The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, From Genocide to Justice
By Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, professor and chair, Art History Program. Highlighted by The New York Times Book Review in its “New & Noteworthy” column Feb. 6: “This is the biography of a medieval manuscript, the Zeytun Gospels, illuminated by an Armenian artist. When eight pages of that sacred work that had been thought lost were discovered in the J. Paul Getty collection in 2010, a lawsuit ensued. The story of how the pages came to be missing unfolds the entire tragic history of the Armenian people in the 20th century.” (Stanford University Press, February 2019)
Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River
Sudipta Sen, professor of history, “offers a beguiling, if somewhat sorrowful, account, both a historical biography of the river and, in a way, its obituary,” reads a Jan. 4 review in The Wall Street Journal. “While Mr. Sen’s book is undeniably academic … it is pleasingly written and indisputably the single best text on the Ganges and its history. The river — both an ‘immaculate and eternal deity’ and a ‘repository of accumulated human misdeeds,’ as Mr. Sen writes — binds India together as few other spiritual forces do.” (Yale University Press, Jan. 8, 2019)
Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire
By Jeffrey S. Kahn, assistant professor of anthropology and a legal scholar. In what the publisher describes as “an innovative historical anthropology,” Kahn offers a new interpretation of the transformation of US borders during the late 20th century and its implications for our understanding of the nation-state as a legal and political form.” (University of Chicago Press, January 2019)
Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt and the First Clash Over the New Deal
History professor Eric Rauchway examines what the publisher describes as “the most acrimonious presidential handoff in American history” — from Herbert Hoover to Franklin Delano Roosevelt after the 1932 election. Winter War reveals how the men, prior to FDR’s inauguration, battled over the president-elect’s New Deal, shaping the divisive politics of the 20th century. (Basic Books, November 2018)
Iberianism and Crisis: Spain and Portugal at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Robert Patrick Newcomb, associate professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, examines how prominent essay writers and public intellectuals advocated for closer ties between the Iberian peninsula’s two kingdoms, Spain and Portugal, as a way to address a succession of political, economic and social crises that shook the two states. (University of Toronto Press, July 2018)