front cover of Coalition Politics and Cabinet Decision Making
Coalition Politics and Cabinet Decision Making
A Comparative Analysis of Foreign Policy Choices
Juliet Kaarbo
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Every day, coalition cabinets make policy decisions critical to international politics. Juliet Kaarbo examines the dynamics of these multiparty cabinets in parliamentary democracies in order to assess both the quality of coalition decision making and the degree to which coalitions tend to favor peaceful or military solutions. Are coalition cabinets so riddled by conflict that they cannot make foreign policy effectively, or do the multiple voices represented in the cabinet create more legitimate and imaginative responses to the international system? Do political and institutional constraints inherent to coalition cabinets lead to nonaggressive policies? Or do institutional and political forces precipitate more belligerent behavior?

Employing theory from security studies and political psychology as well as a combination of quantitative cross-national analyses and twelve qualitative comparative case studies of foreign policy made by coalition cabinets in Japan, the Netherlands, and Turkey, Kaarbo identifies the factors that generate highly aggressive policies, inconsistency, and other policy outcomes. Her findings have implications not merely for foreign policy but for all types of decision making and policy-making by coalition governments.

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Telepresence and Bio Art
Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots
Eduardo Kac
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"Eduardo Kac's work represents a turning point. What it questions is our current attitudes to creativity, taking that word in its most fundamental sense."
-Edward Lucie-Smith, author of Visual Arts in the 20th Century

"His works introduce a vital new meaning into what had been known as the creative process while at the same time investing the notion of the artist-inventor with an original social and ethical responsibility."
-Frank Popper, author of Origins and Development of Kinetic Art

"Kac's radical approach to the creation and presentation of the body as a wet host for artificial memory and 'site-specific' work raises a variety of important questions that range from the status of memory in digital culture to the ethical dilemmas we are facing in the age of bioengineering and tracking technology."
-Christiane Paul, Whitney Museum of Art

For nearly two decades Eduardo Kac has been at the cutting edge of media art, first inventing early online artworks for the web and continuously developing new art forms that involve telecommunications and robotics as a new platform for art. Interest in telepresence, also known as telerobotics, exploded in the 1990s, and remains an important development in media art. Since that time, Kac has increasingly moved into the fields of biology and biotechnology.

Telepresence and Bio Art is the first book to document the evolution of bio art and the aesthetic development of Kac, the creator of the "artist's gene" as well as the controversial glow-in-the-dark, genetically engineered rabbit Alba. Kac covers a broad range of topics within media art, including telecommunications media, interactive systems and the Internet, telematics and robotics, and the contact between electronic art and biotechnology. Addressing emerging and complex topics, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary art.
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The Power-Conflict Story
A Dynamic Model of Interstate Rivalry
Kelly Kadera
University of Michigan Press, 2001
The Power-Conflict Story explains patterns of behavior in major world rivalries since 1816. Kelly M. Kadera carefully lays out the dynamic connections between two rival nations' power relationship and their conflictual interactions with one another. Rivals accumulate power and use conflict as a method of reducing their opponent's power level. But conflict is costly because it invites reciprocation from the opponent who has similar motives. Applying the formal model that she has developed, Kadera makes some interesting and novel predictions about which types of rivals win and what strategies they use. The empirical record on national power levels and interstate conflict convincingly support these predictions. Examples include the rise of the United States as a world power and the corresponding fall of British hegemony near the turn of the last century; Germany's unsuccessful attempt to overtake Britain during the Second World War; and Russia's rivalry with China during the early 1900s.
One of the central contributions of the book's explanation of interstate rivalry is the integration of two opposing schools of thought, balance of power theory and power transition theory. This integration is accomplished by the author's dynamic formal model that emphasizes fluctuations in conflict behavior under different power relationships as well as shifts in power levels resulting from natural growth and resource depletion. The formal model and its analysis are presented in a conversational manner, making it accessible to the reader.
The Power-Conflict Story will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, world history, formal modeling, applied mathematics, numerical methods, and research methodology.
Kelly M. Kadera is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Iowa.
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The Eye of Command
Kimberly Kagan
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Published in 1976, Sir John Keegan's The Face of Battle was a groundbreaking work in military history studies, providing narrative techniques that served as a model for countless subsequent scholarly and popular military histories. Keegan's approach to understanding battles stressed the importance of small unit actions and personal heroism, an approach widely employed in the narratives produced by reporters embedded with American combat troops in Iraq.

Challenging Keegan's seminal work, The Eye of Command offers a new approach to studying and narrating battles, based upon an analysis of the works of the Roman military authors Julius Caesar and Ammianus Marcellinus. Kimberly Kagan argues that historians cannot explain a battle's outcome solely on the basis of soldiers' accounts of small-unit actions. A commander's view, exemplified in Caesar's narratives, helps explain the significance of a battle's major events, how they relate to one another and how they lead to a battle's outcome. The "eye of command" approach also answers fundamental questions about the way commanders perceive battles as they fight them-questions modern military historians have largely ignored.

"The Eye of Command is a remarkable book-smart, thoughtful, clear, vigorous, factual but creative, and grounded in the practical. It is at once scholarly and readable, combining classical scholarship and military theory. Rarely have I come across a book that makes two-thousand-year-old events seem so alive."
-Barry Strauss, Professor of History, Cornell University

"In a work well written, concisely presented, and convincingly argued, Kagan uses examples from Caesar's Gallic Wars to challenge John Keegan's focus on lower-echelon experiences of battle in favor of 'The eye of command': a narrative technique emphasizing decisions and events that shape a battle's outcome."
-Dennis Showalter, Professor of History, Colorado College

"To know whether a battle is won or lost is not enough. Kagan's deep analysis of theory and practice points to a new way of understanding complex army-commander and small-unit perspectives that can properly claim the status of history."
-Gordon Williams, Thacher Professor of Latin Emeritus, Yale University

Kimberly Kagan was an Assistant Professor of History at the United States Military Academy between 2000 and 2005. Since then, she has served as a lecturer in International Affairs, History, and the Humanities at Yale University and as an adjunct professor at Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at American University's Department of History. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History from Yale University.
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Open Wounds
Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori
Martin Kagel
University of Michigan Press, 2022
This volume collects original essays on Hungarian-German playwright and screenwriter George Tabori (1914–2007) and his remarkable contributions to the stage. Tabori, a Jewish refugee and a truly transnational author, was best known for his work in New York theater that irreverently explored the Jewish experience, particularly the Holocaust. Although his illustrious career spanned a century, two continents, several languages, and a variety of literary genres, Tabori’s work has received scant attention in American letters, in spite of its significance for U.S. theater and Holocaust studies.

Until Tabori, most dramas about the Holocaust were either rooted in American domestic realism, striving to create a strong empathetic connection between the audience and Holocaust victims, or featured an unembellished documentary style. Tabori staked out a third position, beyond realism and documentation. The volume brings together the voices of international scholars to provide a comprehensive introduction to Tabori’s theater as well as in-depth analyses of his work, discussing all of his major plays. Individual essays address Tabori’s postdramatic theater in relation to sacrificial ritual, performance studies, and post-humanist approaches to the contemporary stage, as well as performance aspects of his productions, questions of ethics and aesthetics raised by his theater, and his plays’ relation to Holocaust representation in popular culture.
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Mrs. Shipley's Ghost
The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists
Jeffrey Kahn
University of Michigan Press, 2014

Today, when a single person can turn an airplane into a guided missile, no one objects to rigorous security before flying. But can the state simply declare some people too dangerous to travel, ever and anywhere? Does the Constitution protect a fundamental right to travel? Should the mode of travel (car, plane, or boat) or itinerary (domestic or international) make a constitutional difference? This book explores the legal and policy questions raised by government travel restrictions, from passports and rubber stamps to computerized terrorist watchlists.

In tracing the history and scope of U.S. travel regulations, Jeffrey Kahn begins with the fascinating story of Mrs. Ruth Shipley, a federal employee who almost single-handedly controlled access to passports during the Cold War. Kahn questions how far national security policies should go and whether the government should be able to declare some individuals simply too dangerous to travel. An expert on constitutional law, Kahn argues that U.S. citizens’ freedom to leave the country and return is a fundamental right, protected by the Constitution.

[more]

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Sacred Violence
Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty
Paul W. Kahn
University of Michigan Press, 2008

In Sacred Violence, the distinguished political and legal theorist Paul W. Kahn investigates the reasons for the resort to violence characteristic of premodern states. In a startling argument, he contends that law will never offer an adequate account of political violence. Instead, we must turn to political theology, which reveals that torture and terror are, essentially, forms of sacrifice. Kahn forces us to acknowledge what we don't want to see: that we remain deeply committed to a violent politics beyond law.

Paul W. Kahn is Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights.

Cover Illustration: "Abu Ghraib 67, 2005" by Fernando Botero. Courtesy of the artist and the American University Museum.

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Philadelphia Freedom
Memoir of a Civil Rights Lawyer
David Kairys
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"David Kairys is one of the grand long-distance runners in the struggle for justice in America. His brilliant legal mind and superb lawyerly skills are legendary. This marvelous book is his gift to us!"
---Cornel West, Professor of Religion and African American Studies, Princeton University, and award-winning author of Race Matters

Philadelphia Freedom is the spellbinding tale of an idealistic young lawyer coming of age in the political cauldron of the 1960s and 1970s. From his immersion in the civil rights movement to his determined court battles to quell criminal violence by Philadelphia police, Kairys recounts how he helped make history in the city of brotherly love."
---William K. Marimow, Editor and Executive Vice President, Philadelphia Inquirer, and recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes

"In the current climate of political deception and the trampling of our civil rights, Kairys's compelling book is a clenched fist, a prayer for social justice and a call to conscience."
---Steve Lopez, Los Angeles Times columnist and former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist

"With engaging, insider stories of innovative legal strategies of a truly creative lawyer, this book evokes the ebullient spirit of progressive social change launched in the 1960s and should be read by aspiring and practicing lawyers as well as anyone interested in American social history. Philadelphia Freedom reads like a suspense novel and reveals how novel legal and political thinking can and does make a real difference to individuals and to the quality of justice."
---Martha L. Minow, Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard University

"David Kairys's compelling book properly explains the vital role that civil rights attorneys play in our system of justice."
---Judge John E. Jones III, United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and presiding judge in the landmark Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case

A memoir that is also a compelling page-turner, Philadelphia Freedom is the poignant, informative, often inspiring account of renowned civil-rights lawyer David Kairys's personal quest for achieving social justice during the turbulent 1960s and 70s.

Philadelphia Freedom brings us intimately and directly into Kairys's burgeoning law career and the struggles of the 60s as his professional and private life navigated the turmoil and promise of the civil rights and antiwar movements.

Many of the cases Kairys took on involved discrimination and equal protection, freedom of speech, and government malfeasance. Kairys is perhaps most well known for his victory in the Camden 28 draft board case, in which the FBI set up a sting of the Catholic anti-war left at the behest of the highest levels of government.

The stories and cases range from nationally important and recognizable---the family of the scientist the CIA unwittingly gave LSD in the 1950s; the leading race discrimination case against the FBI; Dr. Benjamin Spock's First Amendment case before the Supreme Court; the city handgun lawsuits Kairys conceived---to those he encountered in his early work as a public defender. The characters include public figures such as FBI Directors J. Edgar Hoover and Louis Freeh; CIA Director William Colby; Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter; New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer; U.S. Attorneys General Edward Levi and John Mitchell; Georgia Governor Lester Maddox; Pennsylvania Governor, former Philadelphia Mayor, and Democratic National Committee chair Ed Rendell; Philadelphia Mayor and Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo. But some of the most memorable are not well known, involving regular people caught up in the often heartless machinery of the courts and legal system.

Though it reads like a novel, with all the elements of character, plot, and suspense, Philadelphia Freedom also has historical significance as a firsthand account of the 1960s and 70s and contains social commentary about race as well as insights and major perspectives on the nature and social role of law.

David Kairys is Professor of Law at Beasley School of Law, Temple University. He was a full-time civil rights lawyer from 1968 to 1990.

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Great Lengths
Seven Works of Marathon Theater
Jonathan Kalb
University of Michigan Press, 2013

We know that size matters in many areas of human endeavor, but what about works of the imagination? Why do some dramatic creations extend to five hours or more, and how does their extreme length help them accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims? In Great Lengths, theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb addresses these and other questions through a close look at seven internationally prominent theater productions, including Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby, and the "durational works" of the British experimental company Forced Entertainment. This is a book about extreme length, monumental scope, and intensive immersion in the theater in general, written by a passionate spectator reflecting on selected pinnacles of his theatergoing over thirty years.

The book's examples, deliberately chosen for their diversity, range from adapted novels and epics, to dramatic chronicles with macrohistorical and macropolitical implications, to stagings of super-size classic plays, to "postdramatic" works that negotiate the border between life and art. Kalb reconstructs each of the works, re-creating the experience of seeing it while at the same time explaining how it maintained attention and interest over so many hours, and then expanding the scope to embrace a wider view and ask broader questions. The discussion of Nicholas Nickleby, for example, considers melodrama as a basic tool of theatrical communication, and the section on Peter Brook's The Mahabharata explores the ethical problems surrounding theatrical exoticism. The chapter on Einstein on the Beach grows into a reflection on the media-age status of the much-debated Gesamtkunstwerk (or "total artwork") and a reassessment of the long avant-gardist tradition of challenging the primacy of rational language in theater. The essay on Peter Stein's Faust I + II becomes a reflection on the interpretive role of theater directors and the theatrical viability of antitheatrical closet drama. Great Lengths thus offers a remarkable panorama of the surprisingly broad field of contemporary marathon theater—an art form that diverse audiences of savvy, screen-weaned spectators continue to seek out, for the increasingly rare experiences of awe, transcendence, and sustained immersion that it provides.

Great Lengths will appeal to general readers as well as theater specialists. It situates the chosen productions in various historical and critical contexts and engages with the many lively scholarly debates that have swirled around them. At the same time, it uses the productions as springboards for wide-ranging reflections on the basic purpose and enduring power of theater in an attention-challenged, media-saturated era.

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Becoming a Poet
Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell
David Kalstone
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Becoming a Poet traces the evolution of Elizabeth Bishop's poetic career through her friendships with other poets, notably Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Published in 1989 following critic David Kalstone's death, with the help of a number of his friends and colleagues, it was greeted with uniformly enthusiastic praise. Hailed at that time as "one of the most sensitive appreciations of Elizabeth Bishop's genius ever composed" and "a first-rate piece of criticism" and "a masterpiece of understanding about friendship and about poetry," it has been largely unavailable in recent years.
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Economics as a Social Science
An Approach to Nonautistic Theory
Andrew M. Kamarck
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Economics as a Social Science is a highly readable critique of economic theory, based on a wide range of research, that endeavors to restore economics to its proper role as a social science. Contrary to conventional economic theory, which assumes that people have no free will, this book instead bases economics on the realistic assumption that human beings can choose; that we are complex beings affected by emotion, custom, habit, and reason; and that our behavior varies with circumstances and times. It embraces the findings of history, psychology, and other social sciences and the insights from great literature on human behavior as opposed to the rigidity set by mathematical axioms that define how economics is understood and practiced today.
Andrew M. Kamarck demonstrates that only rough accuracy is attainable in economic measurement, and that understanding an economy requires knowledge from other disciplines. The canonical hypotheses of economics (perfect rationality, self-interest, equilibrium) are shown to be inadequate (and in the case of "equilibrium" to be counterproductive to understanding the forces that dominate the economy), and more satisfactory assumptions provided. The market is shown to work imperfectly and to require appropriate institutions to perform its function reasonably well. Further, Kamarck argues that self-interest does not always lead to helping the general interest.
Economics as a Social Science examines and revises the fundamental assumptions of economics. Because it avoids jargon and explains terms carefully, it will be of interest to economics majors as well as to graduate students of economics and other social sciences, and social scientists working in government and the private sector.
Andrew M. Kamarck is former Director, Economic Development Institute, the World Bank.
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Transformations of Sensibility
The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature
Hideo Kamei
University of Michigan Press, 2002
First published in Japan in 1983, this book is now a classic in modern Japanese literary studies. Covering an astonishing range of texts from the Meiji period (1868–1912), it presents sophisticated analyses of the ways that experiments in literary language produced multiple new—and sometimes revolutionary—forms of sensibility and subjectivity. Along the way, Kamei Hideo carries on an extended debate with Western theorists such as Saussure, Bakhtin, and Lotman, as well as with such contemporary Japanese critics as Karatani Kōjin and Noguchi Takehiko.
Transformations of Sensibility deliberately challenges conventional wisdom about the rise of modern literature in Japan and offers highly original close readings of works by such writers as Futabatei Shimei, Tsubouchi Shōyō, Higuchi Ichiyō, and Izumi Kyōka, as well as writers previously ignored by most scholars. It also provides a new critical theorization of the relationship between language and sensibility, one that links the specificity of Meiji literature to broader concerns that transcend the field of Japanese literary studies. Available in English translation for the first time, it includes a new preface by the author and an introduction by the translation editor that explain the theoretical and historical contexts in which the work first appeared.
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Floundering Stability
US Foreign Policy in Egypt
Amir Magdy Kamel
University of Michigan Press, 2023

The US commitment to stability—both domestically and abroad—has been a consistent feature in the way Washington, DC carries out international relations. This commitment is complimented by the increased overlap between the economic and political spheres in international affairs. Consequently, this US approach to foreign interaction is informed by an assumption that foreign policy tools can influence global stability for the better. In order to investigate this assumption, this book details the foundations of what Amir Magdy Kamel refers to as the US Stability Policy—how it evolved over time and how it was implemented in Egypt. He finds that domestic and global forces were left unaccounted for by the Stability Policy, ultimately leading to a failure to achieve the self-stated stability goals.

Kamel’s analysis is informed through a unique mixed-method approach that sheds light on how and why this policy fared so poorly under Mubarak’s Egypt. He develops and tests a unique and particular way of examining the Stability Policy and presents a framework for future work to replicate and build on in the quest to understand other state-on-state relationships and the effectiveness of other foreign economic policies in achieving stability goals. Floundering Stability reflects on what Kamel’s findings mean for the relationship between the US and Egypt, as well as specific US foreign policy suggestions on how the same mistakes can be avoided in the future.

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The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess
Daisaiin Senshi and Hosshin Wakashu
Edward Kamens
University of Michigan Press, 1991
Senshi was born in 964 and died in 1035, in the Heian period of Japanese history (794–1185). Most of the poems discussed here are what may loosely be called Buddhist poems, since they deal with Buddhist scriptures, practices, and ideas. For this reason, most of them have been treated as examples of a category or subgenre of waka called Shakkyoka, “Buddhist poems.”
Yet many Shakkyoka are more like other poems in the waka canon than they are unlike them. In the case of Senshi’s “Buddhist poems,” their language links them to the traditions of secular verse. Moreover, the poems use the essentially secular public literary language of waka to address and express serious and relatively private religious concerns and aspirations. In reading Senshi’s poems, it is as important to think about their relationship to the traditions and conventions of waka and to other waka texts as it is to think about their relationship to Buddhist thoughts, practices, and texts.
The Buddhist Poetry of the Great Kamo Priestess creates a context for the reading of Senshi’s poems by presenting what is known and what has been thought about her and them. As such, it is a vital source for any reader of Senshi and other literature of the Heian period.
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The Three Treasures
A Revised and Illustrated Study and Translation of Minamoto no Tamenori's Sanboe
Edward Kamens
University of Michigan Press, 2023
When the young Princess Sonshi became a Buddhist nun in the year 984, a scholar-official of the royal court was commissioned to create a guide to the Buddhist religion that would be accessible for her. He did so in the form of the illustrated works of fiction (monogatari) that appealed to women readers of her time and class. The text has survived in later manuscripts; the illustrations, if they ever existed, have not. This revised translation recreates Sonshi’s experience of receiving this multimedia presentation, with illustrations selected to help contemporary readers visualize its content and essays that provide context on the religious and cultural experience of the author. The Three Treasures is a unique document that opens a window onto the world of Buddhist religious experience—especially for women—in high classical Japan, the time of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book and Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji.
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Navigating the English Language Classroom
Effective Practices for Novice Teachers
Lía D. Kamhi-Stein
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Although language teacher preparation programs expose future teachers to a variety of approaches, methods, and techniques, the transition from training environments to real classrooms is not a straightforward one. Navigating the English Language Classroom is designed to bridge the gap between the highly theorized view of the language classroom presented in language teacher preparation programs and the first years of teaching. Written in accessible language and filled with principled pedagogical practices, the chapters can be integrated into any teacher training program. Novice K–12 and post-secondary teachers can turn to Navigating the English Language Classroom as a self-study resource to help them navigate the first few years in their classrooms. 

Each chapter offers context, a case study, common concerns, and then concrete, research-based practices that link theory to practice in an easy-to-access manner. Readers will learn how to face several challenges, including:
  • lesson planning and delivery
  • classroom assessment
  • integrating technology into the classroom
  • using corpora in the classroom
  • establishing a professional identity
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Narrating Their Lives
Examining English Language Teachers' Professional Identities within the Classroom
Lía D. Kamhi-Stein
University of Michigan Press, 2013

“…a groundbreaking book that will…engage, inform, and connect with present and future teachers and teacher educators.”                 

---Stephanie Vandrick, Foreword to Narrating Their Lives

The field of TESOL has called attention to the ways that the issues of race and ethnicity, language status and power, and cultural background affect second language learners’ identities and, to some degree, those of teachers. In Narrating Their Lives, Kamhi-Stein examines the process of identity construction of classroom teachers so as to make connections between their personal and professional identities and their instructional practices. To do that, she has selected six autobiographical narratives from teachers who were once part of her TESL 570 (Educational Sociolinguistics) class in the MA TESOL program at California State University, Los Angeles. These six narratives cover a surprisingly wide range of identity issues but also touch on broader instructional themes that are part of teacher education programs.

Because of the reflective nature of the narratives—with the teachers using their stories to better understand how their experiences shape what they do in the classroom—this volume includes provocative chapter-opening and reflective chapter-closing questions. An informative discussion of the autobiographical narrative assignment and the TESL 570 course (including supplemental course readings and assessment criteria) is also included.

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Stories as Equipment for Living
Last Talks and Tales of Barbara Myerhoff
Marc Kaminsky
University of Michigan Press, 2007

Barbara Myerhoff's groundbreaking work in reflexivity and narrative ethnography broke with tradition by focusing not on the raw ethnographic data, but on her interaction with those she studied. Myerhoff's unfinished projects, including her final talks on storytelling, ritual, and the "culture of aging and Yiddishkeit," offer a magisterial summary of her life's work.

"The beauty of Stories as Equipment for Living is the quality of being a compilation of rescued fragments, bits and pieces of a great master's writing and thinking that were coming towards synthesis but had never reached a finished form prior to her death. This collection is an examination of the place of narrative in human life, the synthetic nature of culture and the constant search for visibility particularly by those relegated for one reason or another to the margins. A thought-provoking book worthy of extended reflection."
---Jack Kugelmass, Professor of Anthropology and Director of Jewish Studies, University of Florida

"Stories as Equipment for Living achieves a nice balance between preserving Myerhoff's work in its original form and reconstructed contexts, but presenting it in a manner relevant to readers a generation after her death. The book documents Myerhoff's growing involvement with Jewish culture, the actual process of anthropological work through field notes, and the picture of how she always was bouncing the fine details of this combined professional and personal venture off the 'big questions' of anthropology in its broadest sense."
---Harvey E. Goldberg, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University, Israel

"These essays capture the rhythm of Barbara Myerhoff's words and her vivid and distinctive train of thought, bringing the reader into the classroom of one of anthropology's finest lecturers. As an anthropologist with a poet's gift for language, she utilizes the tools of ethnography and extraordinary powers of observation---a remarkable 'ethnographic eye'---to explore the outward expressions and inner lives of the Fairfax neighborhood of L.A. These stories are not only glorious introductions to the study of culture, but provide in their revelations a reason for studying it. They are required reading for anyone passionate to know what an anthropologist can teach us about communities and ultimately about ourselves."
---Steve Zeitlin, Director, City Lore: The New York Center for Urban Folk Culture

"Master of the third voice, the voice of collaboration, Myerhoff is at once a consummate listener and inspired storyteller. This book offers a rare and luminous opening into the working process and wisdom of one of the great anthropologists of the twentieth century."
---Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and coauthor of They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust

"Myerhoff and her collaborators have given her 'Hasidim,' her disciples old and new, a final and precious gift."
---Jonathan Boyarin, The Robert M. Beren Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas and author of Thinking in Jewish

Barbara Myerhoff was a renowned anthropologist who did pioneering work in gerontology, Jewish studies, folklore, and narrative anthropology. She is best known for her ethnography of and personal involvement with a community of elderly immigrant Jews in California. Her writings and lectures have had an enormous impact on all of these areas of study, and her books are widely celebrated, especially Number Our Days, whose companion documentary film won an Academy Award.

Marc Kaminsky is a psychotherapist, a poet, a writer, and the former codirector of the Institute on Humanities, Arts and Aging of the Brookdale Center on Aging.

Mark Weiss is a writer, an editor, a translator, and a poet; his books include the widely praised Across the Line/Al Otro Lado.

Deena Metzger is a novelist, a poet, and the founding codirector (with Marc Kaminsky) of the Myerhoff Center.

Thomas R. Cole is the Beth and Toby Grossman Professor and Director of the McGovern Center for Health, Humanities, and the Human Spirit at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, and a Professor of Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University; his expertise lies in the history of aging and humanistic gerontology.

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The German Patient
Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture
Jennifer M. Kapczynski
University of Michigan Press, 2010

The German Patient takes an original look at fascist constructions of health and illness, arguing that the idea of a healthy "national body"---propagated by the Nazis as justification for the brutal elimination of various unwanted populations---continued to shape post-1945 discussions about the state of national culture. Through an examination of literature, film, and popular media of the era, Jennifer M. Kapczynski demonstrates the ways in which postwar German thinkers inverted the illness metaphor, portraying fascism as a national malady and the nation as a body struggling to recover. Yet, in working to heal the German wounds of war and restore national vigor through the excising of "sick" elements, artists and writers often betrayed a troubling affinity for the very biopolitical rhetoric they were struggling against. Through its exploration of the discourse of collective illness, The German Patient tells a larger story about ideological continuities in pre- and post-1945 German culture.

Jennifer M. Kapczynski is Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the coeditor of the anthology A New History of German Cinema.

Cover art: From The Murderers Are Among Us (1946). Reprinted courtesy of the Deutsche Kinemathek.

"A highly evocative work of meticulous scholarship, Kapczynski's deftly argued German Patient advances the current revaluation of Germany's postwar reconstruction in wholly original and even exciting ways: its insights into discussions of collective sickness and health resonate well beyond postwar Germany."
---Jaimey Fischer, University of California, Davis

"The German Patient provides an important historical backdrop and a richly specific cultural context for thinking about German guilt and responsibility after Hitler. An eminently readable and engaging text."
---Johannes von Moltke, University of Michigan

"This is a polished, eloquently written, and highly informative study speaking to the most pressing debates in contemporary Germany. The German Patient will be essential reading for anyone interested in mass death, genocide, and memory."
---Paul Lerner, University of Southern California

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The Arts of Democratization
Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany
Jennifer M. Kapczynski
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Scholars of democracy long looked to the Federal Republic of Germany as a notable “success story,” a model for how to transition from a violent, authoritarian regime to a peaceable nation of rights. Although this account has been contested since its inception, the narrative has proved resilient—and it is no surprise that the current moment of crisis that Western democracies are experiencing has provoked new interest in how democracies come to be. The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany casts a fresh look at the early years of this fledgling democracy and draws attention to the broad range of ways democracy and the democratic subject were conceived and rendered at this time.

These essays highlight the contradictory and competing impulses that ran through the project to democratize postwar society and cast a critical eye toward the internal biases that shaped the model of Western democracy. In so doing, the contributions probe critical questions that we continue to grapple with today. How did postwar thinkers understand what it meant to be democratic? Did they conceive of democratic subjectivity in terms of acts of participation, a set of beliefs or principles, or perhaps in terms of particular feelings or emotions? How did the work to define democracy and its subjects deploy notions of nation, race, and gender or sexuality? As this book demonstrates, the case of West Germany offers compelling ways to think more broadly about the emergence of democracy. The Arts of Democratization offers lessons that resonate with the current moment as we consider what interventions may be necessary to resuscitate democracy today.

 
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Democratic Laboratories
Policy Diffusion among the American States
Andrew Karch
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Observers have long marveled at the spread of ideas and policies from state to state in American democracy. But why and how do politicians, professionals, and citizens in one state take inspiration from national policy debates and imitate, resist, and rework legislative models from other states? For the first time in this important new book, Andrew Karch analyzes in depth the process of policy 'diffusion' across the states, offering a nuanced and powerful framework to explain one of the most important and recurrent features of U.S. politics."
---Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, Harvard University

"Karch does two things with remarkable skill. First, he makes sense of the copious literature on policy diffusion and extends that literature in a very fruitful way. Second, he conducts the most thorough and methodologically sound empirical study of policy diffusion to date, using both qualitative and quantitative analysis. This book is so well written and thoughtful that it will likely stimulate a whole new wave of study of state policy and its diffusion."
---Chris Mooney, editor of State Politics and Policy Quarterly

"Democratic Laboratories goes beyond standard 'diffusion of innovation' approaches to analyze the complex interaction of interstate and intrastate political forces that shapes policy change. The book is a major contribution to the study of American federalism---and a very good read."
---Kent Weaver, Brookings Institution

"Andrew Karch has something new and important to say about the states as laboratories of democracies. In his masterful account we learn about the actual process of diffusion of recent health and welfare policy reforms. "

---Virginia Gray, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"Democratic Laboratories is the seminal work on policy diffusion among the American states. Rigorously designed and well written, it is the new starting place for anyone interested in this important topic. The findings are copious and loaded with insights into the future of this valuable research."

---Harrell Rodgers, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Houston

Andrew Karch is Assistant Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Early Start
Preschool Politics in the United States
Andrew Karch
University of Michigan Press, 2014

In the United States, preschool education is characterized by the dominance of a variegated private sector and patchy, uncoordinated oversight of the public sector. Tracing the history of the American debate over preschool education, Andrew Karch argues that the current state of decentralization and fragmentation is the consequence of a chain of reactions and counterreactions to policy decisions dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when preschool advocates did not achieve their vision for a comprehensive national program but did manage to foster initiatives at both the state and national levels. Over time, beneficiaries of these initiatives and officials with jurisdiction over preschool education have become ardent defenders of the status quo. Today, advocates of greater government involvement must take on a diverse and entrenched set of constituencies resistant to policy change. 

In his close analysis of the politics of preschool education, Karch demonstrates how to apply the concepts of policy feedback, critical junctures, and venue shopping to the study of social policy.

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Torture, Humiliate, Kill
Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System
Hikmet Karcic
University of Michigan Press, 2022

Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and genocides in order to achieve the wartime objectives of perpetrators. Although camps have been used for different strategic purposes, their essential functions are always the same: to inflict torture and lasting trauma on the victims.

Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author’s collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collective traumatization consisted of excessive use of torture, sexual abuse, humiliation, and killing. The physical and psychological suffering imposed by these methods were seen as a quick and efficient means to establish the Serb “living space.” Karčić argues that this trauma was deliberately intended to deter non-Serbs from ever returning to their pre-war homes. The book centers on multiple examples of experiences at concentration camps in four towns operated by Bosnian Serbs during the war: Prijedor, Bijeljina, Višegrad, and Bileća. Chosen according to their political and geographical position, Karčić demonstrates that these camps were used as tools for the ethno-religious genocidal campaign against non-Serbs. Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide.

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Open Wound
The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont
Jason Karlawish
University of Michigan Press, 2013

A shotgun misfires inside the American Fur Company store in Northern Michigan, and Alexis St. Martin's death appears imminent. It's 1822, and, as the leaders of Mackinac Island examine St. Martin's shot-riddled torso, they decide not to incur a single expense on behalf of the indentured fur trapper. They even go so far as to dismiss the attention of U.S. Army Assistant Surgeon William Beaumont, the frontier fort's only doctor.

Beaumont ignores the orders and saves the young man's life. What neither the doctor nor his patient understands—yet—is that even as Beaumont's care of St. Martin continues for decades, the motives and merits of his attention are far from clear. In fact, for what he does to his patient, Beaumont will eventually stand trial and be judged.

Rooted deeply in historic fact, Open Wound artfully fictionalizes the complex, lifelong relationship between Beaumont and his illiterate French Canadian patient. The young trapper's injury never completely heals, leaving a hole into his stomach that the curious doctor uses as a window to understand the mysteries of digestion. Eager to rise up from his humble origins and self-conscious that his medical training occurred as an apprentice to a rural physician rather than at an elite university, Beaumont seizes the opportunity to experiment upon his patient's stomach in order to write a book that he hopes will establish his legitimacy and secure his prosperity. As Jason Karlawish portrays him, Beaumont, always growing hungrier for more wealth and more prestige, personifies the best and worst aspects of American ambition and power.

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Strange Science
Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age
Lara Pauline Karpenko
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The essays in Strange Science examine marginal, fringe, and unconventional forms of scientific inquiry, as well as their cultural representations, in the Victorian period. Although now relegated to the category of the pseudoscientific, fields like mesmerism and psychical research captured the imagination of the Victorian public. Conversely, many branches of science now viewed as uncontroversial, such as physics and botany, were often associated with unorthodox methods of inquiry. Whether ultimately incorporated into mainstream scientific thought or categorized by 21st century historians as pseudo- or even anti-scientific, these sciences generated conversation, enthusiasm, and controversy within Victorian society.
 
To date, scholarship addressing Victorian pseudoscience tends to focus either on a particular popular science within its social context or on how mainstream scientific practice distinguished itself from more contested forms. Strange Science takes a different approach by placing a range of sciences in conversation with one another and examining the similar unconventional methods of inquiry adopted by both now-established scientific fields and their marginalized counterparts during the Victorian period. In doing so, Strange Science reveals the degree to which scientific discourse of this period was radically speculative, frequently attempting to challenge or extend the apparent boundaries of the natural world. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to scholars in the fields of Victorian literature, cultural studies, the history of the body, and the history of science.

 

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Robert of Chester's Latin Translation of the Algebra of Al-Khowarizmi
Louis Karpinski
University of Michigan Press, 1915
Focusing on a history of science and mathematics, this title is an English translation of a Latin text that describes the mathematical ideas of Al-Khowarizmi, an Arabic mathematician. At the time of its original publication, the author attempted to use newer phrasing to make this text more readable to the contemporary mathematics student.
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Mergers of Teaching Hospitals in Boston, New York, and Northern California
John Alfred Kastor
University of Michigan Press, 2003

If a teaching hospital loses funding, what is the next option?

Mergers of Teaching Hospitals in Boston, New York, and Northern California investigates the recent mergers of six of the nation's most respected teaching hospitals. The author explains the reasons why these institutions decided to change their governance and the factors that have allowed two of them to continue to operate while forcing the third to dissolve after only 23 months of operation.

The case studies contained within this book rely on an impressive amount of research. Notably, instead of citing only published articles and books, the author includes information from numerous, extensive personal interviews with key participants in the various mergers. With this research the author not only presents to the reader a picture of why these mergers came about, but also investigates how the organizations have fared since joining together. The mergers are analyzed and compared in order to identify various methods of merger formation as well as ways in which other newly formed hospitals might accomplish a variety of important goals.

Offering a spectacular account of some of the mergers that occurred in the health care field at the close of the twentieth century, these stories provide insight into academia's relationship with teaching hospitals and the challenges involved in bringing prestigious and powerful medical institutions together. The institutions discussed are Partners, the corporation which includes the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Brigham and Women's Hospital, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the union of the New York and Presbyterian hospitals in New York City, and the UCSF Stanford, the merged teaching hospitals of the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford. This book will particularly appeal to professionals and academics interested in medicine, business, and organizational studies.

John Kastor is Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. From 1984 to 1997, he was Theodore E. Woodward Professor of Medicine and Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Maryland and Chief of the Medical Service at the University of Maryland Hospital. Dr. Kastor is also the author of Arrhythmias.
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Banking on Stability
Japan and the Cross-Pacific Dynamics of International Financial Crisis Management
Saori N. Katada
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Saori N. Katada examines international financial stability in the aftermath of financial crises--and how such stability is maintained through collective action among major financial powers across the Pacific, the United States, and Japan. She explores the important role that financial support by the Japanese government played in solving the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s, as well as its lack of support for the Mexican rescue in 1994--95 and its inconsistency during the recent Asian financial crisis.
Banking on Stability looks at Japan's willingness to cooperate financially with the United States--its most important trade partner--in cases where such compliance yields an improvement in relations. Katada argues that the Japanese government carefully weighs the benefits arising in international and domestic realms when taking on the role of collective crisis manager and concludes that Japan is no exception in having private gain as a central motivation during international financial crises.
Saori Katada is Assistant Professor, School of International Relations, University of Southern California.
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New York-Paris
Whitman, Baudelaire, and the Hybrid City
Laure Katsaros
University of Michigan Press, 2012

As New York and Paris began to modernize, new modes of entertainment, such as panoramas, dioramas, and photography, seemed poised to take the place of the more complex forms of literary expression. Dioramas and photography were invented in Paris but soon spread to America, forming part of an increasingly universal idiom of the spectacle. This brave new world of technologically advanced but crudely mimetic spectacles haunts both Whitman's vision of New York and Baudelaire's view of Paris. In New York-Paris, Katsaros explores the images of the mid-nineteenth-century city in the poetry of both Whitman and Baudelaire and seeks to demonstrate that, by projecting an image of the other's city onto his own, each poet tried to resist the apparently irresistible forward momentum of modernity rather than create a paradigmatically happy mixture of "high" and "low" culture.

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Theory and Practice
Bite-Sized Activities for Teaching Reading Skills
Aviva Katzenell
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Theory and Practice: Bite-Sized Activities for Teaching Reading Skills is an easily digestible guide that links key reading skills theory to practical activities that can be adapted for different classrooms. It dives into the physiological process of reading, the link between sounds and symbols, reading accomplishments at different levels, and the skills required for reading fluency. In addition, Theory and Practice discusses Color Vowel methodology and how it aids students in acquiring automaticity through pattern recognition and associating sound with color. Chapters contain activities for pre-reading, interactive reading, and post-reading as well as how to adapt these activities for different learning levels. Examples of real student work, images, vocabulary logs, and the annotations that accompany each activity demonstrate what teachers can expect for the outcome of each activity. Theory and Practice aims to provide practicing ESOL instructors, student teachers, and educators with the key theory and tools they need to help their classes boost L2 reading skills and cultural competency in English.
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Time, Ignorance, and Uncertainty in Economic Models
Donald W. Katzner
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Emerging from the tradition of Marshall, Knight, Keynes, and Shackle, Time, Ignorance, and Uncertainty in Economic Models is concerned with the character of formal economic analysis when the notions of logical or mechanical time and probabilistic uncertainty and the relatively complete knowledge basis it requires, are replaced, respectively, by historical time, and nonprobabilistic uncertainty and ignorance. Examining that analytical character by constructing and exploring particular models, this book emphasizes doing actual economic analysis in a framework of historical time, nonprobabilistic uncertainty, and ignorance.
Donald W. Katzner begins with an extensive investigation of the distinction between potential surprise and probability. He presents a modified version of Shackle's model of decision-making in ignorance and examines in considerable detail its "comparative statics" and operationality properties. The meaning of aggregation and simultaneity under these conditions is also explored, and Shackle's model is applied to the construction of models of the consumer, the firm, microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Katzner concludes with discussions of the roles of history, hysteresis, and empirical investigation in economic inquiry.
Time, Ignorance, and Uncertainty in Economic Models will be of interest to economists and others engaged in the study of uncertainty, probability, aggregation, and simultaneity. Those interested in the microeconomics of consumer and firm behavior, general equilibrium, and macroeconomics will also benefit from this book.
Donald W. Katzner is Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts.
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The Walrasian Vision of the Microeconomy
An Elementary Exposition of the Structure of Modern General Equilibrium Theory
Donald W. Katzner
University of Michigan Press, 1990
The Walrasian Vision of the Microeconomy articulates the traditional vision that is conjured up in the minds of most contemporary economists as they contemplate the microeconomy. It does so by setting out a very simple general-equilibrium model containing 1 produced consumer good, 1 produced capital good, 2 factors, 2 consumers, and 2 firms. Most of the basic theoretical ingredients of perfect competition taught in microeconomic theory courses are geometrically developed in this context: market equilibrium, the derivation of consumer demand for goods and supply of factors from constrained utility maximization, the relation between cost and production functions, the derivation of firm output supply and input demand from profit maximization, and the connections between competitive equilibrium, Pareto optimality, and welfare maximization. Also included is an elementary geometric proof of the existence and uniqueness of competitive equilibrium. The underlying premise is that these elements are all components of a larger picture and, as a result, fit together into a unified whole. The book is ideally suited to accompany the fuller and more detailed expositions of standard microeconomic theory texts.
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From Noose to Needle
Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State
Timothy Vance Kaufman-Osborn
University of Michigan Press, 2002
From Noose to Needle contributes a new perspective on the controversial topic of capital punishment by asking how the conduct of state killing reveals broader contradictions in the contemporary liberal state, especially, but not exclusively, in the United States. Moving beyond more familiar legal and sociological approaches to this matter, Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn asks several questions. Why do executions no longer take the form of public spectacles? Why are certain methods of execution considered barbaric? Why must the liberal state strictly segregate the imposition of a death sentence, whether by judge or jury, from its actual infliction, whether by a state official or an ordinary citizen? Why are women so infrequently sentenced to death and executed? How does the state seek to hide the suffering inflicted by capital punishment through its endorsement of a bio-medical conception of pain? How does the nearly-universal shift to lethal injection pose problems for the late liberal state by confusing its punitive and welfare responsibilities?
Drawing on a wide range of theoretical sources, including John Locke, Max Weber, Nicos Poulantzas, Friedrich Nietzsche, J. L. Austin, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, Elaine Scarry, and others, Kaufman-Osborn grounds his appropriation of these authors in analyses of specific recent executions, including that of Wesley Allan Dodd and Charles Campbell in Washington, Karla Faye Tucker in Texas, and Allen Lee Davis in Florida.
From Noose to Needle will be of interest to students of law, political theory, and sociology as well as more general readers interested in the troublesome issue of capital punishment.
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn is Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics and Leadership, Whitman College.
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The Urban Voter
Group Conflict and Mayoral Voting Behavior in American Cities
Karen M. Kaufmann
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Karen Kaufmann's groundbreaking study shows that perceptions of interracial conflict can cause voters in local elections to focus on race, rather than party attachments or political ideologies. Using public opinion data to examine mayoral elections in New York and Los Angeles over the past 35 years, Kaufmann develops a contextual theory of local voting behavior that accounts for the Republican victories of the 1990s in these overwhelmingly Democratic cities and the "liberal revivals" that followed. Her conclusions cast new light on the interactions between government institutions, local economies, and social diversity. The Urban Voter offers a critical analysis of urban America's changing demographics and the ramifications of these changes for the future of American politics.
This book will interest scholars and students of urban politics, racial politics, and voting behavior; the author's interdisciplinary approach also incorporates theoretical insights from sociology and social psychology. The Urban Voter is appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate level courses.
Karen Kaufmann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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Speaking Our Selves
New Plays by African Women
Asiimwe Deborah Kawe
University of Michigan Press, 2025
Speaking Our Selves brings together plays by women writers from the under-represented African countries of Tanzania, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Mali, Burundi, Benin, and Sudan, plus a play by award-winning Ugandan playwright and volume coeditor Asiimwe Kawe. Although the plays are united in presenting women as central figures who own their voices, they also represent a rich diversity of story-telling. Each unique dramaturgy is rooted in African forms of story-telling that occasionally—but not always—merge with recognizable Western forms to create hybrid, dramatic forms. These hybrid methods emphasize the striking ways in which African women writers continue to experiment with form, moving beyond Western-influenced dramaturgy if and when it jeopardizes an African dramaturgy of language, movement, and music, centered in African Cosmology.

The plays within Speaking Our Selves confront a range of ideas and issues, including women embracing the potential of agency in often contested subject positions; confronting their historical object positions in worlds of devastating patriarchal authority; resisting toxic masculinity and persistent, oppressive binaries of gender roles; finding power in communities of women; women’s increasing acumen in financial, business, and economic spheres; tensions between traditional religious tenets and efforts toward secularization; perpetual acts of violence toward women’s bodies; and the rise of mental health issues among girls and women. Readers and audiences are challenged not to be passive witnesses by observing from safe vantage points, but rather to be active participants in the stories being told.
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Make a Wish
Judith Kay
University of Michigan Press, 2005
It was love at first sight when aspiring actors Abby Nicholson and Lucas Miller met at an audition in NewYork City. After just a few months, their romance seemed destined for marriage. But will their love survive when the demands of their careers and families get in the way?

Genre: Romance
Length: about 15,000 words
Level: 4th grade
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Missing!
Judith Kay
University of Michigan Press, 2005
When high school students in the small midwestern town of Oakton start disappearing, police are left without any clues until a psychic named Serena Sills begins working on the case. Serena and Police Chief Matt Williams combine detective work and supernatural intuition as they try to find the missing teenagers before it's too late.

The MICHIGAN Reading Plus Readers are original fiction written for students who wish to improve their reading skills. The MICHIGAN Reading Plus Readers support the need for extensive reading on topics of interest to today's students. The Readers offer students books in the genres of mystery, science-fiction, and romance. Activities that practice vocabulary and reading skills are provided on the companion website.
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Murder in Montauk
Judith Kay
University of Michigan Press, 2005
Charlie Anderson, a reporter on leave from the Boston Globe, becomes entangled in an unusual mystery when he stumbles upon a news article about his own death. Confused and still very much alive, Charlie travels to Montauk, Long Island, to learn more about the deceased man and learns more about himself in the process.

The MICHIGAN Reading Plus Readers are original fiction written for students who wish to improve their reading skills. The MICHIGAN Reading Plus Readers support the need for extensive reading on topics of interest to today's students. The Readers offer students books in the genres of mystery, science-fiction, and romance. Activities that practice vocabulary and reading skills are provided on the companion website.
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Corpse Crusaders
The Zombie in American Comics
Chera Kee
University of Michigan Press, 2024
In the popular imagination, zombies are scary, decomposing corpses hunting down the living. But since the 1930s, there have also been other zombies shambling across the panels of comic books—zombies that aren’t quite what most people think zombies should be. There have been zombie slaves, zombie henchmen, talking zombies, beautiful zombies, and even zombie heroes.

Using archival research into Golden Age comics and extended analyses of comics from the 1940s to today, Corpse Crusaders explores the profound influence early action/adventure and superheroic generic conventions had on shaping comic book zombies. It takes the reader from the 1940s superhero, the Purple Zombie, through 1950s revenge-from-the-grave zombies, to the 1970s anti-hero, Simon Garth (“The Zombie”) and the gruesome heroes-turned-zombies of Marvel Zombies. In becoming immersed in superheroic logics early on, the zombie in comics became a figure that, unlike the traditional narrative uses of other monsters, actually served to defend the status quo. This continuing trend not only provides insight into the overwhelming influence superheroes have had on the comic book medium, but it also provides a unique opportunity to explore the ways in which zombiism and superheroism parallel each other. Corpse Crusaders explores the ways that truth, justice, and the American way have influenced the undead in comics and turned what is often a rebellious figure into one that works to save the day.
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Pastplay
Teaching and Learning History with Technology
Kevin Kee
University of Michigan Press, 2014

In the field of history, the Web and other technologies have become important tools in research and teaching of the past. Yet the use of these tools is limited—many historians and history educators have resisted adopting them because they fail to see how digital tools supplement and even improve upon conventional tools (such as books). In Pastplay, a collection of essays by leading history and humanities researchers and teachers, editor Kevin Kee works to address these concerns head-on. How should we use technology? Playfully, Kee contends. Why? Because doing so helps us think about the past in new ways; through the act of creating technologies, our understanding of the past is re-imagined and developed. From the insights of numerous scholars and teachers, Pastplay argues that we should play with technology in history because doing so enables us to see the past in new ways by helping us understand how history is created; honoring the roots of research, teaching, and technology development; requiring us to model our thoughts; and then allowing us to build our own understanding.

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Seeing the Past with Computers
Experiments with Augmented Reality and Computer Vision for History
Kevin Kee
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Recent developments in computer technology are providing historians with new ways to see—and seek to hear, touch, or smell—traces of the past. Place-based augmented reality applications are an increasingly common feature at heritage sites and museums, allowing historians to create immersive, multifaceted learning experiences. Now that computer vision can be directed at the past, research involving thousands of images can recreate lost or destroyed objects or environments, and discern patterns in vast datasets that could not be perceived by the naked eye.

Seeing the Past with Computers is a collection of twelve thought-pieces on the current and potential uses of augmented reality and computer vision in historical research, teaching, and presentation. The experts gathered here reflect upon their experiences working with new technologies, share their ideas for best practices, and assess the implications of—and imagine future possibilities for—new methods of historical study. Among the experimental topics they explore are the use of augmented reality that empowers students to challenge the presentation of historical material in their textbooks; the application of seeing computers to unlock unusual cultural knowledge, such as the secrets of vaudevillian stage magic; hacking facial recognition technology to reveal victims of racism in a century-old Australian archive; and rebuilding the soundscape of an Iron Age village with aural augmented reality.

This volume is a valuable resource for scholars and students of history and the digital humanities more broadly. It will inspire them to apply innovative methods to open new paths for conducting and sharing their own research.
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Ecstatic Émigré
An Ethics of Practice
Claudia Keelan
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Most think of an émigré as one who leaves her native land to find home in another. Claudia Keelan, in essays both personal and critical, enlists poetic company for her journey, engaging both canonical and common figures, from Gertrude Stein to a prophetic Las Vegas cab driver named Caesar. Mapping her own peripatetic evolution in poetry and her nomadic life, she also engages with Christian and Buddhist doctrines on the virtues of dispossession.

Ecstatic Émigré pays homage to poets from Thoreau and Whitman to Alice Notley, all of whom share a commitment to living and writing in the moment. Keelan asks the same questions about the growth of flowers or the meaning of bioluminescence as she does about the poetics of John Cage or George Oppen. Her originality is grounded by the ways in which she connects poetic principles with the spiritual concepts of via negativa demonstrated both in St. John of the Cross and Mahayana Buddhism. In addition, her essays demonstrate an activist spirit and share a commitment to the passive resistance demonstrated in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s concept of the “beloved community” and philosopher Simone Weil’s dedication to “exile.”
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Strangers to the Law
Gay People on Trial
Lisa Melinda Keen
University of Michigan Press, 2000
In 1992, the voters of Colorado passed a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to prevent the state or any local government from adopting any law or policy that protected a person with a homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation from discrimination. This amendment was immediately challenged in the courts as a denial of equal protection of the laws under the United States Constitution. This litigation ultimately led to a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court invalidating the Colorado ballot initiative. Suzanne Goldberg, an attorney involved in the case from the beginning on behalf of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Lisa Keen, a journalist who covered the initiative campaign and litigation, tell the story of this case, providing an inside view of this complex and important litigation.
Starting with the background of the initiative, the authors tell us about the debates over strategy, the court proceedings, and the impact of each stage of the litigation on the parties involved. The authors explore the meaning of legal protection for gay people and the arguments for and against the Colorado initiative.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of civil rights protections for gay people and the evolution of what it means to be gay in contemporary American society and politics. In addition, it is a rich story well told, and will be of interest to the general reader and scholars working on issues of civil rights, majority-minority relations, and the meaning of equal rights in a democratic society.
Suzanne Goldberg is an attorney with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. Lisa Keen is Senior Editor at the Washington Blade newspaper.
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Strangers to the Law
Gay People on Trial
Lisa Melinda Keen
University of Michigan Press, 1998
In 1992, the voters of Colorado passed a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to prevent the state or any local government from adopting any law or policy that protected a person with a homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual orientation from discrimination. This amendment was immediately challenged in the courts as a denial of equal protection of the laws under the United States Constitution. This litigation ultimately led to a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court invalidating the Colorado ballot initiative. Suzanne Goldberg, an attorney involved in the case from the beginning on behalf of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Lisa Keen, a journalist who covered the initiative campaign and litigation, tell the story of this case, providing an inside view of this complex and important litigation.
Starting with the background of the initiative, the authors tell us about the debates over strategy, the court proceedings, and the impact of each stage of the litigation on the parties involved. The authors explore the meaning of legal protection for gay people and the arguments for and against the Colorado initiative.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of civil rights protections for gay people and the evolution of what it means to be gay in contemporary American society and politics. In addition, it is a rich story well told, and will be of interest to the general reader and scholars working on issues of civil rights, majority-minority relations, and the meaning of equal rights in a democratic society.
Suzanne Goldberg is an attorney with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. Lisa Keen is Senior Editor at the Washington Blade newspaper.
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Investment, Profit, and Tenancy
The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy
Dennis P. Kehoe
University of Michigan Press, 1997
The economy of the Roman Empire was dominated by the business of agriculture. It employed the vast majority of the Empire's labor force and provided the wealth on which the upper classes depended for their social privileges. Consequently, the way in which upper-class Romans maintained and profited from their agricultural investments played a crucial role in shaping the basic relationships characterizing the Roman economy.
In Investment, Profit, and Tenancy Dennis P. Kehoe defines the economic mentality of upper-class Romans by analyzing the assumptions that Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. In particular the author analyzes the duties of guardians in managing the property of their wards, and the bequeathing of agricultural property. He bases his analysis on Roman legal sources, which offer a comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans. Farm tenancy was crucial to these interests, and Kehoe carefully examines how Roman landowners contended with the legal, social, and economic institutions surrounding farm tenancy as they pursued security from their agricultural investments.
Kehoe argues that Roman jurists offer a consistent picture of agriculture as a form of investment that was grounded in upper-class conceptions of the Roman economy. In the eyes of the jurists, agriculture represented the only form of investment capable of providing upper-class Romans with economic security, and this situation had important implications for the relationship between landowners and tenants. Landowners who sought economic stability from their agricultural holdings preferred to simplify the task of managing their estates by delegating the work and costs to their tenants. This tended to make landowners depend on the expertise and resources of tenants, which in turn gave the tenants significant bargaining power. This dynamic relationship is traced in the jurists' regulation of farm tenancy, as the jurists adapted Roman law to the economic realities of the Roman empire.
Investment, Profit, and Tenancy will be of interest to classicists as well as to scholars of preindustrial comparative economics.
Dennis P. Kehoe is Professor of Classical Studies, Tulane University.
[more]

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Law and the Rural Economy in the Roman Empire
Dennis P. Kehoe
University of Michigan Press, 2010

The economy of the Roman Empire was predominantly agrarian: Roman landowners, agricultural laborers, and small tenant farmers were highly dependent upon one another for assuring stability. By examining the property rights established by the Roman government, in particular the laws concerning land tenure and the contractual relationships between wealthy landowners and the tenant farmers to whom they leased their land, Dennis P. Kehoe is able to demonstrate how the state fostered economic development and who benefited the most. In this bold application of economic theory, Kehoe explores the relationship between Roman private law and the development of the Roman economy during a crucial period of the Roman Empire, from the second to the fourth century C.E. Kehoe is able to use the laws concerning land tenure, and the Roman government's enforcement of those laws, as a window through which to develop a more comprehensive view of the Roman economy. With its innovative application of the methodologies of law and economics and the New Institutional Economics Law and the Rural Economy in the Roman Empire is a groundbreaking addition to the study of the Roman economy.

Dennis P. Kehoe is Professor of Classical Studies at Tulane University. He is the author of several books, including Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy(University of Michigan Press, 1997).

"Kehoe brings his deep expertise in Roman land tenure systems and his broad knowledge of the methodologies of New Institutional Economics to bear on questions of fundamental importance regarding the relationship of Roman law and society. Was governmental policy on agriculture designed to benefit large landowners or small farmers? What impact did it have on the rural economy? The fascinating answers Kehoe provides in this pathbreaking work should occasion a major reassessment of such problems by social and legal historians."
---Thomas McGinn, Department of Classical Studies at Vanderbilt University, and author of The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: A Study of Social History and the Brothel and Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome

"A ground-breaking study using the principles of New Institutional Economics to analyze the impact of legal policy in balancing the interests of Roman tenant-farmers and landowners in the 2-4 centuries C.E. Kehoe's book will be essential reading for historians of the Roman Empire, demonstrating how the government overcame challenges and contradictions as it sought to regulate this enormous sector of the economy."
---Susan D. Martin, Department of Classics, University of Tennessee

"In Law and the Rural Economy, Kehoe brings to life the workings of the ancient economy and the Roman legal system. By analyzing interactions between the imperial government, landlords, and tenant farmers in provinces across the Empire, Kehoe opens insights into imperial economic policy. He handles a variety of challenging sources with mastery and wit, and his knowledge of scholarship is extensive and thorough, covering ancient history, textual problems in the sources, legal history and, perhaps most impressively, the modern fields of economic theory and 'law and economics.' Kehoe's innovative and sophisticated methodology sets his work apart. The book will make an important contribution to our understanding of access to the law and the effectiveness of the legal system, important topics for scholars of law, ancient and modern."
---Cynthia J. Bannon, Department of Classical Studies, Indiana University

[more]

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Ancient Law, Ancient Society
Dennis P. Kehoe
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The essays composing Ancient Law, Ancient Society examine the law in classical antiquity both as a product of the society in which it developed and as one of the most important forces shaping that society. Contributors to this volume consider the law via innovative methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives—in particular, those drawn from the new institutional economics and the intersection of law and economics.

Essays cover topics such as using collective sanctions to enforce legal norms; the Greek elite’s marriage strategies for amassing financial resources essential for a public career; defenses against murder charges under Athenian criminal law, particularly in cases where the victim put his own life in peril; the interplay between Roman law and provincial institutions in regulating water rights; the Severan-age Greek author Aelian’s notions of justice and their influence on late-classical Roman jurisprudence; Roman jurists’ approach to the contract of mandate in balancing the changing needs of society against respect for upper-class concepts of duty and reciprocity; whether the Roman legal authorities developed the law exclusively to serve the Roman elite’s interests or to meet the needs of the Roman Empire’s broader population as well; and an analysis of the Senatus Consultum Claudianum in the Code of Justinian demonstrating how the late Roman government adapted classical law to address marriage between free women and men classified as coloni bound to their land.

In addition to volume editors Dennis P. Kehoe and Thomas A. J. McGinn, contributors include Adriaan Lanni, Michael Leese, David Phillips, Cynthia Bannon, Lauren Caldwell, Charles Pazdernik, and Clifford Ando.



 
[more]

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Queer Voices in Hip Hop
Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance
Lauron J. Kehrer
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success.  In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage.  Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre’s beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of hip hop’s queer roots.
[more]

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The Play of Fictions
Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2
A. M. Keith
University of Michigan Press, 1992
A lucid analysis of the characterization of Ovidian narrative
[more]

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Michigan One-Room Schoolhouses
Mary Keithan
University of Michigan Press, 2008

Nostalgic reminders of a time now past, one-room schoolhouses are deeply embedded in our heritage. Decades after their original purpose and inhabitants have vanished, they dot the rural landscape in all conditions, from neglected and near collapse to handsomely renovated places repurposed into a new existence as living quarters. Today no matter their state they stand as miniature gems of nineteenth-century American history as well as charming examples of rural architecture---above all, things to be treasured and preserved. Mary Keithan's Michigan One-Room Schoolhouses is a beautifully illustrated chronicle that details nearly a hundred of the state's early schoolhouses. Together with information about each schoolhouse's architecture and history, including interviews with former students and teachers, Keithan's photographs bring these structures back to life and assure their place in history.

Mary Keithan is a professional photographer living in Ray, Michigan. Her previous books include Michigan's Heritage Barns and A Time in Michigan: A Photographic Series. New York Times critic Vicki Goldberg selected Keithan's 1995 image "Desert Storm Barn" for the Light Impression Biennial.

[more]

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The Troubles in Ballybogoin
Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland
William F. Kelleher
University of Michigan Press, 2004

Why are the political polarities of Northern Ireland so intractable? Why, in a society riven by class division, do Northern Ireland's people identify most strongly with the nationalist and religious groupings of British Protestant versus Irish Catholic? Why, after over thirty years of violence and death, is dialogue about the future so difficult to create and sustain?

In The Troubles in Ballybogoin, William F. Kelleher Jr. examines the patterns of avoidance and engagement deployed by people in the western region of Northern Ireland and compares them to colonial patterns of settlement and retreat. The book shows how social memories inform and are strengthened by mundane aspects of daily life—the paths people use to move through communal spaces, the bodily movements involved in informal social encounters that mark political identities, and the "holiday" marches that displace citizens for the day and divide cross-community friendships.

The Troubles in Ballybogoin is the story of Ireland, its historical conundrums, its violence. It details the location of historical memory in the politics of the everyday and the colonial modernities that so often nurture long-term conflict.

". . . Bill Kelleher brings the reader in to the heart of Northern Ireland and its long, tragic conflict. Northern Ireland, in all its complexity, is authentically rendered."
-Robert Connolly, writer and co-director, The Road to Reconciliation

". . . this exemplary ethnography is among the best books on Northern Ireland, and one of the very few that makes human sense of daily sectarian life."
-Lawrence Taylor, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

"More than a tour-a moving narrative."
-David Stark, Columbia University

"This is a wonderful contribution to Irish studies, postcolonial studies, and anthropology."
-Begoña Arétxaga, University of Texas, Austin

"It is a book that will be widely read and greatly appreciated."
--David Lloyd, Scripps College
[more]

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The British Blues Network
Adoption, Emulation, and Creativity
Andrew Kellett
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Beginning in the late 1950s, an influential cadre of young, white, mostly middle-class British men were consuming and appropriating African-American blues music, using blues tropes in their own music and creating a network of admirers and emulators that spanned the Atlantic. This cross-fertilization helped create a commercially successful rock idiom that gave rise to some of the most famous British groups of the era, including The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, and Led Zeppelin. What empowered these white, middle-class British men to identify with and claim aspects of the musical idiom of African-American blues musicians? The British Blues Network examines the role of British narratives of masculinity and power in the postwar era of decolonization and national decline that contributed to the creation of this network, and how its members used the tropes, vocabulary, and mythology of African-American blues traditions to forge their own musical identities.

 
[more]

front cover of The Archaeology of the Sierra Blanca Region of Southeastern New Mexico
The Archaeology of the Sierra Blanca Region of Southeastern New Mexico
Jane Holden Kelley
University of Michigan Press, 1984
In this monumental work, Jane Holden Kelley preserved archaeological data from many important sites in southeastern New Mexico, many of which no longer exist. She also established a basic chronological framework for the upland portion of this area. Sites discussed include Bloom Mound and the Bonnell site, as well as many sites in the Upper Gallo Drainage, the Upper Hondo Drainage, the Upper Macho Drainage, and north of Capitan Mountain.
[more]

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Jumano and Patarabueye
Relations at La Junta de los Rios
J. Charles Kelly
University of Michigan Press, 1986
In this volume, author J. Charles Kelley uses historical, linguistic, and archaeological data to compare two indigenous North American cultures: the Patarabueyes and the Jumanos.
[more]

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Lives of Lawyers
Journeys in the Organizations of Practice
Michael J. Kelly
University of Michigan Press, 1994
America has long enjoyed a love/hate relationship with its attorneys; jokes equating lawyers with vermin abound at the same time that our love of litigation is reflected in a doubling of the ranks of lawyers since the 1960s. Though we often see the lawyer as a crusading lone wolf of justice, the illuminating Lives of Lawyers demonstrates that the integrity of individual lawyers is fundamentally influenced by the nature of the legal organizations that have come to dominate the field. In fleshing out these agencies of legal expertise, Kelly offers important insights into the personal ideals of lawyers, the struggle to clarify professionalism as interpreted by the legal origination, and the effects of these factors on society's perceptions of law and lawyering.
Lives of Lawyers paints an intimate portrait of five legal entities: two corporate firms, an in-house corporate counsel's office, and a public interest agency. Each is viewed through a kaleidoscope of client/colleague relationships, connections to civic and community life, income levels and career satisfaction of attorneys, the social status of the organization, and the character of the particular law practiced. These detailed portrayals vividly reveal the diversity inherent to the profession and the wealth of responses to the question of what shapes the values of today's legal practices. The author's deft use of narrative and debt to the discipline of biography and sociology make his five stores a first-rate read.
Kelly gets into the trenches with lawyers comprising these organizations; they don't mince words in passing judgment on themselves, their employers, or the state of the profession--particularly its growing commercialism. Nonetheless, Lives of Lawyers reminds us of the constantly renewed dedication by lawyers to the principles of legal professionalism.
Michael J. Kelly is University Vice President and Professor of Law, Georgetown University.
[more]

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Lives of Lawyers Revisited
Transformation and Resilience in the Organizations of Practice
Michael J. Kelly
University of Michigan Press, 2009

The past two decades have seen profound changes in the legal profession. Lives of Lawyers Revisited extends Michael Kelly’s work in the original Lives of Lawyers, offering unique insights into the nature of these changes, examined through stories of five extraordinarily varied law practices. By placing the spotlight on organizations as phenomena that generate their own logic and tensions, Lives of Lawyers Revisited speaks to the experience of many lawyers and anticipates important issues on the professional horizon.

"Michael Kelly has done it again! His Lives of Lawyers Revisited is a very easy read about some very difficult notions like 'litigation blindness' and law as a business. It presents some fascinating perspectives on our profession."
—J. Michael McWilliams, Past President, American Bar Association

"The best single book about the American realities and possibilities of the American legal profession, combining an empathic and insightful account of law practice with a penetrating analysis of the wider context of professional work."
—Marc Galanter, University of Wisconsin

"Michael Kelly believes that professional values and conduct are not realized in codes, but in the experiences of practice, and that practice draws its routines and ideals from organizations. Through his studies of lawyers in various firms, closely observed and sympathetically described, Kelly reveals how differently organizations adapt to the intense pressures of today's practice environment. His method of linking individual life-experiences to organizational strategies and the external constraints of competition and client demands infuses realism and richness into the concept of professionalism and makes this one of the most interesting and original books on professions and professionalism to appear in years."
—Robert W. Gordon, Yale Law School

"In his two volumes of Lives of Lawyers, Michael Kelly explores legal ethics in an unusual, and unusually rewarding, way. Rather than focusing on rules or arguments, Kelly looks at the kind of lives lawyers lead. Ethics, Socrates thought, is about how to live one's life, and Kelly takes the Socratic question to heart. He explores the institutions lawyers work in and the choices they make. He writes with intelligence, great insight, and above all with heart. This is a superb book."

—David Luban, Georgetown University

Michael J. Kelly is President and Chairman of the Board of the National Senior Citizens Law Center, an advocacy group for older Americans of limited means.

[more]

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Warless Societies and the Origin of War
Raymond C. Kelly
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Warless Societies and the Origin of War employs a comparative ethnographic analysis of warless and warlike hunting and gathering societies to isolate distinctive features of peaceful preagricultural people and to develop a theoretical model of the origin of war and the early coevolution of war and society. Examining key Upper Paleolithic cave paintings and burials that document lethal violence, Raymond Kelly's illumination of the transition from warlessness to warfare in several specific locales in Europe and the Middle East confounds understandings of the origin of war prevalent today.
Kelly addresses fundamental questions concerning the trinity of interrelationship between human nature, war, and the constitution of society: Is war a primordial and pervasive feature of human existence or a set of practices that arose at a certain time in our recent prehistoric past? Are there peaceful societies in which war is absent and, if so, what are they like and how do they differ from warlike societies? Do the critical differentiating features pertain to child-rearing practices, to modes of conflict resolution, to social and economic inequality, to resource competition, or to the constitution of social groups?
As the conclusions of such an inquiry are central to our conceptions of human nature, the book will interest a wide range of readers, from those curious about the origins of collective violence to those studying the roles social institutions play in society.
Raymond C. Kelly is Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan.
[more]

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Teaching History in the Digital Age
T. Mills Kelly
University of Michigan Press, 2013
Although many humanities scholars have been talking and writing about the transition to the digital age for more than a decade, only in the last few years have we seen a convergence of the factors that make this transition possible: the spread of sufficient infrastructure on campuses, the creation of truly massive databases of humanities content, and a generation of students that has never known a world without easy Internet access.
 
Teaching History in the Digital Age serves as a guide for practitioners on how to fruitfully employ the transformative changes of digital media in the research, writing, and teaching of history. T. Mills Kelly synthesizes more than two decades of research in digital history, offering practical advice on how to make best use of the results of this synthesis in the classroom and new ways of thinking about pedagogy in the digital humanities.

[more]

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Latin and Greek in American Education
With Symposia on the Value of Humanistic Studies
Francis Kelsey
University of Michigan Press, 1911
Latin and Greek in American Education is a volume of papers edited by Michigan’s Francis W. Kelsey, stemming from the Michigan Classical Conference’s examination of the methods and strategies for teaching Latin and Greek and their relation to public life, and the relationship between Classics and law, theology, politics, and medicine. Included in the volume is “The Case for the Classics” by Paul Shorey, of the University of Chicago.
[more]

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Boogaloo
The Quintessence of American Popular Music
Arthur Kempton
University of Michigan Press, 2005
The much-anticipated paperback edition of Arthur Kempton's story on the art, influence, and commerce of Black American popular music

Praise for Boogaloo:

"From Thomas A. Dorsey and gospel to Sam Cooke and the classic age of boogaloo ('soul') to George Clinton and hip hop, this comprehensive analysis of African-American popular music is a deep and gorgeous meditation on its aesthetics and business."
---Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard

"Surpassingly sympathetic and probing. . . . a panoramic critical survey of black popular music over seventy-five years. . . .There is no book quite like it."
---New York Review of Books

". . . moving, dense, and fascinating. . . ."
---New Yorker

". . . a grand and sweeping survey of the history of soul music in America. . . . one of the best books of music journalism. . . ."
---Publisher's Weekly

". . . a fascinating and often original addition to the extensive literature. . . . an astute and witty account. . . . there is plenty in Boogaloo to set the mind and heart alight, as well as some flashes of brilliance and originality rare in music writing today."
---Times Literary Supplement
[more]

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Rethinking Reality
Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature
Duncan F. Kennedy
University of Michigan Press, 2002
How deeply into the structure of physical reality do the effects of our way of representing it reach? To what extent do constructivist accounts of scientific theorizing involve realist assumptions, and vice versa? This book provides a lucid and concise introduction to contemporary debates, taking as its theme the question of the relationship of representation and reality. It treats in an attractive and accessible way the historical, philosophical, and literary aspects of this question. In particular, it explores how the present relates to and configures claims to scientific knowledge from the past, taking as its main case study On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), the poem on physics written by the Roman poet Lucretius in the 50s B.C.E.
The book engages in a sustained argument about realist assumptions in scientific and other discourses through detailed analysis and discussion of some of the most important recent contributions to this debate. Engaging sympathetically but not uncritically with constructivist accounts of scientific knowledge, the book takes up a sustained critique of recent contributions to that debate, including those of Ian Hacking, Evelyn Fox Keller, Bruno Latour, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. What are the implications of regarding such knowledge as "discovered" or "invented"? How is the rhetoric of such claims to be identified and the pretentions of those claims assessed?In what ways can realist and constructivist approaches be reconciled? How do these considerations affect the way we read scientific texts from the past and regard them historically?
What emerges is a fresh and challenging assessment of the role of time and temporal perspective in assessing claims to knowledge in scientific thought and of the importance of textuality to the history of knowledge. A wide variety of readers, from classicists and intellectual historians to epistemologists of science, will enjoy and learn from Rethinking Reality.
Duncan Kennedy is Reader in Latin Literature and the Theory of Criticism, University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy.
[more]

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The Wire
Race, Class, and Genre
Liam Kennedy
University of Michigan Press, 2012

Few other television series have received as much academic, media, and fan celebration as The Wire, which has been called the best dramatic series ever created. The show depicts the conflict between Baltimore's police and criminals to raise a warning about race; drug war policing; deindustrialization; and the inadequacies of America’s civic, educational, and political institutions. The show's unflinching explorations of a city in crisis and its nuanced portrayals of those affected make it a show all about race and class in America.

The essays in this volume offer a range of astute critical responses to this television phenomenon. More consistently than any other crime show of its generation, The Wire challenges viewers' perceptions of the racialization of urban space and the media conventions that support this. The Wire reminds us of just how remarkably restricted the grammar of race is on American television and related media, and of the normative codings of race---as identity, as landscape---across urban narratives, from documentary to entertainment media.

[more]

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Magnus Felix Ennodius
A Gentleman of the Church
Stefanie A.H. Kennell
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Magnus Felix Ennodius (474-521), deacon of Milan and bishop of Pavia in the turbulent years after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, was a prolific writer of letters, poetry, speeches, and pamphlets on the controversies that beset the church in his day. In the Middle Ages, he was read as a model of style and source of canon law. More recently, however, Ennodius' writings have been denigrated as the vapid product of a frivolous mind more concerned with form than content. Magnus Felix Ennodius: A Gentleman of the Church sets the record straight by restoring Ennodius to his social and literary context. Ennodius stands revealed as a man on the cusp of the ancient and medieval worlds, his thought still shaped according to classical norms, but his writings informed with a sensibility that prefigures that of the Christian Middle Ages. As the only book-length study of Ennodius, here the author explores all aspects of Ennodius' life and literary production to augment the collective understanding of him on two major fronts, rhetoric and meaning, so that he can take his place as an important author and historical figure. Deeply insightful, and refreshingly original, the author breaks new ground in studying this period of history, so often overshadowed by the classical and middle ages that immediately precede and succeed it.
S. A. H. Kennell is Adjunct Professor of Classics, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
[more]

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Ford Road
Amy Kenyon
University of Michigan Press, 2012

After the death of her mother, Kay Seger abandons her career as a historical consultant to a Los Angeles film company and returns to her childhood home in Michigan. There, she rekindles a teenage love affair with Joe Chase, now a Vietnam War veteran and Ford auto worker. Afflicted by grief and the mysterious symptoms of an unidentified ailment, Kay, at Joe's urging, begins an investigation of her family's past.

As Kay pores over the boxes of papers, letters, and photo albums her mother left behind, vivid recollections of a bygone Detroit, ragged and teeming at the start of the automotive age, come to life alongside snapshots of Michigan's rural western counties after the settlement of the frontier. In the midst of her searches, Kay comes across the long-forgotten medical history of nostalgia, and it is this new knowledge that helps her to recover the lost histories of her family and find a resolution to her troubled relationship with Joe.

An exploration of memory as both pathology and promise, Ford Road offers a moving examination of the injuries we inflict on the people closest to us, the worldly injuries that are often beyond our control, and our astonishing ability to act upon and inhabit our own stories. It is also a meditation on American car culture, the road, and the role of early Hollywood in the creation of America's vision of itself. Written in spare, evocative prose, historian Amy Kenyon's first novel is as heartbreaking as it is thought-provoking.

[more]

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Negotiating Disability
Disclosure and Higher Education
Stephanie L. Kerschbaum
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Disability is not always central to claims about diversity and inclusion in higher education, but should be. This collection reveals the pervasiveness of disability issues and considerations within many higher education populations and settings, from classrooms to physical environments to policy impacts on students, faculty, administrators, and staff.  While disclosing one’s disability and identifying shared experiences can engender moments of solidarity, the situation is always complicated by the intersecting factors of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. With disability disclosure as a central point of departure, this collection of essays builds on scholarship that highlights the deeply rhetorical nature of disclosure and embodied movement, emphasizing disability disclosure as a complex calculus in which degrees of perceptibility are dependent on contexts, types of interactions that are unfolding, interlocutors’ long- and short-term goals, disabilities, and disability experiences, and many other contingencies.

 
[more]

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Great Lakes Rocks
4 Billion Years of Geologic History in the Great Lakes Region
Stephen E Kesler
University of Michigan Press, 2019
The geologic story of the Great Lakes region is one of the most remarkable of any place on Earth. Great Lakes Rocks takes readers on this fascinating journey through geologic history, beginning with an investigation of the surface features—the hills and valleys, waterfalls and caves, and the Great Lakes themselves—that we encounter on a daily basis. From there the book digs deeper into the past, and readers learn about the amazing techniques geologists have used to reconstruct the events that shaped this region millions and even billions of years before humans set foot on Earth. Throughout, the book gives special attention to the link between the region’s geology and its modern history, including the impacts of geology on settlement patterns as well as the development of industries and the present-day economy. Other discussed topics include natural hazards that are geologic in nature, including earthquakes, floods, landslides, and coastal erosion, as well as information on rocks, minerals, and ancient life seen in fossils. Written for nonspecialist readers, this book provides a detailed but easy-to-follow introduction to the geology of the Great Lakes region, and it is an ideal fit for introductory geology courses, including those aimed at nonscience majors.
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The Lives of Machines
The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture
Tamara S. Ketabgian
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"The Lives of Machines is intelligent, closely argued, and persuasive, and puts forth a contention that will unsettle the current consensus about Victorian attitudes toward the machine."
---Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University

Today we commonly describe ourselves as machines that "let off steam" or feel "under pressure." The Lives of Machines investigates how Victorian technoculture came to shape this language of human emotion so pervasively and irrevocably and argues that nothing is more intensely human and affecting than the nonhuman. Tamara Ketabgian explores the emergence of a modern and more mechanical view of human nature in Victorian literature and culture.

Treating British literature from the 1830s to the 1870s, this study examines forms of feeling and community that combine the vital and the mechanical, the human and the nonhuman, in surprisingly hybrid and productive alliances. Challenging accounts of industrial alienation that still persist, the author defines mechanical character and feeling not as erasures or negations of self, but as robust and nuanced entities in their own right. The Lives of Machines thus offers an alternate cultural history that traces sympathies between humans, animals, and machines in novels and nonfiction about factory work as well as in other unexpected literary sites and genres, whether domestic, scientific, musical, or philosophical. Ketabgian historicizes a model of affect and community that continues to inform recent theories of technology, psychology, and the posthuman.

The Lives of Machines will be of interest to students of British literature and history, history of science and of technology, novel studies, psychoanalysis, and postmodern cultural studies.

Cover image: "Power Loom Factory of Thomas Robinson," from Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835), frontispiece.

DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library

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The Michigan Murders
Edward Keyes
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"True crime devotees won't want to miss this one!"
---Publishers Weekly

"Very engrossing . . . in the finest you can't put it down tradition."
---Hartford Courant

 "This factual account of each murder, through the conviction of the killer, has all the excitement of a first-rate work of fiction, and is told straight, without the usual sociological jargon. Keyes collaborated with Robin Moore on The French Connection; The Michigan Murders is his first solo effort, and it is a good one."
---Miami Herald

"The Michigan Murders is the ultimate True Crime classic, unfolding like great mystery fiction while still delivering the powerful charge of real life." 
---Jamie Agnew, Aunt Agatha's Mystery Bookshop

With a new prologue by Mardi Link and a new epilogue by Laura James

The true story of the savage coed killings---by the boy who could have lived next door!

Southeastern Michigan was rocked in the late 1960s by the terrifying serial murders of young women, whose bodies were dumped in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. In each case, few clues were left at the scene, and six separate police agencies were unable to end the horror. Then, almost by accident, a break came. The suspect: John Norman Collins, a young, quiet, all-American boy.

Collins was caught, went to trial, and, on August 19, 1970, was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. He is now in his sixties and is serving his sentence in Marquette, Michigan.

Collins was one of the first serial killers exposed in the region, and his crimes had many in the area locking their doors for the first time. Edward Keyes's harrowing The Michigan Murders covers every step of the case. It fell out of print for more than a decade before being revived for this special edition.

Mardi Link, author of the new prologue, is the author of two regionally best-selling true crime books based in northern Michigan, When Evil Came to Good Hart and Isadore's Secret.

Laura James, author of the new epilogue, is a trial lawyer, crime historian, and true crime author who blogs about the true crime genre at her Web site CLEWS (www.laurajames.com).

Edward Keyes, now deceased, spent several years in the early 1970s investigating the Michigan murders. He also authored the works Double Dare and Cocoanut Grove. The Michigan Murders was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Fact Crime in 1977.

[more]

front cover of The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture
The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture
Dina Khapaeva
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture investigates the emergence and meaning of the cult of death. Over the last three decades, Halloween has grown to rival Christmas in its popularity. Dark tourism has emerged as a rapidly expanding industry. “Corpse chic” and “skull style” have entered mainstream fashion, while elements of gothic, horror, torture porn, and slasher movies have streamed into more conventional genres. Monsters have become pop culture heroes: vampires, zombies, and serial killers now appeal broadly to audiences of all ages. This book breaks new ground by viewing these phenomena as aspects of a single movement and documenting its development in contemporary Western culture.

This book links the mounting demand for images of violent death with dramatic changes in death-related social rituals. It offers a conceptual framework that connects observations of fictional worlds—including The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and the Harry Potter series—with real-world sociocultural practices, analyzing the aesthetic, intellectual, and historical underpinnings of the cult of death. It also places the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and investigates the role played by 20th-century French theory, posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement in shaping the current antihumanist atmosphere.

This timely, thought-provoking book will appeal to scholars of culture, film, literature, anthropology, and American and Russian studies, as well as general readers seeking to understand a defining phenomenon of our age.
 
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Communicating the Other across Cultures
From Othering as Equipment for Living, to Communicating Other/Wise
Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Whenever political and social decisions use categories of identity such as race, religion, social class, or nationality to distinguish groups of people, they risk holding certain groups as inferior and culturally “Other.” When people employ ideologies of imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, and classism, they position certain groups as superior or ideal/ized people. Such ideological positioning causes nations to take actions that isolate or endanger minoritized populations. This cultural Othering can lead to atrocities such as Native Americans being expelled from their native lands through the Trail of Tears, millions of Ukrainians starving to death during the Holodomor, or millions of Jews exterminated during the Holocaust. 

Communicating the Other across Cultures uses examples from the United States, Western Europe, and Russia to demonstrate historical patterns of Othering people, as well as how marginalized people fight back against dominant powers that seek to silence or erase them. Deeply ingrained in our society, cultural Othering affects information in history books, children’s education, and the values upheld in our society. By taking a closer look at historical and modern instances of Othering, Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager shows examples of how different societies created ideas of social and cultural superiority or inferiority, and how deeply they are ingrained in our current society. In everyday life—the cash in your pocket, the movies shown at your local theater, museum exhibits, or politician's speeches—certain cultural ideologies are consistently upheld, while others are silenced. By exposing the communicative patterns of those in power, Khrebtan-Hörhager then suggests alternative ways of thinking, communicating, and eventually being, that offer transformative solutions for global problems. 
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Ishtyle
Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife
Kareem Khubchandani
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Ishtyle follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of “ishtyle” to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves, ornamental inclusions in the racialized grammar of desire. Ishtyle allows us to reimagine a global class perpetually represented as docile and desexualized workers caught in the web of global capitalism. The book highlights a different kind of labor, the embodied work these men do to feel queer and sexy together. Engaging major themes in queer studies, Khubchandani explains how his interlocutors’ performances stage relationships between: colonial law and public sexuality; film divas and queer fans; and race, caste, and desire. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the unlikely site of nightlife can be a productive venue for the study of global politics and its institutional hierarchies.
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Over the Rainbow
Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature
Kenneth B. Kidd
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"Over the Rainbow is lively, engaging, and thoughtful. More to the point, the field of children's literature needs such a collection."
---Katherine Capshaw Smith, University of Connecticut

In spite of the growing critical interest concerning gender and sexual nonnormativity in and around narratives written for young readers, no book-length volume on the subject has yet appeared. Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature is the first collection of essays dedicated to LGBTQ issues in children's literature. Bringing together significant essays and introducing new work, Over the Rainbow is intended to serve both as a scholarly reference and as a textbook for students of children's studies; gender/queer studies; and related disciplines such as English, history, sociology, and education. Editors Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd showcase important essays on the subject of LGBTQ children's and young adult literature ---including Harriet the Spy, Rainbow Boys, Little Women, the Harry Potter series, and A Separate Peace---while providing a provisional history of both the literature and the scholarship and examining the field's origins, current status, and possible future orientations.

Over the Rainbow collects essays by Jes Battis, Robin Bernstein, Thomas Crisp, June Cummins, Elizabeth A. Ford, Sherrie A. Inness, Christine A. Jenkins, Vanessa Wayne Lee, Biddy Martin, Robert McRuer, Claudia Nelson, Jody Norton, Tison Pugh, Catherine Tosenberger, Eric L. Tribunella, Roberta Seelinger Trites, and Andrea Wood. These pieces will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of children's literature, American Studies, LGBTQ and queer studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

Cover art: Original title page of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Frank L. Baum, illustrated by W. W. Denslow. New York: George M. Hill, 1900.

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Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences
Foundations and Applications
L. Douglas Kiel
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences: Foundations and Applications offers the most recent thinking in applying the chaos paradigm to the social sciences. The book explores the methodological techniques--and their difficulties--for determining whether chaotic processes may in fact exist in a particular instance and examines implications of chaos theory when applied specifically to political science, economics, and sociology. The contributors to the book show that no single technique can be used to diagnose and describe all chaotic processes and identify the strengths and limitations of a variety of approaches.
The essays in this volume consider the application of chaos theory to such diverse phenomena as public opinion, the behavior of states in the international arena, the development of rational economic expectations, and long waves.
Contributors include Brian J. L. Berry, Thad Brown, Kenyon B. DeGreene, Dimitrios Dendrinos, Euel Elliott, David Harvey, L. Ted Jaditz, Douglas Kiel, Heja Kim, Michael McBurnett, Michael Reed, Diana Richards, J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., and Alvin M. Saperstein.
L. Douglas Kiel and Euel W. Elliott are both Associate Professors of Government, Politics, and Political Economy, University of Texas at Dallas.
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Complex Systems in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Theory, Method and Application
L. Douglas Kiel
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Complexity Systems in the Social and Behavioral Sciences provides a sophisticated yet accessible account of complexity science or complex systems research. Phenomena in the behavioral, social, and hard sciences all exhibit certain important similarities consistent with complex systems. These include the concept of emergence, sensitivity to initial conditions, and interactions between agents in a system that yield unanticipated, nonlinear outcomes. The topics discussed range from the implications for artificial intelligence and computing to questions about how to model complex systems through agent-based modeling, to complex phenomena exhibited in international relations, and in organizational behavior. This volume will be an invaluable addition for both the general reader and the specialist, offering new insights into this fascinating area of research.

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The Birds of Washtenaw County, Michigan
Michael Kielb
University of Michigan Press, 1993

The Birds of Washtenaw County, Michigan provides a comprehensive account of the birdlife in Washtenaw County. Situated to the west of Detroit in southeast Michigan, the county has an exceptionally rich history of ornithological study, fueled by the activists of numerous amateur birdwatchers and by the interests of two major universities.

Frequency accounts of the 267 species recorded in the county during the last 15 years are framed by a discussion of the topographical history of the county. In addition, the authors present notes on another 30 species not seen in the county since 1976. A comprehensive site guide offers suggestions of the optimal locals and times to try to find the birds.

Michael A. Kielb has studied birds in Michigan for over 15 years and teaches classes on birds at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor and the College of Du Page in Illinois. He also leads bird-watching tours throughout the Americas and is currently a Research Associate in the Reproductive Sciences Program at the University of Michigan.

John M. Swales first became interested in birds while teaching in the Sudan and has been exploring the birdlife of Washtenaw County since arriving at the University of Michigan in 1985. He is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the English Language Institute, University of Michigan.

Richard A. Wolinski has been studying birds of Washtenaw County for nearly two decades. He is a staff biologist with an engineering firm in southeast Michigan.

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Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript
Kevin S. Kiernan
University of Michigan Press, 1997
The story of Beowulf and his hard-fought victory over the monster Grendel has captured the imagination of readers and listeners for a millennium. The heroic Anglo-Saxon story survives to the world in one eleventh-century manuscript that was badly burned in 1731, and in two eighteenth-century transcriptions of the manuscripts.
Kevin S. Kiernan, one of the world's foremost Beowulf scholars, has studied the manuscript extensively with the most up-to-date methods, including fiber-optic backlighting and computer digitization. This volume reprints Kiernan's earlier study of the manuscript, in which he presented his novel conclusions about the date of Beowulf. It also offers a new Introduction in which the author describes the value of electronic study of Beowulf, and a new Appendix that lists all the letters and parts of letters revealed by backlighting.
This important volume will be a must-read not only for the scholar of early English history and literature, but for all those who are interested in practical applications of the new technologies.
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When Charlie Met Joan
The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law
Diane Kiesel
University of Michigan Press, 2025
Charlie Chaplin, the silent screen’s “Little Tramp,” was beloved by millions of movie fans until he starred in a salacious, real-life federal courtroom drama. The 1944 trial was described by ace New York Daily News reporter Florabel Muir as “the best show in town.” The leading lady was a woman under contract to his studio—red-haired ingénue Joan Barry, Chaplin’s protégée and former mistress. Although he beat the federal criminal trial, Chaplin lost a paternity case and had to pay child support despite blood type evidence that proved he was not the child’s father. 

A decade later during the Cold War, the U.S. government used the Barry trials as an excuse to bar the left-leaning, sexually adventurous, British-born comic from the country he had called home for forty years. Not only did these trials have a lasting impact on law; they also raise concerns about the power of celebrity, Cold War politics, the media frenzy surrounding high-profile court proceedings, and the sorry history of the casting couch. When Charlie Met Joan examines these trials from the perspective of both parties, asking whether Chaplin was unfairly persecuted by the government because of his left-leaning political beliefs, or if he should have been held more accountable for his cavalier treatment of Barry and other women in his life?
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Who Killed American Poetry?
From National Obsession to Elite Possession
Karen L. Kilcup
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\

Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal.

Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.
 
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Democracy's News
A Primer on Journalism for Citizens Who Care about Democracy
G. Michael Killenberg
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Since the Founding, America’s faith in a democratic republic has depended on citizens who could be trusted to be communicators. Vigorous talk about equality, rights, and collaboration fueled the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution with its amendments. In a republic, the people set the terms for their lives not individually, but in community. The genius of keeping it alive exists in how everyday citizens talk and listen, write and read, for a common good. Dialogue and deliberation—rather than an accumulation of individual preferences—sustains a republic, yet a diminished and scarred institution of journalism jeopardizes citizens’ access to shared and truthful information. A disturbing “what’s in it for me?” attitude has taken over many citizens, and a creeping, autocratic sense of dismissive accusation too often characterizes the political style of elected officials.

The basic fuel for democracy is the willingness of informed citizens to take each other seriously as they talk about political choices. Once we begin to clam up, build walls, and dismiss each other, we unravel the threads tying us to the Founders’ vision of a republic. A free press and free speech become meaningless if not supported by sustained listening to multiple positions. There are those who profit by dividing citizens into two camps: a comfortable “us” versus a scary “them.” They make their case with accusations and often with lies. They warp the very meaning of communication, hoping citizens never truly discover each other’s humanity. Democracy’s News discusses today’s problems of public communication in the context of history, law, and interpersonal life. News should not be something to dread, mistrust, or shun. Aided by reliable, factual journalism, citizens can develop a community-based knowledge to cope with social issues great and small. They come to treat neighbors and strangers as more than stereotypes or opponents. They become collaborators with whom to identify and sustain a working republic where news, citizenship, and public discourse merge.

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Compound Containment
A Reigning Power's Military-Economic Countermeasures against a Challenging Power
Dong Jung Kim
University of Michigan Press, 2022

When does a reigning great power of the international system supplement military containment of a challenging power by restricting its economic exchanges with that state? Scholars of great power politics have traditionally focused on examining a reigning power’s military containment of a challenging power. In direct contrast, Compound Containment demonstrates that these conventional studies are flawed without a sound understanding of the multilayered aspects of containment strategy in great power politics. Since economic capacity and military power are intimately linked to one another, countering a challenging power requires addressing both economic and military dimensions. Nonetheless, this nexus of security and economy in a reigning power’s response to a challenging power cannot be explained by traditional theories that dominate research in international security. Author Dong Jung Kim fills a gap in the scholarship on great power competition by investigating when a reigning power will make its military containment of a challenging power “compound” by simultaneously employing restrictive economic measures. Its main theoretical claims are corroborated by an analysis of key historical cases of reigning power-challenging power competition. This book also offers policy prescriptions for the United States by examining whether the United States is in a position to complement military containment of China with restrictive economic measures.

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Sex, Identity, Aesthetics
The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies
Jina B. Kim
University of Michigan Press, 2021
The late Tobin Siebers was a pioneer of, and one of the most prominent thinkers in, the field of disability studies.  His scholarship on sexual and intimate affiliations, the connections between structural location and coalitional politics, and the creative arts has shaped disability studies and continues to be widely cited.  Sex, Identity, Aesthetics: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies uses Siebers’ work as a launchpad for thinking about contemporary disability studies.  The editors provide an overview of Siebers’ research to show how it has contributed to humanistic understandings of ability and disability along three key axes: sex, identity, and aesthetics.  The first section of the book explores how disability provides a way for scholars to theorize a wider range of intimacies and relationalities, arguing that disabled people seek sexual access and revolution in ways that transgress heteronormative dictates on sexual propriety.  The second part of the book works outward from Siebers’ work to looks at how disability broadens our concepts of social location and political affiliations.  The final section examines how disability challenges traditional notions of artistic beauty and agency.  Rather than being a strictly commemorative collection meant to mark the end of a major scholar’s career, this collection shows how Siebers’ foundational work in disability studies remains central to and continues to inspire scholars in the field today.   
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Beyond Notation
The Music of Earle Brown
Rebecca Y. Kim
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Earle Brown (1926–2002) was a crucial part of a group of experimental composers known as the New York School, and his music intersects in fascinating ways with that of his colleagues John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff.  This book seeks to expand our view of Brown’s work by exploring his practices as a composer and draughtsman through a selection of works composed in the United States and Europe, which included a seminal collaboration with sculptor Alexander Calder.  These essays detail Brown’s compositional methods in historical context: not only his influential experiments with open form composition and graphic notation, but his interest in performance, mixed media, jazz, the Schillinger system, and his engagement with the European avant-garde.  The volume also includes never before published essays by Brown that shed new light on his relationships with colleagues and the ideas that shaped his work, in addition to several color photographs of Brown’s paintings.

 
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Illusive Utopia
Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea
Suk-Young Kim
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"North Korea is not just a security or human rights problem (although it is those things) but a real society. This book gets us closer to understanding North Korea beyond the usual headlines, and does so in a richly detailed, well-researched, and theoretically contextualized way."
---Charles K. Armstrong, Director, Center for Korean Research, Columbia University

"One of this book's strengths is how it deals at the same time with historical, geographical, political, artistic, and cultural materials. Film and theatre are not the only arts Kim studies---she also offers an excellent analysis of paintings, fashion, and what she calls 'everyday performance.' Her analysis is brilliant, her insights amazing, and her discoveries and conclusions always illuminating."
---Patrice Pavis, University of Kent, Canterbury

No nation stages massive parades and collective performances on the scale of North Korea. Even amid a series of intense political/economic crises and international conflicts, the financially troubled country continues to invest massive amounts of resources to sponsor unflinching displays of patriotism, glorifying its leaders and revolutionary history through state rituals that can involve hundreds of thousands of performers. Author Suk-Young Kim explores how sixty years of state-sponsored propaganda performances---including public spectacles, theater, film, and other visual media such as posters---shape everyday practice such as education, the mobilization of labor, the gendering of social interactions, the organization of national space, tourism, and transnational human rights. Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, Illusive Utopia shows how the country's visual culture and performing arts set the course for the illusionary formation of a distinctive national identity and state legitimacy, illuminating deep-rooted cultural explanations as to why socialism has survived in North Korea despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and China's continuing march toward economic prosperity. With over fifty striking color illustrations, Illusive Utopia captures the spectacular illusion within a country where the arts are not only a means of entertainment but also a forceful institution used to regulate, educate, and mobilize the population.

Suk-Young Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor with Kim Yong of Long Road Home: A Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor.

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Epiphanius of Cyprus
Imagining an Orthodox World
Young Richard Kim
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Epiphanius of Cyprus offers the first complete biography in English of Epiphanius, lead bishop of Cyprus in the late fourth century CE and author of the Panarion, a massive encyclopedia of heresies. Imagining himself a defender of orthodoxy, he became an active heresy-hunter, involving himself in the most significant theological and ecclesiastical debates of his day.

Young Richard Kim studies the bishop as a historical person and a self-constructed persona, as mediated within the pages of the Panarion. Kim’s “micro-readings” of the Panarion present a close look at autobiographical anecdotes, situated in historical contexts, that profoundly shaped both Epiphanius’ character and how he wanted his readers to perceive him. “Macro-readings” examine portions of the Panarion that reflected how Epiphanius imagined his world, characterized by an orthodoxy that had existed since Creation and was preserved through the generations. In the final chapter, Kim considers Epiphanius’ life after the publication of the Panarion and how he spent years “living” the pages of his heresiology.

Kim brings a more balanced perspective to a controversial figure, recognizing shortcomings but also understanding them in light of Epiphanius’ own world. The bishop appears not as a buffoon, but as someone who knew how to use the power of the rhetoric of orthodoxy to augment his own authority. Quintessentially late antique, he embodied the contentious transition from the classical past to the medieval and Byzantine worlds.

This book will be of broad interest to students and scholars of ancient history, classics, and religious studies.
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Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet
Danny Kimball
University of Michigan Press, 2022
“Net neutrality,” a dry but crucial standard of openness in network access, began as a technical principle informing obscure policy debates but became the flashpoint for an all-out political battle for the future of communications and culture. Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet is a critical cultural history of net neutrality that reveals how this intentionally “boring” world of internet infrastructure and regulation hides a fascinating and pivotal sphere of power, with lessons for communication and media scholars, activists, and anyone interested in technology and politics. While previous studies and academic discussions of net neutrality have been dominated by legal, economic, and technical perspectives, Net Neutrality and the Battle for the Open Internet offers a humanities-based critical theoretical approach, telling the story of how activists and millions of everyday people, online and in the streets, were able to challenge the power of the phone and cable corporations that historically dominated communications policy-making to advance equality and justice in media and technology.
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Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way
Izumi Shikibu and the Buddhist Literature of Medieval Japan
R. Keller Kimbrough
University of Michigan Press, 2008
According to a sixteenth-century Japanese commentary on the Lotus Sutra, the venerable Chinsō Kashō was once preaching on the “ten wickednesses of women” when an angry old nun stepped out from the audience and shouted, “It’s not just women who are so evil—you’ve got plenty of wickedness in you, too!” Women were reviled in much of the popular Buddhist rhetoric of medieval Japan, castigated for their “filthy femininity,” but their low spiritual status was in fact frequently contested. This dispute over the place of women in Buddhism was often played out in the realm of medieval preachers’ and storytellers’ apocryphal tales of the lives, deaths, and inevitable religious awakenings of prominent female literary figures of an earlier age. Inspired by the folklorist Yanagita Kunio’s groundbreaking work of the early 1930s, Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way explores the ways in which such fictional and usually scandalous stories of the Heian women authors Izumi Shikibu, Ono no Komachi, Murasaki Shikibu, and Sei Shōnagon were employed in the competitive preaching and fund-raising of late-Heian and medieval Japan.
The book draws upon a broad range of medieval textual and pictorial sources to describe the diverse and heretofore little-studied roles of itinerant and temple-based preacher-entertainers in the formation and dissemination of medieval literary culture. By plumbing the medieval roots of Heian women poets’ contemporary fame, Preachers, Poets, Women, and the Way illuminates a forgotten world of doctrinal and institutional rivalry, sectarian struggle, and passionately articulated belief, revealing the processes by which Izumi Shikibu and her peers came to be celebrated as the national cultural icons that they are today.
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The Burden of the Past
Problems of Historical Perception in Japan-Korea Relations
Kan Kimura
University of Michigan Press, 2019
The Burden of the Past reexamines the dispute over historical perception between Japan and South Korea, going beyond the descriptive emphasis of previous studies to clearly identify the many independent variables that have affected the situation. From the history textbook debates, to the Occupation-period exploitation of “comfort women,” to the Dokdo/Takeshima territory dispute and Yasukuni Shrine visits, Professor Kimura traces the rise and fall of popular, political, and international concerns underlying these complex and highly fraught issues.
 
Utilizing Japanese and South Korean newspaper databases to review discussion of the two countries’ disputed historical perceptions from the end of World War II to the present, The Burden of the Past provides readers with the historical framework and the major players involved, offering much-needed clarity on such polarizing issues. By seeing behind the public discourse and political rhetoric, this book offers a firmer footing for a discussion and the steps toward resolution.
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Experimental Foundations of Political Science
Donald R. Kinder
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Shows the range and power of experimental methods in political science
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A Near-Perfect Gift
Rose Marie Kinder
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"[Kinder] writes with the x-ray vision of a Sherwood Anderson, and with the insight of a Freudian analyst, an interpreter of dreams, in language that could be as well suited to the traditional folktale or the hometown newspaper as to poetry of the French surrealists. Here is a collection of short fiction for our times: a mirror held up to the homely details, reflecting back to us the wild insides."
---Laura Kasischke, MLFA judge

"I read A Near-Perfect Gift from start to end without stopping, and, when I finished, found myself sitting in my darkened office, infused with an unexpected sense of peace."
---Eileen Pollack, MLFA judge

The stories in A Near-Perfect Gift revolve around the often hardscrabble small-town life in one rural village. Like any other community inhabited by the human race, it's a place where the banal and the improbable coalesce, a place with its share of common tragedies and uncommon madmen: some howl at the moon, while others turn out to be heroes. There are the two old ladies down the street who might be witches and must be exorcised, and the man who plucks chickens for a living. It is within the perimeter of this offbeat microcosm of the world that seemingly small questions---often the kind that children ask, arising from a child's imagined understanding of how the adult world works---assume an eerie portent: Was that a snake beneath the woodpile? Could a pregnant bat climb out of a hole in the ground? The answers never cease to surprise.
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Unifying Political Methodology
The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Inference
Gary King
University of Michigan Press, 1998
One of the hallmarks of the development of political science as a discipline has been the creation of new methodologies by scholars within the discipline--methodologies that are well-suited to the analysis of political data. Gary King has been a leader in the development of these new approaches to the analysis of political data. In his book, Unifying Political Methodology, King shows how the likelihood theory of inference offers a unified approach to statistical modeling for political research and thus enables us to better analyze the enormous amount of data political scientists have collected over the years. Newly reissued, this book is a landmark in the development of political methodology and continues to challenge scholars and spark controversy.
"Gary King's Unifying Political Methodology is at once an introduction to the likelihood theory of statistical inference and an evangelist's call for us to change our ways of doing political methodology. One need not accept the altar call to benefit enormously from the book, but the intellectual debate over the call for reformation is likely to be the enduring contribution of the work."
--Charles Franklin, American Political Science Review
"King's book is one of the only existing books which deal with political methodology in a clear and consistent framework. The material in it is now and will continue to be essential reading for all serious students and researchers in political methodology." --R. Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Tech-nology
Gary King is Professor of Government, Harvard University. One of the leading thinkers in political methodology, he is the author of A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data and other books and articles.
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Another Part of a Long Story
Literary Traces of Eugene O'Neill and Agnes Boulton
William Davies King
University of Michigan Press, 2010
"An engrossing biography about the marital breakdown of a major literary figure, of particular interest for what it reveals about O'Neill's creative process, activities, and bohemian lifestyle at the time of his early successes and some of his most interesting experimental work. In addition, King's discussion of Boulton's efforts as a writer of pulp fiction in the early part of the 20th century reveals an interesting side of popular fiction writing at that time, and gives insight into the lifestyle of the liberated woman."
---Stephen Wilmer, Trinity College, Dublin

Biographers of American playwright Eugene O'Neill have been quick to label his marriage to actress Carlotta Monterey as the defining relationship of his illustrious career. But in doing so, they overlook the woman whom Monterey replaced---Agnes Boulton, O'Neill's wife of over a decade and mother to two of his children. O'Neill and Boulton were wed in 1918---a time when she was a successful pulp novelist and he was still a little-known writer of one-act plays. During the decade of their marriage, he gained fame as a Broadway dramatist who rejected commercial compromise, while she mapped that contentious territory known as the literary marriage. His writing reflected her, and hers reflected him, as they tried to realize progressive ideas about what a marriage should be. But after O'Neill left the marriage, he and new love Carlotta Monterey worked diligently to put Boulton out of sight and mind---and most O'Neill biographers have been quick to follow suit.

William Davies King has brought Agnes Boulton to light again, providing new perspectives on America's foremost dramatist, the dynamics of a literary marriage, and the story of a woman struggling to define herself in the early twentieth century. King shows how the configuration of O'Neill and Boulton's marriage helps unlock many of O'Neill's plays. Drawing on more than sixty of Boulton's published and unpublished writings, including her 1958 memoir, Part of a Long Story, and an extensive correspondence, King rescues Boulton from literary oblivion while offering the most radical revisionary reading of the work of Eugene O'Neill in a generation.

William Davies King is Professor of Theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of several books, most recently Collections of Nothing, chosen by Amazon.com as one of the Best Books of 2008.

Illustration: Eugene O'Neill, Shane O'Neill, and Agnes Boulton ca. 1923. Eugene O'Neill Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Congressmen's Voting Decisions
John W. Kingdon
University of Michigan Press, 1989
This classic study of voting decisions in the U.S. House of Representatives, based on extensive interviewing and observation, combines theory and substance, generalization and detailed description. With a new introduction, this influential and innovative book remains the best statement of the ways in which legislators reach decisions. The work contributes in critical ways to scholars’ and students’ understanding of such larger features of legislative process as representation of constituencies, the place of specialization in the making of public policy, the extent and types of legislative rationality, the importance of principles in decisions, and the place of legislatures in larger political systems.
 
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front cover of The Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615 to 1760
The Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615 to 1760
W. Vernon Kinietz
University of Michigan Press, 1940
Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615–1760 is an ethnographic study of five tribes of the region: Huron, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Chippewa. Author W. Vernon Kinietz based this study on a survey of contact-era accounts from archives in Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec, Chicago, Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Washington, DC.
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The Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615-1760
W. Vernon Kinietz
University of Michigan Press, 1965
The stories of the Huron, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Chippewa tribes in the years before contact with European settlers
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Shawnese Traditions
C. C. Trowbridge's Account
W. Vernon Kinietz
University of Michigan Press, 1939
C. C. Trowbridge wrote reports on the customs of the Miami, Menominee, Shawnee, and Wyandot tribes. It is believed that he wrote the manuscript entitled Shawnese Traditions around 1824; the University of Michigan published it in 1939.
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The Origins of Free Verse
H. T. Kirby-Smith
University of Michigan Press, 1998
H. T. Kirby-Smith offers a far-ranging and intellectually engaging study of the literary history of the debated genre of free verse, aimed not at perpetuating a particular dispute but instead at discovering the generative points of this often celebrated, often maligned form.
Though free verse became a dominant poetic mode only in the twentieth century, Kirby-Smith finds its roots in seventeenth-century England. Beginning his study with writers such as John Milton--who was considered by T. S. Eliot to be the greatest writer of free verse in English--the author places recent and divisive topics in poetics in context, showing them to be attenuated remnants of issues first broached hundreds of years ago.
The book seeks to establish a consensus on the nature of free verse, with reference to critics and poets including Pound, Eliot, Williams, Amy Lowell, Yvor Winters, and Hugh Kenner. Good free verse, argues Kirby-Smith, arises as a reaction to a well-established set of conventions. Likewise, The Origins of Free Verse goes against the conventions of existing poetic scholarship, offering an encompassing yet fresh--and controversial--literary history of free verse.
"At moments, this study is revelatory. . . . In its range and detail it offers a way of thinking about the history of English-language prosody which recognizes the importance of the poet's individual choices and undercuts our century's vanity. . . . Poetry is a learned art, and Kirby-Smith brings both insight and much learning to reading it." --Times Literary Supplement
"The best study of free verse I have seen. . . . The Origins of Free Verse is a book that all students of prosody will want to read. " --Harvard Review
". . . a witty and polemical account of the emergence and development of free verse." --Choice
H. T. Kirby-Smith is Professor of English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
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front cover of The Use of Land and Water Resources in the Past and Present Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico
The Use of Land and Water Resources in the Past and Present Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico
Anne V. T. Kirkby
University of Michigan Press, 1973
In the first volume of a series on Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca, Anne V. T. Kirkby investigated the agricultural production in the valley. With land-use data gathered at the time of her study (the 1960s), she created population and distribution models to help archaeologists interpret prehistoric settlement patterns in the region.
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front cover of Indecision in American Legislatures
Indecision in American Legislatures
Justin Howard Kirkland
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Lawmaking provides many opportunities for proposals to be altered, amended, tabled, or stopped completely. The ideal legislator should assess evidence, update his or her beliefs with new information, and sometimes be willing to change course. In practice, however, lawmakers face criticism from the media, the public, and their colleagues for “flip-flopping.” Legislators may also only appear to change positions in some cases as a means of voting strategically.

This book presents a systematic examination of legislative indecision in American politics. This might occur via “waffling”—where a legislator cosponsors a bill, then votes against it at roll call. Or it might occur when a legislator votes one way on a bill, then switches her vote to the other side. In Indecision in American Legislatures, Jeffrey J. Harden and Justin H. Kirkland develop a theoretical framework to explain indecision itself, as well as the public’s attitudes toward indecision. They test their expectations with data sources from American state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, and survey questions administered to American citizens. Understanding legislative indecision from both the legislator and citizen perspectives is important for discussions about the quality of representation in American politics.

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The Radical Right in Western Europe
A Comparative Analysis
Herbert Kitschelt
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Winner of the American Political Science Association's 1996 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award.
The rise of new political competitors on the radical right is a central feature of many contemporary European party systems. The first study of its kind based on a wide array of comparative survey data, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis provides a unifying framework to explain why rightist parties are electorally powerful in some countries but not in others. The book argues that changes in social structure and the economy do not by themselves adequately explain the success of extremist parties. Instead we must look to the competitive struggles among parties, their internal organizational patterns, and their long-term ideological traditions to understand the principles governing their success.
Radical right authoritarian parties tend to emerge when moderate parties converge toward the median voter. But the success of these parties depends on the strategy employed by the right-wing political actors. Herbert Kitschelt's in-depth analysis, based on the experiences of rightist parties in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Britain, reveals that the broadest appeal is enjoyed by parties that couple a fierce commitment to free markets with authoritarian, ethnocentric--or even racist--messages. The author also shows how a country's particular political constituency or its intellectual and organizational legacies may allow right-wing parties to diverge from these norms and still find electoral success. The book concludes by exploring the interaction between the development of the welfare state, cultural pluralization through immigrants, and the growth of the extreme right.
Herbert Kitschelt is Professor of Political Science at both Duke University and Humboldt University, Berlin. Anthony McGann is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Duke University.
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front cover of Lewd and Notorious
Lewd and Notorious
Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century
Katharine Kittredge
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Accounts of women's transgressive behavior in eighteenth-century literature and social documents have much to teach us about constructions of femininity during the period often identified as having formed our society's gender norms. Lewd and Notorious explores the eighteenth century's shadows, inhabited by marginal women of many kinds and degrees of contrariness. The reader meets Laetitia Pilkington, whose sexual indiscretions caused her to fall from social and literary grace to become an articulate memoirist of personal scandal, and Elizabeth Brownrigg, who tortured and starved her young servants, propelling herself to an infamy comparable to Susan Smith's or Myra Hindley's. More awful women wait between these covers to teach us about society's reception (and construction) of their debauchery and dangerousness.
 
The authors draw upon a rich range of contemporary texts to illuminate the lives of these women. Astute analysis of literary, legal, evangelical, epistolary, and political documents provides an understanding of 1700s womanhood. From lusty old maids to murderous mistresses, the characters who exemplify this period's vision of women on the edge are essential acquaintances for anyone wishing to understand the development and ramifications of conceptions of femininity.
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