College of Arts & Letters Bookshelf

A gallery of books by faculty from the College of Arts & Letters, Old Dominion University. Faculty books are also listed under specific departments.

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Assassination in Vichy: Marx Dormoy and the Struggle for the Soul of France
2020
Gayle Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite

During the night of 25 July 1941, assassins planted a time bomb in the bed of the former French Interior Minister, Marx Dormoy. The explosion on the following morning launched a two-year investigation that traced Dormoy’s murder to the highest echelons of the Vichy regime. Dormoy, who had led a 1937 investigation into the “Cagoule,” a violent right-wing terrorist organization, was the victim of a captivating revenge plot. Based on the meticulous examination of thousands of documents, Assassination in Vichy tells the story of Dormoy’s murder and the investigation that followed.

At the heart of this book lies a true crime that was sensational in its day. A microhistory that tells a larger and more significant story about the development of far-right political movements, domestic terrorism, and the importance of courage, Assassination in Vichy explores the impact of France’s deep political divisions, wartime choices, and post-war memory. [From the publisher]
The Oxford Handbook of Central American History
2020
Robert H. Holden (Editor)
Cosmos, Values, and Consciousness in Latin American Digital Culture
2020
Angelica J. Huizar

This book understands digital cultural production of electronic literatures and digital art by looking at electronic and digital works that produce subjective positionality, clouded knowledges of quantum theories, and metaphysical patterns grounded in a cultural ideology. This book underlines a conceptual framework for understanding how digital media impacts reading, approaching, and even interpreting social reality. The qualitative analyses interpret the current zeitgeist, and the works selected speak of the diverse, sometimes regionalized, and often multi-ethnic reality of the Latin American experience. The analyses elaborate on how artists reflect both the world they live in and a universal consciousness. These artists are not simply “digitalizing literature,” and these works are more than techy creations; rather, they make us think of other directions and connections. [From the back cover]
Unexpressed Subjects in English: An Empirical Analysis of Narrative and Conversational Discourse
2020
Amy M. Lindstrom

Unexpressed Subjects in English: An Empirical Analysis of Narrative and Conversational Discourse challenges previous assumptions of what is grammatically possible in English through an examination of contexts in which speakers omit subjects, demonstrating how language structure is influenced by communicative needs.

Through corpus-based analysis of both interactive conversations and monologic narratives, Amy M. Lindstrom reveals how the discourse/pragmatic factors of accessibility and chronological ordering, the prosodic effect of linking, and the mechanical effect of priming intersect to provide a rigorous account of subject (un)expression in spoken American English. Higher degrees of linking, cohesion, and connection lead to more unexpressed subjects. Lindstrom also analyzes frequent constructions with unexpressed subjects vis-à-vis paths of grammaticalization. The author presents a measurement of discourse connectedness that shows how the intersection of prosody and pragmatics illustrates the powerful effect of spontaneous discourse in shaping grammar. This study adds to our understanding of language and cognition by contributing to our knowledge of the conceptualization, categorization, and representation of experience and memory. [Amazon.com]
Moral Theory and Climate Change: Ethical Perspectives on a Warming Planet
2020
Dale Miller (Editor) and Ben Eggleston (Editor)

Climate change has become the most pressing moral and political problem of our time. Ethical theories help us think clearly and more fully about important moral and political issues. And yet, to date, there have been no books that have brought together a broad range of ethical theories to apply them systematically to the problems of climate change. This volume fills that deep need. Two preliminary chapters―an up-to-date synopsis of climate science and an overview of the ethical issues raised by climate change―set the stage. After this, ten leading ethicists in ten separate chapters each present a major ethical theory (or, more broadly, perspective) and discuss the implications of that view for how we decide to respond to a rapidly warming planet. Each chapter first provides a brief exposition of the view before working out what that theory “has to say” about climate change and our response to the problems it poses. [From the back cover]
The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration
2020
Courtney Adams Wooten (Editor), Jacob Babb (Editor), Kristi Murray Costello (Editor), Kate Navickas (Editor), and Laura Micciche (Forward)

Emotional labor is not adequately talked about or addressed by writing program administrators. The Things We Carry makes this often-invisible labor visible, demonstrates a variety of practical strategies to navigate it reflectively, and opens a path for further research. Particularly timely, this collection considers how writing program administrators work when their schools or regions experience crisis situations.

The book is broken into three sections: one emphasizing the WPA's own work identity, one on fostering community in writing programs, and one on balancing the professional and personal. Chapters written by a diverse range of authors in different institutional and WPA contexts examine the roles of WPAs in traumatic events, such as mass shootings and natural disasters, as well as the emotional labor WPAs perform on a daily basis, such as working with students who have been sexually assaulted or endured racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise disenfranchising interactions on campus. The central thread in this collection focuses on "preserving" by acknowledging that emotions are neither good nor bad and that they must be continually reflected upon as WPAs consider what to do with emotional labor and how to respond. Ultimately, this book argues for more visibility of the emotional labor WPAs perform and for WPAs to care for themselves even as they care for others.... [From the publisher]
Speech Accommodation in Student Presentations
2020
Alla Zareva

This book examines student presentations as a genre of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and analyses the elements of speech and audience accommodation which make a successful presentation. Offering an antidote to the audience-centric approach to presentation design and delivery promoted by numerous books and manuals on the subject, each chapter tackles an under-researched aspect of student presentations, and presents data-based evidence for practical recommendations within the genre. The language analyses presented in the book are based on a real-life corpus of student presentations, providing clear examples of successful oral academic discourse. This book will be of interest to students of applied linguistics, EAP, TESOL and language education. [From the back cover]
Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters
2019
Felice Blake (Editor), Paula Ioanide (Editor), and Alison R. Reed (Editor)

Antiracism Inc. traces the ways people along the political spectrum appropriate, incorporate, and neutralize antiracist discourses to perpetuate injustice. It also examines the ways organizers continue to struggle for racial justice in the context of such appropriations. Antiracism Inc. reveals how antiracist claims can be used to propagate racism, and what we can do about it. While related to colorblind, multicultural, and diversity discourses, the appropriation of antiracist rhetoric as a strategy for advancing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas is a unique phenomenon that requires careful interrogation and analysis. Those who co-opt antiracist language and practice do not necessarily deny racial difference, biases, or inequalities. Instead, by performing themselves conservatively as non-racists or liberally as ‘authentic’ antiracists, they purport to be aligned with racial justice even while advancing the logics and practices of systemic racism. Antiracism Inc. therefore considers new ways of struggling toward racial justice in a world that constantly steals and misuses radical ideas and practices. The collection focuses on people and methods that do not seek inclusion in the hierarchical order of gendered racial capitalism. Rather, the collection focuses on aggrieved peoples who have always had to negotiate state violence and cultural erasure, but who work to build the worlds they envision. These collectivities seek to transform social structures and establish a new social warrant guided by what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” a way of being and thinking that privileges people, mutual interdependence, and ecological harmony over individualist self-aggrandizement and profits. These aggrieved collectivities reshape social relations away from the violence and alienation inherent to gendered racial capitalism, and towards the well-being of the commons. Antiracism Inc. articulates methodologies that strive toward freedom dreams without imposing monolithic or authoritative definitions of resistance. Because power seeks to neutralize revolutionary action through incorporation as much as elimination, these freedom dreams, as well as the language used to articulate them, are constantly transformed through the critical and creative interventions stemming from the active engagement in liberation struggles. [From the back cover]
Leibniz Discovers Asia: Social Networking in the Republic of Letters
2019
Michael C. Carhart

Who are the nations of Europe, and where did they come from? Early modern people were as curious about their origins as we are today. Lacking twenty-first-century DNA research, seventeenth-century scholars turned to language—etymology, vocabulary, and even grammatical structure—for evidence. The hope was that, in puzzling out the relationships between languages, the relationships between nations themselves would emerge, and on that basis one could determine the ancestral homeland of the nations that presently occupied Europe.

In Leibniz Discovers Asia, Michael C. Carhart explores this early modern practice by focusing on philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who developed a vast network of scholars and missionaries throughout Europe to acquire the linguistic data he needed. The success of his project was tied to the Jesuit search for an overland route to China, whose itinerary would take them through the nations from whom Leibniz wanted language samples. Drawing on Leibniz's extensive correspondence with the members of this network, Carhart gives us access to the philosopher's scintillating discussions about astronomy and mapping; ethnology and missionary work; the contest of the Asiatic empires of Muscovy, Persia, the Ottoman, and China for control of the Caucasus, the steppes, and the Far East; and above all, language, as the best indicator of the prehistoric genealogy of the myriad peoples from Central Asia to Western Europe. [From the publisher]
Cybercrime and Digital Deviance
2019
Roderick Graham and Shawn K. Smith

Cybercrime and Digital Deviance is a work that combines insights from sociology, criminology, and computer science to explore cybercrimes such as hacking and romance scams, along with forms of cyberdeviance such as pornography addiction, trolling, and flaming. Other issues are explored including cybercrime investigations, organized cybercrime, the use of algorithms in policing, cybervictimization, and the theories used to explain cybercrime. … [Amazon.com]
Of Color: Poets' Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics
2019
Amanda Galvan Huynh (Editor) and Luisa A. Igloria (Editor)

How do poets of color come to know what they do about their art and practice? How do they learn from and teach others? For poets of color, what does the relationship of “what one knows” have, with conditions extending but not limited to publishing, mentorship and pedagogy, comradeship and collegiality, friendship, love, and possibility? Is one a real poet if one does not have an MFA? For minority poets not considered part of the mainstream because of the combined effects of their ethnic, class, racial, cultural, linguistic, and other identities, what should change in order to accord them the space and respect they deserve? How best can they discuss with and pass on what they have learned to others?

These and other questions come up so consistently in our daily experience as poets of color. And we hear them from poets of color at various stages of their careers. Out of the desire not only to hear from each other but also to share what we’ve learned—each from our unique as well as bonded experiences of writing as poets of color in this milieu—this anthology project was born. ...{Amazon.com]
Homer's Hero: Human Excellence in the Iliad and the Odyssey
2019
Michelle M. Kundmueller

Draws on Plato to argue that Homer elevated private life as the locus of true friendship and the catalyst of the highest human excellence.

Offering a new, Plato-inspired reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey, this book traces the divergent consequences of love of honor and love of one’s own private life for human excellence, justice, and politics. Analyzing Homer’s intricate character portraits, Michelle M. Kundmeuller concludes that the poet shows that the excellence or virtue to which humans incline depends on what they love most. Ajax’s character demonstrates that human beings who seek honor strive, perhaps above all, to display their courage in battle, while Agamemnon’s shows that the love of honor ultimately undermines the potential for moderation, destabilizing political order. In contrast to these portraits, the excellence that Homer links to the love of one’s own, such as by Odysseus and his wife, Penelope, fosters moderation and employs speech to resolve conflict. It is Odysseus, rather than Achilles, who is the pinnacle of heroic excellence. Homer’s portrait of humanity reveals the value of love of one’s own as the better, albeit still incomplete, precursor to a just political order. Kundmueller brings her reading of Homer to bear on contemporary tensions between private life and the pursuit of public honor, arguing that individual desires continue to shape human excellence and our prospects for justice. [From the publisher]
Game of Thrones: A Guide to Westeros and Beyond: The Complete Series
2019
Myles McNutt

Bound in gorgeous gold and silver foil, this remarkable volume celebrates and explores the complex stories, relationships, and world building in HBO's Emmy-award winning Game of Thrones series, from Season 1 through Season 8. The book follows the story of Essos and southern Westeros, with fire breathing dragons and clashing noble houses, and the story of northern Westeros, where the Night King leads his army of the dead across the icy landscape. Mapping bloodlines and battle lines, the approximately 300 pages are filled with stunning photographs, original art, timelines, and charts newly created for this book. This definitive visual guide commemorates this momentous series and offers a must-have companion for every Game of Thrones fan. [Amazon.com]
Introduction to Criminal Justice: A Balanced Approach (Second Edition)
2019
Brian K. Payne, Willard M. Oliver, and Nancy E. Marion

Introduction to Criminal Justice, Second Edition, provides you with balanced, comprehensive, and up-to-date coverage of all aspects of the criminal justice system. Authors Brian K. Payne, Willard M. Oliver, and Nancy E. Marion cover criminal justice from a student-centered perspective by identifying the key issues confronting today’s criminal justice professionals. You are presented with objective, research-driven material through an accessible and concise writing style that makes the content easier to comprehend. By exploring criminal justice from a broad and balanced perspective, you will understand how decision making is critical to the criminal justice process and your future career.

The fully updated Second Edition has been completely revised to include new studies and current examples that are relatable to today’s students. Two new feature boxes have been added to this edition to help you comprehend and apply the content. "You Have the Right to…" gives insight into several Constitutional amendments and their relationship with criminal justice today; and "Politics and Criminal Justice" explores current political hot topics surrounding the justice system and the debates that occur on both sides of the political aisle. [From Amazon.com]
Early Morning Koffee Klatch at the Egg 'n Hash Sitdown
2019
Philip Raisor

These poems of Philip Raisor’s consider our daily bread, broken around the table, broken as we are also broken, aging and approaching the dark, in communion.
Nurse Practitioners and the Performance of Professional Competency: Accomplishing Patient-Centered Care
2018
Staci Defibaugh

This book examines the interactional practices of nurse practitioners (NPs) and the delivery of health care in the US. The author takes a discourse analytic approach, examining the linguistic resources that NPs employ in their interactions with patients. These linguistic features are connected to the concept of professional competency with specific focus on the enactment of the patient-centered approach. Analytic focus is placed on how NPs address organizational responsibilities during medical visits with patients, the form and function of patient education, the use of indirect speech, and the role that small talk plays in health care encounters. The book explores the understudied professional field of nurse practitioners and examines their linguistic practices with an eye on crossing disciplinary boundaries, integrating research from linguistics, discourse analysis and health communication. It will appeal to those interested in medical discourse analysis and health communication, as well as applied linguistics scholars. [Amazon.com]
Sissi’s World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth
2018
Maura E. Hametz (Editor) and Heidi Schlipphacke (Editor)

Sissi's World offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of the Habsburg Empress Elisabeth of Austria. It investigates the myths, legends, and representations across literature, art, film, and other media of one of the most popular, revered, and misunderstood female figures in European cultural history.

Sissi's World explores the cultural foundations for the endurance of the Sissi legends and the continuing fascination with the beautiful empress: a Bavarian duchess born in 1837, the longest-serving Austrian empress, and the queen of Hungary who died in 1898 at the hands of a crazed anarchist.

Despite the continuing fascination with “the beloved Sissi," the Habsburg empress, her impact, and legacy have received scant attention from scholars. This collection will go beyond the popular biographical accounts, recountings of her mythic beauty, and scattered studies of her well-known eccentricities to offer transdisciplinary cultural perspectives across art, film, fashion, history, literature, and media. [From the Publisher]
The Buddha Wonders if She Is Having a Mid-Life Crisis
2018
Luisa A. Igloria

Luisa A. Igloria's "Buddha poems," written in early 2016, first appeared online at Via Negativa, where she has posted a new poem every day since November 2010. The author says these poems began from the premise that "if the Buddha in me can greet the Buddha in you," then the aspiration to transcendence is a daily work in progress. She writes about the constant seesaw between our appetite for worldly things and the hunger for deeper permanence; about our human imperfections and foibles; and our longing to be touched by grace, if not love and absolution, in this lifetime. [From Amazon.com]
Posthuman Praxis in Technical Communication
2018
Kristen R. Moore (Editor) and Daniel P. Richards (Editor)

This collection, aimed at scholars, teachers, and practitioners in technical communication, focuses on the praxis-based connections between technical communication and theoretical movements that have emerged in the past several decades, namely new materialism and posthumanism. It provides a much needed link between contemporary theoretical discussions about new materialisms and posthumanism and the practical, everyday work of technical communicators. The collection insists that where some theoretical perspectives fall flat for practitioners, posthumanism and new materialisms have the potential to enable more effective and comprehensive practices, methodologies, and pedagogies. [From Amazon.com]
The Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology
2018
Ruth Ann Triplett (Editor)

Featuring contributions by distinguished scholars from ten countries, The Wiley Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology provides students, scholars, and criminologists with a truly a global perspective on the theory and practice of criminology throughout the centuries and around the world. In addition to chapters devoted to the key ideas, thinkers, and moments in the intellectual and philosophical history of criminology, it features in-depth coverage of the organizational structure of criminology as an academic discipline world-wide. ... [From Amazon.com]
Challenged Hegemony: The United States, China, and Russia in the Persian Gulf
2018
Steve A. Yetiv and Katerina Oskarsson

Few issues in international affairs and energy security animate thinkers more than the classic topic of hegemony, and the case of the Persian Gulf presents particularly fertile ground for considering this concept. Since the 1970s, the region has undergone tumultuous changes, with dramatic shifts in the diplomatic, military, and economic roles of the United States, China, and Russia. In this book, Steve A. Yetiv and Katerina Oskarsson offer a panoramic study of hegemony and foreign powers in the Persian Gulf, offering the most comprehensive, data-driven portrait to date of their evolving relations. The authors argue that the United States has become hegemonic in the Persian Gulf, ultimately protecting oil security for the entire global economy. Through an analysis of official and unofficial diplomatic relations, trade statistics, military records, and more, they provide a detailed account of how U.S. hegemony and oil security have grown in tandem, as, simultaneously, China and Russia have increased their political and economic presence. The book sheds light on hegemony's complexities, and challenges and reveals how local variations in power will continue to shape the Persian Gulf in the future. [From Amazon.com]
Migrant Marketplaces: Food and Italians in North and South America
2018
Elizabeth Zanoni

Italian immigrants to the United States and Argentina hungered for the products of home. Merchants imported Italian cheese, wine, olive oil, and other commodities to meet the demand. The two sides met in migrant marketplaces--urban spaces that linked a mobile people with mobile goods in both real and imagined ways. Elizabeth Zanoni provides a cutting-edge comparative look at Italian people and products on the move between 1880 and 1940. Concentrating on foodstuffs--a trade dominated by Italian entrepreneurs in New York and Buenos Aires --Zanoni reveals how consumption of these increasingly global imports affected consumer habits and identities and sparked changing and competing connections between gender, nationality, and ethnicity. Women in particular--by tradition tasked with buying and preparing food--had complex interactions that influenced both global trade and their community economies. Zanoni conveys the complicated and often fraught values and meanings that surrounded food, meals, and shopping. [From the publisher]
Starlight & Error
2017
Remica Bingham-Risher, Patty Paine (Editor), and Law Alsobrook (Editor)

In Starlight & Error, Remica Bingham-Risher redefines the beat of the heart not only in the adult situations of romantic love but also in the adult decisions within the love of family. The scope of her vision helps us see into our own lives with a sharper focus. At a time in America when we need hope the most, this book offers us an open path; we no longer "wonder what other secrets/ we've been keeping/ on this side of the world." Here- in her songs of forgetfulness and of memory, songs of the closed fist and the open palm, songs of regrets and of gratitude-we clearly see a world worth fighting for. A. Van Jordan
Dream and Legacy: Dr. Martin Luther King in the Post-Civil Rights Era
2017
Michael L. Clemons (Editor), Donathan L. Brown, and William H. L. Dorsey

This book examines how Martin Luther King's life and work had a profound, if unpredictable, impact on the course of the United States since the civil rights era. A global icon of freedom, justice, and equality, King is recognized worldwide as a beacon in the struggles of peoples seeking to eradicate oppression, entrenched poverty, social deprivation, as well as political and economic disfranchisement. While Dr. King's work and ideas have gained broad traction, some powerful people misappropriate the symbol of King, skewing his legacy… [From Amazon.com]
Robert Ryman
2017
Vittorio Colaizzi

The only comprehensive monograph on the artist whose abstract 'white' paintings have inspired generations. A much-revered figure in the art world, Robert Ryman has, over six decades, continuously and methodically experimented with the different possibilities inherent within a painting - abolishing color in order to focus on material, brushstroke, support, and scale. This, the only comprehensive monograph covering his career to date, places his famous square 'white' paintings with lesser-known but increasingly exhibited works, in order to show that he is not a reductionist, but in fact a restless experimenter. [Amazon.com]