Are you searching for a book to read this summer – one that will test your knowledge, challenge your perspective, or offer beautiful lyrics and prose? Look no further than this list of 24 books published by faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences over the past year.
Maybe you’re looking for a book that delves deep into a specific subject matter – crimes of the powerful, Native writing, Japan’s nuclear power. Perhaps you’re hoping to enjoy a collection of poetry or short stories. Or do you want to learn something new: Biology? Chinese?
No matter your preference, you can’t go wrong with one of these books, demonstrating the range and depth of faculty expertise found at UNC Greensboro.
African American and African Diaspora Studies (AADS)
Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life
By Sarah Jane Cervenak, jointly appointed in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Duke University Press, 2021
Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans.
Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
By Joseph L. Graves Jr. (AADS affiliate faculty) and Alan H. Goodman
Columbia University Press, 2021
Two distinguished scientists tackle common misconceptions about race, human biology, and racism. Using an accessible question-and-answer format, Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Alan H. Goodman explain the differences between social and biological notions of race.
Burnished: Zulu Ceramics between Rural and Urban South Africa
By Elizabeth Perrill (AADS affiliate faculty)
Indiana University Press, 2022
Featuring 90 color images, “Burnished” engages directly with individual artists and specific vessels, fracturing assumptions that Zulu ceramicists are resistant to rural transformation and insulated from urban realities. Elizabeth Perrill shares compelling narratives of women ceramic artists and the sophisticated beer pots they create – their aesthetic choices, audiences, production, and artistic lives.
Biology
Presenting Science Concisely
By Bruce Kirchoff
CABI, 2021
Imagine you are a scientist faced with presenting your research clearly and concisely. Where would you go for help? This book provides the answer. It shows how to use story structure to craft clear, credible presentations.
Biology for the AP® Course
By James Morris; Domenic Castignetti; John Lepri (UNCG); Rick Relyea
Bedford, Freeman and Worth High School Publishers, WH Freeman & Company, 2022
Imagine contributing to a text that will be read (perhaps) by millions and you will know what a thrill it was to be part of the team for this book. John Lepri’s experience as Chief Faculty Consultant/Chief Reader in AP® Biology helped the team develop the book to match the goals and organization for the course that were established by the College Board®.
The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Climate and Environmental Change (Paperback edition)
Edited by Gwen Robbins Schug
Routledge, 2022
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. Bioarchaeology – the study of archaeological human skeletons – provides direct evidence of the human experience of past climate and environmental changes.
Communication Studies
Communication Ethics: Activities for Critical Thinking and Reflection
By Spoma Jovanovic (UNCG), Tammy Swenson Lepper, Leeanne McManus, Melba Velez Ortiz, Robert Ballard, Michelle Leavitt, Lori Charron
Kendall Hunt Publishing Co, 2021
This book helps readers make informed decisions about many of the ethical questions they will face throughout life. Instead of providing readers with the definitive answers, it provides guidance and empowers readers to make the best ethical decision.
Expression in Contested Public Spaces: Free Speech and Civic Engagement
Edited by Spoma Jovanovic
Rowman & Littlefield, 2021
This book addresses how people express themselves and their differences, in ways that amplify the many voices central to the mission of democracy. This book investigates in what ways and in what discursive forms people interrupt the status quo or unjust practices to advance positive social change.
Competing Discourses on Japan’s Nuclear Power: Pronuclear versus Antinuclear Activism
By Etsuko Kinefuchi
Routledge, 2022
This book examines the discursive formation of nuclear power in Japan to provide insights into the ways this technology has been both promoted and resisted, constituting and being constituted by Japan’s sociocultural landscape.
English
Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction
By Heather Brook Adams
The University of South Carolina Press, 2022
Heather Brook Adams recasts the 1960s and ’70s – an era of presumed progress – as a time when expanding reproductive rights were paralleled by communicative practices of shame that cultivated increasingly public interventions into unwed and teen pregnancy and new forms of injustice.
The Lookout Man
By Stuart Dischell
The University of Chicago Press, 2021
Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, and always transformative, “The Lookout Man” embodies the energy, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell’s award-winning poetry.
Antipodes
By Holly Goddard Jones
University of Iowa Press, 2022
This collection of stories contemplate our current reality with both frankness and hard-earned hopefulness, realism and fabulism, tackling parenthood, environment, and the absurd-but-unavoidable daily toil of worrying about mundane matters when we’ve entered “an era of unknowability, of persistent strangeness.”
Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons
Edited by Christian Moraru (UNCG), Andrei Terian, Alexandru Matei
Bloomsbury, 2021
This anthology brings together the work and perspectives of a group of Romanian theorists who discuss the morphings of contemporary theory in what the editors call the “post” era.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory
Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Christian Moraru (UNCG)
Bloomsbury, 2022
This anthology examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study … With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.
Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form
By Mark Rifkin
Duke University Press, 2021
Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings to reframe contemporary debates around Indigenous recognition, refusal, and resurgence. Rifkin shows how works by Native authors illustrate the intellectual labor involved in representing modes of Indigenous political identity and placemaking.
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Speak and Act: Beginning Chinese (Volume II)
By Maiheng S. Dietrich, Meiqing Sun (UNCG), and Karina H. Chen
Phoenix Tree Publishing, 2021
This digital textbook is for learners who have never learned Chinese before. The teaching goal is to lay a solid foundation for beginners in all four skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing. It seamlessly blends the study of Chinese culture, especially behavior culture, with rigorous training in the four skills. The printed copies will be released in July 2022.
Mathematics and Statistics
A Tribute to the Legend of Professor C. R. Rao: The Centenary Volume
Edited by Arijit Chaudhuri, Sat Gupta (UNCG), and Rajkumar Roychoudhury
Springer, 2021
This book includes speeches given during five seminar sessions held in honor of Prof. C. R. Rao, on his 100th year. The chapters pay tribute to Prof. C. R. Rao, the Padma Vibhushan awardee by the Government of India (2001), and the National Medal of Science (2002) by President George W. Bush, by discussing his life and contributions to the field of statistics.
Media Studies
A History of Three-Dimensional Cinema
by David A. Cook
Anthem Press, 2021
From the author of the universally renowned textbook “The History of Narrative Film” comes this latest contribution to the field of cinematic studies. The book chronicles 3-D cinema from its origins in 19th-century stereoscopic photography through anaglyphic/digital stereoscopic cinema in the 20th century to the promise of Virtual Reality in the 21st century.
Political Science
Laughter as Politics: Critical Theory in an Age of Hilarity
By Patrick Giamario
Edinburgh University Press, 2022
This book offers a novel account of laughter’s role in contemporary political life. A world awash in hilarity has rendered the traditional philosophical question of whether laughter should play a role in politics obsolete. This book develops a critical theory of laughter that illuminates laughter as a privileged site wherein the contemporary social order constructs, preserves, and transforms itself politically.
Psychology
Researching Daily Life: A Guide to Experience Sampling and Daily Diary Methods
By Paul Silvia (UNCG) and Katherine N. Cotter
American Psychological Association (APA), 2021
This practical, beginner-friendly book teaches readers how to do daily life research, which is the study of what people do in their ordinary environments in their everyday lives. Common methods include daily diaries, experience sampling, and ecological momentary assessment. Collectively, these methods trade off the control and precision of the lab for the texture, depth, and realism of the real world.
Multiple Pathways of Cognitive Aging: Motivational and Contextual Influences
Edited by Grzegorz Sedek, Thomas Hess, and Dayna Touron (UNCG)
Oxford University Press, 2021
This book explores the factors associated with adaptive functioning in later life. Its emphasis is on understanding both the factors underlying individual differences in change in cognitive functioning in later life and the nature of the compensatory mechanisms developed by most successful and active middle-aged and older adults.
Sociology
Reintroducing George Herbert Mead
By Daniel R. Huebner
Routledge, 2022
George Herbert Mead has long been known for his social theory of meaning and the ‘self’… This book provides an approachable introduction to Mead’s contemporary relevance in the social sciences, showing how a pragmatic view of social action serves as the core of Mead’s theory, offering striking insights into human agency, symbolism, politics, social change, temporality, and materiality.
Crimes of the Powerful: White-Collar Crime and Beyond
By Dawn L. Rothe and David Kauzlarich (UNCG)
Taylor & Francis Group, 2022
As politicians and the media perpetuate the stereotype of the “common criminal,” crimes committed by the powerful remain for the most part invisible or are reframed as a “bad decision” or a “rare mistake.” This is the first textbook to bring together and show the symbiotic relationships between the related fields of state crime, white- collar crime, corporate crime, financial crime and organized crime, and environmental crime.
Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City
By Zachary Levenson
Oxford University Press, 2022
In post-apartheid South Africa, nearly a fifth of the urban population lives in shacks. Unable to wait any longer for government housing, people occupy land, typically seeking to fly under the state’s radar. Yet in most cases, occupiers wind up in dialogue with the state. Levenson follows this journey from avoidance to incorporation, explaining how the post-apartheid Constitution shifts squatters’ struggles onto the judicial register.
Explore the departments and programs in UNCG’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Story by Elizabeth Keri, College of Arts & Sciences
