“Emergency in Transit responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary study reformulates Europe’s so-called ‘migrant crisis’ from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights. Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Eleanor Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration."

“American Philosophies offers the first historically framed introduction to the tradition of American philosophy and its contemporary engagement with the world. Born out of the social and political turmoil of the Civil War, American philosophy was a means of dealing with conflict and change. In the turbulence of the 21st century, this remains as relevant as ever. Placing the work of present-day American philosophers in the context of a history of resistance, through a philosophical tradition marked by a commitment to pluralism, fallibilism, and liberation, this book tells the story of philosophies shaped by major events and illustrates the ways in which philosophy is relevant to lived experience."

"In interwar Paris, the encounter between surrealism and the nascent discipline of ethnology led to an intellectual project now known as ‘ethnographic surrealism.’ In The Persistence of Masks, Joyce Suechun Cheng considers the ethnographic dimension of the surrealist movement in its formative years through a close look at the reviews Documents (1929–30) and Minotaure (1933–39) as well as the surrealist writer-turned-ethnographer Michel Leiris’s ethnography of possession."

"Blacks Against Brown documents the intra-racial conflict among Black Topekans over the city’s segregated schools. Black resistance to school integration challenges conventional narratives about Brown by highlighting community concerns about economic and educational opportunities for Black educators and students and Black residents’ pride in all-Black schools. This history of the local story behind Brown v. Board contributes to a literature that provides a fuller and more complex perspective on African Americans and their relationship to Black education and segregated schools during the Jim Crow era."

"As we see the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene proliferate, advanced technologies also grant us greater access to the furthest reaches of the world’s oceans, facilitating the discovery of countless new species. Sorting through the implications of this strange paradox, Stacy Alaimo explores the influence this newfound intimacy with the deep sea might have on our broader relationship to the nonhuman world."

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
"Interested in preserving her family folklore, Jeannie B. Thomas recorded detailed oral histories from her mother and two grandmothers. While analyzing the tapes of these sessions, she notices the inappropriate laughter often accompanied the retelling of painful stories. In this book, Thomas combines these personal narratives with original scholarship drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva to uncover meaning behind the startling presence of unconventional laughter in women's histories."

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
"The twenty novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett comprise a tightly constructed, radically renovated house of fiction. This study finds that her work is grounded on a rational feminism that defies the Christianized moral ethic which restricts traditional novels by and about women. Compton-Burnett condenses the abuses of patriarchy, and its attendant hierarchy, into the closed arena of the Victorian/Edwardian family. Through this fictional technique of condensation, her 'insular' English novels paradoxically expose contradictions and illegitimate foundations of masculinized Western civilization."

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
"Tracing the history of refugee settlement in Fargo, North Dakota, from the 1980s to the present day, Race-ing Fargo focuses on the role that gender, religion, and sociality play in everyday interactions between refugees from South Sudan and Bosnia-Herzegovina and the dominant white Euro-American population of the city."

"Imagining the Nation integrates a fine appreciation of the formal features of Asian American literature with the conflict and convergence among different reading communities and the dilemma of ethnic intellectuals caught in the process of their institutionalization. By articulating Asian American structures of feeling across the nexus of East and West, black and white, nation and diaspora, the book both sets out a new terrain for Asian American literary culture and significantly strengthens the multiculturalist challenge to the American canon."

"What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States--laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between whites and members of other races. Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest."