reis, and volume editor John Vickrey Van Cleve.

The incisive articles collected here include an exploration of the genesis of the Deaf community and early evidence of the use of sign language; a comparison of a failed, oralist school for deaf students in Virginia to the success of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut; the development of Deaf consciousness among people who carried a dominant gene for deafness; a biographical sketch of Mary Ann Walworth Booth, an accomplished deaf woman who lived on the Western frontier; an account of Deaf agency in the Indiana Institution and the Evansville Day School; the early antecedents of mainstreaming deaf children despite the objections of their parents; a profile of Alexander Graham Bell that contrasts his support of eugenics to his defense of Deaf rights; the conflicting actions of supervisors of the Pennsylvania Society for the Advancement of the Deaf; and finally, the critical role played by deaf people in the Chicago Mission for the Deaf’s success in maintaining the Deaf community for more than five decades. The remarkably rich range of topics treated in The Deaf History Reader assure its future status as a standard resource for all Deaf scholars and students.

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Deaf History Unveiled
Interpretations from the New Scholarship
John Vickrey Van Cleve
Gallaudet University Press, 1999
Deaf History Unveiled features 16 essays, including work by Harlan Lane, Renate Fischer, Margret Winzer, William McCagg, and other noted historians in this field. Readers will discover the new themes driving Deaf history, including a telling comparison of the similar experiences of Deaf people and African Americans, both minorities with identifying characteristics that cannot be hidden to thwart bias.

       Other studies track societal paternalism toward deaf people in Italy, Hungary, and the United States. Adding to its intrigue, the new research in this milestone study provides evidence for previously uncredited self-determination of Deaf people in establishing education, employment, and social structures common throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Historians, teachers, and students alike will prize Deaf History Unveiled as a singular collection of insights that will change historical perspectives on the Deaf experience worldwide.
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Genetics, Disability, and Deafness
John Vickrey Van Cleve
Gallaudet University Press, 2004

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand begins this wide-ranging volume with an essay that extols diversity and warns of the dangers of modifying the human genome. Nora Groce reviews the ways that societies have defined disability and creates an interpretive framework for discussing the relationship between culture and disability.

     In essays devoted to historical perspective, Brian H. Greenwald comments upon the real “toll” taken by A. G. Bell’s insistence upon oralism, while Joseph J. Murray weighs the nineteenth-century debate over whether deaf-deaf marriages should be encouraged. John S. Schuchman’s chilling account of deafness and eugenics in the Nazi era adds wrenching reinforcement to the impetus to include disabled people in genetics debates.

     Mark Willis offers an intensely personal reflection on the complexities of genetic alteration, addressing both his heart condition and his blindness in surprisingly different ways. Anna Middleton extends Willis’s concepts in her discussion of couples currently considering the use of genetic knowledge and technology to select for or against a gene that causes deafness.

     In the part on the science of genetics, Orit Dagan, Karen B. Avraham, Kathleen S. Arnos, and Arti Pandya clarify the choices presented by genetic engineering, and geneticist Walter E. Nance emphasizes the importance of science in offering individuals knowledge from which they can fashion their own decisions. In the concluding section, Christopher Krentz raises moral questions about the ever-continuing search for human perfection, and Michael Bérubé argues that disability should be considered democratically to ensure full participation of disabled people in all decisions that might affect them.

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A Place of Their Own
Creating the Deaf Community in America
John Vickrey Van Cleve
Gallaudet University Press, 1989

Using original sources, this unique book focuses on the Deaf community during the 19th century. Largely through schools for the deaf, deaf people began to develop a common language and a sense of community.

       A Place of Their Own brings the perspective of history to bear on the reality of deafness and provides fresh and important insight into the lives of deaf Americans.

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Black Swan
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002
Winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Prize
Selected by Marilyn Nelson
Finalist, 2003 Paterson Poetry Prize

"Imagine Leda black—" begins Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s exciting new collection of poems. Mixing vernacular language with classical mythology, modern struggles with Biblical trials, she gives voice to silenced women past and present.

In Van Clief-Stefanon’s powerful voice, last night’s angry words "puffed / into the dark room like steam / punching through the thick surface / of cooking grits." She remembers a child’s innocence "lost / in the house where I learned the red rug / against my chest, my knees / my tongue, . . . ." Black Swan is filled with pain, loss, hope, and the promise of salvation.
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Open Interval
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009
Drawing upon intersections of astronomy and mathematics, history, literature, and lived experience, the poems in Open Interval locate the self in the interval between body and name.
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Purchase
Poems
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024
Purchase is for those who are grieving, who feel frightened by the world’s meanness, who are solitary. It is for those who, even in the midst of mourning, find themselves distracted from despair by the natural world. It is for everyone looking to find comfort and understanding. From a hidden river in upstate New York to a massive flood in Kentucky, currents of all strengths run through these poems, taking the reader through grief, estrangement, and the too-often unseen interiority of Black women, landing at a new perspective, the light of faith dawning. 
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Struggling Upward
Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel
Timothy J. Van Compernolle
Harvard University Press
Struggling Upward reconsiders the rise and maturation of the modern novel in Japan by connecting the genre to new discourses on ambition and social mobility. Collectively called risshin shusse, these discourses accompanied the spread of industrial capitalism and the emergence of a new nation-state in the archipelago. Drawing primarily on historicist strategies of literary criticism, the book situates the Meiji novel in relation to a range of texts from different culturally demarcated zones: the visual arts, scandal journalism, self-help books, and materials on immigration to the colonies, among others. Timothy J. Van Compernolle connects these Japanese materials to topics of broad theoretical interest within literary and cultural studies, including imperialism, gender, modernity, novel studies, print media, and the public sphere. As the first monograph to link the novel to risshin shusse, Struggling Upward argues that social mobility is the privileged lens through which Meiji novelists explored abstract concepts of national belonging, social hierarchy, and the new space of an industrializing nation.
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The Uses of Memory
The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyō
Timothy J. Van Compernolle
Harvard University Press, 2006

The pioneering writer Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896) has been described as “the last woman of old Japan,” a consummate stylist of classical prose, whose command of the linguistic and rhetorical riches of the premodern tradition might suggest that her writings are relics of the past with no concern for the problems of modern life.

Timothy Van Compernolle investigates the social dimensions of Ichiyō’s artistic imagination and argues that she creatively reworked the Japanese literary tradition in order to understand, confront, and critique the emerging modernity of the Meiji period. For Ichiyō, the classical canon was a reservoir of tropes and paradigms that could be reshaped and renewed as a way to explore the sociopolitical transformations of the 1890s and cast light upon the human costs of modernization.

Drawing critical momentum from the dialogical theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, the author explores in five of Ichiyō’s best known stories how traditional rhetoric and literary devices are dialogically engaged with discourses associated with modernity within the pages of Ichiyō’s narratives. In its close, sensitive readings of Ichiyō’s oeuvre, The Uses of Memory not only complicates the scholarly discussion of her position in the Japanese literary canon, but also broaches larger theoretical issues.

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The Friendly Liquidation of the Past
The Politics of Diversity in Latin America
Donna Lee Van Cott
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000
Based on interviews with more than 100 participants, Van Cott demonstrates how social issues were placed on the constitutional reform agenda and transformed into the nation’s highest law. She follows each reform for five years to assess early results of what she calls an emerging model of multicultural constitutionalism.
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Utah Place Names
A Geopgraphic Guide to the Origins of Geographic Names, a Compilation
John Van Cott
University of Utah Press, 1991
Poverty Flat. Bearskin Gulch. Drunken Hollow. Soberville. Hogup Mountain. Lousy Jim Creek. Hey Hoe Canyon. Snake John Reef. Sob Rapids. Nipple Butte. Tooele. Laverskin. Skutumpah. All Utah toponyms, or place names. Where are they? What is their history? Their importance? Are they, or where they populated? Do they exist today? And always, The name. how did they get it? Who provided it? When? What does it mean? Is Centerville in the center, and of what? Was Notom named for a rejected suitor?

John W. Van Cott has spend the better part of a lifetime searching out the answers to these questions. Now the fruits of his labor are recorded in this, the most extensive compilation of Utah place names ever published. Almost five thousand toponyms are listed alphabetically, marking the passage of peoples and cultures from earliest times. Specialists will appreciate the geographical precision of Section, Township, Range, and altitude. Generalists will recognize counties and relationships to know features. All will delight in the rich lore, often a mixture of myth and history, of the place and its name. Scholars will find useful the inclusion of synonyms, nicknames, previous names, all cross-referenced, and all tied to a bibliography of over five hundred entries.

The author concluded his work of over forty years with the observation that he hardly touched the surface of Utah’s place names, numbered at over twenty-two thousand by the U.S. Geological Survey.
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Chinese Poetry and Translation
Rights and Wrongs
Maghiel van Crevel
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs offers fifteen essays on the triptych of poetry + translation + Chinese. The collection has three parts: "The Translator's Take," "Theoretics," and "Impact." The conversation stretches from queer-feminist engagement with China's newest poetry to philosophical and philological reflections on its oldest, and from Tang- and Song-dynasty classical poetry in Western languages to Baudelaire and Celan in Chinese. Translation is taken as an interlingual and intercultural act, and the essays foreground theoretical expositions and the practice of translation in equal but not opposite measure. Poetry has a transforming yet ever-acute relevance in Chinese culture, and this makes it a good entry point for studying Chinese-foreign encounters. Pushing past oppositions that still too often restrict discussions of translation-form versus content, elegance versus accuracy, and "the original" versus "the translated" - this volume brings a wealth of new thinking to the interrelationships between poetry, translation, and China.
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Command in War
Martin Van Creveld
Harvard University Press, 1985

Many books have been written about strategy, tactics, and great commanders. This is the first book to deal exclusively with the nature of command itself, and to trace its development over two thousand years from ancient Greece to Vietnam. It treats historically the whole variety of problems involved in commanding armies, including staff organization and administration, communications methods and technologies, weaponry, and logistics. And it analyzes the relationship between these problems and military strategy.

In vivid descriptions of key battles and campaigns—among others, Napoleon at Jena, Moltke’s Königgrätz campaign, the Arab–Israeli war of 1973, and the Americans in Vietnam—Martin van Creveld focuses on the means of command and shows how those means worked in practice. He finds that technological advances such as the railroad, breech-loading rifles, the telegraph and later the radio, tanks, and helicopters all brought commanders not only new tactical possibilities but also new limitations.

Although vast changes have occurred in military thinking and technology, the one constant has been an endless search for certainty—certainty about the state and intentions of the enemy’s forces; certainty about the manifold factors that together constitute the environment in which war is fought, from the weather and terrain to radioactivity and the presence of chemical warfare agents; and certainty about the state, intentions, and activities of one’s own forces. The book concludes that progress in command has usually been achieved less by employing more advanced technologies than by finding ways to transcend the limitations of existing ones.

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Conscience
A Biography
Martin van Creveld
Reaktion Books, 2015
Many consider conscience to be one of the most important—if not the fundamental—quality that makes us human, distinguishing us from animals, on one hand, and machines on the other. But what is conscience, exactly? Is it a product of our biological roots, as Darwin thought, or is it a purely social invention? If the latter, how did it come into the world?

In this biography of that most elusive human element, Martin van Creveld explores conscience throughout history, ranging across numerous subjects, from human rights to health to the environment. Along the way he considers the evolution of conscience in its myriad, occasionally strange, and ever-surprising permutations. He examines the Old Testament, which—erroneously, it turns out—is normally seen as the fountainhead from which the Western idea of conscience has sprung. Next, he takes us to meet Antigone, the first person on record to explicitly speak of conscience. We then visit with the philosophers Zeno, Cicero and Seneca; with Christian thinkers such as Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, and, above all, Martin Luther; as well as modern intellectual giants such as Machiavelli, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Individual chapters are devoted to Japan, China, and even the Nazis, as well as the most recent discoveries in robotics and neuroscience and how they have contributed to the ways we think about our own morality. Ultimately, van Creveld shows that conscience remains as elusive as ever, a continuously mysterious voice that guides how we think about right and wrong.  
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Emerson's Ethics
Gustaff Van Cromphout
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Everyone knows that Emerson was a moralist, but what does that really mean? In an attempt to answer that question, Gustaaf Van Cromphout provides in Emerson's Ethics a detailed and philosophically grounded discussion of Emerson's moral thought. In this first comprehensive study of Emerson's ethics in the broader context of ethical theory, Van Cromphout explores Emerson's answers to what he considered the basic question facing any thinking human being: "How should I live?"

Van Cromphout begins by examining Emerson's college essays on ethics—essays that reflect his response to the moral thought prevailing in his intellectual environment. He then discusses the mature Emerson's attempt to establish ethics on a surer foundation than the religion inherited from his forebears, showing that Emerson was influenced significantly by Kant's moral thought.

He goes on to examine Emerson's search for a morally competent self in an age when the very notion of "self" was under serious threat. The ethical dimension of Emerson's politics and his theories of friendship and love, as well as the quest for a life worth living in the modern world, are also addressed. The last chapters are devoted to nature and literature. Van Cromphout explores Emerson's understanding of nature as a focus of ethical responsibility, and he examines the corruptibility of language, the ethics of self- expression, and the moral responsibilities of writers toward their audiences. Emerson believed that ethics permeated every aspect of human life. By examining Emerson's understanding of ethics and his contribution to ethical thought, Emerson's Ethics shows one of the truly great minds in American culture confronting issues of fundamental relevance to all human beings. Filling an important gap in Emerson studies, this book will appeal not only to readers interested in Emerson and his significance in American thought and literature but also to readers concerned with ethics and, more generally, with the interrelations of literature and philosophy.

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The Riddle of Literary Quality
A Computational Approach
Karina van Dalen-Oskam
Amsterdam University Press, 2023
What is literature? Can we measure ‘literariness’ in texts themselves? The innovative Computational Humanities project The Riddle of Literary Quality asked thousands of Dutch readers for their opinion about contemporary Dutch and translated novels. The public shared which novels they had read, what they really thought of them, and how they judged their quality. Their judgments of the same novels were compared with the results of computational analysis of the books. Using evidence from almost 14,000 readers and building on more textual data than ever before, Van Dalen-Oskam and her team uncovered unconscious biases that shed new light on prejudices many people assumed no longer existed. This monograph explains in an accessible way how the project unfolded, which methods were used, and how the results may change the future of Literary Studies.
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Gum Arabic
The Golden Tears of the Acacia Tree
Dorrit van Dalen
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Gum Arabic has been seen as a symbol of the “noble Orient” and later as a symbol of trouble. It is the hardened sap of varieties of acacia trees which grow exclusively in the Sahel, an area stretching across the African continent just south of the Sahara. From the time of the Crusades, when Europeans purchased it in Arab countries, it has played an ever-growing role in the global economy. It is now a common ingredient in foods, sodas, and cosmetics. Combining cultural history with travel writing, Dorrit van Dalen follows the fascinating history and shifting meanings assigned to gum Arabic from Shakespeare to Bin Laden and from the Industrial Revolution to a veteran of a recent coup d’état in Chad. She shows that both Western and African civilisations would not be the same without these tears of the acacia.
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Theoretical Perspectives on Fan Scholarship in the Franchise Era
Sophie Charlotte van de Goor
Amsterdam University Press

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Spitting Image
Kara van de Graaf
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Kara van de Graaf’s debut collection heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary poetry. Through poems that balance personal recollection with ekphrasis, science, and meditation, Van de Graaf searches for answers in the fluctuating relationship between the body and the self.
 
Taking as its primary theme the exploration of the female body in current culture, Spitting Image considers the myriad intersections of the body and gender, desire, relationships, and otherness. Van de Graaf interrogates underrepresented elements of the female experience, especially the physical, rhetorical, and aesthetic limitations of fatness in poetry and other arts. She then complicates those limitations through her use of innovative forms and imaginative verse, implicitly calling for poetry to engage with the female form in fresh ways. Throughout, Van de Graaf’s poems ask: In a time where we have more agency to define ourselves than ever before, what barriers still remain? What do our bodies mean to who we are?
 
At turns oblique and direct, Van de Graaf’s poems strive to create space for themselves not only in the field of contemporary poetry but also in a larger world that has been prone to ignoring or shaming women for their bodies. That these poems succeed on both counts is a testament to this remarkable new poet, who claims “That millimeter of space that means / all of us are apart, that means / we can never really touch / anything. . . . Yes, I want that, too.”
 
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Ecstatic Encounters
Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real
Mattijs van de Port
Amsterdam University Press, 2011

For over a hundred years, writers, artists, anthropologists and tourists have travelled to Bahia, Brazil, in search of the spirit possession cult called Candomblé. Thus, successive generations of cultists have seen a long, steady stream of curious outsiders coming to their temples with notebooks and cameras, questions and inquisitive gazes, or ogling eyes and the hope of inclusion. This study asks what seduced these outsiders to seek access to the Afro-Brazilian religious universe and, conversely, how did cultists respond to the overwhelming interest in their creed and to becoming an object of the outsiders’ imaginations.

“Thriving in the gap between the sensuous fullness of life and the impossibility of its cultural representation, Ecstatic Encounters opens mind-blowing vistas for 'writing culture' in anthropology today.”— Birgit Meyer, Free University of Amsterdam.
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Henry van de Velde
Selected Essays, 1889–1914
Henry van de Velde
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
The first English collection of writings by Henry van de Velde, one of the most influential designers and theorists of the twentieth century.
 
Belgian artist, architect, designer, and theorist Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) was a highly original and influential figure in Europe beginning in the 1890s. A founding member of the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements, he also directed the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, Germany, which eventually became the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius.
 
This selection of twenty-six essays, translated from French and German, includes van de Velde’s writings on William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement, Neo-Impressionist painting, and relationships between ornament, line, and abstraction in German aesthetics. The texts trace the evolution of van de Velde’s thoughts during his most productive period as a theorist in the artistic debates in France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Katherine M. Kuenzli expertly guides readers to see how van de Velde’s writings reconcile themes of aesthetics and function, and expression and reason, throughout the artistic periods and regions represented by these texts. With introductory discussions of each essay and full annotations, this is an essential volume for a broad range of scholars and students of the history of fine and applied arts and ideas.
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China at War
Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China
Hans van de Ven
Harvard University Press, 2018

China’s mid-twentieth-century wars pose extraordinary interpretive challenges. The issue is not just that the Chinese fought for such a long time—from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 1937 until the close of the Korean War in 1953—across such vast territory. As Hans van de Ven explains, the greatest puzzles lie in understanding China’s simultaneous external and internal wars. Much is at stake, politically, in how this story is told.

Today in its official history and public commemorations, the People’s Republic asserts Chinese unity against Japan during World War II. But this overwrites the era’s stark divisions between Communists and Nationalists, increasingly erasing the civil war from memory. Van de Ven argues that the war with Japan, the civil war, and its aftermath were in fact of a piece—a singular process of conflict and political change. Reintegrating the Communist uprising with the Sino-Japanese War, he shows how the Communists took advantage of wartime to increase their appeal, how fissures between the Nationalists and Communists affected anti-Japanese resistance, and how the fractious coalition fostered conditions for revolution.

In the process, the Chinese invented an influential paradigm of war, wherein the Clausewitzian model of total war between well-defined interstate enemies gave way to murky campaigns of national liberation involving diverse domestic and outside belligerents. This history disappears when the realities of China’s mid-century conflicts are stripped from public view. China at War recovers them.

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Big Books in Times of Big Data
Inge van de Ven
Leiden University Press, 2019
This book explores the aesthetics, medial affordances, and cultural economics of monumental literary works of the digital age and offers a comparative and cross-cultural perspective on a wide range of contemporary writers. Using an international archive of hefty tomes by authors such as Mark Z. Danielewski, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård, George R.R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and William T. Vollmann, van de Ven investigates multiple strands of bigness that speak to the tenuous position of print literature in the present but also to the robust stature of literary discourse within our age of proliferating digital media. Her study makes a case for the cultural agency of the big book—as a material object and a discursive phenomenon, entangled in complex ways with questions of canonicity, materiality, gender, and power. Van de Ven takes us into a contested terrain beyond the 1,000-page mark, where issues of scale and reader comprehension clash with authorial aggrandizement and the pleasures of binge reading and serial consumption.
 
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Making Ends Meet
Farm Women's Work in Manitoba
Charlotte van de Vorst
University of Manitoba Press, 2002
Based on hundreds of interviews with Manitoba farm men and women, Making Ends Meet reconstructs the common history shared by modern farm women as well as by their mothers and grandmothers. It explores women's changing roles on the farm, from the early days of the Red River settlement to the twentieth-century farm community. The women's own stories reveal their ingenuity and tenacity in "making ends meet" through economies, shared, labour, and generation of new resource income as varied as raising poultry and custom woodworking. These stories prove that the contributions of farm women have been vital in establishing and maintaining the family farm, and are critical to its continued survival.
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Regulating Menstruation
Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations
Etienne van de Walle
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Menstruation, seen alternately as something negative—a "curse" or a failed conception—or as a positive part of the reproductive process to be celebrated as evidence of fertility, has long been a universal concern. How women interpret and react to menstruation and its absence reflects their individual needs both historically as well as in the contemporary cultural, social, economic, and political context in which they live. This unique volume considers what is known of women's options and practices used to regulate menstruation—practices used to control the periodicity, quantity, color, and even consistency of menses—in different places and times, while revealing the ambiguity that those practices present.

Originating from an Internet conference held in February 1998, this volume contains fourteen papers that have been revised and updated to cover everything from the impact of the birth control pill to contemporary views on reproduction to the pharmacological properties of various herbal substances, reflecting the historical, contemporary, and anthropological perspectives of this timely and complex issue.

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Black Camelot
African-American Culture Heroes in Their Times, 1960-1980
William L. Van Deburg
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In the wake of the Kennedy era, a new kind of ethnic hero emerged within African-American popular culture. Uniquely suited to the times, burgeoning pop icons projected the values and beliefs of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and reflected both the possibility and the actuality of a rapidly changing American landscape.

In Black Camelot, William Van Deburg examines the dynamic rise of these new black champions, the social and historical contexts in which they flourished, and their powerful impact on the African-American community.

"Van Deburg manages the enviable feat of writing with flair within a standardized academic framework, covering politics, social issues and entertainment with equal aplomb."—Jonathan Pearl, Jazz Times

"[A] fascinating, thorough account of how African-American icons of the 1960s and '70s have changed the course of American history. . . . An in-depth, even-tempered analysis. . . . Van Deburg's witty, lively and always grounded style entertains while it instructs."—Publishers Weekly
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Hoodlums
Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life
William L. Van Deburg
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali. When you think of African American history, you think of its heroes—individuals endowed with courage and strength who are celebrated for their bold exploits and nobility of purpose. But what of black villains? Villains, just as much as heroes, have helped define the black experience.

Ranging from black slaveholders and frontier outlaws to serial killers and gangsta rappers, Hoodlums examines the pivotal role of black villains in American society and popular culture. Here, William L. Van Deburg offers the most extensive treatment to date of the black badman and the challenges that this figure has posed for race relations in America. He first explores the evolution of this problematic racial stereotype in the literature of the early Republic—documents in which the enslavement of African Americans was justified through exegetical claims. Van Deburg then probes antebellum slave laws, minstrel shows, and the works of proslavery polemicists to consider how whites conceptualized blacks as members of an inferior and dangerous race. Turning to key works by blacks themselves, from the writings of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois to classic blaxploitation films like Black Caesar and The Mack, Van Deburg demonstrates how African Americans have combated such negative stereotypes and reconceptualized the idea of the badman through stories of social bandits—controversial individuals vilified by whites for their proclivity toward evil, but revered in the black community as necessarily insurgent and revolutionary.

Ultimately, Van Deburg brings his story up-to-date with discussions of prison and hip-hop culture, urban rioting, gang warfare, and black-on-black crime. What results is a work of remarkable virtuosity—a nuanced history that calls for both whites and blacks to rethink received wisdom on the nature and prevalence of black villainy.
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New Day in Babylon
The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975
William L. Van Deburg
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The most comprehensive account available of the rise and fall of the Black Power Movement and of its dramatic transformation of both African-American and larger American culture. With a gift for storytelling and an ear for street talk, William Van Deburg chronicles a decade of deep change, from the armed struggles of the Black Panther party to the cultural nationalism of artists and writers creating a new aesthetic. Van Deburg contends that although its tactical gains were sometimes short-lived, the Black Power movement did succeed in making a revolution—one in culture and consciousness—that has changed the context of race in America.

"New Day in Babylon is an extremely intelligent synthesis, a densely textured evocation of one of American history's most revolutionary transformations in ethnic group consciousness."—Bob Blauner, New York Times

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award, 1993
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Information Sharing
Reference and Presupposition in Language Generation and Interpretation
Kees van Deemter
CSLI, 2002
This book introduces the concept of information sharing as an area of cognitive science, defining it as the process by which speakers depend on "given" information to convey "new" information—an idea crucial to language engineering. Where previous work in information sharing was often fragmented between different disciplines, this volume brings together theoretical and applied work, and joins computational contributions with papers based on analyses of language corpora and on psycholinguistic experimentation.
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Semantic Ambiguity and Underspecification
Kees van Deemter
CSLI, 1996
Kees van Deemter and Stanley Peters Subject: Linguistics; Semantics; Ambiguity
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The Exemplifying Past
A Philosophy of History
Chiel van den Akker
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
This book addresses a wide range of philosophical problems about history and the semantics of time. The point of departure is the distinction between events under the description of past witnesses and their contemporaries and events under the description of historians. Its main claim is that a thesis on the past is exemplified rather than being justified by the available evidence. Such thesis, the book argues, retroactively becomes concrete in the past under consideration. This book will not only appeal to philosophers and historians, but to students and scholars across the humanities.
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The Modern Idea of History and its Value
An Introduction
Chiel van den Akker
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This is an original and accessible introduction to the modern idea of history and its value, and an indispensable companion to the study of history and its philosophical underpinnings. The book answers two basic questions: What is history? And what is its value? It also shows how the answers to these questions are mutually dependent. The old view that history is the teacher of life, for instance, assumes that the past is a reservoir of examples from which moral lessons for the present can be drawn. The subjects discussed include history as the teacher of life, the need for truth and objectivity, the moral standards of the historian, realism and the value of historical insight, historical explanation and understanding, the intelligibility of the historical process, the tragedy of history, the politics of history-writing, and the close connection between history, narrative, and the desire for justice. These topics are discussed with the help of inspiring and influential historians and philosophers such as Thucydides, Ranke, Hegel, Nietzsche, Collingwood, Arendt, White, Hunt, and Ankersmit.These topics are discussed with the help of inspiring and influential historians and philosophers such as Thucydides, Ranke, Hegel, Nietzsche, Collingwood, Arendt, White, Hunt, and Ankersmit.
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Museums in a Digital Culture
How Art and Heritage Become Meaningful
Chiel van den Akker
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
The experience of engaging with art and history has been utterly transformed by information and communications technology in recent decades. We now have virtual, mediated access to countless heritage collections and assemblages of artworks, which we intuitively browse and navigate in a way that wasn't possible until very recently. This collection of essays takes up the question of the cultural meaning of the information and communications technology that makes these new engagements possible, asking questions like: How should we theorise the sensory experience of art and heritage? What does information technology mean for the authority and ownership of heritage?
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Time, History and Ritual in a K'iche' Community
Contemporary Maya Calendar Knowledge and Practices in the Highlands of Guatemala
Paul van den Akker
Leiden University Press, 2018

This work analyzes ritual practices and knowledge related to the Mesoamerican calendar with the aim of contributing to an understanding of the use and conceptualization of this calendar system in the contemporary K’iche’ community of Momostenango in the Highlands of Guatemala. The research presented here discusses the indigenous calendar system, forms of synergy between the Christian and the Highland Guatemalan calendar, the indigenous perception of history, and continuity in time-related symbolism.

Van den Akker argues that the social role of cultural anthropologists and archaeologists is to contribute to the ongoing process of cultural healing and spiritual recovery of the peoples that suffer(ed) from colonization and oppression. This study therefore places an emphasis on cultural continuity and approaches the continuation of Maya calendar practices as a possible tool for restoring breaks in social memory, which are caused by dramatic events such as colonization.

Throughout this book it is argued that time is an authority which directs human behavior in a cyclical manner through the landscape on a local and regional scale. Time is related to morality and cultural values, and a shared perception of time contributes to the cohesion of the community as it recreates and reaffirms the identity of its members by reiterating their shared social conventions and history. Finally, the conjunction of time and ritual provides a tool to overcome the rupture caused by death and to transmit messages from generation to generation over a long span of time.

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Mediated Modeling
A System Dynamics Approach To Environmental Consensus Building
Marjan van den Belt
Island Press, 2004

Mediated modeling is an innovative new approach that enhances the use of computer models as invaluable tools to guide policy and management decisions. Rather than having outside experts dispensing answers to local stakeholders, mediated modeling brings together diverse interests to raise the shared level of understanding and foster a broad and
deep consensus. It provides a structured process based on system dynamics thinking in which community members, government officials, industry representatives, and other stakeholders can work together to produce a coherent, simple but elegant simulation model.

Mediated Modeling by Marjan Van Den Belt is a practical guide to participatory modeling for both practitioners and students, one that is firmly theoretically grounded in the field of systems dynamics and environmental modeling. Five in-depth case studies describe the successful use of the technique in a variety of settings, and a final chapter synthesizes the lessons highlighted by the case studies.

Mediated Modeling's step-by-step description of the techniques and practical advice regarding implementation offer a real-world solution for all those seeking to make sound decisions about the environment.


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Ancient Egypt
Cradle of Early Christianity
Tjeu van Den Berk
Eburon Academic Publishers, 2021
Traces the sources of the Christian religion to ancient Egypt.

The earliest Christian myths emerged in the melting pot of gnostic Alexandria—not in orthodox Jerusalem, classical Athens, or legalistic Rome. In this book, Tjeu van den Berk traces the sources of the Christian faith to the banks of the river Nile. Focusing on ancient archetypes, van den Berk underscores the striking similarities between the Egyptian and Christian religions. In this fascinating study, he explores the symbolism of the Trinity, the cross, and the myths of a god born of a virgin. He also traces the origins of the stories of Lazarus and Saint George, and he finds stunning parallels between Egyptian mythology and the Book of Revelation. 
 
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Civil and Corrupt Asia
Image and Text in the Itinerario and the Icones of Jan Huygen Van Linschoten
Ernst van den Boogaart
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1562-1611) was a Dutchman who, in 1596, penned the famous Itinerario, an account of his travel to the Indian Peninsula and its eastern surroundings that described the inhabitants of this vast region and quickly became a travel guide for everyone going there. Van Linschoten is held as a key eyewitness of the Portuguese-Asian empire at its height, and as one who worked to shift the center of European expansion from the Iberian peninsula and Italy to the Netherlands and England. In 1604 he published an abridged version, the Icones et Habitus Indorum, which contained 36 of the engravings from the Itinerario together with Latin captions.

Divine and Spoiled Asia reproduces these engravings and their captions (in English), together with an extensive analysis of them by historian Ernst van den Boogaart. In addition to providing unparalleled insights into early modern European views of the East, the engravings also contain valuable depictions of the peoples, customs, and flora and fauna of late sixteenth-century India and neighboring countries.

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Battery Management Systems and Inductive Balancing
Alex Van den Bossche
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2022
The application areas of batteries are currently booming. The recent generation of devices combines a high energy density with a reasonable cost and life expectancy, making them suitable not only for cars but also electric bikes, scooters, forklifts, gardening and household tools, storage batteries as well as airborne applications such as drones, helicopters, and small airplanes.
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Branding Books Across the Ages
Strategies and Key Concepts in Literary Branding
Helleke van den Braber
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
As marketing specialists know all too well, our experience of products is prefigured by brands: trademarks that identify a product and differentiate it from its competitors. This process of branding has hitherto gained little academic discussion in the field of literary studies. Literary authors and the texts they produce, though, are constantly 'branded': from the early modern period onwards, they have been both the object and the initiator of a complex marketing process. This book analyzes this branding process throughout the centuries, focusing on the case of the Netherlands. To what extent is our experience of Dutch literature prefigured by brands, and what role does branding play when introducing European authors in the Dutch literary field (or vice versa)? By answering these questions, the volume seeks to show how literary scholars can account for the phenomenon of branding.
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Moral Sentiments in Modern Society
A New Answer to Classical Questions
Gabriël van den Brink
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Since the time of Adam Smith, scholars have tried to understand the role moral sentiments play in modern life, an issue that became especially urgent during and after the 2008 global financial crisis. Previous explanations have ranged from the idea that modern society is built on moral values to the notion that modernization results in moral decay. The essays in this interdisciplinary volume use the example of Dutch society and a wealth of empirical data to propose a novel theory about the ambivalent relation between contemporary life and human nature. In the process, the contributors argue for the need to reject simplistic explanations and reinvent civil society.
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Tasting Spain
A Culinary Tour
H. M . van den Brink
Haus Publishing, 2017
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part cookbook, this addition to the Haus Armchair Traveller series offers a dynamic journey through Spain, one where the focus is on culinary delights found everywhere from Madrid’s cafes to Barcelona’s fish markets.

H. M. van den Brink paints an evocative scene of everyday life in Spain. Readers see the urban shop windows displaying famous serrano ham and Spanish sweet cakes, taste crispy pigs’ ears along with rich chickpea soup, and smell the strong coffee and steaming tortillas often enjoyed while breakfasting outdoors. An appealing blend of historical background and personal recollections, Tasting Spain shapes a lively account of the country and its culture, both in the city and out in the countryside. From exquisite restaurants to private settings, this is a book about eating—meals that Van den Brink has enjoyed solo or with friends—and about the vivid and sustaining memories such meals can create.

“I am not a cook, nor a historian, nor a critic,” writes Van den Brink. “I am just an eater.” With Tasting Spain, he opens new vistas on Spanish cuisine that will tickle the taste buds of readers and leave them hungry for more of this beautiful land.
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The ABC of Work Motivation
How to Energize Any Organization
Anja van den Broeck
Amsterdam University Press, 2024
What are the innate and universal ingredients to stimulate employee well-being and performance? This book will help you learn more about these, based on the latest research in motivational science. Motivation is the key to our lives. Whether at work, at home, at school or on the sports field, we constantly need to find ways to motivate ourselves and those we support. What if, instead of motivational tricks, we could rely on a positive, universal, and surprisingly simple point of view: that of Self-Determination Theory? Validated by science, this approach is based on the principle that people have a natural tendency to invest themselves, but they just need to be psychologically nourished, so they feel autonomous and competent, and belonging in the right place. No stick, carrot or other form of control has the power and quality of this source of energy that allows people to grow and make them happy. Packed with examples and lists of questions to help us move from theory to practice, this book will change the way we are and the way we do things. Step by step, it explains the principles of Self-Determination Theory and the research that led to their discovery, and invites us to apply them for the greater well-being of ourselves and our colleagues or subordinates. This book is one of the first to present this analysis that is valued the world over, as witnessed by the four international experts who co-authored it.
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Ostrannenie
On "Strangeness" and the Moving Image. The History, Reception, and Relevance of a Concept
Annie van den Oever
Amsterdam University Press

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Technè/Technology
Researching Cinema and Media Technologies, their Development, Use and Impact
Annie van den Oever
Amsterdam University Press
Techne;/Technology offers a penetrating, close look at the origins of the term techne;, which unleashed a revolution in cinema and media studies when it was first introduced and which continues to influence the study of film as the digital revolution rolls along. The contributors investigate the effects of technologies on major film debates and, moreover, how technologies have affected film theory and its key concepts.
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Systematics and Conservation of African Plants
Proceedings of the 18th AETFAT Congress, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Xander van der Burgt
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2010

An edited volume based on the proceedings of the eighteenth Association for the Taxonomic Study of the Flora of Tropical Africa Congress held in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Systematics and Conservation of African Plants includes one hundred research papers in separate sections on taxonomy, phytogeography, ethnobotany, and the conservation and sustainable use of African plants. Topics covered include recent advances in reproductive biology, vegetation, and Podostometaceae in Africa. A separate section on African floras reflects the present state of knowledge and progress towards our understanding and documentation of the plants of Africa.

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The Essence of Politics
Cees van der Eijk
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
ntroduction to political science. Discusses the character of the 'political'; its essential characteristics; key question to address for understanding politics; key concepts such as power, conflict, cooperation, political system and political community.Politics is about the resolution of matters for a society or group that are contested. It exists not only in and between states (with their governments and other political institutions), but also in churches, sports organisations, commercial enterprises, schools and social organisations. Politics is driven by conflict, but also by cooperation. To understand politics requires asking specific ('key') questions about the nature of conflicts; about persons, groups and institutions that are involved; about their resources; and about the wider context that provides constraints and opportunities for all. It Also requires a grasp of key concepts such as power, influence and political community, and, of course, of the term politics, conflict and cooperation. This book is about the 'essence' of politics, which is introduced by way of key questions and key concepts that are indispensable for understanding politics in many different settings.
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Choosing Europe?
The European Electorate and National Politics in the Face of Union
Cees van der Eijk
University of Michigan Press, 1996


This is a book about elections to the European Parliament, their failure to legitimate and control the exercise of power in the European Union, and the consequences of this failure for domestic politics in EU member states. It also sheds new light on why voters behave the way they do. The authors examine the 1989 Europe-wide elections with the aid of large-scale surveys fielded in all twelve member countries of the (then) European Community--placing European citizens within their institutional, political, economic, and social contexts. In particular, because three countries held national elections concurrently with the 1989 European elections, the study controls for the presence or absence of a national election context--permitting the authors to investigate electoral behavior in general, not just at European elections. Looking at such behavior while taking account of the strategic contexts within which elections are held has yielded new insights about turnout and party choice, while clarifying the crisis of legitimacy that faces the European Union. The more recent Europe-wide elections of 1994 are used to validate the findings.

This book will be of interest to political scientists interested in elections, the European Union, comparative politics, and political development.

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Chapters on Interdisciplinary Research and Research Skills
Koen van der Gaast
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This book is a special edition, compiled for to the MSc Course Research Methodologies as taught at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology. It is a compilation of useful chapters from several sources on how to structure, set up, carry out and write up your (thesis) research to aid you in writing your research plan. Next to that it acts as a companion during your thesis research. After introducing you to the philosophy of scientific research, subsequent chapters each contribute to the different phases of your research. The book uniquely allows for the often multi- or interdisciplinary research many of you carry out, based on the established Dutch university tradition of (semi-)independent student research, creating a thread through the process for you to follow.

This edition is a collection of chapters from An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Research (2016), edited by Steph Menken and Machiel Keestra, and Academic Skills for Interdisciplinary Studies. Revised edition (2019), by Koen van der Gaast, Laura Koenders and Ger Post, published by Amsterdam University Press.
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Academic Skills for Interdisciplinary Studies
Revised Edition
Koen van der Gaast
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
What’s a theoretical framework for? How do you effectively present your data in a figure? What’s the secret to a good presentation?As an interdisciplinary student, you delve into theories and research methodsfrom a whole range of disciplines. Academic skills are the tools that you can use to take in, develop, integrate and question knowledge. This guide provides specific instructions, tips and examples to help students develop these skills, both during and after their studies.As academic education focuses on research, the empirical cycle forms a keytheme of the book, including when discussing the following skills:- Searching for, critically reading and analysing scholarly texts- Formulating research questions- Making concepts measurable, qualitatively and quantitatively- Organizing literature and data- Analysing and formulating an argument- Academic writing- Collaborating- Reflecting- Presenting
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The European Repository Landscape 2008. Inventory of Digital Repositories for Research Output
Maurits Van der Graaf
Amsterdam University Press, 2009

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Lyric Address in Dutch Literature, 1250-1800
Cornelis van der Haven
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Lyric Address in Dutch Literature, 1250-1800 provides accessible and comprehensive readings of ten Dutch lyrical poems, discussing each poem's historical context, revealing its political or ideological framing, religious elements, or the self-representational interests of the poet. The book focuses on how the use of the speaker's "I" creates distance or proximity to the social context of the time. Close, detailed analysis of rhetorical techniques, such as the use of the apostrophe, illuminates the ways in which poetry reveals tensions in society.
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Images of the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945-1949/Perang Kemerdekaan Indonesia dalam Gambar
Sander van der Horst
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Four years of protracted negotiations and bitter warfare passed between the declaration of Indonesian independence on 17 August, 1945, and the official transfer of sovereignty on 27 December, 1949. Whereas the newly proclaimed Republic of Indonesia rejected the colonial regime and hence any attempt at ‘recolonization’ by the Dutch after the Japanese occupation (1942-1945), the Dutch framed their return to the archipelago as a mission to restore ‘order and peace’. Images of the Indonesian War. Many of these materials, alongside photographs and oral history collections, ended up in the collections of the KITLV and eventually the Leiden University Libraries. This trilingual (English, Dutch and Indonesian) catalogue accompanies a digital exhibition of some fifty unique items. The selection made demonstrates the sharply contrasting perspectives on the legitimacy of the Republic and Dutch colonialism, and also offers first-hand testimonies of a bitter war with a huge imbalance of casualties.
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Huygens and Hofwijck
The Inventive World of Constantijn and Christiaan Huygens
Kees van der Leer
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
Constantijn Huygens was a poet, composer and connoisseur of art and the classics. He was also secretary and confidant to three princes of Orange for 62 years. Hofwijck was also the place where Constantijn’s son Christiaan spent a significant part of his life. Christiaan Huygens was a member of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge and became one of the greatest inventors and scientists. At the end of his life, at Hofwijck, he wrote Cosmotheoros, his magnum opus on the universe. At Huygens’s Hofwijck we look at the seventeenth century through the eyes of these two versatile men. With Constantijn and Christiaan, the story is about literature, art, music, politics, the House of Orange, science and life at a seventeenth-century country estate.
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Revolt in the Netherlands
The Eighty Years War, 1568-1648
Anton van der Lem
Reaktion Books, 2019
In 1568, the Seventeen Provinces in the Netherlands rebelled against the absolutist rule of the king of Spain. A confederation of duchies, counties, and lordships, the Provinces demanded the right of self-determination, the freedom of conscience and religion, and the right to be represented in government. Their long struggle for liberty and the subsequent rise of the Dutch Republic was a decisive episode in world history and an important step on the path to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And yet, it is a period in history we rarely discuss.

In his compelling retelling of the conflict, Anton van der Lem explores the main issues at stake on both sides of the struggle and why it took eighty years to achieve peace. He recounts in vivid detail the roles of the key protagonists, the decisive battles, and the war’s major turning points, from the Spanish governor’s Council of Blood to the Twelve Years Truce, while all the time unraveling the shifting political, religious, and military alliances that would entangle the foreign powers of France, Italy, and England. Featuring striking, rarely seen illustrations, this is a timely and balanced account of one of the most historically important conflicts of the early modern period.
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The World Wide Web of Work
A History in the Making
Marcel van der Linden
University College London, 2023
A groundbreaking exploration of the core ideas and concepts of global labor history.

Global labor history is one of the fastest-growing fields of study worldwide today. This volume assembles a group of contributors from around the world to discuss the core concepts “capitalism” and “workers,” and to refine notions such as “coerced labor,” “household strategies,” and “labor markets.” It explores in new ways the connections between laborers in different parts of the world, arguing that both globalization and modern labor management originated in agriculture in the Global South and were only later introduced in Northern industrial settings. It reveals that nineteenth-century chattel slavery was frequently replaced by other forms of coerced labor, and it reconstructs the twentieth-century attempts of the International Labor Organisation to regulate work standards internationally. The book also pays attention to the relational inequality through which workers in wealthy countries benefit from the exploitation of those in poor countries. The final part addresses workers’ resistance and acquiescence: why collective actions often have unanticipated consequences, why and how workers sometimes organize massive flights from exploitation and oppression, and why proletarian revolutions took place in pre-industrial or industrializing countries but never in fully developed capitalist societies.
 
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Forest and Shade Trees of Iowa
Peter J. van der Linden
University of Iowa Press, 2011

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Back in print at last in a third edition, the classic Forest and Shade Trees of Iowa now has a wealth of full-color photographs and updated, reorganized information that will please both new and returning readers.

Part 1 of this guide focuses on identification, with user-friendly keys to both summer and winter trees and illustrated descriptions of more than one hundred common species. The trees are arranged according to similarities in foliage; each entry includes a large scan of a leafy branch along with two or three smaller photos of buds, flowers, fruits, and winter twigs. The text contains a description of the species, its geographical distribution, and notes on how to distinguish it from similar species. Part 2 is divided into conifers and flowering trees and includes all trees native to Iowa, trees that are widely planted, invasive species, some less commonly planted trees, and tall native shrubs that might be mistaken for trees. The authors provide information about the natural history of individual trees, their ecological requirements, pests and diseases that affect them, and their usefulness for such different purposes as windbreaks, landscaping, wildlife plantings, fuel, lumber, and food. Following these two main parts, three shorter sections describe the planting and care of trees, Iowa’s forest communities, and good places to see trees in the state; a glossary and a bibliography are also included.

A complete guide to Iowa’s trees, both native and introduced, full of hundreds of color photos, this new edition of Forest and Shade Trees of Iowa will be immensely useful to arborists, foresters, horticulturists, landscape architects, gardeners, and all Iowans and midwesterners who appreciate the beauty and value of trees and want to learn more about them.

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Shrubs and Vines of Iowa
Peter J. van der Linden
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Shrubs and vines, often literally overshadowed by trees, also receive much less attention than their taller neighbors, and yet they are very important elements of the region’s natural landscape. A guide to these interesting and useful plants, this book identifies all 150 shrubs and vines native to Iowa, along with frequently seen naturalized ones. Here you’ll find the widely distributed buttonbush, the distinctive pagoda dogwoods, sumacs with their striking fall foliage, the adaptable ninebark, the attractive grape honeysuckle, the many species of Rubus and wild grapes that provide food for birds and animals, willows with their graceful promise of spring, and the diverse viburnums.

Like trees, shrubs and vines are woody plants that are easy to observe year round. The first part of this book will help you identify them. Illustrated keys take you through the identification process one step at time; these are followed by images and descriptions of all but the rarest species. Noted naturalists Peter van der Linden and Donald Farrar also provide information about each species’ distribution, ecology, and uses. Summer and winter features are covered separately to facilitate identification at these two very different times of year.

Chapters about the culture and natural history of shrubs and vines explain why the plants grow where they do in nature and show how to use them effectively in outdoor spaces. Plants native to Iowa have much to offer to the landscaper: winter hardiness, resistance to drought and climatic extremes, and food and shelter for native wildlife and pollinators. Many natives are ornamental as well, providing attractive flowers, bright autumn displays, and colorful stems or fruits in winter. The authors offer tips for selecting, planting, and caring for these plants effectively. With native plants, you can create a landscape that is sustainable, authentic to place, and satisfying to you.

Iowa and midwestern arborists, conservationists, horticulturists, landscape architects, gardeners, and all those who appreciate the beauty and value of native plants will find Shrubs and Vines of Iowa immensely useful. 
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Mission Uruzgan
Collaborating in Multiple Coalitions for Afghanistan
Jan van der Meulen
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Mission Uruzgan provides on-site testimony of the Dutch military mission in Uruzgan, Afghanistan from 2001 to the present day. Proffering fresh data and probing analyses, this extensive examination of a controversial deployment addresses a variety of crucial issues related to Dutch involvement in Afghanistan, from the politicking that led up to the utilization of military tactics to the rules of engagement on the ground. This collection brings together an assortment of learned scholars to deliver a wide range of insights into the problems faced by Dutch soldiers.
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Global Rivalries From the Cold War to Iraq
Kees van der Pijl
Pluto Press, 2006
This book offers a highly original analysis of world events in the light of the Iraq War. It explores the history and development of relations between major countries in the international community and the impact that successive wars and changes in the global political economy have had on the way states relate to each other today.

Tracing the liberal state structure back to the closing stages of the English Civil War and settlement in North America, it argues that the rise of the English-speaking West has created rivalries between contender states that are never entirely put to rest. With each round of Western expansion, new rivalries are created.

Offering a truly global analysis that covers every area of the world - from Europe and America to China, the Middle East, Latin America and Russia -- he analyses the development of international relations post WWII, and questions whether the neoliberal project and its human rights ideology have collapsed back into authoritarianism under the guise of the 'war on terror'.
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front cover of Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean
Ways of Being Non/Sovereign
Yvon van der Pijl
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean is a collection of essays that explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic research, historical and media analysis, the study of popular culture, and autoethnographic accounts, the various contributions challenge conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty. While the book recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it opens a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life. Focusing on all six different islands and through a multitude of voices and stories, the volume engages with the everyday projects, ordinary imaginaries, and dreams of equaliberty alongside the work of independistas and traditional social movements aiming for more or full self-determination. As such, it offers a rich and powerful telling of the various ways of being in and belonging to our contemporary postcolonial world.
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front cover of A Mantis Carol
A Mantis Carol
Laurens van der Post
Island Press, 1983
In his classic A Mantis Carol, Laurens van der Post tells the true story of an episode in his life that lead him from his home in London to New York City in search of one of the "First People" of his native Africa. Hans Taaibosch, a Bushman from Africa working the circus in modern America, is the focus of this remarkable tale, which begins with a recurring dream of a praying mantis and follows a web of coincidences to a deeply moving conclusion.
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front cover of Ecological Design, Tenth Anniversary Edition
Ecological Design, Tenth Anniversary Edition
Sim Van der Ryn
Island Press, 2007
Ecological Design is a landmark volume that helped usher in an exciting new era in green design and sustainability planning. Since its initial publication in 1996, the book has been critically important in sparking dialogue and triggering collaboration across spatial scales and design professions in pursuit of buildings, products, and landscapes with radically decreased environmental impacts. This 10th anniversary edition makes the work available to a new generation of practitioners and thinkers concerned with moving our society onto a more sustainable path.
Using examples from architecture, industrial ecology, sustainable agriculture, ecological wastewater treatment, and many other fields, Ecological Design provides a framework for integrating human design with living systems. Drawing on complex systems, ecology, and early examples of green building and design, the book challenges us to go further, creating buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes that are truly restorative rather than merely diminishing the rate at which things are getting worse.
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front cover of Design for an Empathic World
Design for an Empathic World
Reconnecting People, Nature, and Self
Sim Van der Ryn
Island Press, 2014
Despite an uncertain economy, the market for green building is exploding. The US green building market has expanded dramatically since 2008 and is projected to double in size by 2015 (from $42 billion in construction starts to $135 billion). But green-building pioneer Sim Van der Ryn says, “greening” our buildings is not enough.  He advocates for “empathic design”, in which a designer not only works in concert with nature, but with an understanding of and empathy for the end user and for ones self.  It is not just one of these connections, but all three that are necessary to design for a future that is more humane, equitable, and resilient.

Sim’s lifelong focus has been in shifting the paradigm in architecture and design. Instead of thinking about design primarily in relation to the infrastructure we live in and with—everything from buildings to wireless routing—he advocates for a focus on the people who use and are affected by this infrastructure. Basic design must include a real understanding of human ecology or end-user preferences. Understanding ones motivations and spirituality, Sim believes, is critical to designing with empathy for natural and human communities.

In Design for an Empathic World Van der Ryn shares his thoughts and experience about the design of our world today. With a focus on the strengths and weaknesses in our approach to the design of our communities, regions, and buildings he looks at promising trends and projects that demonstrate how we can help create a better world for others and ourselves. Architects, urban designers, and students of architecture will all enjoy this beautifully illustrated book drawing on a rich and revered career of a noted leader in their field. The journey described in Design for an Empathic World will help to inspire change and foster the collaboration and thoughtfulness necessary to achieve a more empathic future.
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