"The attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, and in Madrid on March 11, 2004, provoked diverse political reactions, but the imminence of the ruins triggered a collective historical awakening. In Cities in Ruins, Cecilia Enjuto Rangel argues that the portrayal in poetry of the modern city as a disintegrated, ruined space is part of a critique of the visions of progress and the historical process of modernization that developed during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

"When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act became law in 1996, the architects of welfare reform celebrated what they called the new "consensus" on welfare: that cash assistance should be temporary and contingent on recipients' seeking and finding employment.

"Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers, a companion to Kathleen Rowe Karlyn's groundbreaking work, The Unruly Woman, studies the ways popular culture and current debates within and about feminism inform each other.

"This book is an examination of how American mass media, including advertising, presents Otherness – anyone or anything constructed as different from an established norm – in terms of gender, race, sex, disabilities, and other markers of difference. Using a mythological lens, the book looks below the surface of media content to explore the psychological, social, and economic underpinnings of a system of beliefs that result in prejudice, discrimination, and oppression.

"The authors of the essays in this unique collection explore the lives and cultural contributions of gay Latino men in the United States, while also analyzing the political and theoretical stakes of gay Latino studies. In new essays and influential previously published pieces, Latino scholars based in American studies, ethnic studies, history, performance studies, and sociology consider gay Latino scholarly and cultural work in relation to mainstream gay, lesbian, and queer academic discourses and the broader field of Chicano and Latino studies.

"In The Aroma of Righteousness, Deborah Green explores images of perfume and incense in late Roman and early Byzantine Jewish literature. Using literary methods to illuminate the rabbinic literature, Green demonstrates the ways in which the rabbis’ reading of biblical texts and their intimate experience with aromatics build and deepen their interpretations.

"These memoirs all come from women forced to live lives of impropriety, often after ill-treatment from unscrupulous men. Their tales of survival in the face of extreme hardship and privations make inspirational and compelling reading."

Taylor & Francis, 420 pages

"Beyond the Island recreates the Galapagos Islands as a paradise poised between destruction and redemption, its inhabitants as varied as an Elizabethan pirate, an expert on the prickly pear, and a baker infatuated with a vanished baroness. By turns hilarious and troubling, Yanez Cossio's ultimately generous treatment of small town self-importance and personal ambition underscores the violence born of prejudice and intolerance and finally discovers an unexpected path to renewal."

UNO Press (University of New Orleans), 226 pages

"Grounded in both theoretical and political practices—in the lived realities of people’s experience—Identity Complex reinvigorates identity as a key concept and as a tool for the pursuit of social justice. Hames-García draws on a wide range of examples to show that social identities are central to how exploitation works, such as debates about the desirability of sexual minority identities in postcolonial contexts, questions about the reality of race, and the nature of the U.S. prison crisis.

"Examining how gender enables the globalization of markets and how emerging forms of service labor are changing women’s social status in China, this book reveals the forms of social inequality produced by shifts in the economy. No longer working for the common good as defined by the socialist state, service workers are catering to the individual desires of consumers.