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A Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Volume II unveils the rich diversity and enduring legacy of the Greek manuscript tradition preserved in one of North America's largest collections. Building on the acclaimed first volume, this second and concluding volume offers comprehensive illustrated descriptions of eighty-four manuscripts and fragments housed in the University of Michigan Library's Special Collections Research Center. The discovery of twenty-three previously unknown manuscripts and fragments significantly expands our understanding of Byzantine and post-Byzantine book culture, illuminating the remarkable continuity of Greek scholarly, liturgical, and artistic traditions from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries.

Each entry integrates codicological features, handwriting analysis, textual content, decoration, binding, provenance, and references to earlier scholarship as well as high-quality color plates to illustrate representative pages, script types, and illuminations. Among the exceptional highlights are a fragment of The Great Calculation According to the Indians by Maximos Planoudes, preserving portions of this rare mathematical treatise otherwise lost; an illuminated 1371 copy of The Heavenly Ladder by John Klimax, created by the renowned scribe Joasaph II of the Hodegon Monastery in Constantinople; and a newly identified manuscript containing rare patristic homilies linked to the sixteenth-century Choniates scriptorium in Venice.

The New Deal introduced sweeping social, political, and cultural change across the United States, which Hollywood embraced enthusiastically. Then, when the heady idealism of the 1930s was replaced by the paranoia of the postwar years, Hollywood became an easy target for the anticommunists. A Divided World examines some of the important programs of the New Deal and the subsequent response of the film community—especially in relation to social welfare, women’s rights, and international affairs. The book also provides an analysis of the major works of three European directors—Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lang—compared and contrasted with the products of mainstream Hollywood. This is a new interpretation of an influential period in American film history and it is sure to generate further debate and scholarship.

Barbara Stafford is a pioneering art historian whose research has long helped to bridge the divide between the humanities and cognitive sciences. In A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field, she marshals a distinguished group of thinkers to forge a ground-breaking dialogue between the emerging brain sciences, the liberal arts, and social sciences.

Stafford’s book examines meaning and mental function from this dual experimental perspective. The wide-ranging essays included here—from Frank Echenhofer’s foray into shamanist hallucinogenic visions to David Bashwiner’s analysis of emotion and danceability—develop a common language for implementing programmatic and institutional change. Demonstrating how formerly divided fields are converging around shared issues, A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field maps a high-level, crossdisciplinary adventure from one of our leading figures in visual studies.

Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890s, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination. Wheeler Winston Dixon's fully revised and updated A History of Horror is still the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre.

Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. In covering the last decade, this new edition includes coverage of the resurgence of the genre, covering the swath of new groundbreaking horror films directed by women, Black and queer horror films, and a new international wave in body horror films.

A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the Hollywood studio system, how the distribution and exhibition of horror films have changed in a post-COVID world, and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time.

Dixon examines key periods in the horror film-in which the basic precepts of the genre were established, then banished into conveniently reliable and malleable forms, and then, after collapsing into parody, rose again and again to create new levels of intensity and menace. A History of Horror, supported by rare stills from classic films, brings over sixty timeless horror films into frightfully clear focus, zooms in on today's top horror Web sites, and champions the stars, directors, and subgenres that make the horror film so exciting and popular with contemporary audiences.
 

Dedicated to the art of the United States, the Smithsonian American Art Museum contains works by more than 7,000 artists and is widely regarded as an invaluable resource for the study and preservation of the nation's cultural heritage. But as Lois Marie Fink shows in this probing narrative, the history of the museum is hardly one of steady progress. Instead, it reads like a nineteenth-century melodrama, replete with villains and heroes, destruction by fire, dashed hopes, and periods of subsistence survival—all leading eventually to a happy ending. 

Originating as the art gallery stipulated in the 1846 founding legislation of the Smithsonian, the museum developed within an institution that was essentially controlled by scientists. In its early years, the museum's holdings included a diverse selection of art and artifacts, mostly donated from private collections. Government support varied in response to shifting attitudes of officials and the public toward American art, ranging from avid admiration at the turn of the twentieth century to a tepid response and an almost total withdrawal of funding a generation later in favor of European masterworks. For decades the museum followed scientific organizational principles in exhibitions and collection strategies. Far into the twentieth century, accessions remained tied to nineteenth-century figurative art, reflecting the strength and influence of anthropology and biological sciences at the Smithsonian. A key breakthrough for modern art came in 1964 with the appointment of Smithsonian secretary Dillon Ripley, a scientist who strongly promoted the art side of the institution. With renewed support for expanding the collection and programs, the museum moved in 1968 to its present location in the Patent Office Building. 

In recounting the history of the museum from 1846 to 1980, Fink unravels the various levels of institutional authority, power, governance, and bureaucracy and shows how people at each level influenced the fortunes of the collection. She also places changing concepts of art and museum practice in the context of national ideals and Washington realities.

What representations of a monument across centuries can tell us about how we engage with, study, and understand the past.

In a square in the heart of Athens, a cylindrical structure rests on a platform made up of large stone blocks. Semi-columns encircle it, and a slanted roof sits on top, with a plantlike feature at its highest point. Focusing on this well-documented remnant of classical Greece, the so-called Choregic Monument of Lysikrates, Milette Gaifman considers the history of engagement with this ancient landmark, looking at how names, scholarly classifications, and illustrations have shaped our understanding of it from the fourth century BCE to the modern era. 

Studying the landmark’s representation through centuries of scholarship and illustrations, she examines how modes of engagement with the past often impose their own baggage, interpretive forces, and inaccuracies. By being aware of their histories, advantages, and limitations, Gaifman argues that we should treat them as helpful tools and flexible guidelines rather than as strict or unmoving criteria. A Landmark Through Time reveals how adapting and expanding traditional frameworks of classification and technologies can open fresh vantage points for appreciating the complexity and ingenuity of ancient Greek art and architecture.

Founded in 1921, the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin has become one of the world’s great libraries for the study of Latin America, as well as the largest university library collection of Latin American materials in the United States. Encompassing all areas of the Western Hemisphere that were ever part of the Spanish or Portuguese empires, the Benson Collection documents Latin American history and culture from the first European contacts to the current activities of Latinas/os in the United States. Scholars, students, and members of the public from around the world regularly use the multifaceted, multimedia resources of the Benson.

Showcasing the incredible depth, diversity, and history of the Benson Collection, A Library for the Americas presents rare books and manuscripts, maps, photographs, music, oral histories, art and objects dating from the early 1500s to the present. Images of and captions for these materials are paired with a series of essays and reflections by distinguished scholars of Latin American and Latina/o studies, who describe the role that the Benson Collection has played in the research and intellectual contributions that have defined their careers. As a whole, the book celebrates the remarkable place for learning that is the Benson Collection, while not shying away from larger questions about what it means to have a monumental library and archive devoted to Latin America in the United States.

A timely reexamination of Joseph Wright’s captivating “candlelight” paintings, featuring the recently rediscovered Two Boys with a Bladder.

The dramatic “candlelight” paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) cast a spell, enthralling viewers with striking scenes that portray human curiosity, the quiet intensity of domestic life, and the excitement of scientific discovery. With a variety of brushstrokes—dabbed here, whiskered there, and dragged elsewhere—Wright pushed boundaries with the transformative power of light. In 2020, the Getty Museum acquired the newly rediscovered Two Boys with a Bladder (1767), a luminous study of innovation, intimacy, and artistic brilliance that challenged established assumptions about Wright and sparked renewed interest in his experiments with light.

A Light in the Dark presents new research to uncover the origins of Two Boys and expand our understanding of Wright's early candlelights, tracing the invention and initial development of his distinctive style. Whereas recent scholarship has maintained an outward approach that ties the artist’s oeuvre to places that he visited, this volume returns the focus to Wright himself—his biography, technique, and hometown of Derby—in a much-needed reexamination. Complete with fresh historical and technical evidence, this is a fascinating look into the inspirations, aspirations, and experiments behind some of the most remarkable paintings in the history of British art.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from November 24, 2026, to March 14, 2027.

Exploring a collection of wondrous objects to understand the nineteenth-century desire to preserve the perfect moment

Cultural studies of the nineteenth century often categorize their subjects as being motivated by one of two opposing notions: a wholehearted embrace of progress or an antimodernist nostalgia. A Perfectionist Impulse centers a different kind of response to the period’s newly intensified awareness of temporality and history: an obsession with preserving perfection. Engaging a diverse set of case studies, Ellery E. Foutch explores the era’s desire to forestall the march of time and immortalize the fleeting moment through art and technology.

Beginning with an investigation of artist and naturalist Titian Peale’s butterfly illustrations and specimen boxes, Foutch assesses the implications of attempts to fix animal life in the “perfect state.” She then turns to Harvard’s Ware Collection of Glass Flowers, botanical models meticulously crafted to serve as instructional tools but most famous internationally as a spectacle for tourists. Finally, she scrutinizes the period’s preoccupation with the fragility of the human body, examining artistic representations of the legendary bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, widely known during his time as the “Perfect Man.” Highlighting the paradoxical way in which these attempts at preservation ultimately sap the vitality from the organic processes they seek to arrest, Foutch uses these curious objects to unpack a deep set of cultural anxieties around decay and death.

By analyzing objects of mass culture and natural history using methods typically reserved for works of art, A Perfectionist Impulse provides a unique window into how nineteenth-century scientists, technologists, artists, and entertainers rendered a common desire for perfection and immortality. Itself a wondrous collection of attempts to capture the idealized moment, this extensively illustrated book serves as a shining example of our enduring fascination with the ephemeral.

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This volume examines the role of mass knowledge production—whether artistic, scientific, or technical—in China’s Great Leap Forward.

A Revolution Across Art and Science examines how laborers reimagined knowledge during a high point of radicalism in modern Chinese history. Encouraged to become curators, historians, writers, artists, technicians, scientists, and other kinds of experts, Chinese workers and peasants were mobilized to produce new knowledge in the humanities and sciences. Moving beyond the economic questions that have dominated most previous scholarship on the Great Leap Forward, this volume explores the cultural dimensions of the movement to establish the significance of mass knowledge production. Through ten case studies authored by emerging scholars, this volume offers a simultaneously empathetic and critical inquiry into PRC history and its impact on ongoing efforts to democratize knowledge around the world.

A hybrid of short works exploring the 1859 Carrington solar flare

A flood of illumination, a cosmic cataclysm frozen in time—the Carrington Event of 1859 was the most disruptive solar flare in recorded history, an electromagnetic storm that wiped out telegraph systems across the world and which, if it were to occur today, might well destroy anything on the planet with an electrical circuit.

Candace Nunag’s A Solar Flare is a hybrid of short essays, research notes, poems, graphite rubbings, and instant photographs, as well as bits of flash fiction, all simultaneously contemplating technology and memory, while preoccupied with the 1859 solar flare. The ghost of the Carrington Event haunts A Solar Flare with the promise of definitive answers about the narrator’s many severed connections: her digital, supernatural, eastern, western, and analog past. It is an attempt to illuminate the path of thought, wending its way through the tangles of rumination and irreconcilable spaces of wonder.