Over the past year, faculty in UNC Greensboro’s College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) have published more than 25 books!
From poetry to history – textbooks to social commentaries – this range of books represents the breadth and depth of scholarly activity across UNCG’s largest and most diverse academic unit.
“I continue to be impressed by our faculty, who contribute an incredible amount of knowledge, expertise, and creativity to their respective fields,” said John Z. Kiss, dean of CAS. “I invite you to pick up one or several of these publications – you will undoubtedly learn much and gain valuable insights, as I have myself.”
The following list represents books published between January 2020 – July 2021:
African American and African Diaspora Studies
In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States
By Omar Ali
Ohio University Press, 2020
This new edition of Ali’s groundbreaking narrative reveals the multiple independent political tactics and strategies that African Americans have used to expand democracy and uphold civil and political rights since the founding of the nation.
Anthropology
The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Climate and Environmental Change
Edited by Gwen Robbins Schug
Routledge, 2021
This handbook examines human responses to climatic and environmental changes in the past, and their impacts on disease patterns, nutritional status, migration, and interpersonal violence.
Classical Studies
Individualizing the Dead: Attributes in Palmyrene Funerary Sculpture
Edited by Maura Heyn and Rubina Raja
Brepols, 2021
This volume brings together eight contributions that illuminate how attributes were used by Palmyrene sculptors and patrons in order to express social cohesion and group identity, as well as to demonstrate individuality.
Death in Late Bronze Age Greece: Variations on a Theme
Edited by Joanne M. Murphy
Oxford University Press, 2020
Late Bronze Age tombs in Greece and their attendant mortuary practices have been a topic of scholarly debate for over a century, dominated by the idea of a monolithic culture with the same developmental trajectories throughout the region. This book contributes to that body of scholarship by exploring both the level of variety and of similarity that we see in the practices at each site and thereby highlights the differences between communities that otherwise look very similar.
Rituals, Collapse, and Radical Transformation in Archaic States
Edited by Joanne M. Murphy
Routledge, 2020
This book explores the role of ritual in a variety of archaic states and generates discussion on how the decline in a state’s ability to continue in its current form affected the practices of ritual and how ritual as a culture-forming dynamic affected decline, collapse, and regeneration of the state.
Introduction to Greek (Third Edition)
By Susan C. Shelmerdine and Cynthia W. Shelmerdine
Hackett Publishing, 2020
A widely adopted textbook for first-year Classical Greek, “Introduction to Greek” has been rethought from the ground up in this third edition to make it even more effective and user friendly.
A Cultural History of Color in Antiquity
Edited by David B. Wharton
Bloomsbury Academic, 2021
This book presents a history of color in western culture from 3000 BC to 500 AD. The first systematic and comprehensive history, the work examines how color has been perceived, developed, produced, and traded, and how it has been used in all aspects of performance – from the political to the religious to the artistic – and how it shapes all we see, from food and nature to interiors and architecture, to objects and art, to fashion and adornment, to the colors of the human body, and to the way our minds work and our languages are created.
Communication Studies
Womanist Ethical Rhetoric: A Call for Liberation and Social Justice in Turbulent Times
Edited by Cerise L. Glenn and Annette D. Madlock
Lexington Books, 2021
Womanist thought remains of critical importance given contemporary issues of social justice and advocacy. “Womanist Ethical Rhetoric” centers discourses of religious rhetoric and its influence on Black women’s aims for voice, empowerment, and social justice in these turbulent times.
Transforming Conflict and Building Peace: Community Engagement Strategies for Communication Scholarship and Practice
Edited by Peter M. Kellett, Stacey L. Connaughton and George Cheney
Peter Lang, 2020
This inaugural volume in the Peter Lang Conflict and Peace series brings together works that richly depict the tensions between the promise and reality of applying communication principles and theories to conflict transformation and peacebuilding around the world and in the United States.
Everybody Eats: Communication and the Paths to Food Justice
By Marianne LeGreco and Niesha Douglas
University of California Press, 2021
“Everybody Eats” tells the story of food justice in Greensboro, North Carolina – a midsize city in the southern United States. The city’s residents found themselves in the middle of conversations about food insecurity and justice when they reached the top of the Food Research and Action Center’s list of major cities experiencing food hardship.
Essentials of Autoethnography
By Christopher N. Poulos
American Psychological Association, 2021
In this book, Christopher Poulos provides a step-by-step guide to writing autoethnography, illustrating its essential features and practices with excerpts from his own and others’ work. Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze one’s personal experience in various contexts, and thereby understand its cultural, social, and emotional meaning.
English
Stronger, Truer, Bolder: American Children’s Writing, Nature, and the Environment
By Karen L. Kilcup
University of Georgia Press, 2021
Covering a period that initially regarded children’s natural bodies as laboring resources, “Stronger, Truer, Bolder” traces the shifting pedagogical impulse surrounding nature and the environment through the transformations that included America’s nineteenth century emergence as an industrial power. Karen L. Kilcup shows how children’s literature mirrored those changes in various ways.
Embouchre
By Emilia Phillips
University of Akron Press, 2021
Phillips’ collection of poems is at turns self-deprecatory and self-revelatory as it trumpets about the speaker’s closeted crushes on women and her eventual embrace of queerness. The book’s disarming joy is cut with challenges to toxic masculinity, making this mock-confessionalism brassy as it is vulnerable.
History
Antioch: A History
By A. Asa Eger and Andrea U. De Giorgi
Routledge, 2021
This is a complete history of Antioch, one of the most significant major cities of the eastern Mediterranean and a crossroads for the Silk Road, from its foundation by the Seleucids, through Roman rule, the rise of Christianity, Islamic and Byzantine conquests, to the Crusades and beyond.
They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties
By Lisa Levenstein
Basic Books, 2020
A revisionist history of the origins of contemporary feminism, “They Didn’t See Us Coming” shows how women on the margins built a movement at the dawn of the Digital Age.
North Carolina’s Free People of Color 1715-1885
By Warren Eugene Milteer, Jr.
LSU Press, 2020
Milteer’s innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements – with whites placing themselves above persons of color – those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions.
Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967–1988
By David Wight
Cornell University Press, 2021
In “Oil Money,” David M. Wight offers a new framework for understanding the course of Middle East–US relations during the 1970s and 1980s: the transformation of the US global empire by Middle East petrodollars.
Media Studies
Animation Behind the Iron Curtain
By Eleanor Cowen
John Libbey Publishing, 2020
“Animation Behind the Iron Curtain” is a journey of discovery into the world of Soviet era animation from Eastern Bloc countries. From Jerzy Kucia’s brutally exquisite “Reflections” in Poland to the sci-fi adventure of “Ott in Space” by Estonian puppet master Elbert Tuganov to the endearing Gopo’s little man by Ion Popescu-Gopo in Romania, this excursion into Soviet era animation brings to light magnificent art, ruminations on the human condition, and celebrations of innocence and joy.
American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper
Edited by Will Dodson and Kristopher Woofter
University of Texas Press, 2021
A master of gritty horror, Tobe Hooper captured on screen an America in constant crisis and upended myths of prosperity to reveal the country’s internal decay.
Philosophy
Living with Dementia: Neuroethical Issues and International Perspectives
Edited by Frances Bottenberg and Veljko Dubljevic
Springer International Publishing, 2021
This book addresses current issues in the neuroscience and ethics of dementia care, including philosophical as well as ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSIs), issues in clinical, institutional, and private care-giving, and international perspectives on dementia and care innovations.
Political Science
Rich Voter, Poor Voter, Red Voter, Blue Voter: Social Class and Voting Behavior in Contemporary America
By Charles Prysby
Routledge, 2020
This book examines the changing relationship between social class and voting behavior in contemporary America. At the end of the 20th century, working-class white voters were significantly more Democratic than their middle-class counterparts, as they had been since the 1930s. By the second decade of the 21st century, that long-standing relationship had reversed: Republicans now do better among working-class whites.
Religious Studies
Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam
By Alyssa Gabbay
Bloomsbury, 2020
Alyssa Gabbay examines episodes in pre-modern Islamic history in which individuals or societies recognized descent from both men and women. Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, features prominently in this study, for her example constituted a striking precedent for acknowledging bilateral descent in both Sunni and Shi’i societies, with all of its ramifications for female inheritance, succession and identity.
Elements of Christian Thought: A Basic Course in Christianese
By Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.
Fortress Press, 2021
During the coronavirus pandemic, Eugene Rogers transcribed as closely as possible the spoken lectures that have made his Introduction to Christian Thought course at UNC Greensboro, a course he has taught some forty times, justly famous. The result is this book: an insightful, winsome, and engaging introduction to the history of Christian thought by a teacher at the height of his craft.
Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk
By Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.
Cambridge University Press, 2020
The unsettling language of blood has been invoked throughout the history of Christianity. Eugene F. Rogers Jr. discusses in his much-anticipated new book the sheer, surprising strangeness of Christian blood-talk, exploring the many and varied ways in which it offers a language where Christians cooperate, sacrifice, grow, and disagree.
Sociology
Racial Reconciliation: Black Masculinity, Societal Indifference, and Church Socialization
By Steven R. Cureton
Peter Lang, 2020
“Racial Reconciliation: Black Masculinity, Societal Indifference, and Church Socialization” pursues the deconstruction and construction of black masculinity. This book is partly exploratory in that it presents an abundance of profound quotes from historical and contemporary blacks who have a vested interest in race relations.
I Never Wanted to Be a Stereotype: A Sociologist’s Narrative of Healing
By Cindy Brooks Dollar
Peter Lang Publishers, 2021
Trauma and its consequences are social phenomena. Coming from a working-class family and raised in a small, rural Southern area, this author’s narrative offers a unique style of life history reporting whereby the author uses her academic standpoint to situate her life experiences in broader macro-social and cultural contexts.
Gender Violence in Ecofeminist Perspective: Intersections of Animal Oppression, Patriarchy and Domination of the Earth
By Gwen Hunnicutt
Routledge, 2020
This book aims to begin an eco-centered, eco-feminist informed discussion about the ways in which our relationship to “nature” is bound up with gender, patriarchy, and violence.
The Sympathetic Consumer: Moral Critique in Capitalist Culture
By Tad Skotnicki
Stanford University Press, 2021
When people encounter consumer goods – sugar, clothes, phones – they find little to no information about their origins. The goods will thus remain anonymous, and the labor that went into making them, the supply chain through which they traveled, will remain obscured. In this book, Tad Skotnicki argues that this encounter is an endemic feature of capitalist societies, and one with which consumers have struggled for centuries in the form of activist movements constructed around what he calls The Sympathetic Consumer.
Story by Elizabeth Keri, College of Arts & Sciences
