College of Arts & Letters Bookshelf

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

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American Sports and the Great War: College, Military and Professional Athletics, 1916-1919
2021
Peter C. Stewart

Drawing on newspaper accounts, college yearbooks and the recollections of veterans, this book examines the impact of World War I on sports in the U.S. As young men entered the military in large numbers, many colleges initially considered suspending athletics but soon turned to the idea of using sports to build morale and physical readiness. Recruits, mostly in their twenties, ended up playing more baseball and football than they would have in peacetime. Though most college athletes volunteered for military duty, others replaced them so that the reduction of competition was not severe. Pugilism gained participants as several million men learned how to box. [Amazon.com]
Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China
2021
Nicole Willock

In the aftermath of the cataclysmic Maoist period, three Tibetan Buddhist scholars living and working in the People’s Republic of China became intellectual heroes. Renowned as the “Three Polymaths,” Tséten Zhabdrung (1910–1985), Mugé Samten (1914–1993), and Dungkar Lozang Trinlé (1927–1997) earned this symbolic title for their efforts to keep the lamp of the Dharma lit even in the darkest hour of Tibetan history.

Lineages of the Literary reveals how the Three Polymaths negotiated the political tides of the twentieth century, shedding new light on Sino-Tibetan relations and Buddhism during this turbulent era. Nicole Willock explores their contributions to reviving Tibetan Buddhism, expanding Tibetan literary arts, and pioneering Tibetan studies as an academic discipline. Her sophisticated reading of Tibetan-language sources vivifies the capacious literary world of the Three Polymaths, including autobiography, Buddhist philosophy, poetic theory, and historiography. Whereas prevailing state-centric accounts place Tibetan religious figures in China in one of two roles, collaborator or resistance fighter, Willock shows how the Three Polymaths offer an alternative model of agency. She illuminates how they by turns safeguarded, taught, and celebrated Tibetan Buddhist knowledge, practices, and institutions after their near destruction during the Cultural Revolution. … [Amazon.com]
The Right to Food: The Global Campaign to End Hunger and Malnutrition
2020
Francis Adams

This book examines the global campaign to end hunger and malnutrition. Focus is placed on the work of the United Nations which has led international efforts to improve food security in the world’s poorest countries. The book first reviews the long-term project to establish access to safe, sufficient, and nutritious food as a universally recognized human right. This is followed by separate chapters that examine the nature and central causes of food insecurity in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. These chapters also review the contemporary work of three United Nations agencies – the World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organization, and International Fund for Agricultural Development – in providing both food aid and food assistance to each region of the developing world. This includes the provision of emergency food aid in response to natural disaster and civil conflict, as well as longer-term food assistance to promote agricultural productivity, advance rural development, and preserve natural environments. The concluding chapter considers ways to strengthen food aid and assistance in the years to come, with many of the recommendations advanced reflecting lessons learned from the actual experience of food aid and assistance described in this book. [Amazon.com]
Neo-Noir as Post-Classical Hollywood Cinema
2020
Robert Arnett

Neo-Noir as Post-Classical Hollywood Cinema suggests the terms “noir” and “neo-noir” have been rendered almost meaningless by overuse. The book seeks to re-establish a purpose for neo-noir films and re-consider the organization of 60 years of neo-noir films. Using the notion of post-classical, the book establishes how neo-noir breaks into many movements, some based on time and others based on thematic similarities. The combined movements then form a mosaic of neo-noir. The time-based movements examine Transitional Noir (1960s-early 1970s), Hollywood Renaissance Noir in the 1970s, Eighties Noir, Nineties Noir, and Digital Noir of the 2000s. The thematic movements explore Nostalgia Noir, Hybrid Noir, and Remake and Homage Noir. Academics as well as film buffs will find this book appealing as it deconstructs popular films and places them within new contexts. [Amazon.com]
The Bread Makers: The Social and Professional Lives of Bakers in the Western Roman Empire
2020
Jared Benton

Bread was the staple of the ancient Mediterranean diet. It was present in the meals of emperors and on the tables of the poorest households. In many instances, a loaf of bread probably constituted an entire meal. As such, bread was both something that unified society and a milieu through which social and ethnic divisions played out. Similarly, bakers were not a monolithic demographic. They served both the rich and the poor, but some bakers clearly operated within regional traditions. Some lived in big cities and others lived in small towns. Some bakers made flat breads and others made leavened loaves. Some made coarse brown loaves and others specialized in fancier white breads. This book offers new methods and new ways of framing bread production in the Roman world to reveal the nuances of an industry that fed an empire. Inscriptions, Roman law, and material remains of Roman-period bakeries are combined to expose the cultural context of bread making, the economic context of commercial baking, the social hierarchy within the workforces of bakeries, and the socio-economic strategies of Roman bakers. [Amazon.com]
Places I've Taken My Body: Essays
2020
Molly McCully Brown

In seventeen intimate essays, poet Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body―in her case, one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy, a permanent and often painful movement disorder. In spite of―indeed, in response to―physical constraints, Brown leads a peripatetic life: the essays comprise a vivid travelogue set throughout the United States and Europe, ranging from the rural American South of her childhood to the cobblestoned streets of Bologna, Italy. Moving between these locales and others, Brown constellates the subjects that define her inside and out: a disabled and conspicuous body, a religious conversion, a missing twin, a life in poetry. As she does, she depicts vividly for us not only her own life but a striking array of sites and topics, among them Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the world’s oldest anatomical theater, the American Eugenics movement, and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Throughout, Brown offers us the gift of her exquisite sentences, woven together in consideration, always, of what it means to be human―flawed, potent, feeling. [Amazon.com]
In the Field Between Us: Poems
2020
Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison

In the Field Between Us is a friendship in poems, an epistolary project by Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison that ponders disability and the possibility of belonging in the aftermath of lifelong medical intervention. In the beginning, the poem-letters express, in gorgeous harmony, the psychic and physiological complexities of surviving remedy. As the book unfolds, the writers encounter a natural world around them that increasingly seems to mirror the traumas they have endured. Out of its tracing of innumerable scars, this book emits a perseverance, a spirit of communion, and a hopeful resolve that rises out of the poets’ attention to detail and their profound connection to one another. [Amazon.com]
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]
Cities of the World: Regional Patterns and Urban Environments
2020
Stanley D. Brunn (Editor), Donald J. Zeigler (Editor), Maureen Hays-Mitchell (Editor), and Jessica K. Graybill (Editor)

Remarkably, more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, and the numbers grow daily as people abandon rural areas. This fully updated and revised seventh edition of the classic text offers readers a comprehensive set of tools for understanding the urban landscape, and, by extension, the world's politics, cultures, and economies.

Providing a sweeping overview of world urban geography, noted experts explore the eleven major global regions. Each regional chapter considers urban history, economy, culture, and environment, as well as urban spatial models and problems and prospects. Each begins with two facing pages: a regional map that shows the major cities and a table of basic statistical information about cities and urbanization in each region and a list of ten salient points about that region’s urban experience. Chapters conclude with a list of references, including films and webpages, which can be used by the student and instructor for additional information about specific cities. … [Amazon.com]
All Heathens
2020
Marianne Chan

All Heathens is a declaration of ownership—of bodies, of histories, of time. Revisiting Magellan’s voyage around the world, these poems explore the speaker’s Filipino American identity by grappling with her relationship to her family and notions of diaspora, circumnavigation, and discovery. Whether rewriting the origin story of Eve (“I always imagined that the serpent had the legs of a seductive woman in black nylons”), or ruminating on what-should-have-been-said “when the man at the party said he wanted to own a Filipino,” Chan paints wry, witty renderings of anecdotal and folkloric histories, while both preserving and unveiling a self-identity that dares any other to try and claim it. [Amazon.com]
The Oxford Handbook of Early China
2020
Elizabeth Childs-Johnson (Editor)

The Oxford Handbook on Early China brings 30 scholars together to cover early China from the Neolithic through Warring States periods (ca 5000-500BCE). The study is chronological and incorporates a multidisciplinary approach, covering topics from archaeology, anthropology, art history, architecture, music, and metallurgy, to literature, religion, paleography, cosmology, religion, prehistory, and history. [Amazon.com]
Modernism in the Green: Public Greens in Modern Literature and Culture
2020
Julia E. Daniel (Editor) and Margaret Konkol (Editor)

Modernism in the Green traces a trans-Atlantic modernist fascination with the creation, use, and representation of the modern green. From the verdant public commons in the heart of cities to the lookout points on mountains in national parks, planned green spaces serve as felicitous stages for the performance of modernism. In its focus on designed and public green zones, Modernism in the Green offers a new perspective on modernism’s overlapping investments in the arts, politics, urbanism, race, class, gender, and the nature-culture divide. This collection of essays is the first to explore the prominent and diverse ways greens materialize in modern literature and culture, along with the manner in which modernists represented them. This volume presents the idea of "the green" as a point of exploration, as our contributors analyze social-organic spaces ranging from public parks to roadways and refuse piles. Like the term "green," one that evokes both more-than-human natural zones and crafted public meeting places, these chapters uncover the social and spatial intersection of nature and culture in the very architecture of parks, gardens, buildings, highways, and dumps. This book argues that such greens facilitate modernists’ exploration of how nature can manifest in an era of increasing urbanization and mechanization and what identities and communities the green now enables or prevents. [Amazon.com]
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]
Maps for Migrants and Ghosts
2020
Luisa A. Igloria

For immigrants and migrants, the wounds of colonization, displacement, and exile remain unhealed. Crossing oceans and generations, from her childhood home in Baguio City, the Philippines, to her immigrant home in Virginia, poet Luisa A. Igloria demonstrates how even our most personal and intimate experiences are linked to the larger collective histories that came before.

In this poetry collection, Igloria brings together personal and family histories, ruminates on the waxing and waning of family fortunes, and reminds us how immigration necessitates and compels transformations. Simultaneously at home and displaced in two different worlds, the speaker lives in the past and the present, and the return to her origins is fraught with disappointment, familiarity, and alienation. [From the publisher]
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]
The Routledge Introduction to Native American Literature
2020
Drew Lopenzina

This Introduction makes available for both student, instructor, and aficionado a refined set of tools for decolonizing our approaches prior to entering the unfamiliar landscape of Native American literatures. This book will introduce indigenous perspectives and traditions as articulated by indigenous authors whose voices have been a vital, if often overlooked, component of the American dialogue for more than 400 years. Paramount to this consideration of Native-centered reading is the understanding that literature was not something bestowed upon Native peoples by the settler culture, either through benevolent interventions or violent programs of forced assimilation. Native literature precedes colonization, and Native stories and traditions have their roots in both the pre-colonized and the decolonizing worlds. As this far-reaching survey of Native literary contributions will demonstrate, almost without fail, when indigenous writers elected to enter into the world of western letters, they did so with the intention of maintaining indigenous culture and community. Writing was and always remains a strategy for survival. [Amazon.com]
The Picky Eagle: How Democracy and Xenophobia Limited U.S. Territorial Expansion
2020
Richard Maass

The Picky Eagle explains why the United States stopped annexing territory by focusing on annexation's domestic consequences, both political and normative. It describes how the U.S. rejection of further annexations, despite its rising power, set the stage for twentieth-century efforts to outlaw conquest. In contrast to conventional accounts of a nineteenth-century shift from territorial expansion to commercial expansion, Richard W. Maass argues that U.S. ambitions were selective from the start.

By presenting twenty-three case studies, Maass examines the decision-making of U.S. leaders facing opportunities to pursue annexation between 1775 and 1898. U.S. presidents, secretaries, and congressmen consistently worried about how absorbing new territories would affect their domestic political influence and their goals for their country. These leaders were particularly sensitive to annexation's domestic costs where xenophobia interacted with their commitment to democracy: rather than grant political representation to a large alien population or subject it to a long-term imperial regime, they regularly avoided both of these perceived bad options by rejecting annexation. As a result, U.S. leaders often declined even profitable opportunities for territorial expansion, and they renounced the practice entirely once no desirable targets remained. [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]
On Teacher Neutrality: Politics, Praxis, and Performativity
2020
Daniel P. Richards (Editor)

On Teacher Neutrality explores the consequences of ideological arguments about teacher neutrality in the context of higher education. It is the first edited collection to focus exclusively on this contentious concept, emphasizing the practical possibilities and impossibilities of neutrality in the teaching of writing, the deployment of neutrality as a political motif in the public discourse shaping policy in higher education, and the performativity of individual instructors in a variety of institutional contexts. The collection provides clarity on the contours around defining “neutrality,” depth in understanding how neutrality operates differently in various institutional settings, and nuance in the levels and degrees of neutrality—or what is meant by it—in the teaching of writing.

Higher education itself and its stakeholders are continually exploring the role of teachers in the classroom and the extent to which it is possible or ethical to engage in neutrality. Amplifying voices from teachers in underrepresented positions and institutions in discussions of teacher ideology, On Teacher Neutrality shapes the discourse around these topics both within the writing classroom and throughout higher education. The book offers a rich array of practices, pedagogies, and theories that will help ground instructors and posits a way forward toward better dialogue and connections with the various stakeholders of higher education in the United States. [Amazon.com]
Sex-Positive Criminology
2020
Aimee Wodda and Vanessa R. Panfil

Sex-Positive Criminology proposes a new way to think about sexuality in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. Sex-positivity is framed as a humanizing approach to sexuality that supports the well-being of self and others. It is rooted in the principle of active and ongoing consent, and it encourages perspectives that value bodily autonomy, the right to access education, and respect for sexual difference. In this book, the authors argue that institutions such as prisons, schools, and healthcare facilities, as well as agents of governments, such as law enforcement, correctional officers, and politicians, can unduly cause harm and perpetuate stigma through the regulation and criminalization of sexuality.

In order to critique institutions that criminalize and regulate sexuality, the authors of Sex-Positive Criminology examine case studies exploring the criminalization of commercial sex and related harm (at the hands of law enforcement) experienced by those who sell sex. They investigate sex education in schools, reproductive justice in communities and institutions, and restrictions on sexuality in places like prisons, jails, juvenile detention, and immigrant detention facilities. They look into the criminalization of BDSM practices and address concerns about young people’s sexuality connected to age of consent and privacy violations. The authors demonstrate how a sex-positive perspective could help criminologists, policymakers, and educators understand not only how to move away from sex-negative frameworks in theory, policy, and practice, but how sex-positive criminological frameworks can be a useful tool to reduce harm and increase personal agency. [Amazon.com]
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]
The All-Night Sun: A Novel
2020
Diane Zinna

Lauren Cress teaches writing at a small college outside of Washington, DC. In the classroom, she is poised, smart, and kind, well-liked by her students and colleagues. But in her personal life, Lauren is troubled and isolated, still grappling with the sudden death of her parents ten years earlier. She seems to exist at a remove from everyone around her until a new student joins her class: charming, magnetic Siri, who appears to be everything Lauren wishes she could be. They fall headlong into an all-consuming friendship that makes Lauren feel as though she is reclaiming her lost adolescence.

When Siri invites her on a trip home to Sweden for the summer, Lauren impulsively accepts, intrigued by how Siri describes it: green, fresh, and new, everything just thawing out. But once there, Lauren finds herself drawn to Siri’s enigmatic, brooding brother, Magnus. Siri is resentful, and Lauren starts to see a new side of her friend: selfish, reckless, self-destructive, even cruel. On their last night together, Lauren accompanies Siri and her friends on a seaside camping trip to celebrate Midsommar’s Eve, a night when no one sleeps, boundaries blur, and under the light of the unsetting sun, things take a dark turn.

Ultimately, Lauren must acknowledge the truth of what happened with Siri and come to terms with her own tragic past in this gorgeously written, deeply felt debut about the transformative relationships that often come to us when things feel darkest. [From the publisher]
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]