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Image one: E-book titled The Shaman's Mirror: Visionary Art of the Huichol (2012) - synopsis: Huichol Indian yarn paintings are one of the world’s great indigenous arts, sold around the world and advertised as authentic records of dreams and visions of the shamans. Using glowing colored yarns, the Huichol Indians of Mexico paint the mystical symbols of their culture—the hallucinogenic peyote cactus, the blue deer-spirit who appears to the shamans as they croon their songs around the fire in all-night ceremonies deep in the Sierra Madre mountains, and the pilgrimages to sacred sites, high in the central Mexican desert of Wirikuta. Hope MacLean provides the first comprehensive study of Huichol yarn paintings, from their origins as sacred offerings to their transformation into commercial art. Drawing on twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork, she interviews Huichol artists who have innovated important themes and styles.
Image two: Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada and the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (2015) - synopsis: In 1916, as World War I raged around them, a group of bohemians gathered at a small nightclub in Zurich, Switzerland for a series of bizarre performances. Three readers simultaneously recited a poem in three languages; a monocle-wearing teenager performed a spell from New Zealand; another young man flung bits of papier-mâché into the air and glued them into place where they landed. One of these artists called the sessions “both buffoonery and a requiem mass.” Soon they would be known by a more evocative name: Dada. In Destruction Was My Beatrice, modernist scholar Jed Rasula presents the first narrative history of the emergence, decline, and legacy of Dada, showing how this strange artistic phenomenon spread across Europe and then the world in the wake of the Great War, fundamentally reshaping modern culture in ways we’re still struggling to understand today.
Image one: Native American Heritage Month
Image two: E-book titled Land of the Tejas: Native American Identity and Interaction in Texas, A.D. 1300 to 1700 (2012) - synopsis: Combining archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and environmental data, Land of the Tejas represents a sweeping, interdisciplinary look at Texas during the late prehistoric and early historic periods. Through this revolutionary approach, John Wesley Arnn reconstructs Native identity and social structures among both mobile foragers and sedentary agriculturalists.
Image three: E-book titled Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (2016) - synopsis: Inter/Nationalism seeks to lay conceptual ground between American Indian and Indigenous studies and Palestinian studies through concepts of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and state violence. By establishing Palestine as an indigenous nation under colonial occupation, this book draws crucial connections between the scholarship and activism of Indigenous America and Palestine.
Image one: E-book titled Vampires and Zombies: Transcultural Migrations and Transnational Interpretations (2016) - synopsis: The vampire, with roots in medieval European folklore, and the zombie, with origins in Afro-Caribbean mythology, have both undergone significant transformations in global culture, proliferating as deviant representatives of the zeitgeist. Among other topics, contributors discuss zombies in Thai films, vampire novels of Mexico, and undead avatars in horror videogames. This volume—with scholars from different national and cultural backgrounds—explores the transformations that the vampire and zombie figures undergo when they travel globally and through various media and cultures.
Image two: E-book titled Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (2023) - synopsis: Ecohorror represents human fears about the natural world—killer plants and animals, catastrophic weather events, and disquieting encounters with the nonhuman. Its portrayals of animals, the environment, and even scientists build on popular conceptions of zoology, ecology, and the scientific process. Featuring new readings of the genre, Fear and Nature brings ecohorror texts and theories into conversation with other critical discourses. The chapters cover a variety of media forms, from literature and short fiction to manga, poetry, television, and film. The chronological range is equally varied, beginning in the nineteenth century with the work of Edgar Allan Poe and finishing in the twenty-first with Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro.
Image one: E-book titled Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai (2008) - synopsis: Water sprites, mountain goblins, shape-shifting animals, and the monsters known as yokai have long haunted the Japanese cultural landscape. This history of the strange and mysterious in Japan seeks out these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines, and movies, exploring their meanings in the Japanese cultural imagination and offering an abundance of valuable and understudied material.
Image two: E-book titled Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales (2013) - synopsis: Baba Yaga is an ambiguous and fascinating figure. She appears in traditional Russian folktales as a monstrous and hungry cannibal, or as a canny inquisitor of the adolescent hero or heroine of the tale. In new translations and with an introduction by Sibelan Forrester, Baba Yaga: The Wild Witch of the East in Russian Fairy Tales is a selection of tales that draws from the famous collections and other lesser-known 19th century tales. The preface and introduction place these tales in their traditional context with reference to Baba Yaga’s continuing presence in today’s culture.
Image one: E-book titled Poetry of Psychiatry: Essays on Early Twentieth-Century Russian Symbolist Culture (2014) - synopsis: A century ago the Symbolists in Moscow and St. Petersburg dreamed of a fundamental transformation of life in Russia. From their reading of signs in the heavens, these poets, philosophers, and mystics sensed that tsardom was on the threshold of an apocalyptic upheaval. The eventual collision between these dreams and tsarist reality generated enormous intellectual turbulence and the need for substitutes. Not least psychoanalysis came to the rescue of these stranded dreamers.
Image two: E-book titled American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (2004) - synopsis: Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs.
Image one: E-book titled Farzana: The Woman Who Saved an Empire (2014) - synopsis: Amongst the riches of 19th century India, as the British fought their way across Mughal territory, an orphaned street-girl is brought to court to perform for the Emperor. That girl was Farzana, and she would become a courtesan, a leader of armies, a treasured defender of the last Mughal emperor and the head of one of the most legendary courts in history. In this book, Julia Keay weaves a story which spans the Indian continent and the end of a golden era in Indian history, the story of a nobody who became a teenage seductress and died one of the richest and most prominent woman of her age. Farzana rode into battle atop a stallion, though only 4.5 feet tall, and led an army which defended a sickly Mughal empire. She dabbled in witchcraft while gaining favour with the Pope, and died a favourite of the British Raj.
Image two: E-book titled SheMurenga: The Zimbabwe Women's Movement, 1995 to 2000 (2013) - synopsis: This book demonstrates the place of women’s movements during a defining period of contemporary Zimbabwe. The government of Robert Mugabe may have been as firmly in power in 2000 as it was in 1995, but the intervening years saw severe economic crisis, mass strikes and protests, the start of land occupations, intervention in the war in the DRC, and the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Author Shereen Essof shows how Zimbabwean women crafted responses to these and other events, and aimed for a feminist agenda that would prioritize the interests of the rural and urban poor.
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Image one: E-book titled The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies (2021) - synopsis: This encyclopedia takes an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to trans studies. Entries address a wide range of topics, from broad concepts, to specific subjects, to key historical figures, events, and organizations. Entries focus on diverse lives, identities, and contexts, including the experiences of trans people in different racial, religious, and sexual communities in the United States and the variety of ways that gender is expressed in other countries.
Image two: E-book titled Envisioning Global LGBT Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance, and Hope (2018) - synopsis: Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope is an outcome of a five-year international collaboration among partners that share a common legacy of British colonial laws that criminalize same-sex intimacy and gender identity/expression. The chapters are bursting with invaluable first hand insights from leading activists at the forefront of some of the most fiercely fought battlegrounds of contemporary sexual politics in India, the Caribbean, and Africa. As well, authors from Canada, Botswana, and Kenya examine key turning points in the advancement of SOGI issues at the United Nations, and provide critical insights on LGBT asylum in Canada. Authors also speak to a need to reorient and decolonize queer studies, and turn a critical gaze northwards from the Global South.
Image one: E-book titled Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration (2018) - synopsis: In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang’s work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that has been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.
Image two: E-book titled Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex (2018) - synopsis: Ujarak, Iqallijuq, and Kupaaq were elders from the Inuit community on Igloolik Island in Nunavut. The three elders, among others, shared with Bernard Saladin d'Anglure the narratives which make up the heart of Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth. Through their words, and historical sources recorded by Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen, Saladin d'Anglure examines the Inuit notion of personhood and its relationship to cosmology and mythology. Central to these stories are womb memories, narratives of birth and reincarnation, and the concept of the third sex—an intermediate identity between male and female. As explained through first-person accounts and traditional legends, myths, and folk tales, the presence of transgender individuals informs Inuit relationships to one another and to the world at large, transcending the dualities of male and female, human and animal, human and spirit.
Image one: LGBTQ+ Pride Month
Image two: E-book titled The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (2018) - synopsis: The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition.
Image three: E-book titled Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History (2019) - synopsis: While LGBTQ history dates to ancient civilizations such as Ancient Egypt and Greece, LGBTQ studies remains a relatively new field. It covers constantly evolving developments as laws are challenged, activism expands, and LGBTQ topics grab headlines. Students and researchers need the most current information available to make sense of both contemporary and historical discussions.
Image one: E-book titled Learning To Be Latino: How Colleges Shape Identity Politics (2018) - synopsis: In Learning to Be Latino, sociologist Daisy Verduzco Reyes paints a vivid picture of Latino student life at a liberal arts college, a research university, and a regional public university, outlining students’ interactions with one another, with non-Latino peers, and with faculty, administrators, and the outside community. Reyes identifies the normative institutional arrangements that shape the social relationships relevant to Latino students’ lives, including school size, the demographic profile of the student body, residential arrangements, and more. Together these characteristics create an environment for Latino students that influences how they interact, identify, and come to understand their place on campus.
Image two: E-book titled The Battle for Paradise: Surfing, Tuna, and One Town's Quest to Save a Wave (2015) - synopsis: Pavones, a town located on the southern tip of Costa Rica, is a haven for surfers, expatriates, and fishermen seeking a place to start over. Located on the Golfo Dulce (Sweet Gulf), a marine sanctuary and one of the few tropical fjords in the world, Pavones is home to a legendary surf break and a cottage fishing industry. In The Battle for Paradise, Jeremy Evans travels to Pavones to uncover the story of how this ragtag group stood up to a multinational company and how a shadowy figure from the town’s violent past became an unlikely hero.
Image one: E-book titled American Civil Wars: United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s (2017) - synopsis: Contributors position the American Civil War squarely in the context of a wider transnational crisis across the Atlantic world, marked by a multitude of civil wars, European invasions and occupations, revolutionary independence movements, and slave uprisings—all taking place in the tumultuous decade of the 1860s. The multiple conflicts described in these essays illustrate how the United States' sectional strife was caught up in a larger, complex struggle in which nations and empires on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the control of the future.
Image two: E-book titled A Constitutional History of the Supreme Court (2015) - synopsis: Presents a concise overview and general history for readers and students in constitutional history and politics, one that will also make an excellent fact-filled source book for lawyers and political scientists. The chapters deal with leading decisions of successive courts and begin with brief biographies of the justices on the courts. Famous cases from Marbury v Madison, to the Dred-Scott decision, Brown v Board of Education, Roe v Wade, up to the Roberts court decision on the constitutionality of Obamacare are discussed.
Image one: E-book titled The CIA in Ecuador (2020) - synopsis: Draws on recently released US government surveillance documents on the Ecuadorian left to chart social movement organizing efforts during the 1950s. Emphasizing the competing roles of the domestic ruling class and grassroots social movements, this book details the struggles and difficulties that activists, organizers, and political parties confronted.
Image two: E-book titled The Mosquito Crusades: A History of the American Anti-Mosquito Movement from the Reed Commission to the First Earth Day (2009) - synopsis: Among the struggles of the twentieth century, the one between humans and mosquitoes may have been the most vexing, as demonstrated by the long battle to control these bloodsucking pests. As vectors of diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, encephalitis, and dengue fever, mosquitoes forced open a new chapter in the history of medical entomology. Based on extensive use of primary sources, The Mosquito Crusades traces this saga and the parallel efforts of civic groups in New Jersey's Meadowlands and along San Francisco Bay's east side to manage the dangerous mosquito population.
Image one: E-book titled Designing Motion: Automotive Designers, 1890-1990 (2016) - synopsis: For a long time, car design was considered to be anonymous, the designers stood in the shadow of the perception of the design, even though their designs can be found on the roads in millions. This richly illustrated book captures the origin of a profession and maps the development of car design based on a comprehensive introduction and the career biographies of over 200 selected designers who contributed to the design of cars and many different associated products in the USA, Europe, and Japan between 1900 and 2000.
Image two: E-book titled Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature (2010) - synopsis: Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature presents a broad perspective on the development and history of literature in modern China. It offers a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, literary and historical developments, trends, genres, and concepts that played a central role in the evolution of modern Chinese literature.
Image one: E-book titled Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Backgrounds Issues (2020) - synopsis: This book argues that women served as leaders in a number of synagogues during the Roman and Byzantine periods. The evidence for this consists of nineteen Greek and Latin inscriptions in which women bear the titles "head of the synagogue," "leader," "elder," "mother of the synagogue" and "priestess." These inscriptions range in date from 27 B.C.E. to perhaps the sixth century C.E. and in provenance from Italy to Asia Minor, Egypt and Palestine. While new discoveries make this a growing corpus of material, a number of the inscriptions have been known to scholars for some time.
Image two: E-book titled Rethinking Japanese Feminisms (2017) - synopsis: Rethinking Japanese Feminisms offers a broad overview of the great diversity of feminist thought and practice in Japan from the early twentieth century to the present. Drawing on methodologies and approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, literature, media studies, and sociology, each chapter presents the results of research based on some combination of original archival research, careful textual analysis, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation.
Image one: E-book titled Heroines of the Qing: Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories (2016) - synopsis: Traditionally, “exemplary women” (lienu)--heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example--were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian family standards. However, despite the rich writing traditions about these women, their lives were often distorted by moral and cultural agendas. Binbin Yang, drawing on interdisciplinary sources, shows how they were able to cross boundaries that were typically closed to women--boundaries not only of gender, but also of knowledge, economic power, political engagement, and ritual and cultural authority.
Image two: E-book titled The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science (2010) - synopsis: In The Madame Curie Complex, Julie Des Jardins dismantles the myth of the lone male genius, reframing the history of science with revelations about women’s substantial contributions to the field. She explores the lives of some of the most famous female scientists, including Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist; Rosalind Franklin, the chemist whose work anticipated the discovery of DNA’s structure; Rosalyn Yalow, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist; and, of course, Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer whose towering, mythical status has both empowered and stigmatized future generations of women considering a life in science.
Image one: E-book titled Jane Austen's Women: An Introduction (2018) - synopsis: Jane Austen's Women answers these questions by exploring Austen's affirming yet challenging vision of both who her dynamic female characters are, and who they become. This important new work analyzes the heroines' relationships to body, mind, spirit, environment, and society.
Image two: E-book titled Cultivating Femininity: Women and Tea Culture in Edo and Meiji Japan (2018) - synopsis: The overwhelming majority of tea practitioners in contemporary Japan are women, but there has been little discussion on their historical role in tea culture (chanoyu). In Cultivating Femininity, Rebecca Corbett writes women back into this history and shows how tea practice for women was understood, articulated, and promoted in the Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji (1868–1912) periods. Viewing chanoyu from the lens of feminist and gender theory, she sheds new light on tea’s undeniable influence on the formation of modern understandings of femininity in Japan.
Image one: Women's History Month
Image two: E-book titled When Women Rule the Court: Gender, Race, and Japanese American Basketball (2017) - synopsis: For nearly one hundred years, basketball has been an important part of Japanese American life. Women's basketball holds a special place in the contemporary scene of highly organized and expansive Japanese American leagues in California, in part because these leagues have produced numerous talented female players. Using data from interviews and observations, Nicole Willms explores the interplay of social forces and community dynamics that have shaped this unique context of female athletic empowerment.
Image three: E-book titled Women in Mongol Iran: The Khatuns, 1206-1335 (2017) - synopsis: This book shows the development of women's status in the Mongol Empire from its original homeland in Mongolia up to the end of the Ilkhanate of Iran in 1335. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters show a coherent progression of this development and contextualise the evolution of the role of women in medieval Mongol society.
