? = Review forthcoming
CLASSICS
- New Heroes in Antiquity: From Achilles to Antinoos
By Christopher P. Jones, George Martin Lane professor of the Classics and of history, Harvard University. Harvard University Press, £22.95. ISBN 9780674035867
Jones starts from literary heroes such as Achilles and moves to the historical record of those exceptional men and women who were worshipped after death, asking why and how mortals became heroes and what that entailed in terms of religious action and belief.
ECONOMICS
- Capital Ideas: The IMF and the Rise of Financial Liberalization
By Jeffrey M. Chwieroth, senior lecturer in international relations, London School of Economics. Princeton University Press. £48.95 and £20.95. ISBN 9780691142319 and 2326
Drawing on scholarship from economics, politics and sociology, Chwieroth traces the evolution of the IMF's approach to capital controls from the 1940s through spring 2009 and the first stages of the credit crisis.
EDUCATION
- Intercultural Journeys: From Study to Residence Abroad
By Jane Jackson, professor of English, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 97802305218
Focusing on the experiences of second-language students who travelled from their homes to foreign lands as part of a faculty-led, short-term programme, Jackson explores the links between intercultural awareness and sensitivity, language development and identity reconstruction.
- Multilingualism, Citizenship, and Identity: Voices of Youth and Symbolic Investments in an Urban, Globalized World
By Julie Byrd Clark, assistant professor in the faculty of education, University of Western Ontario. Continuum, £75.00. ISBN 9781441168245
Byrd Clark reveals the multiple (and sometimes simultaneous) ways in which individuals engage and invest in representations of languages and identities.
GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
- ? Coyote at the Kitchen Door: Living with Wildlife in Suburbia
By Stephen DeStefano, research professor in the department of natural resources conservation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Harvard University Press, £18.95. ISBN 9780674035560
DeStefano explores what our insatiable appetite for real estate means for the health and wellbeing of animals and ourselves, and highlights growing concerns, such as the loss of darkness at night because of light pollution.
HISTORY
- Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836
By Lisa Ford, lecturer in history, University of New South Wales. Harvard University Press, £36.95. ISBN 9780674035652
This is a comparative study of law and imperialism that argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime.
- We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama
By Stephen Tuck, university lecturer in American history, Pembroke College, Oxford. Harvard University Press, £22.95. ISBN 9780674036260
Tuck traces the black freedom struggle in all its diversity, from the first years of freedom during the Civil War to Barack Obama's inauguration. He weaves stories of ordinary black people, as well as celebrated figures, into the sweep of racial protest and social change.
LITERATURE
- Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance
By Katherine Isobel Baxter, research assistant professor in English, University of Hong Kong. Ashgate, £50.00. ISBN 9780754669029
Baxter examines not only familiar novels such as Lord Jim but also less-studied works such as Romance and The Rover, using Robert Miles' model of the "philosophical romance" to show that for Conrad, romance is also philosophically engaged with issues of ideology.
- Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination
By Sophie Gee, assistant professor of English, Princeton University. Princeton University Press, £18.95. ISBN 9780691139845
Gee explains how English writers used contemporary theological and philosophical texts about unwanted and leftover matter to explore secular literary relationships between waste and value.
- 2000 Years of Mayan Literature
By Dennis Tedlock, distinguished professor and McNulty chair of English and research professor of anthropology, University of Buffalo at the State University of New York. University of California Press. £34.95. ISBN 9780520232211
Tedlock draws on decades of living and working among the Maya to assemble this book, which treats ancient Mayan texts as literature and considers the texts chronologically.
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES
- Presidential Campaign Communication
By Craig A. Smith, professor of communication, North Carolina State University. Polity, £55.00 and £19.99. ISBN 9780745646084 and 6091
Smith's book is designed to help readers understand and appreciate more fully the ways in which US citizens use the process of human communication to select their presidents.
- War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views of War
By Matthew A. Baum, Marvin Kalb professor of global communications, Harvard University, and Tim J. Groeling, associate professor of communication studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Princeton University Press. £48.95 and £18.95. ISBN 9780691138589 and 8596
Baum and Groeling argue that the media systematically distort the information the public vitally needs, for reasons having more to do with journalists' professional interests than the merits of the policies, and that this has significant consequences for national security.
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
- Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics
By Jacques Ranciere, emeritus professor of philosophy, University of Paris VIII. Continuum, £14.99. ISBN 9781847064455
This new collection of essays by Ranciere on art and politics aims to show the critical potential of two of his most important concepts: the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.
- Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being
By Philip Tonner, honorary research fellow in philosophy and co-director, Centre for Technology and Phenomenological Research, University of Glasgow. Continuum, £65.00. ISBN 9781441172297
Tonner presents an interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy that builds on a suggested interpretation by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition to clearly illuminate his debt to Duns Scotus.
- Kierkegaard and the Greek World, Volume Two, Tome I: Socrates and Plato
Edited by Jon Stewart, associate research professor, Soren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen. Ashgate, £60.00. ISBN 9780754669814
This volume has been organised so as to reflect the full spectrum of Kierkegaard's Greek sources. It contains a series of articles on Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes, as well as the reception of the figure of Socrates in the Germanophone world and in Denmark respectively.
POLITICS
- Citizenship and Immigration
By Christian Joppke, professor of political science, American University of Paris. Polity, £50.00 and £14.99. ISBN 9780745642345 and 2352
Joppke provides an overview of the new academic field of citizenship and immigration, as well as presenting an argument about changing citizenship in our contemporary human rights era.
- Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions
By Joy Gordon, professor of philosophy, Fairfield University. Harvard University Press, £29.95. ISBN 9780674035713
Gordon examines the key role the US played in shaping the Iraq sanctions, whose harsh strictures resulted in part from US definitions of "dual use" and "weapons of mass destruction", and claims that everything from water pipes to laundry detergent to child vaccines could be used to produce weapons.
- Participation and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century City
Edited by Jenny Pearce, professor of Latin American politics and director, International Centre for Participation Studies, University of Bradford. Palgrave Macmillan, £57.50. ISBN 9780230229440
Using recent experience in participatory innovations at the city level to explore the practice of participation, Pearce takes examples from Latin America and the UK and argues the case for revitalising democracy through participation.
- Understanding Peacekeeping
By Alex J. Bellamy, professor of international relations, University of Queensland, and Paul D. Williams, associate professor of international affairs, George Washington University. Polity, £55.00 and £18.99. ISBN 9780745641850 and 1867
Bellamy and Williams evaluate the changing characteristics of the contemporary environment in which peacekeepers operate, what role peace operations play in wider processes of global politics, the growing impact of non-state actors and the major challenges facing today's peacekeepers.
SOCIAL SCIENCES
- Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture
By Paul Gilroy, Anthony Giddens professor of social theory, London School of Economics. Harvard University Press, £16.95. ISBN 9780674035706
Gilroy seeks to awaken a new understanding of W.E.B. Du Bois' intellectual and political legacy by considering the ways that consumerism has diverted African-Americans' political and social aspirations.
- The New Political Sociology: Power, Ideology and Identity in an Age of Complexity
By Graham Taylor, reader in sociology, University of the West of England. Palgrave Macmillan. £55.00 and £19.99. ISBN 9780230573321 and 3338
Taylor gives an overview of key issues, argues for an "existential turn" in political sociology and aims to bring the study of politics and society up to date.
THEATRE STUDIES
- Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre
By Shannon Steen, assistant professor of theatre, dance and performance studies, University of California, Berkeley. Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00. ISBN 9780230221932
Steen uses the US theatrical practices in the run-up to the Second World War to model how we might use performance histories to more carefully assess how racial formation occurs on the boundaries between racial groups in an international context.