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The Resurrection Plate, a Late Classic Maya dish, is decorated with an arresting scene. The Maize God, assisted by two other deities, emerges reborn from a turtle shell. At the center of the plate, in the middle of the god’s body and aligned with the point of emergence, there is a curious sight: a small, neatly drilled hole.

Art historian Andrew Finegold explores the meanings attributed to this and other holes in Mesoamerican material culture, arguing that such spaces were broadly understood as conduits of vital forces and material abundance, prerequisites for the emergence of life. Beginning with, and repeatedly returning to, the Resurrection Plate, this study explores the generative potential attributed to a wide variety of cavities and holes in Mesoamerica, ranging from the perforated dishes placed in Classic Maya burials, to caves and architectural voids, to the piercing of human flesh. Holes are also discussed in relation to fire, based on the common means through which both were produced: drilling. Ultimately, by attending to what is not there, Vital Voids offers a fascinating approach to Mesoamerican cosmology and material culture.

Winner, 2022 Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov

This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana Dragunoiu reads Nabokov’s fictional worlds as battlegrounds between an autonomous will and heteronomous passions, demonstrating Nabokov’s insistence that genuinely moral acts occur when the will triumphs over the passions by answering the call of duty.
 
Dragunoiu puts Nabokov’s novels into dialogue with the work of writers such as Alexander Pushkin, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust; with Kantian moral philosophy; with the institution of the modern duel of honor; and with the European traditions of chivalric literature that Nabokov studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. This configuration of literary influences and philosophical contexts allows Dragunoiu to advance an original and provocative argument about the formation, career, and legacies of an author who viewed moral activity as an art, and for whom artistic and moral acts served as testaments to the freedom of the will.

Centered on the former slaving port of Ouidah, Benin, Dana Rush's research extends through Togo to Ghana, a region where exchanges of histories, ideas, and belief systems are given material forms. This is a land where Shango, Jesus, and the Buddha are all gods of Vodun; where Hindu and Vodun deities co-exist in symbiosis; where the spirits of people enslaved 150 years ago are paid tribute by the children of their long-lost masters; and where Haitian, Brazilian, and Cuban images, artists, and spirits remain relevant to contemporary West African practices.

The book is richly illustrated with color photographs of Vodun shrines, temple wall paintings, masquerades, and Hindu chromolithographs.

This book is the first publication in a new series called "Critical Investigations of the African Diaspora." The series grows out of Issues in Critical Investigation, a Vanderbilt initiative to assist junior scholars through critical feedback from senior faculty, annual symposia, and prize competitions in the humanities and social sciences. Dana Rush's Vodun in Coastal Benin is the winner of the inaugural Anna Julia Cooper Prize in the Humanities.

2024 Visual Communication Division Award, National Communication Association
2025 Philosophy of Communication, Theory, and Critique Division Distinguished Book Award, National Communication Association
2025 Winans-Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, National Communication Association

How a city government in central Mexico evolved from waging war on graffiti in the early 2000s to sanctioning its creation a decade later, and how youth navigated these changing conditions for producing art.

The local government, residents, and media outlets in León, Mexico, treated graffiti as a disease until the state began sponsoring artistic graffiti through a program of its own. In Voices in Aerosol, the first book-length study of state-sponsored graffiti, Caitlin Frances Bruce considers the changing perceptions and recognition of graffiti artists, their right to the city, and the use of public space over the span of eighteen years (2000–2018). Focusing on the midsized city of León, Bruce offers readers a look at the way negotiations with the neoliberal state unfolded at different levels and across decades.

Issues brought to light in this case study, such as graffiti as a threat and graffiti as a sign of gentrification, resonate powerfully with those germane to other urban landscapes throughout the Western Hemisphere and beyond. Combining archival work, interviews, considerations of urban planning, local politics in Mexico, and insights gained by observing graffiti events and other informal artistic encounters, Bruce offers a new lens through which to understand the interplay between sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of cultural expression. Ultimately, Voices in Aerosol builds a strong case for graffiti as a contested tool for "voicing" public demands.

An acute theorization of the human voice in contemporary art

Voiceworks is a perceptive exploration of contemporary artworks in which the primary medium of activation is the human voice. Engaging in close readings of video and installations primarily from the 2010s and 2020s, Sarah Hayden reveals how voiceworks intervene politically through their handling of writing and voicing.

Surveying works from eighteen established and emerging artists including Hito Steyerl, John Akomfrah, Alban Muja, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, and Cally Spooner, Voiceworks attends to the sensuous potentiality of voiced language in composition and physical space. The book elucidates how these works operate relationally, conscripting embodied involvement in the service of collective critical and resistant aims.

Augmented by Hayden’s experience as a curator of exhibitions and public programs around audiovisual work, Voiceworks skillfully traverses scholarship in critical theory, sound studies, film and video theory, poetics, and feminist criticism to analyze this prominent but underexplored strand of contemporary art practice.

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