Bryn Mawr Bookshelf: 2024 Releases by Our Community

This book explores the faith, work, and lives of seafarers and port chaplains. These two groups of people are frequently overlooked by academics, as well as by members of wider society. Ports and ships are largely inaccessible to the public. As a result of their lack of visibility, many people are oblivious to the duties, needs, hopes, and aspirations of port chaplains and seafarers. This book therefore offers a rare insight into the life worlds of two little-known groups of workers. The book takes a broadly sociological approach and combines ethnographic and qualitative methodologies. It draws on the findings of a comprehensive study that was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

By Helen Sampson, Nelson Turgo, Sophie Gilliat-Ray and President and Professor of Sociology Wendy Cadge.

This volume explores aspects of ancient magic and religion in the ancient Mediterranean, specifically ways in which religious and mythical ideas, including the knowledge and practice of magic, were transmitted and adapted through time and across Greco-Roman, Near Eastern, and Egyptian cultures.

Offering an original and innovative combination of case studies on the material aspects and cross-cultural transfers of magic and religion, this book brings together a range of contributions that cross and connect sub-fields with a pan-Mediterranean, comparative scope.

Edited by Professor of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Carolina López-Ruiz, Sofía Torallas-Tovar.

Tea is the world’s most popular beverage. Dive into a cup of tea with a chemist and discover the rich molecular brew that can be extracted from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant. Tea contains over a hundred different chemical compounds which contribute to its colour, taste and scent – and its stimulating effects. The best-known is caffeine, but how does caffeine end up in tea and how can you get it out?

Beginning with the leaves, Steeped explores the chemistry behind different styles of tea, from green teas to pu-erh. It tackles the age-old question of when, or even whether, to add milk. And it puts the chemistry to use with advice on how to brew a better cup.

By Professor of Chemistry Michelle Francl
 

In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery.
 
By Associate Professor of Literatures in English Colby Gordon.

This book examines how social issues shape and influence our engagement with sport, leisure time physical activity, and health-promoting exercise. Connecting the personal with the public, it helps the reader understand how individual exercise, leisure, and sport participation are both facilitated and constrained by their social contexts.

Presenting a series of in-depth descriptions of grassroots sport, urban lifestyle sport, physical activity across the life course, sport for children with special needs, and the development of creative climates in sport, this book seeks to encourage what C. Wright Mills described as the “sociological imagination."

Edited by Sine Agergaard and Professor of Sociology David Karen.

Maps are rarely given the same attention as other print media or art forms in urban history. Author Min Kyung Lee shows their rich potential in this lavishly illustrated study, which brings together maps and other archival materials along with drawings and paintings. She works across disciplines to examine mapping practices in the development of nineteenth-century Paris and the transformative role that urban mapping had on the city’s modernization. Lee investigates Paris’s formation as a modern city, ultimately framing the practice of cartography as a catalyst for the emergence of new spatial and compositional theories.
 

By Assistant Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities Min Kyung Lee.

This book unwraps a bubblegum dance classic to offer the first in-depth examination of what lies beneath Aqua's sticky-sweet veneer. It traces the history of Aquarium alongside interpretations of the album's singles informed by queer theory and covers by contemporary musicians commissioned for the book. Peeling back the layers of Aquarium reveals a confection rife with unexpected contradictions and possibilities; videos permeated by seemingly innocuous articulates of heteronormativity are held in tension with suggestions of queerness, fetishism, and adolescent lust when heard through the ironic lens of camp.

By Assistant Professor of History of Art C.C. McKee.

"No agradarà a ningú, però a mi m’ha encantat escriure-la. No està del tot acabada, està, com li diria jo?, per brodar-la, eh? És molt estranya, no hi ha res que sigui veritat. És horrible!," així és com Mercè Rodoreda anunciava La mort i la primavera en una entrevista del 1982. Va morir la primavera de l’any següent, sense haver pogut enllestir-ne la revisió definitiva. La seva novel·la pòstuma no podia agradar a gaire gent a principis dels seixanta -quan n’escrigué la primera versió- ni a la Catalunya de la transició, quan Rodoreda assolí fama nacional; però, des del 2017, per fi ha trobat el públic que es mereix. Potser és que una novel·la fascinant sobre la mort estava destinada a convertir-se en una criatura que veuria la llum després del traspàs de la mare per assegurar-li la fama pòstuma, que ja s’havia guanyat amb les altres novel·les, però que aquesta actualitzava.

És precisament la novel·la sobre la mort i de la mort la que la fa viure encara com una escriptora radicalment actual en les lletres catalanes. Aquest assaig reivindica el lloc central que La mort i la primavera va ocupar en el projecte creador de Rodoreda i es proposa d’interpretar la novel·la des d’una triple lectura que aprofundeix en els ressons històrics, antropològics i metafísics d’aquest poble sense nom que put a fems i a glicines.

By Assistant Professor of Spanish Neus Penalba.

Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings delves into the imaginative realm of books and libraries and the interpretive structures of subject bibliographies. It is the first monograph of its kind to historicize, theorize, and survey two decades of what the author refers to as contemporary visual bibliography or experimental subject bibliography—artistic and poetic projects that explore artifactual, intellectual, spatial, and design possibilities. Ranging from artists’ books and web data-bases to stack interventions and reading room installations, Bibliographic Performances & Surrogate Readings reviews over fifty compelling visio-bibliographic examples created by diverse, international cultural workers.

By Director of Special Collections Janelle Rebel.

The Department of Transnational Italian Studies has created a new open educational resource (OER) textbook for the beginning Italian courses offered at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, to better serve, and include, BIPOC and minority students. Cotto e Mangiato: Corso di Italiano Multiculturale volumes I and II are authored by Professor Roberta Ricci and Assistant Professor Luca Zipoli, and are tailored to Tri-Co students’ interests and expectations.

By Professor and Chair of Transnational Italian Studies Roberta Ricci and Assistant Professor of TIS Luca Zipoli.

Tania El Khoury’s Live Art is the first book to examine the work of Tania El Khoury, a “live” artist deeply engaged in the politics and histories of the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region. This interdisciplinary and multimedia reader features essays by artists, curators, and scholars who explore the dynamic possibilities and complexities of El Khoury’s art. From social workers to archeologists to archivists, contributing authors engage with the radical epistemological and political revolutions that El Khoury and her collaborators invite us all to join.

Edited by Laurel V. McLaughlin, Ph.D. '23.
By Curator and Academic Liaison for Art & Artifacts Carrie Robbins.

This book traces the path that led Vernon Lee to make the hillside of Florence her immortal home and brings to life the intricacies of her network of friends (and enemies), neighbors, and international visitors, including many of the era's most famous writers and artists.

By Professor of Literatures in English Kate Thomas.

Encyclopedia of the Dog is a complete and freely accessible bilingual digital edition of Sasha Sokolov’s 1980 novel Between Dog and Wolf. It features both the original Russian text and Alexander Boguslawski’s English translation as well as multiple kinds of annotations to help readers grasp the various meanings, allusions, and layers of the novel.

By Associate Professor of Russian José Vergara.

Contributors to this special issue investigate how spaces and practices of “home” structure and challenge norms of intimate and collective belonging as they play out in everyday life. Asking what it means to queer or reinvent the domestic by examining the diverse functionings of home for LGBTQIA+ and other marginalized groups in both the past and the present, the authors describe historical and contemporary shifts in the meanings of home as an opportunity to rethink domestic spaces, ideologies, and practices in queer politics and culture.

By Special Issue Editors: Lauren Jae Gutterman, Martin F. Manalansan, and Assistant Professor of History Stephen Vider.

This book explores the theological significance of horror elements in the works of Hesiod and in the Homeric Hymns for the characters within these poems, the mortal audience consuming them, and the poet responsible for mythopoesis.

Theologies of Fear in Early Greek Epic argues that just as modern supernatural horror fiction can be analyzed to reveal popular conceptions of the divine, so too can the horrific elements in early Greek epic. 

By Visiting Assistant Professor of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies Carman Romano.

This book offers a new vision of ecological and participatory democratic life for a time of crisis. Identifying myth and ritual as key resources for contemporary politics, Earthborn Democracy excavates practices and narratives that illustrate the interdependence necessary to inspire ecological renewal. It tells stories of multispecies agency and egalitarian political organization across history, from ancient Mesopotamia and the precolonial Americas to contemporary social movements, emphasizing Indigenous traditions and resistance. Resonating across these practices and stories past and present is a belief that we are all—human as well as nonhuman—earthborn, and this can serve as the basis for reimagining democracy. 

By Ali Aslam, David W. McIvor, and Professor of Political Science Joel Alden Schlosser.

These poems take the reader from Mexico City to West Philadelphia to Karachi. The works wade into the difficult joys of mothering, self-exploration, and romantic entanglement in midlife. Throughout, Eleanor Stanford embraces the mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen, the abjection of Tammy Wynette, and the wry self-appraisal of Sylvia Plath, fashioning it all into something entirely its own.

By Fellowships Advisor Eleanor Stanford.

In the United States, the second-wave feminist fight to achieve legal and societal recognition of men's violence against women leaned heavily on the victim-offender binary, which has since become inscribed in funding schemes, legal remedies, and intervention approaches. In Broken, scholar-practitioner Lisa Young Larance draws on her extensive in-depth qualitative inquiry and practice experience with women who have participated in antiviolence intervention to explain how this binary erases the trauma histories of those who both survive and cause harm. Calling for a more holistic conception of interpersonal violence, Broken illuminates the connections across race, class, and sexual orientation that facilitate women's healing and repair.

By Assistant Professor of Social Work Lisa Young Larance.