front cover of As Is
As Is
Poems
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
As Is gathers everyday poems written over time and mostly at the poet’s home in the Ridge and Valley province of northern Appalachia. This work pays attention to the world as it is with curiosity, candor, and delight. Seeking connection with others and the earth and savoring the fine details of a messy life, these poems reckon with the demands of family, pandemic, aging, and loss even as they witness injustice, violence, environmental degradation, and climate crisis.  
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The Corporate Contract in Changing Times
Is the Law Keeping Up?
Edited by Steven Davidoff Solomon and Randall Stuart Thomas
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Over the past few decades, significant changes have occurred across capital markets. Shareholder activists have become more prominent, institutional investors have begun to wield more power, and intermediaries like investment advisory firms have greatly increased their influence. These changes to the economic environment in which corporations operate have outpaced changes in basic corporate law and left corporations uncertain of how to respond to the new dynamics and adhere to their fiduciary duties to stockholders.
           
With The Corporate Contract in Changing Times, Steven Davidoff Solomon and Randall Stuart Thomas bring together leading corporate law scholars, judges, and lawyers from top corporate law firms to explore what needs to change and what has prevented reform thus far. Among the topics addressed are how the law could be adapted to the reality that activist hedge funds pose a more serious threat to corporations than the hostile takeovers and how statutory laws, such as the rules governing appraisal rights, could be reviewed in the wake of appraisal arbitrage. Together, the contributors surface promising paths forward for future corporate law and public policy.
 
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Economic Turbulence
Is a Volatile Economy Good for America?
Clair Brown, John Haltiwanger, and Julia Lane
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Every day, in every sector of our economy, a business shuts down while another starts up, jobs are created while others are cut, and workers are hired while others are laid off. This constant flux, or turbulence, is a defining characteristic of our free market system, yet it mostly inspires angst about unemployment, loss of earnings, and the overall competitiveness of corporations. But is this endless cycle of fluctuation really so bad for America? Might something positive be going on in the economy as a result of it?

In this penetrating work, three esteemed economists seek to answer these questions by exploring the real impact of volatility on American workers and businesses alike. According to the authors, while any number of events--shifts in consumer demand, changes in technology, mergers and acquisitions, or increased competition--can contribute to economic turbulence, our economy as a whole is, by and large, stronger for it, because these processes of creation and destruction make it more flexible and adaptable. The authors also acknowledge and document the adverse consequences of this turbulence on different groups of workers and firms and discuss the resulting policy challenges. Basing their argument on an up-close look into the dealings and practices of five key industries—financial services, retail food services, trucking, semiconductors, and software—the authors demonstrate the positive effects of turbulence on career paths, employee earnings, and firm performance.

The first substantial attempt to disentangle and make clear the complexities of this phenomenon in the United States, Economic Turbulence will be viewed as a major achievement and the centerpiece of any discussion on the subject for years to come.

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Is a Single Teachable Indian Past Possible Today?
Janaki Nair
Seagull Books, 2024
An accessible contribution to the ongoing discussion about the quality and politics of social science textbooks in India.
 
More than ever before, the school history textbook in India has become an embattled object and the subject of many contestations from both above and below. It is vulnerable not only to the political vagaries of governments but also to the exclusive claims of myriad communities and groups to their sense of the past. What is the future of India’s textbook, arguably the most important repository of the country’s national past? Is a single teachable past even possible any longer?
 
In this essay, Janaki Nair uses the Indian predicament to discuss the possibility of building up a “historical temper” in the Indian classroom. Sharing examples from her unique position as a professional historian with sustained experience in the field of pedagogy, Nair invites reflections on the prospect of cultivating a historical temper that can help the teacher equip students to grapple with history.
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Is the Cemetery Dead?
David Charles Sloane
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In modern society, we have professionalized our care for the dying and deceased in hospitals and hospices, churches and funeral homes, cemeteries and mausoleums to aid dazed and disoriented mourners. But these formal institutions can be alienating and cold, leaving people craving a more humane mourning and burial process. The burial treatment itself has come to be seen as wasteful and harmful—marked by chemicals, plush caskets, and manicured greens. Today’s bereaved are therefore increasingly turning away from the old ways of death and searching for a more personalized, environmentally responsible, and ethical means of grief.

Is the Cemetery Dead? gets to the heart of the tragedy of death, chronicling how Americans are inventing new or adapting old traditions, burial places, and memorials. In illustrative prose, David Charles Sloane shows how people are taking control of their grief by bringing their relatives home to die, interring them in natural burial grounds, mourning them online, or memorializing them streetside with a shrine, ghost bike, or RIP mural. Today’s mourners are increasingly breaking free of conventions to better embrace the person they want to remember. As Sloane shows, these changes threaten the future of the cemetery, causing cemeteries to seek to become more responsive institutions.

A trained historian, Sloane is also descendent from multiple generations of cemetery managers and he grew up in Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery. Enriched by these experiences, as well as his personal struggles with overwhelming grief, Sloane presents a remarkable and accessible tour of our new American way of death.
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Is the Rectum a Grave?
and Other Essays
Leo Bersani
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Over the course of a distinguished career, critic Leo Bersani has tackled a range of issues in his writing, and this collection gathers together some of his finest work. Beginning with one of the foundations of queer theory—his famous meditation on how sex leads to a shattering of the self, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”—this volume charts the inspired connections Bersani has made between sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics.

Over the course of these essays, Bersani grapples with thinkers ranging from Plato to Descartes to Georg Simmel. Foucault and Freud recur as key figures, and although Foucault rejected psychoanalysis, Bersani contends that by considering his ideas alongside Freud’s, one gains a clearer understanding of human identity and how we relate to one another. For Bersani, art represents a crucial guide for conceiving new ways of connecting to the world, and so, in many of these essays, he stresses the importance of aesthetics, analyzing works by Genet, Caravaggio, Proust, Almodóvar, and Godard.

Documenting over two decades in the life of one of the best minds working in the humanities today, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays is a unique opportunity to explore the fruitful career of a formidable intellect.

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The Music between Us
Is Music a Universal Language?
Kathleen Marie Higgins
University of Chicago Press, 2012
From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. In The Music between Us, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music’s uncanny ability to provoke, despite its myriad forms across continents and throughout centuries, the sense of a shared human experience.
                Drawing on disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, musicology, linguistics, and anthropology, Higgins’s richly researched study showcases the ways music is used in rituals, education, work, healing, and as a source of security and—perhaps most importantly—joy. By participating so integrally in such meaningful facets of society, Higgins argues, music situates itself as one of the most fundamental bridges between people, a truly cross-cultural form of communication that can create solidarity across political divides. Moving beyond the well-worn takes on music’s universality, The Music between Us provides a new understanding of what it means to be musical and, in turn, human. 
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Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is
Theories and Approaches for the Field
Lisa Melonçon, S. Scott Graham, Jenell Johnson, John A. Lynch, and Cynthia Ryan
The Ohio State University Press, 2020
The rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) is a growing and vibrant area of inquiry incorporating scholars working across a variety of fields and disciplines. While this makes it a source for rich and innovative scholarship, this emerging field is in need of a guiding text that can bring together the disparate work spread across multiple disciplines and institutional spaces. Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is: Theories and Approaches for the Field answers this call by providing an in-depth and wide-reaching analysis of the state of the rhetoric of health and medicine and offering core concepts and critical theories to ground research moving forward.
 
With a foreword by Judy Segal and in sections that address interdisciplinary perspectives, representations of health and illness in online spaces, and health activism and advocacy, this volume proceeds in a unique format: essays tackle these key topic areas through case studies ranging from food and its relation to public health, to apps that track fertility, to mental health and disability, to racial disparities that exist in public health campaigns about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The essays within each section are then followed by responses from prominent scholars in the rhetoric of health and medicine—including John Lyne, J. Blake Scott, and Lisa Keränen—who take on the central theme and discuss how the theory or concept under study can and should evolve in the next stages of research. Unifying the essays is a consideration of RHM as a theoretical construct guiding research and thinking alongside the conceptual parameters that constitute what RHM is and can be in practice. In asking questions about the role of rhetoric—both as 
analytic and productive framework—in health and medicine, this volume engages with broader theoretical and ethical concerns about our current healthcare system and how healthcare and medical issues circulate in all the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of our world.
 
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