News about publications and books from faculty, instructors and staff in the College of Letters & Science.
On June 6, 1944, a massive military force arrived on the beaches of Normandy in a surprise invasion intended to overthrow Nazi Germany. The story of brave Allied forces splashing ashore under heavy fire has been immortalized in novels, memoirs, documentary films, and blockbuster movies — with American GIs cast as the unequivocal heroes of [...]
This week, University of Wisconsin-Madison English professor Rob Nixon receives the 2013 biennial award for best book in environmental literary studies from the American Society for Literature and the Environment, for his 2011 book “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” It’s the fourth award for Nixon’s book, which was named a Choice Outstanding [...]
Manon van de Water, a professor of theatre research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has won the American Alliance for Theatre and Education’s 2013 Distinguished Book of the Year award for “Theatre, Youth, and Culture: A Critical and Historical Exploration” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Van de Water has been a faculty member at UW-Madison since 1998. [...]
The Dictionary of American Regional English has reached the end of the alphabet, but ‘Z’ is not the end of the road for the definitive source on American speech. Chief Editor Joan Hall says the dictionary known as DARE still has more to accomplish. The dynamic nature of language means that updating the dictionary is an ongoing [...]
Bridget Zinn (BA’99, Theatre and Drama, MA’05, Library and Information Studies) always wanted to be a published novelist. Her dream is finally coming true — nearly two years after the University of Wisconsin-Madison alum died of colon cancer. “This is something really good coming out of something really bad,” says her husband and fellow UW-Madison grad [...]
Caroline Levine is a scholar of Victorian literature — one who’s spent plenty of hours poring over the words of Charles Dickens, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters. Yet one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison English professor’s newest publications is an essay on the popular television series Mad Men, an edgy drama centered on a Madison [...]
There are more than 200 ways to say someone is stalling, but the Dictionary of American Regional English is not dilly-dallying when it comes to showcasing the full depth of linguistic creativity around the country. The dictionary known as DARE, a landmark project housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, now has a companion volume that [...]
As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Florencia Mallon wanted to write fiction. But fact came first. “For fiction, you really have to have a voice of your own,” Mallon says. “Back then, I wasn’t ready to express it.” So she studied Latin American history, a subject she has written numerous books about and has taught at the University of [...]
With a sweep of his pen, Abraham Lincoln changed the lives of 4 million black Americans when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation that led to the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery in the U.S. But a striking, often-overlooked campus mural by John Steuart Curry tells a part of the story that’s often forgotten. “The Freeing of the Slaves” adorns [...]
James Sweet, Vilas-Jartz Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for his book Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press). The Douglass Prize was jointly created by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center [...]
The cover of Rob Nixon‘s new book features black smoke, drifting across a dreary cityscape. The title, “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” hints at grim topics within: radiation contamination, toxic drift, the destruction of ecosystems and communities to make way for dams or mines. But the book, which has just won the 2012 American [...]
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of English and Environmental Studies, has been named a 2012 American Book Award winner. Presented by the Before Columbus Foundation, the American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The award winners [...]
Growing up in Catonsville, Md., a suburb of Baltimore, Shawn Peters can’t remember the first time he heard about the Catonsville Nine. He was 18 months old in May 1968, when nine people — including two brothers, both well-known activists and Catholic priests, and a former nun — removed hundreds of files from the local [...]
Professor Emeritus of History, Alfred Senn celebrated his 80th birthday on April 12, 2012 with a visit to Lithuania, where Vytautas Magnus University in Kauna sponsored a formal presentation of his new book Lithuania in my Life. The Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also presented Senn with a medal, “Star of Lithuanian Diplomacy,” and the [...]
Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and UW-Madison Professor Deborah Blum (MA’82) has turned a quest to write the definitive handbook on poisons in America into the intriguing tale of two Jazz-Era scientists who played a major role in developing the field of forensic toxicology and fostering cooperation between scientists and police. Blum, who has been teaching [...]
What Friedrich Nietzsche did to America (The New York Times) Featuring Associate Professor of History Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen and her book, American Nietzsche, the New York Times describes what reading Nietzsche did for American audiences. Read More…
Professor Neil Kodesh (History) recently won the Melville J. Herskovits Award for his book Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda (University of Virginia Press, 2010). The award is bestowed by the African Studies Association and recognizes the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year. Kodesh’s book examines the [...]
Professor Jim Sweet (History) won the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History for his recent book Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) The prize is awarded by the American Historical Association and recognizes outstanding historical writing that explores aspects of integration of Atlantic worlds before [...]
The College of Letters & Science is home to an interdisciplinary project that is publishing a chronicle of the history of maps and mapping. Known as The History of Cartography Project, the multi-volume project is also proving that maps aren’t just for books. All four books of Volumes One and Two of The History of Cartography are now available online at [...]
A new book on media ethics by University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Stephen J. A. Ward explores the leading issues in global, online media. The book, “Ethics and the Media: An Introduction” was just published by Cambridge University Press.
Most Americans believe that with due sacrifice of time and effort anyone will be able to prosper and provide their children with a better life. But the reality is that children born into poor families in the United States tend to stay poor and children born into wealthy families generally stay rich.
In the summer of 2007, University of Wisconsin–Madison economist Menzie Chinn was among those who started to think something was amiss with the U.S. economy. Mortgage-backed securities were little-understood financial instruments, but Chinn remembers red flags going up as certain measures indicated that the AAA-rated versions of these securities were losing value.
Two well-known College of Letters & Science staff will soon be honored in the a publication produced by the Center for Study of the American Constitution in the UW-Madison Department of History. Assistant Deans Maggie Sullivan (Human Resources) and Linda Johnson (Pre-Award Research Services) will be honored in the acknowledgments of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution Volume XXIV: Ratification of the Constitution by the States: Rhode Island, Vol 1.
Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor of English, recently published a new book that was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Professor Hemant Shah (Journalism & Mass Communication) published a new book “The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and ‘The Passing of Traditional Society’” (Temple University Press, 2011).
Dr. Lyn Turkstra recently published a text book, Optimizing Cognitive Rehabilitation: Effective Instructional Methods (Guilford Publications). Turkstra is an Associate Professor at UW-Madison, where she directs the Cognition and Communication Laboratory.
Save the Date: Joyce Bromley, UW Honors Alumna and author of “An Honorable Legacy: History of the First 50 Years of L&S Honors Program” will be doing a reading and book signing at the University Bookstore in Hilldale on Wednesday, April 27 at 7 PM. All are welcome.
[9780816670376.big] Associate Professor Preeti Chopra (Languages and Cultures of Asia) published a new book with the University of Minnesota Press: “A Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British Bombay.”
Danielle McGuire (BA’97, MA’99, Afro-American Studies) is making waves with a provocative new book, “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power” (Knopf, 2010).
Aili Mari Tripp, professor of political science and gender and women’s studies, takes a close, clear-sighted look at Ugandan politics since 1986, when Yoweri Museveni became the country’s president in her new book, Museveni’s Uganda: Paradoxes of Power in a Hybrid Regime (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010). Museveni’s exercise of power has been replete with contradictions: steps toward political [...]
Professor Claire Wendland (Anthropology, obstetrics & gynecology, and medical history and bioethics) has just published A Heart for the Work: Journeys through an African Medical School (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Anthropologists and other social scientists have published many valuable ethnographies of medical training over the past fifty yearsbut all of the major research was [...]
Claudia Card, Emma Goldman Professor Philosophy, recently published the second in a volume on evil: Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide (July 2010 by Cambridge University Press) Card is among the most prominent feminist philosophers in the country and has created a new niche as one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars of evil. This is the [...]
Anne McClintock, Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s Studies, recently published three essays (reportage and photographs) on the Gulf Oil Crisis. Behind the media blockade in the Gulf (Truthout, Aug. 4, 2010) The Gul Oil Crisis is not over: Slow Violence and the BP Coverups (CounterPunch, Aug. 23-24, 2010) We are all BP [...]
Several UW-Madison professors in the Institute for Research on Poverty have published new books that look at the challenges facing the poor.
This summer Political Science Professor Nadav Shelef is publishing a book Evolving Nationalism: Homeland, Religion and Identity in Israel (Cornell University Press, 2010) in August.
UW-Madison Journalism and Mass Communication Professor Hemant Shah and former UW-Madison professor Michael Curtin recently edited “Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders” published with the University of Illinois Press.
The embryo within a seed grows and develops into a seedling through physiological processes studied by Botany Professor Edgar Spalding and members of his laboratory in Birge Hall.
The Department of Philosophy will be the new home of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, the world’s leading journal for scholarship in the history of philosophy.
Professor Donald Davis (Languages & Cultures of Asia) recently published a bookThe Spirit of Hindu Law with Cambridge University Press.
Professor Anna M. Gade (Languages and Cultures of Asia) recently published The Qur’an: An Introductionwith Oneworld Publications.
Professor Robert Bickner (Thai) along with his colleagues have just published Thai Reader, an online text book consisting of 76 lessons based on authentic Thai texts.
Katherine Mellen Charron, who received her MA’97 in the Department of Afro-American Studies, has published Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Professor Alfonso Morales (Urban & Regional Planning) has a lot to look forward to this spring.
We have the iPhone, Google, Twitter, Facebook … when do we get a break?
Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative will host a book launch on November 14th for Nairobi Heat a debut novel by Mukoma Wa Ngugi, a Ph’D candidate in the English Department. The book launch is Saturday, November 14, 2-4 pm with more details available here.
Stephen G. Hall (MA’ 93, Afro-American Studies) recently published “A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Professor Alfonso Morales recently completed a number of projects.
Penguin Books, SA has published a debut novel “Nairobi Heat” by Mukoma Wa Ngugi, a dissertator in the English Department.
A new book “Changing Poverty, Changing Policies” is out this month and is based on a UW conference hosted by the Institute for Research on Poverty last year.
Associate Professor Ann Smart Martin celebrated her 10th Anniversary as Stanley and Polly Stone Professor of Decorative Arts and Material Culture.
Two faculty members in the Department of German recently published books that became non-fiction best-sellers in Germany.
Two new co-edited volumes by La Follette School faculty address today’s pressing social policy problems.
