A selection of books by College of Letters and Science faculty members, published since last year. Click on the boxes to go to publisher webpages for each book.
Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger
By Julie Sze, professor of American studies and founding director of the Environmental Justice Project at UC Davis, examines mobilizations and movements — from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria — and issues of dispossession, deregulation, privatization and inequality, providing what the publisher describes as “the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future.” (University of California Press, January 2020)
Conditionality and Coercion
Electoral Clientelism in Eastern Europe
By Lauren E. Young, assistant professor of political science, UC Davis; and Isabela Mares, professor of political science, Yale University. They argue that we must disaggregate clientelistic strategies based on whether they use public or private resources, and whether they involve positive promises or negative threats and coercion; and document that the type of clientelistic strategies that candidates and brokers use varies systematically across localities based on their underlying social coalitions. (Oxford University Press, Dec. 17, 2019)
Pure Filth
Ethics, Politics and Religion in Early French Farce
Noah D. Guynn, professor of French and comparative literature, demonstrates how one person’s “filth” — as early French farce has been dismissed for centuries — can conceal finely drawn and sometimes quite radical perspectives on the urgent issues its spectators faced in their everyday lives: economic inequality and authoritarian rule, social justice and ethical renewal, sacramental devotion and sacerdotal corruption, and heterosocial relations and household politics. (University of Pennsylvania Press, Nov. 8, 2019)
The New Noir
Race, Identity and Diaspora in Black Suburbia
Says the publisher: Orly Clerge, assistant professor of sociology, explores the richly complex worlds of an extraordinary generation of black middle class adults who have migrated from different corners of the African diaspora to suburbia. She compellingly analyzes the making of a new multinational black middle class and how they create a spectrum of black identities that help them carve out places of their own in a changing 21st-century global city. (University of California Press, October 2019)
Beside You in Time
Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American 19th Century
According to the publisher: Elizabeth Freeman, professor of English, makes the case for the body as an instrument of what she calls queer hypersociality — a mode of being in which bodies are connected to others and their histories across and throughout time — contending it provides the means for subjugated bodies to escape disciplinary regimes of time and create new social worlds. (Duke University Press, August 2019)
Between the Ottomans and the Entente
The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925
Stacy D. Fahrenthold, assistant professor of history, has written the first social history of the Syrian/Lebanese diaspora during World War I, providing context for the fundamental role that migration, forced migration, refugees and diaspora play in modern Syrian and Lebanese history. Winner of the Khayrallah Prize in Migration Studies from the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, and the Syrian Studies Association Book Prize. (Oxford University Press, March 18, 2019)