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Both a life story and a portrait of public higher education during the twentieth century, Harry Huntt Ransom captures the spirit of a dynamic individual who dedicated his talents to nurturing intellectual life in Texas and beyond. Tracing the details of Ransom's youth in Galveston and Tennessee and his education at Yale, where he earned a doctorate, Alan Gribben provides new insight into the factors that shaped Ransom's future as a renowned administrator and defender of the humanities.

Ransom's career at the University of Texas began in 1935, when he was hired as an instructor of English. He rose through the ranks to become chancellor, stepping down in 1971 during a volatile period when debates about the University's central mission raged—particularly over the question of commercializing higher education. The development of Ransom's lasting legacy, the Humanities Research Center bearing his name, is explored in depth as well. Bringing to life a legendary figure, Harry Huntt Ransom is a colorful testament to a singular man of letters who had the audacity to propose "that there be established somewhere in Texas—let's say in the capital city—a center of our cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation."

With top billing at many film forums around the world, as well as a string of prestigious prizes, including consecutive nominations for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Israeli films have become one of the most visible and promising cinemas in the first decade of the twenty-first century, an intriguing and vibrant site for the representation of Israeli realities. Yet two decades have passed since the last wide-ranging scholarly overview of Israeli cinema, creating a need for a new, state-of-the-art analysis of this exciting cinematic oeuvre.

The first anthology of its kind in English, Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion presents a collection of specially commissioned articles in which leading Israeli film scholars examine Israeli cinema as a prism that refracts collective Israeli identities through the medium and art of motion pictures. The contributors address several broad themes: the nation imagined on film; war, conflict, and trauma; gender, sexuality, and ethnicity; religion and Judaism; discourses of place in the age of globalism; filming the Palestinian Other; and new cinematic discourses. The authors' illuminating readings of Israeli films reveal that Israeli cinema offers rare visual and narrative insights into the complex national, social, and multicultural Israeli universe, transcending the partial and superficial images of this culture in world media.

Follow Lahore’s Orange Line metro corridor to discover the tensions between development and displacement, progress and preservation, in one of the world’s great metropolises.

Lahore is a city in constant flux, and the frictions that characterize urban life are vividly apparent along the tracks of its first metro rail corridor, opened in 2020. Lahore in Motion follows the Orange Line’s 27-kilometer path, bringing together reflections from academics, activists, artists, and architects on the ways that infrastructure shapes urban belonging. The book offers a novel methodology for assessing how this mega-project has reconfigured neighborhoods, sparked new desires for modernity, and deepened existing social differences while destabilizing others.

Each chapter unfolds through the lens of a particular metro stop, providing intimate glimpses into the frictions generated by development where connectivity and fragmentation, aspiration and dispossession collide. Engaging with broader debates on urban transformation in the Global South, Lahore in Motion goes against familiar narratives of top-down development, revealing a city animated by resistance and reinventing itself in response. An eye-opening, beautifully written work for all interested in urbanism, infrastructure, politics, and the intimate rhythms of everyday life in one of the world’s most dynamic cities.

Modernity in Motion offers a groundbreaking exploration of Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor’s richly layered body of work spanning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Through the lens of transnational Indigenous studies, this compelling study reveals how Vizenor’s concept of transmotion, which he defines as the interplay between local and global identities, reconstructs modernity as a dynamic force of transformation.

Close readings illuminate Vizenor’s radical storytelling, which bridges seemingly disparate worlds: the White Earth Reservation, Nazi-occupied Paris, post-Hiroshima Japan, and beyond. By weaving these far-flung geographies into unexpected constellations, Vizenor challenges readers to rethink Indigenous history, sovereignty, and creative expression within a global framework.

Positioned at the intersection of tribal-centric and world literature paradigms, Modernity in Motion is essential reading for scholars of Indigenous studies and comparative literature.

Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion documents a revealing irony in the latter sort: internal migration often is global in character, motivated by foreign affairs and international economic integration, and it is no less transformative than its cross-border analogue.

Iván Sandoval-Cervantes spent nearly two years observing and interviewing migrants from the rural Oaxacan town of Santa Ana Zegache. Many women from the area travel to Mexico City to work as domestics, and men are encouraged to join the Mexican military to fight the US-instigated “war on drugs” or else leave their fields to labor in industries serving global supply chains. Placing these moves in their historical and cultural context, Sandoval-Cervantes discovers that migrants’ experiences dramatically alter their conceptions of gender, upsetting their traditional notions of masculinity and femininity. And some migrants bring their revised views with them when they return home, influencing their families and community of origin. Comparing Oaxacans moving within Mexico to those living along the US West Coast, Sandoval-Cervantes clearly demonstrates the multiplicity of answers to the question, “Who is a migrant?”

Beginning in the late fifteenth century, more than two million people were taken from areas that lay behind the Bight of Benin, enslaved, and forced into the perilous Middle Passage bound for the New World. While a vast swath of scholarly work on this region has explored the relationships among the transatlantic slave trade’s ruling elites and overseas merchants, the practices that shaped the region’s political and cultural dynamics, especially those that dealt with other kinds of trade, have yet to be thoroughly examined.

Sandra T. Barnes offers a history focused on the Benin Region’s patchwork of small states and ports that saw a constant movement of people and goods for centuries. As such, this book widens the lens of scholarship to include people of all social levels behind the political rivalries and dynamic changes that marked the period. Barnes concentrates on protective relationships and the violence people were forced to endure during a fast-moving, tumultuous period of history, examining how they organized their lives and why this mattered. The result is a refreshingly original work that challenges long-held assumptions about West Africa’s past, explaining what life was like for people on the coast during the transatlantic slave trade.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Non-fiction
The unexpurgated edition of the award-winning autobiography

Born in New York City’s black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city’s new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade’s opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters.