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."

"Increased use of mass transportation in the early twentieth century enabled men and women of different social classes to interact in ways they had not before. Using a cultural studies approach that combines historical research and literary analysis, author Alisa Freedman investigates fictional, journalistic, and popular culture depictions of how mass transportation changed prewar Tokyo's social fabric and artistic movements, giving rise to gender roles that have come to characterize modern Japan."

“This book addresses current political and social upheaval and distress with new concepts for the relationship between citizens and government. Politics has become turbo-charged as a form of agonistic contest where candidates and the public become more focused on winning than on governing or holding the government accountable for the benefit of the people. This failure of the government to fulfill its part of the social contract calls for a new social compact wherein citizens as a collective whole make long-term resolutions outside of government institutions.”

"To the casual observer, farming on the Mande Plateau in central Mali looks rather traditional, involving hand tools and crops that date back centuries. The same might be said for the region's famous antelope (ciwara) headdresses and dances, which have ancient origins. Yet Stephen Wooten tells a story of the essential dynamism of agriculture and masquerade, understood as linked processes of performance."

"In Mapping the Americas, Shari M. Huhndorf tracks changing conceptions of Native culture as it increasingly transcends national boundaries and takes up vital concerns such as patriarchy, labor and environmental exploitation, the emergence of pan-Native urban communities, global imperialism, and the commodification of indigenous cultures.While nationalism remains a dominant anticolonial strategy in indigenous contexts, Huhndorf examines the ways in which transnational indigenous politics have reshaped Native culture (especially novels, films, photography, and performance) in the United States and Canada since the 1980s."

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
“This study examines the influence of gender constructs on the international regime protecting war-affected civilians. Although international law nominally protects all civilians, Carpenter argues that belligerents, human rights advocates and humanitarian players interpret civilian immunity so as to leave adult civilian men and older boys at grave risk in conflict zones. This ground-breaking study demonstrates how gender assumptions shape international politics, and develops a framework for incorporating gender into the often gender-blind scholarship on international norms.”