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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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]
Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality and Literacy: Dwelling in Speech II
2019
Lawrence J. Hatab

Through his innovative study of language, noted Heidegger scholar Lawrence Hatab offers a proto-phenomenological account of the lived world, the “first” world of factical life, where pre-reflective, immediate disclosiveness precedes and makes possible representational models of language. Common distinctions between mind and world, fact and value, cognition and affect miss the meaning-laden dimension of embodied, practical existence, where language and life are a matter of “dwelling in speech.” In this second volume, Hatab supplements and fortifies his initial analysis by offering a detailed treatment of child development and language acquisition, which exhibit a proto-phenomenological world in the making. He then takes up an in-depth study of the differences between oral and written language (particularly in the ancient Greek world) and how the history of alphabetic literacy shows why Western philosophy came to emphasize objective, representational models of cognition and language, which conceal and pass over the presentational domain of dwelling in speech. Such a study offers significant new angles on the nature of philosophy and language. [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]
Colonize Me
2019
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

"Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley has an athlete's feel for moving through poems. Just as the reader settles into an image, Kingsley pivots and plots a new course. In the process we learn to let go of our assumptions about who this poet might be, and instead read in awe at the play. These poems play with such fervor that every reading reveals another detail, another escape hatch Kingsley has left for us to find. I love these poems and their many voices. I love their contradictions. I love their energy. Read COLONIZE ME and then read it again."—José Olivarez
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.
Proceedings of the 37th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication, SIGDOC 2019, Portland, OR, USA, October 4-6, 2019
2019
Julie Staggers (Editor), Daniel P. Richards (Editor), Tim Amidon (Editor), and Ehren Pflugfelder (Editor)

Welcome to the 2019 ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication! It is only fitting that this year's theme---Broadening the Boundaries in Communication Design---shares a kinship with our host city of Portland, Oregon, a town known for its abundance of iconic bridges. The call for this year's event asked interested scholars, practitioners, and teachers to consider how disciplinary, social, geographic, technical, cultural, and ethical boundaries shape our professional experiences and civic lives in communication design, professional and technical communication (PTC), and user experience (UX), and/or how these boundaries might be questioned, broken down, or reassembled. We specifically invited scholarship and practice that reconsidered and remarked the boundaries of our professional and civic lives, old and new, that inhibit connections. We encouraged attendees to rethink how more inclusive research, methods, and habits could bring about further innovation and justice within the design of communication. We invited designers, researchers, practitioners, and educators to submit proposals that think along or across social, methodological, theoretical, and pedagogical axes. The bridges conjoining the earthly boundaries in our geographical backdrop, then, represent the bridges we as scholars and practitioners of the design of communication build or do not build in the various boundaries of our work.
Inside Social Life: Readings in Sociological Psychology and Microsociology
2018
Spencer Cahill (Editor), Kent Sandstrom (Editor), and Carissa Froyum (Editor)

Now in its eighth edition, this best-selling reader provides an introduction to the sociological study of social psychology, interpersonal interaction, embodiment, emotion, selfhood, inequality, and the politics of everyday realities. Inside Social Life: Readings in Sociological Psychology and
Microsociology presents thirty-nine selections that include both classic and contemporary theoretical work and empirical studies. Detailed introductions to each part and article identify and explain central issues, key concepts, and relationships among topics. [Amazon.com]
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]
Not Your Mama's Melting Pot
2018
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley

This is a collection which aims to lay bare a mixed-race experience: Native Americans understood only as wax models in museums, erased discourses of Indigeneity; the immigrant grind, Asian Americans in Anglo Society, anti-Hapa rhetoric reverbing in 21st century America; the quandary of Rust Belt poverty plaguing small Appalachian communities, its cycle of concrete ceilings, its left-hook-right-hook masculinity, its dirt-caked realities. [From the Author]
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]
American Dangerous
2018
Rénee Olander

American Dangerous is a stunningly honest book of semi-autobiographical poetry about a single, middle-aged woman’s experiences of rape, the prejudice derived from interracial love, the death of her parents and America’s class system. It reads like a story. [Amazon.com]
Comparative Justice: Off the Beaten Path
2018
Victoria M. Time and Timothy Austin

Comparative Criminal Justice Systems encourages critical thinking by introducing students and policy makers to different ways of organizing the administration of justice in the different parts of the world without ethnocentric assumptions that ‘our’ ways must be superior to all others.

Comparative Justice: Off the Beaten Path offers a simple definition of comparative justice: the study of the similarities and dissimilarities of diverse systems of social order. It introduces readers to interesting case studies of the families of law and offers engaging contributions in comparative justice as well as fresh perspectives on developing countries. [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]
Scheherazade's Last Night and Other Plays
2018
Jules Verne (Author) and Peter Schulman (Translator)

Jules Verne, before he became the famous novelist we know today from Around the World in 80 Days, learned his profession writing for the stage. Many of those youthful plays have been discovered for the first time, and three are translated into English for the first time in Scheherazade’s Last Night and Other Plays. In An Excursion at Sea, Verne offers a humorous account of a nautical adventure interrupted by pirates. In La Guimard, he relates a love affair between the dancer, and the painter Jacques-Louis David, creating a realistic historical background as well as a deeply-felt romance. And in The Thousand and Second Night, Verne draws upon the world of the Arabian Nights to tell how the Sultan and the story-telling Scheherazade are finally united in marriage. [Amazon.com]

Translated from the French by Peter Schulman, ODU Professor of French and International Studies.
The New Inheritors
2018
Kent Wascom

Kent Wascom is one of the most exciting and ambitious emerging voices in American fiction. Envisaging a quartet of books telling the story of America through a single family and region, the Gulf Coast of the United States, Wascom began with his much-lauded debut, The Blood of Heaven, published when he was just twenty-six and praised as “stunning” by the Miami Herald, and “like the sermon of a revivalist preacher” by the Wall Street Journal. His second novel, Secessia, continues the story of the Woolsack family in Civil War New Orleans, and in The New Inheritors, he has written his most powerful and poignant novel yet.

In 1914, with the world on the brink of war, Isaac, a nature-loving artist whose past is mysterious to all, including himself, meets Kemper, a defiant heiress caught in the rivalry between her brothers. Kemper’s older brother Angel is hiding a terrible secret about his sexuality, and her younger brother Red possesses a capacity for violence that frightens even the members of his own brutal family. Together Isaac and Kemper build a refuge on their beloved, wild, Gulf Coast. But their paradise is short-lived; as the coast is rocked by the storms of summer, the country is gripped by the furor preceding World War I, and the Woolsack family’s rivalries come to a bloody head. From the breathtaking beauty of the Gulf to the bloody havoc wreaked by the United States in Latin America, The New Inheritors explores the beauty and burden of what is handed down to us all. At once a love story and a family drama, a novel of nature and a novel of war, The New Inheritors traces a family whose life is intimately tied to the Gulf, that most disputed, threatened, and haunted part of this country we call America. [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
The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded: Poems
2017
Molly McCully Brown

Harrowing poems from a dark corner of American history by the winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry.

Haunted by the voices of those committed to the notorious Virginia State Colony, epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century, this evocative debut marks the emergence of a poet of exceptional poise and compassion, who grew up in the shadow of the Colony itself.[Amazon.com]
Ying Chen's Impressions of Summer
2017
Ying Chen (Author) and Peter Schulman (Translator)

Chapbook of narrative/personal poems by Ying Chen originally published by Finishing Line Press in 2013. Translated from the French by Peter Schulman, ODU Professor of French and International Studies.