2024–25

Jose Fernandez (Latina/o/x Studies, Division of Interdisciplinary Programs)
Book project: Publishing Latinidad: Latinx Literary and Intellectual Production 1880–1960
Fernandez writes, "This book argues that early Latinx authors before 1960 entered social and cultural discourses in the U.S. through alternative modes of literary and intellectual production beyond the printed book."

Viridiana Hernández Fernández (History, CLAS)
Book project: Guacamole Ecosystems: Agriculture, Deforestation, and Migration in Twentieth-Century Mexico
This project, writes Fernández, "reveals how Mexican rural people, bureaucrats, businessmen, agronomists, U.S. farmers, scientists, government officials, entrepreneurs, and consumers on both sides of the border voluntarily and involuntarily contributed to the emergence and expansion of Michoacán’s avocado belt. This project also exposes how nonhuman agents like soils, climate, thrips and mites, a volcano, and, indeed, avocados, materialized, refashioned, and shattered human expectations of creating avocado ecologies in Michoacán’s Sierra Purhépecha and Southern California."

Jennifer Kayle (Dance, CLAS)
Book project: A Practical Philosophy of [ensemble dance] Improvisation
This is, Kayle writes, "a book-length discussion bridging artistic and philosophical perspectives on ensemble dance improvisation in order to analyze its core nature, its modes of training, practice, and performance, and to propose appropriate frameworks for identifying its value."

Sarah Minor (English, CLAS)
Book project: The Listening Rooms
Minor writes, "By presenting the audience with examples of 'looking' brought to life across time, the book asserts that panoramic modes of vision incarnate a colonial gaze, and further, demonstrates how this form of gazing, and its impulses, hide in forms of new media today."

Cesár F. Rosado Marzán (Law)
Book project: A Baseline of Decency: The Moral Economy of Worker Centers and Alt-Labor
"In this book," writes Rosado Marzan, "I examine how worker centers—non-union community groups advocating for low-wage workers—effectively promote new labor rights across the United States despite their small memberships, limited staff, and modest budgets. These rights include state and local laws addressing higher minimum wages, protections against wage theft, fair scheduling, paid leave, domestic worker rights, and new enforcement institutions."

2023–24

Katy Ambrose (School of Music, CLAS)
Book project: Horns, Hypocrisy, and History
Ambrose writes, "This book addresses the inequity in representation of People of Color in music history through a study of Black French Horn players in the United States. Through slave narratives, historical documents and iconography, biographies, autobiographies, and personal interviews, I have provided a history and a critique of ways in which the Horn has been both an instrument for oppressing and uplifting Black musicians." 

Mihailis Diamantis (College of Law)
Book project: Law and Philosophy of the Corporate Person
Diamantis writes, "This book is a sweeping survey of the theory and regulation of corporations. Each chapter addresses a different topic from the perspectives of both law and philosophy. The two disciplines carry out parallel discussions of overlapping issues with few points of contact [...] My manuscript {...] present[s] the most relevant literature from both sides and offer[s] a methodology for lawyers and philosophers to engage each other."

Ana M. Rodriguez-Rodriguez (Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS)
Book project: Muslim-Christian Encounters on the Edges of the Spanish Empire (1565–1898)
This monograph analyzes Spanish contacts with Islam in the Philippines during the three centuries when Spain ruled the archipelago, and its impact on the perceptions and representations of racial and religious difference in the Spanish empire.

2022–23

Paula Amad (Cinematic Arts, CLAS)
Book project: Cin-aereality: Aviation, Cinema, and Modernity
Amad writes, "In a little-known essay from 1931 titled “Speaking of Cinema” (“A Propos du cinéma”), the painter Fernand Léger claimed that “[t]he cinema and aviation go arm in arm through life. They were born on the same day.” [...] My book asks: What can we learn from Léger’s (and others’) couplings of cinema and aviation that adds to our understanding of the most fraught mode of modern perception -- aerial vision -- both at the point of its historical emergence and its controversial intensification a century later in the era of drone warfare? In order to answer this question, I historicize and theorize the forgotten conditions of possibility for Léger’s ostensibly incongruous alliance of what most would today consider a mode of communication (cinema) and a mode of transportation (aviation)."

Eric Vazquez (American Studies, CLAS)
Book project: States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries about Revolutionary Central America
Vazquez writes, "After over a century of political uprisings, U.S. intellectuals looked upon the twenty-first century and determined that revolutionary struggle—previously thought to be the motor of human history—had somehow run aground. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States' pivot towards boundless intervention and imperialist occupation in the global war on terror (GWOT), ideologies of social liberation and decolonization seemed like the remnants of a bygone era. My book project reframes the consensus about this geopolitical transition through an analysis of intellectual works about the Cold War's final paroxysm: wars of revolution and counterrevolution in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala during the 1980s and 90s."

2021–22

Thalassa Raasch (School of Art & Art History, CLAS)
Book project: In Over My Head
This collection, the first of its kind, will present the 50-year photographic archive of Everard Hall, one of the last traditional gravediggers still hand-digging and filling graves year-round in rural Maine. Raasch writes, "With Everard's permission, I welcome readers to this landscape, where death is a daily fact and where life is simultaneously beautiful, comfortable, difficult, and humorous."

William Rhodes (English, CLAS)
Book project: Work, Waste, and Reform: The Political Ecology of the Piers Plowman Tradition, 1350–1600
Work, Waste, and Reform argues that one of the most important influences on Edmund Spenser’s colonial writing in Elizabethan Ireland was the Middle English and mid-Tudor Piers Plowman tradition, which established a poetic mode for analyzing the interactions of economics, ecology, and political power.

Louise Seamster (Sociology & Criminology and African American Studies, CLAS)
Book project: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Flint, Black Debt, and the Right to Infrastructure 
This book retells the story of the Flint Water Crisis to explain how racialized poverty can be exploited for revenue capture; why Black governance poses such a threat to white power structures; and how minimizing financial risk can mean exacerbating physical risk.

Celsiana Warwick (Classics, CLAS)
Book project: Gendered Voices in The Iliad: Lament and Heroic Glory
In Gendered Voices, Warwick argues that Homer uses feminine voices and perspectives, particularly the female-coded discourse of lament, to critique the ways in which rigid adherence to the hegemonic warrior masculinity of the society depicted in The Iliad is detrimental to the well-being of the community. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to The Iliad, Warwick says she seeks "to reevaluate assumptions of The Iliad’s monologic masculinity. ... [F]emininity is not excluded from the poem but is instead fundamental in The Iliad’s evaluation of heroic society."

Summer 2021

Christopher Goetz (Cinematic Arts, CLAS)
Book project: The Counterfeit Coin: Videogames and Fantasies of Empowerment
The Counterfeit Coin maps three key empowerment fantasies across distinct entertainment media over the past 30 years, arguing that these fantasies offer new avenues for thinking about identity in relation to entertainment formats in the age of media convergence.

Meena Khandelwal (Anthropology and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies, CLAS)
Book project: Demons of the Hearth: Feminist Fieldnotes on India’s Cookstove Campaigns
Demons of the Hearth begins with the simple problem of rural women in India having to collect fuelwood for cooking to suggest ways to break the stalemate between STEM on the one hand and feminist and decolonial theory on the other, with four goals: to better understand why improved stoves are often rejected by cooks, to push past reductive analyses that arise from disciplinary silos, to demonstrate the necessity of combining transnational analysis with area studies, and to demystify the interdisciplinary research process.

Spring 2021

Tara Bynum (English and African American Studies, CLAS)
Book project: Reading Pleasures
Reading Pleasures examines those instances when black personhood—in eighteenth-century American colonies and newly-founded U.S.—delights in individual and shared pleasures.

Brady G'Sell (Anthropology and Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies, CLAS)
Book project: Producing Citizens: Motherhood, Race, and Political Belonging in South Africa
Producing Citizens analyzes the livelihood strategies of South African mothers living in poverty across five decades of political economic shifts. G'Sell demonstrates how the content of citizenship is created and negotiated at the micro-political scale of interpersonal relationships.

Summer 2019

Emerson Cram (Communication Studies, CLAS)
Book project: Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West
Cram's manuscript examines spaces and performances of memory in/of western lands to interpret the ongoing legacy of sexual modernity in shaping cultures of violence in the Rocky Mountain region.

Björn Anderson (School of Art and Art History, CLAS) 
Book project: Negotiating Identity in Nabataean Arabia 
Anderson's manuscript examines the intersections of cultural identity in the kingdom of Nabataea, centered at Petra in southern Jordan. The Nabataean kingdom was active from ca. 300 B.C.E. to 106 C.E.; it saw the rise and fall of neighboring Hellenistic kingdoms and the inexorable expansion of Rome, and it witnessed the arrival of new religions, new forms of art, new languages, and new cultures. The book centers on observable dialogues, particular episodes or choices that reflect currents and priorities active within the broad confines of the Nabataean kingdom. These dialogues reveal much about how the population resolved social, cultural, and political changes, especially as they balanced "indigenous" traditions with an influx of new influences.