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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Listening to the SONG of Life: Listening to Self, Others, Nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine
2024
E. James Baesler

Listening to the SONG of Life means listening to all of life. The word "SONG" represents four listening contexts: Self (S), Others (O), Nature (N), Goddess-God-the Divine (G). Listening to the SONG of life offers a broader, inclusive, and magnanimous view listening. The book draws on scholarship from multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences and includes experiential learning activities such as: meditation for cultivating attention and insight, using a listening stick for building connection and intimacy with others, grounding to root and connect with the earth, and holy listening, passage mediation, and praying in color for listening to the Divine. [From Bowker Bookwire]
Room Swept Home
2024
Remica Bingham-Risher

Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered magnifying glass into all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us. In a strange twist of kismet, two of Bingham-Risher's ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before she herself is born: her paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"―postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery―nine days after birthing her first child. Marrying meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher's latest collection treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women's rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living? [Amazon.com]
L’assassinat de Marx Dormoy: Enquête sur la "Cagoule"
2024
Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite

Dans la nuit du 25 juillet 1941, une bombe est placée dans le lit de l’ancien ministre français de l’Intérieur Marx Dormoy, un proche de Léon Blum. En 1937, Dormoy avait mené une enquête sur la Cagoule, organisation terroriste d’extrême droite, qui cherchait à se venger. L’assassinat de Dormoy le 26 juillet a déclenché une enquête policière longue de deux ans qui permet de remonter le fil d’un complot jusqu’aux plus hautes sphères du régime de Vichy.

Basé sur l’examen de milliers de documents, cet ouvrage raconte l’enquête menée par le commissaire de police Charles Chenevier, qui se bat pour traquer les assassins de Dormoy malgré l’opposition de Vichy et des collaborationnistes pronazis à Paris.

En retraçant les divisions politiques profondes de la France, les choix faits pendant la guerre et la mémoire de l’après-guerre, les auteures analysent l’impact de l’extrémisme fasciste sur l’histoire de la France et révèlent pourquoi, après la guerre, aucun des assassins de Dormoy n’a été puni.
Leaving Biddle City: Poems
2024
Marianne Chan

A coming-of-age narrative, Leaving Biddle City details one Filipina American speaker’s experience of growing up amid a white, Midwestern suburbia mythologized as “Biddle City.” Through prose poems, pantoums, ballads, flattened haikus, and thematic autobiographies, Chan maps a territory of intergenerational conflict, racial alienation, and memory and forgetfulness. What’s achieved is a work of play and meticulous beauty, a collection that reframes how we may understand ourselves, our histories, and the places where we are from. [Amazon.com]
Caulbearer
2024
Luisa A. Igloria

In many cultures, a caul is considered talismanic; and a child born with it, possessing luck or protection. Luisa A. Igloria invokes this metaphor to weave poems exploring the veiled intervals of transition experienced by those in the diaspora—or by anyone who has felt a severing from their origins. The poems in Caulbearer enter spaces not only of nostalgia, loss, and impossible return. They also offer opportunities for glimpsing pleasure in the re-imagining and telling of our own stories, for as long and as many times as we need, in a world still full of beauty and mystery. [From the publisher]
Alliances and Partnerships in a Complex and Challenging Security Environment
2024
Regina Karp (Editor) and Richard Maass (Editor)

This publication is a product of the Conference "Alliances and Partnerships in a Complex and Challenging Security Environment," organized by NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. The Conference, held in person on March 11-13, 2024, is part of a long-term cooperation among the two institutions, and it represents the eleventh iteration of ACT's Academic Conference series. The success of the event was due to the joint efforts of the two institutions, and the editors want to acknowledge ACT's Academic Outreach Team, in particular Dr. Vlasta Zekulic, Lieutenant Colonel Virginie Lotti, and Staff Officer Luisa Freutel as well as ODU's Conference Support Team, especially Karen Meier, Christina LiPuma, Dr. Austin Jersild, Ivy Robinson, and Jonas Bensah. Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within this report are solely those of the contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of ACT or their respective universities or agencies.

--NATO Allied Command Transformation

--Old Dominion University
Ontological Security-Seeking: National Identities under Stress
2024
Reginia Karp

This book addresses a central puzzle in ontological security theory, namely the relationship between identity continuity and change, and the role anxiety plays in fostering and inhibiting change.

The work argues for a more nuanced perspective on how change and threats to national identity relate, thus advancing our understanding of the role anxiety plays in shaping state choices. The case studies of Sweden and Germany show that national identity can experience highly disruptive challenges when the external security environment changes. According to extant ontological security theory, these structural challenges should lead to heightened anxiety and identity crises as national narratives become unstable and fragile. Instead, empirical evidence shows that states turn ontological anxiety into strategies of anxiety abatement, management, and ontological innovation. The evidence also reveals that states go to extraordinary lengths to maintain existing narratives, discursively maneuvring between the twin needs of biographical continuity and responsiveness to change. In their efforts to adapt and preserve identity, states embrace ontological ambiguity; they neither fully respond to change, nor do they ignore it. Rather, they strive for discursive innovation where new interpretations of how to be are balanced with new interpretations of the meaning of necessary change. In the process, ontological ambiguity becomes the new normal. These findings suggest that Sweden and Germany may not be outliers, and that being and becoming is an inherent feature of social life all state actors must engage with.

This book will be of interest to students of security studies, European politics, foreign policy, and international relations. [From the publisher]
William Hanson and the Texas-Mexico Border: Violence, Corruption, and the Making of the Gatekeeper State
2024
John Weber

An examination of the career of Texas Ranger and immigration official William Hanson illustrating the intersections of corruption, state-building, and racial violence in early twentieth century Texas.

At the Texas-Mexico border in the 1910s and 1920s, William Hanson was a witness to, and an active agent of, history. As a Texas Ranger captain and then a top official in the Immigration Service, he helped shape how US policymakers understood the border, its residents, and the movement of goods and people across the international boundary. An associate of powerful politicians and oil company executives, he also used his positions to further his and his patrons' personal interests, financial and political, often through threats and extralegal methods.

Hanson’s career illustrates the ways in which legal exclusion, white-supremacist violence, and official corruption overlapped and were essential building blocks of a growing state presence along the border in the early twentieth century. In this book, John Weber reveals Hanson’s cynical efforts to use state and federal power to proclaim the border region inherently dangerous and traces the origins of current nativist politics that seek to demonize the border population. In doing so, he provides insight into how a minor political appointee, motivated by his own ambitions, had lasting impacts on how the border was experienced by immigrants and seen by the nation. [Amazon.com]
The Insurrectionist: Major General Edwin A. Walker and the Birth of the Deep State Conspiracy
2023
Peter Adams

Peter Adams’s The Insurrectionist is the first comprehensive biography of Major General Edwin A. Walker, a figure who, in the 1950s and 1960s, became a leader of a far-right political movement known for its elaborate conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and uncompromising white supremacy. Sixty years before the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Edwin Walker was charged with insurrection and seditious conspiracy. He was arrested on orders from the attorney general after leading a deadly riot against federal marshals as they protected the first African American student attempting to register at the University of Mississippi. Those who flocked to Walker’s side believed an invisible government working with coconspirators in the Kremlin and United Nations would soon enslave America under a one-world dictatorship. Walker’s deep state conspiracy theory has echoed through American political culture into the age of QAnon, finding a new home among today’s far-right extremists. [From the publisher]
Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion
2023
Elizabeth Childs-Johnson and John S. Major

Metamorphic Imagery in Ancient Chinese Art and Religion demonstrates that the concept of metamorphism was central to ancient Chinese religious belief and practices from at least the late Neolithic period through the Warring States Period of the Zhou dynasty.

Central to the authors' argument is the ubiquitous motif in early Chinese figurative art, the metamorphic power mask. While the motif underwent stylistic variation over time, its formal properties remained stable, underscoring the image’s ongoing religious centrality. It symbolized the metamorphosis, through the phenomenon of death, of royal personages from living humans to deceased ancestors who required worship and sacrificial offerings. Treated with deference and respect, the royal ancestors lent support to their living descendants, ratifying and upholding their rule; neglected, they became dangerous, even malevolent. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that integrates archaeologically recovered objects with literary evidence from oracle bone and bronze inscriptions to canonical texts, all situated in the appropriate historical context, the study presents detailed analyses of form and style, and of change over time, observing the importance of relationality and the dynamic between imagery, materials, and affects.

This book is a significant publication in the field of early China studies, presenting an integrated conception of ancient art and religion that surpasses any other work now available. [Amazon.com]
The Struggle for Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond
2023
Marvin T. Chiles

A Black-majority city with a history of the most severe segregation and inequity, Richmond is still grappling with this legacy as it moves into the twenty-first century. Marvin Chiles now offers a unique take on Richmond’s racial politics since the civil rights era by demonstrating that the city’s current racial disparities in economic mobility, housing, and public education actually represent the unintended consequences of Richmond’s racial reconciliation measures. He deftly weaves municipal politics together with grassroots efforts, examining the work and legacies of Richmond’s Black leaders, from Henry Marsh on the city council in the 1960s to Mayor Levar Stoney, to highlight the urban revitalization and public history efforts meant to overcome racial divides after Jim Crow yet which ironically reinforced racial inequality across the city. Compellingly written, this project carries both local and broader regional significance for Richmonders, Virginians, southerners, and all Americans. [From the publisher]
Family Communication and Cultural Transformation: (Re)Awakening Legacies of Equality, Social Justice, Freedom, and Hope
2023
Rhunette C. Diggs (Editor) and Thomas J. Socha (Editor)

Building on their past work in race and family communication, Rhunette C. Diggs and Thomas J. Socha gather in this volume contemporary theory and research concerning ways that families use communication to transform inherited cultural legacies for the better (Communication 3.0).

The book expands the field of communication’s understanding of the life-long impact that family communication has on the managing diverse and clashing cultural relationships, identities, meanings, and communication practices. It spotlights the economically disenfranchised alongside the economically secure, the systematically oppressed next to beneficiaries of Whiteness, and those actually or metaphorically killed and or threatened by violence and hateful systems outside of home. Together, the contributions address omissions of diverse family contexts in family communication research and reconsider qualitative and quantitative approaches that bring respect and equality to the participant-researcher relationship.

This book is suitable as a supplementary text for courses in family communication, family studies, race and ethnicity in communication, and intergroup communication.
Lesbian Porn Magazines and the Sex Wars: Reimagining Sex, Power, and Identity
2023
Elizabeth Groeneveld

Lesbian Porn Magazines and the Sex Wars re-examines the heated debates about the politics of sexuality known as the sex wars, investigating how they were fundamentally engaged in the complex intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality.

Groeneveld presents an accessible and fascinating framing of lesbian sex magazines as activist media texts engaged in education, community building, and dialogue, amplifying theories or writers and artists across the intersectional spectrum. Making use of archival material and a cohort of lesbian radical porn magazines, the book posits that collectively these magazines helped create and circulate new ideas about sex, power, and identity. The chapters cover lesbian public culture, trans self-representation, AIDS activism, and issues of consent.

This is an essential intervention into sexuality studies and is suitable for students and scholars in gender and sexuality studies, sociology, media studies, literature, and cultural studies. [From the publisher]
Exploring Extended Realities: Metaphysical, Psychological, and Ethical Challenges
2023
Andrew Kissel (Editor) and Erick José Ramirez (Editor)

This volume highlights interdisciplinary research on the ethical, metaphysical, and experimental dimensions of extended reality technologies, including virtual and augmented realities. It explores themes connected to the nature of virtual objects, the value of virtual experiences and relationships, experimental ethics, moral psychology in the metaverse, and game/simulation design.

Extended reality (XR) refers to a family of technologies aiming to augment (AR) or virtually replace (VR) human experience. The chapters in this volume represent cutting-edge research on XR experiences from a wide range of approaches including philosophy, psychology, Africana studies, and cognitive sciences. They are organized around three guiding questions. Part 1, “What is Extended Reality?”, contains a series of chapters examining metaphysical questions about virtual objects, actions, and worlds. Part 2, “Is There an Ethics for Extended Realities?”, includes chapters that address ethical questions that arise within XR experiences. Finally, Part 3, “What Can We Do with Extended Realities?”, features chapters from a diverse group of social scientists on the potential uses of XR as an investigative and educational tool, including its strengths and pitfalls. [From the publisher]
Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity
2023
Kate Mattingly

Dance criticism has long been integral to dance as an art form, serving as documentation and validation of dance performances, yet few studies have taken a close look at the impact of key critics and approaches to criticism over time. The first book to examine dance criticism in the United States across 100 years, from the late 1920s to the early twenty-first century, Shaping Dance Canons argues that critics in the popular press have influenced how dance has been defined and valued, as well as which artists and dance forms have been taken most seriously.

Kate Mattingly likens the effect of dance writing to that of a flashlight, illuminating certain aesthetics at the expense of others. Mattingly shows how criticism can preserve and reproduce criteria for what qualifies as high art through generations of writers and in dance history courses, textbooks, and curricular design. She examines the gatekeeping role of prominent critics such as John Martin and Yvonne Rainer while highlighting the often-overlooked perspectives of writers from minoritized backgrounds and dance traditions. The book also includes an analysis of digital platforms and current dance projects—On the Boards TV, thINKingDANCE, Black Dance Stories, and Amara Tabor-Smith’s House/Full of BlackWomen—that challenge systemic exclusions. In doing so, the book calls for ongoing dialogue and action to make dance criticism more equitable and inclusive. [From Amazon.com]
Unbroken: The Trauma Response Is Never Wrong: And Other Things You Need to Know to Take Back Your Life
2023
MaryCatherine McDonald

For centuries, we’ve been taught that being traumatized means we are somehow broken—and that trauma only happens to people who are too fragile or flawed to deal with hardship. But as a researcher, teacher, and survivor, Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald has learned that the only thing broken is our society’s understanding of trauma. “The body’s trauma response is designed to save our lives—and it does,” she says. “It’s not a sign of weakness, but of our function, strength, and amazing resilience.”

With Unbroken: The Trauma Response Is Never Wrong, Dr. McDonald overturns the misconceptions about trauma with the latest evidence from neuroscience and psychology—and shares tested practices and tools to help you work with your body’s coping mechanisms to accelerate healing. [From the publisher]
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Material Cultures
2023
Irina D. Mihalache (Editor) and Elizabeth Zanoni (Editor)

Cookbooks. Menus. Ingredients. Dishes. Pots. Kitchens. Markets. Museum exhibitions. These objects, representations, and environments are part of what the volume calls the material cultures of food. The book features leading scholars, professionals, and chefs who apply a material cultural perspective to consider two relatively unexplored questions: 1) What is the material culture of food? and 2) How are frameworks, concepts, and methods of material culture used in scholarly research and professional practice?

This book acknowledges that materiality is historically and culturally specific (local), but also global, as food both transcends and collapses geographical and ideological borders. Contributors capture the malleability of food, its material environments and “stuff,” and its representations in media, museums, and marketing, while following food through cycles of production, circulation, and consumption. As many of the featured authors explore, food and its many material and immaterial manifestations not only reflect social issues, but also actively produce, preserve, and disrupt identities, communities, economic systems, and everyday social practices.

The volume includes contributions from and interviews with a dynamic group of scholars, museum and information professionals, and chefs who represent diverse disciplines, such as communication studies, anthropology, history, American studies, folklore, and food studies. [From the publisher]
The Battle of Gettysburg 1863 (2): The Second Day
2023
Timothy J. Orr and Steve Noon (Illustrator)

This work provides an authoritative illustrated examination of the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, analyzing both grand strategy, and the tactical decisions of Day Two and the ensuing combat.

July 2, 1863 was the bloodiest and most complicated of the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg. On this day, the clash involved five divisions of Confederate infantry and their accompanying artillery battalions, as well as a cavalry skirmish at nearby Hunterstown. The bulk of the Union army engaged on the second day of fighting, including men from the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 11th and 12th Corps.

Assisted by superb maps and 3D diagrams, this fascinating work describes the tactical play-by-play, the customary “who did what” of the battle. Among the famous actions covered are Hunterstown and Benner's Hill, Little Round Top, Devil's Den, the Rose Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, and Culp's and Cemetery hills. The critical decisions taken on the second day are examined in detail, and why the commanders committed to them. Gettysburg was-first and foremost-a soldier's battle, full of raw emotion and high drama, and this work also examines the experience of combat as witnessed by the rank and file, bringing this to life in stunning battle scene artworks and primary accounts from common soldiers.
The Road to Dungannon: Journeys in Literary Ireland
2023
Michael Patrick Pearson

Chasing after a family secret--a curious silence surrounding a long-lost ancestor--led the author on a pilgrimage through the landscape, history and literature of Ireland. His journey of self-discovery, flavored by poems, stories, lore and legend, reflects his idea that literature may be the key that explains the past and reveals the present.

Serving as part memoir and part journalistic chronicle, this work offers a unique look at how memory, literature and travel shape one's definition of oneself. Also serving as a love letter to Ireland with chapters on native born authors such as James Joyce, Frank O'Connor, Seamus Heaney and more, this book explores the deeper influences of what makes a man a writer, scholar, adventurer, husband and father. [Amazon.com]
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture
2023
Hussein Rashid (Editor) and Kristian Petersen (Editor)

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture illustrates how Muslims participate in a broad spectrum of activities. Moving beyond a framework that emphasizes ritual, legal, historical, or theological issues, this book speaks to how Muslims live in the world, in relation to their religion and the realities of the world around them.

The international team of contributors provide in-depth analysis that chronicles Islamic cultural products in regional and transnational contexts, explores dominant and emerging theories about popularization, and offers provocations in the field of religion and popular culture. The handbook is structured in six parts: spaces; appetites; performances; readings; visions; and communities.

The book explores a variety of Muslim societies and communities within the last 100 years, ranging from the Islamic presence in Latin American architecture to Muslim Anglophone hip-hop, and Muslims in modern Indian theatre. [Amazon.com]
Nietzsche as Metaphysician
2023
Justin Remhof

This book defends the controversial view that Nietzsche is a metaphysician against a long-standing tendency to sever Nietzsche from metaphysical philosophy.

Remhof presents a metametaphysical treatment of Nietzsche’s writings to show that for Nietzsche the questions, answers, methods, and subject matters of metaphysical philosophy are not only perfectly legitimate, but also crucial for understanding the world and our place within it. The book examines aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that have received little attention in the literature, including his view of what makes metaphysics possible; his metaphysics of science; his naturalized metaphysics; how he appeals to the intuitions of readers; how he employs a priori reasoning; how he uses metaphysical grounding explanations; and how metaphysics is intertwined with topics central to his philosophical thinking, including his understanding of becoming, ethics, nihilism, life, perspective, amor fati, and eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche as Metaphysician will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Nietzsche and the history of metaphysics. [From the publisher]
Nights at the Calcutta Café
2023
Peter Schulman (Editor) and Somrita Urni Ganguly (Editor)

Nights at the Calcutta Café is a result of an enriching collaboration between poets from Calcutta, Montreal, and Norfolk, VA originally curated in memory of a beloved, erstwhile Indian restaurant near Columbia University. The poems delve into issues of loneliness, poverty, belonging and of course love during the pandemic as a way of breaking geographical barriers when the world was still separated. The poems accentuate the differences between these cities but also urban commonalities that highlight global solidarity in times of great calamity. We have assembled a group of highly respected, world-wide legendary poets who have contributed to this volume and is the fruition of an on-line poetry event meant to bridge geographical boundaries and distances in the spirit of an exchange of words and ideas. [From the publisher]
Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up
2022
Remica Bingham-Risher

Acclaimed Cave Canem poet and essayist Remica Bingham-Risher interweaves personal essays and interviews she conducted over a decade with 10 distinguished Black poets, such as Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and Patricia Smith, to explore the impact of identity, joy, love, and history on the artistic process. Each essay is thematically inspired, centered on one of her interviews, and uses quotes drawn from her talks to showcase their philosophies. Each essay also delves into how her own life and work are influenced by these elders.

Noting the frustrating tendency for Black artists to be pigeonholed into the confines of various frameworks and ideologies—Black studies, women’s studies, LGBTQIA+ studies, and so on—Bingham-Risher reveals the multitudes contained within Black poets, both past and present. By capturing the radical love ethic of Blackness amid incessant fear, she has amassed not only a wealth of knowledge about contemporary Black poetry and poetry movements but also brings to life the historical record of Black poetry from the latter half of the 20th century to the early decades of the 21st. Examining cultural traditions, myths, and music from the Four Tops to Beyoncé, Bingham-Risher reflects on the enduring gifts of art and community. If you’ve ever felt alone on your journey into the writing world, the words of these poets are for you. [Amazon.com]
Medieval Fare: Food and Culture in Medieval Iberia
2022
Martha Daas

Unique in its cultural and religious makeup, medieval Iberia represented a crossroads of cultures. This crossroads was reflected in large and small ways. On a grand scale, we see the convergence of intellectual ideas and great innovations in agriculture and science. On a more intimate level, we see an intersection of cultures as reflected in habits of consumption. The acts of producing food, cooking, and eating demonstrate the political realities of the land: at times interdependent, and, at times, at odds. Food, as an archeological and anthropological tool, can help us understand a particular moment in time. In considering the nature of consumption, we may arrive at the heart of a culture. In Medieval Fare, the author explores food references found in a number of medieval Iberian texts in order to expand our knowledge of daily life in the Middle Ages. By examining the depiction of food and consumption, this pioneering study provides insight into the cultural, religious, and social complexities of medieval Iberia. [From the publisher]
The Time Left Between Us
2022
Alicia DeFonzo

A blend of memoir, history, and oral storytelling, The Time Left between Us bridges the gap between the generation who fought World War II and the generation who has forgotten it. Alicia DeFonzo takes an unplanned visit to the Normandy beaches while staying in Paris. Her grandfather “Del” (Anthony DelRossi) had fought in World War II, and she becomes distraught after realizing how little she knows about the war and his experiences, which until then had remained largely unspoken.

Across landscapes and lifetimes DeFonzo retraces her beloved grandfather’s tour through World War II Europe. The eighty-four-year-old DelRossi recounts stories as an army combat engineer surviving major campaigns, including Normandy, St. Lo, the Bulge, Hürtgenwald, and Remagen, then liberating concentration camps. In this braided narrative, we see DeFonzo’s childhood in a traditional Italian American family with an erratic Marine Corps father and a beloved grandfather. Spanning ten years, DeFonzo’s travels and research take an unexpected detour after she inherits a Nazi Waffen-SS diary from her grandfather, and, in her final trip, returns to Germany to confront the diary owner’s family. DeFonzo’s and her grandfather’s stories merge when Del undergoes open-heart surgery and Alicia must be the one to safeguard the past. Both nostalgic and gripping, The Time Left between Us is a meditation on how deeply connected the past is to the present and how the truth—and what we remember of it—are fragmented. [Amazon.com]