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This arresting graphic provides a visual overview of the impacts of arts integration and interdisciplinarity in the university. It can be a tool for case-making, communication, and further inquiry.

President of the Archaeological Institute of America, professor at the University of Michigan from 1889 to 1927, and president of the American Philological Association, Francis Kelsey was crucially involved in the founding or growth of major educational institutions. He came to maturity in a period of great technological change in communications, transportation, and manufacturing. Kelsey took full advantage of such innovations in his ceaseless drive to promote education for all, to further the expansion of knowledge, and to champion the benefits of the study of antiquity.

A vigorous traveler around the United States, Europe, and the Mediterranean, Kelsey strongly believed in the value of personally viewing sites ancient and modern and collecting artifacts that could be used by the new museums and universities that were springing up in the United States. This collecting habit put him in touch with major financiers of the day, including Charles Freer, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, as he sought their help for important projects.

Drawing heavily on Kelsey's daily diaries now held at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library, John Griffiths Pedley gives us a biography that records the wide-ranging activities of a gifted and energetic scholar whose achievements mirrored the creative and contributive innovations of his contemporary Americans.

Art and technology have been converging rapidly in the past few years; an important example of this convergence is the alliance of neuroscience with aesthetics, which has produced the new field of neuroaesthetics.

Irving Massey examines this alliance, in large part to allay the fears of artists and audiences alike that brain science may "explain away" the arts. The first part of the book shows how neuroscience can enhance our understanding of certain features of art. The second part of the book illustrates a humanistic approach to the arts; it is written entirely without recourse to neuroscience, in order to show the differences in methodology between the two approaches. The humanistic style is marked particularly by immersion in the individual work and by evaluation, rather than by detachment in the search for generalizations. In the final section Massey argues that, despite these differences, once the reality of imagination is accepted neuroscience can be seen as the collaborator, not the inquisitor, of the arts.

How does a so-called bad neighborhood go about changing its reputation? Is it simply a matter of improving material conditions or picking the savviest marketing strategy? What kind of role can or should the arts play in that process? Does gentrification always entail a betrayal of a neighborhood’s roots? Tackling these questions and offering a fresh take on the dynamics of urban revitalization, The Philadelphia Barrio examines one neighborhood’s fight to erase the stigma of devastation.

Frederick F. Wherry shows how, in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Centro de Oro, entrepreneurs and community leaders forged connections between local businesses and cultural institutions to rebrand a place once nicknamed the Badlands. Artists and performers negotiated with government organizations and national foundations, Wherry reveals, and took to local galleries, stages, storefronts, and street parades in a concerted, canny effort to reanimate the spirit of their neighborhood.

Complicating our notions of neighborhood change by exploring the ways the process is driven by local residents, The Philadelphia Barrio presents a nuanced look at how city dwellers can make commercial interests serve the local culture, rather than exploit it.

Long before the concept of “globalization,” the Portuguese constructed a vast empire that extended into Africa, India, Brazil, and mid-Atlantic territories, as well as parts of China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Using this empire as its starting point and spanning seven centuries and four continents, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora examines literary and artistic works about the ensuing diaspora, or the dispersion of people within the Portuguese-speaking world, resulting from colonization, the slave trade, adventure seeking, religious conversion, political exile, forced labor, war, economic migration, and tourism.

Based on a broad array of written and visual materials, including historiography, letters, memoirs, plays, poetry, fiction, cartographic imagery, paintings, photographs, and films, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora is the first detailed analysis of the different and sometimes conflicting cultural productions of the imperial diaspora in its heyday and an important context for understanding the more complex and broader-based culture of population travel and displacement from the former colonies to present-day “homelands.” The topics that Darlene J. Sadlier discusses include exploration and settlement by the Portuguese in different parts of the empire; the Black Atlantic slave trade; nineteenth-century travel and Orientalist imaginings; the colonial wars; and the return of populations to Portugal following African independence. A wide-ranging study of the art and literature of these and other diasporic movements, this book is a major contribution to the growing field of Lusophone studies.

Intermedia art—an avant-garde multimedia practice that combines sound and moving images—took root in Japan alongside other places in the 1960s. In Transpacific Experiments, Miki Kaneda analyzes intermedia as a practice that gives form to errant possibilities, unfolding in spaces of the everyday, to offer nuanced insights into the global flow of ideas, influence, and discourses of appropriation. The stories of intermedia art throughout the study offer feminist and transnational perspectives on experimental music and art that disorient existing narratives about the experimental and political in unexpected ways.

Transpacific Experiments contends that social, cultural, and political arrangements local to Japan had a greater influence on the transnational experimental music scene than previously acknowledged. Kaneda’s perspective extends, exceeds, and at times unsettles frameworks for experimental practices, revealing the limitations of any single political or aesthetic lens.