Chava Rosenfarb
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
This volume describes the lives of the novel’s protagonists in the Lodz Ghetto at the beginning of World War II. Chava Rosenfarb, herself a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, draws on her own history to create realistic characters who struggle daily to retain a sense of humanity and dignity despite the physical and psychological effects of ghetto life. Although horrendous experiences are depicted, the light of faith in the human spirit shines through this novel’s every page.
Darius Staliunas
Central European University Press, 2021
This collection of essays addresses the challenge of modern nationalism to the tsarist Russian Empire. First appearing on the empire’s western periphery this challenge, was most prevalent in twelve provinces extending from Ukrainian lands in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, as well as to the Kingdom of Poland.
At issue is whether the late Russian Empire entered World War I as a multiethnic state with many of its age-old mechanisms run by a multiethnic elite, or as a Russian state predominantly managed by ethnic Russians. The tsarist vision of prioritizing loyalty among all subjects over privileging ethnic Russians and discriminating against non-Russians faced a fundamental problem: as soon as the opportunity presented itself, non-Russians would increase their demands and become increasingly separatist.
The authors found that although the imperial government did not really identify with popular Russian nationalism, it sometimes ended up implementing policies promoted by Russian nationalist proponents. Matters addressed include native language education, interconfessional rivalry, the “Jewish question,” the origins of mass tourism in the western provinces, as well as the emergence of Russian nationalist attitudes in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution.
John F. Wippel
Catholic University of America Press, 2011
Jon Stewart
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Hannes Klöpper
Central European University Press, 2016
Francesco Torchiani, Translated by Johanna Bishop
University of Wisconsin Press, 2026
As gay men and lesbian women increasingly gained recognition and acceptance in twentieth-century literature and film, and subsequently in social and political movements, the Catholic Church reacted by subtly moving away from its overt condemnation of homosexuality as an urgent moral problem and toward tacitly shunning homosexuality as an “unspeakable vice.” In this revealing history, Francesco Torchiani reconstructs the Catholic Church’s shifting attitudes toward homosexuality during this period by drawing on a vast array of internal documents and external accounts. This monograph expands the scholarship on the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality in terms of both method and content, ultimately concluding that the Catholic Church continues to wholeheartedly condemn homosexuality despite making genuine efforts to reflect on and understand its social and cultural impact. The Unspeakable Vice therefore sheds new light on and places into historical perspective the questions the Catholic Church continues to reckon with regarding its role in contemporary society.
Nathan Gorelick
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Martha Lampland
University of Chicago Press, 2016
David Nyberg
University of Chicago Press, 1993

Andrew Senter Andrew Morrell
University of London Press, 2019
Simon Joyce
Ohio University Press, 2007
When Margaret Thatcher called in 1979 for a return to Victorian values such as hard work, self-reliance, thrift, and national pride, Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock responded that “Victorian values” also included “cruelty, misery, drudgery, squalor, and ignorance.”
The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror is an in-depth look at the ways that the twentieth century reacted to and reimagined its predecessor. It considers how the Victorian inheritance has been represented in literature, politics, film, and visual culture; the ways in which modernists and progressives have sought to differentiate themselves from an image of the Victorian; and how conservatives (and some liberals) have sought to revive elements of nineteenth-century life. Nostalgic and critical impulses combine to fix an understanding of the Victorians in the popular imagination.
Simon Joyce examines heritage culture, contemporary politics, and the “neo-Dickensian” novel to offer a more affirmative assessment of the Victorian legacy, one that lets us imagine a model of social interconnection and interdependence that has come under threat in today’s politics and culture.
Although more than one hundred years have passed since the death of Queen Victoria, the impact of her time is still fresh. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror speaks to diverse audiences in literary and cultural studies, in addition to those interested in visual culture and contemporary politics, and situates detailed close readings of literary and cinematic texts in the context of a larger argument about the legacies of an era not as distant as we might like to think.
Michael Bibby
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999
The longest war in the nation's history, the American military intervention in Vietnam dominated United States culture and politics from 1965 to 1975. In addition to causing immense devastation in Southeast Asia, the war transformed American society, with effects that continue to be felt today. Yet aside from a few cultural studies of the war's representations, scholars have tended to ignore the relationship between the American war in Vietnam and broader cultural developments in the West. Frederic Jameson once characterized the Vietnam War as “the first terrible postmodernist war,” suggesting that it embodied or reflected the sensibility of an emerging historical epoch. But does it make sense to place a military conflict within a category of cultural and aesthetic periodization? Is it possible to see the Vietnam War as an expression and reflection of postmodernity—what Jameson calls “the cultural logic of late capitalism?” These are some of the questions addressed in this volume. Ranging across a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, cultural studies, literary criticism, and film studies, the essays explore the war's discourses and technologies in relation to the post-modern condition. At the same time, they reinterpret key cultural representations of the war from a postmodern perspective. The result is a book that poses important challenges to both Vietnam War studies and postmodern studies, at once reshaping the ways postmodernity is conceived and reminding us of the war's enduring significance in contemporary cultural history. In addition to Michael Bibby, contributors are Philip D. Beidler, Michael Clark, Cynthia J. Fuchs, Brady Harrison, Tony Williams, Eric Gadzinski, Chris Hables Gray, and Douglas Kellner.
Anu Mai Kõll
Central European University Press, 2013
Lauren Nossett
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Edited by Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson
University of Michigan Press, 2023
The Visual Life of Romantic Theater examines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book places the stage front and center in Romantic scholarship—a field in a period long defined by its focus on poetry—by reenvisioning traditional approaches to artistic and social production. How, it asks, did dramaturgy and stagecraft influence aesthetic and sociopolitical concerns? How does a focus on visuality expand our understanding of the historical experience of theatergoing? In what ways did stage performance converge with visual culture beyond the theater? How did extra-theatrical genres engage with theatrical sight and spectacle? Finally, how does a focus on dramatic vision change the way we conceive of Romanticism itself? The volume’s essays by emerging and established scholars provide exciting and suggestive answers to these questions, along with a more capacious conception of Romantic theater as a locus of visual culture that reached well beyond playhouse walls.
Gary Johnson
The Ohio State University Press, 2012
Peter W. Sinnema
Ohio University Press, 2006
Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the duke’s death.
The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington’s spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented.
Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times’s celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington “was the very type and model of an Englishman.” The dead duke, as Sinnema demonstrates, was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation.
The Wake of Wellington provides a unique view of how in death Wellington and his career were promoted as the consummation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself, and with what it meant to be English at midcentury.
David R. Marples
Central European University Press, 2022
This collective work analyzes the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, providing a coherent picture of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in the period 2013–2020. Giving voice to different social groups, scholarly communities and agencies relevant to Ukraine’s recent history, The War in Ukraine's Donbas goes beyond simplistic media interpretations that limit the analysis to Vladimir Putin and Russian aims to annex Ukraine. Instead, the authors identify the deeper roots linked to the autonomy and history of Donbas as a region. The contributions explore local society and traditions and the alienation from Ukraine caused by the events of Euromaidan, which saw the removal of the Donetsk-based president Viktor Yanukovych. Other chapters address the refugee crisis, the Minsk Accords in 2014 and the impact of the new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his efforts to bring the war to an end by negotiations among Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany.
The book concludes with four proposals for a durable peace in Donbas: territorial power-sharing; the conversion of rebels into legitimate political parties; amnesty for all participants of the armed conflict; and a transitional period of several years until political institutions are fully re-established.
David Kirkpatrick
Westholme Publishing, 2019
Alina Margolis-Edelman
Central European University Press, 2026
Hermann Lons
Westholme Publishing, 2006
Janine P. Holc
Brandeis University Press, 2023
Reid Gómez
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
A visionary reckoning with prophecy, possession, and the grammar of liberation
A bold, experimental intervention in literary and theoretical discourse of colonialism and diaspora, The Web of Differing Versions engages with Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 Almanac of the Dead as literature, prophecy, and philosophy. Reid Gómez makes “The Indian Connection” that Silko prophesizes—Land Back!—and offers a prescient response to Silko’s enduring question: who has spiritual possession of the Américas?
Realizing the great capacity of Black and Native studies, Gómez crafts a visionary mode of scholarship that resists acknowledging conceptual, political, spiritual, formal, or linguistic borders. Rather than comparing or separating, she demonstrates how to stop telling things apart: Black|Indian, slavery|colonization, and writing|translation. Gómez shifts focus from racialized identities to the prophesied world itself, working with music, literature, and language to elaborate the connections that exist between racialized bodies, land, and sea as she emphasizes the ubiquity of escape, revolt, and beauty/hózhǫ́.
A theoretical composition, this book enacts a practice of re-visioning that uses Silko’s Almanac to challenge the limits of thought, language, and the very idea of scholarship. Attending the multiplicity of time into times, past into pasts, future into futures, The Web of Differing Versions offers a new grammar for a shared and violent world.
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Dennis McCann
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
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University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
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University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
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University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
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University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2024
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2025
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2026
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Allison M. Prasch
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Lilian Alweiss
Ohio University Press, 2003
The World Unclaimed argues that Heidegger’s critique of modern epistemology in Being and Time is seriously flawed. Heidegger believes he has done away with epistemological problems concerning the external world by showing that the world is an existential structure of Dasein. However, the author argues that Heidegger fails to make good his claim that he has “rescued” the phenomenon of the world, which he believes the tradition of philosophy has bypassed. Heidegger fails not only to reclaim the world but also to acknowledge its loss. Alweiss thus calls into question Heidegger’s claim that ontology is more fundamental than epistemology.
The World Unclaimed develops its powerful critique of Being and Time by arguing for a return to Husserl. It draws on Husserl’s insight that it is the moving and sensing body that discloses how we are already familiar with the world. Kinaesthesia provides a key for understanding our relation to the world. The author thus suggests that thinkers in the vein of Husserl and Kant -who, for Heidegger, epitomize the tradition of modern philosophy by returning to a “worldless subject”- may provide us with the resources to reclaim the phenomenon of the world that Being and Time sets out to salvage.
Alweiss’s fresh and innovative study demonstrates that it is possible to overcome epistemological skepticism without ever losing sight of the phenomenon of the world. Moreover, Alweiss challenges us to reconsider the relation between Husserl and Heidegger by providing a forceful defense of Husserl’s critique of cognition.
Christof Mauch
Ohio University Press, 2008
For better or worse, the view through a car’s windshield has redefined how we see the world around us. In some cases, such as the American parkway, the view from the road was the be-all and end-all of the highway; in others, such as the Italian autostrada, the view of a fast, efficient transportation machine celebrating either Fascism or its absence was the goal. These varied environments are neither necessary nor accidental but the outcomes of historical negotiations, and whether we abhor them or take delight in them, they have become part of the fabric of human existence.
The World beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe is the first systematic, comparative look at these landscapes. By looking at examples from the United States and Europe, the chapters in this volume explore the relationship between the road and the landscape thatit traverses, cuts through, defines, despoils, and enhances. The authors analyze the Washington Beltway and the Blue Ridge Parkway, as well as iconic roads in Italy, Nazi Germany, East Germany, and Great Britain. This is a story of the transatlantic exchange of ideas about environment and technology and of the national and nationalistic appropriations of such landscaping.
Peter Schrag
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Daniel J. Ennis
University of Delaware Press, 2022
Rosemary Wakeman
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Ha Jin
University of Chicago Press, 2008