Addressing the often fraught and truncated nature of educating new writing instructors, Conceptions of Literacy proposes a theoretical framework for examining new graduate student instructors’ preexisting attitudes and beliefs about literacy. Based on an empirical study author Meaghan Brewer conducted with graduate students teaching first-year composition for the first time, Conceptions of Literacy draws on narratives, interviews, and classroom observations to describe the conceptions of literacy they have already unknowingly established and how these conceptions impact the way they teach in their own classrooms.
 
Brewer argues that conceptions of literacy undergird the work of writing instructors and that many of the anxieties around composition studies’ disciplinary status are related to the differences perceived between the field’s conceptions of literacy and those of the graduate instructors and adjuncts who teach the majority of composition courses. Conceptions of Literacy makes practical recommendations for how new graduate instructors can begin to perceive and interrogate their conceptions of literacy, which, while influential, are often too personal to recognize.

 

Reveals how art shaped the economy, social order, and legal claims during the rise of capitalism.
 
In the sixteenth century, German goldsmiths played a unique role in articulating property claims and social values. These artisans shaped precious metals into visible expressions of domination, subordination, and obligation. The objects they crafted played a major role in the practices of exchange and inheritance that were reconfiguring a tumultuous economic landscape. Cities commissioned goldsmiths to transform revenue into goblets that could be given as diplomatic gifts or reconverted into currency in times of war, and courts used serving implements as promises of credit.
 
With The Goldsmith’s Debt, art historian Shira Brisman offers the first book-length study of the Nuremberg goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer (1563–1618), who created elaborate gilded silver drinking cups that he crafted into unexpected forms, with designs ranging from racialized heads to mining scenes. Considering how works of art can shape a social order, Brisman explores what Jamnitzer’s etchings and goblets reveal about how goldsmiths shared ideas and how their patrons used commissioned works to legitimize their claims over land and the rights of others. Drawing on a range of textual and material evidence—including commentaries on Roman and customary laws, wills and civic statutes, printed designs, and firsthand study of lidded cups in dozens of major European institutions—this unprecedented study places the goldsmith at the heart of the era’s arguments about how people and lands should be subjugated. Brisman reveals the insidious side of these objects that were often used to advance socially conservative agendas, and she presents radical proposals for addressing inequity in the world of ornament prints.