This page is documented in a Twitter thread available here. The master list of university presses, catalogs, and Twitter accounts can be found here. All seasonal recommendation lists are posted here.
Fall 2020 Book Recommendations by . . .
General Interest
Race, Indigeneity, and Whiteness
American Studies
World Cultural Studies
SF / Fantasy / Horror Studies
Comics Studies
The recommendation lists below are organized alphabetically by the author/editor’s last name.
General Interest
Abate, No Kids Allowed: Children’s Literature for Adults (JHU)
Abe, Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle (Washington)
Ben-Amos, Folklore Concepts: Histories and Critiques (Indiana)
Bennett, A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague (Pennsylvania)
Berti, et al., eds., Ancient Violence in the Modern Imagination: The Fear and the Fury (Bloomsbury)
Caterine, Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide (Princeton)
Colarusso and Salbiev, eds., Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians, paperback ed. (Princeton)
D’arbaud, trans. by Zonana, The Beast, and Other Tales (Northwestern)
Devecka, Broken Cities: A Historical Sociology of Ruins (JHU)
Esman, Rage: Narcissism, Patriarchy, and the Culture of Terrorism (Nebraska)
Givens, Mormonism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford)
Gordon and Perugini, Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (California)
Kaufman and Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto)
Kidd, Theory for Beginners: Children’s Literature as Critical Thought (Fordham)
Lyons, The Typewriter Century: A Cultural History of Writing Practices (Toronto)
Masco, The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making (Duke)
McNamara, Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones: The Quest for the Meaning of Fossils (Reaktion)
Mitchell, Imperial Nostalgia (Manchester)
Mittermeier, A Cultural History of Disneyland Theme Parks: Middle Class Kingdoms (Intellect)
Norrick-Rühl, Book Clubs and Book Commerce (Columbia)
Obeng-Odoom, The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty: Decolonizing Nature, Economy, and Society (Toronto)
Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination, expanded second edition (Illinois)
Rosenberg, Time for Things: Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption (Harvard)
Satia, Time’s Monsters: How History Makes History (Harvard)
Sawin and Zumwalt, Folklore in the United States and Canada: An Institutional History (Indiana)
Smithies, Introducing the Medieval Ass (Wales)
RACE, Indigeneity, AND WHITENESS
Aldama and Aldama, eds., Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities (Arizona)
Ballantyne, et al., eds., Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire (Duke)
Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton)
Black, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (Nebraska)
Bromberg, Unsettling: Jews, Whiteness, and Incest in American Popular Culture (Rutgers)
Browne, Alaska Native Games and How to Play Them (Alaska)
Casey and McManimon, Building Pedagogues: White Practicing Teachers and the Struggle for Antiracist Work in Schools (SUNY)
Clair, Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton)
Dorais, Words of the Inuit: A Semantic Stroll through a Northern Culture (Manitoba)
Driscoll, The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection (Duke)
Feliciano-Santos, A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity: Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno Activism (Rutgers)
Ferber, White Privilege: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford)
Finley, et al., eds., The Religion of White Rage: Religious Fervor, White Workers and the Myth of Black Racial Progress (Edinburgh)
Fontaine, Our Hearts Are as One Fire: An Ojibway-Anishinaabe Vision for the Future (UBC)
Ford, Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic (Mississippi)
Freeland, Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization (MSU)
Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (Oklahoma)
Geary, et al., The Global History of White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Donald Trump (Manchester)
Gust, Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760-1830 (Bloomsbury)
Hertzberg, White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (Chicago)
Hopkins, Off Whiteness: Place, Blood, and Tradition in Post-Reconstruction Southern Literature (Tennessee)
Jütte, The Jewish Body: A History (Pennsylvania)
Katz, Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence (Columbia)
Lauro, Kill the Overseer: The Gamification of Slave Resistance (Minnesota)
Lippard, et al., eds., Protecting Whiteness: Whitelash and the Rejection of Racial Equality (Washington)
Lucia, White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals (California)
Madison, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland (Indiana)
Nolan, Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Desgin (Minnesota)
Nygaard and Lagerwey, Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness (NYU)
Palmater, Warrior Life: Indigenous Resistance and Resurgence (Columbia)
Patsauq, trans. by Henitiuk and Mhieu, Uumajursiutik unaatuinnamut / Hunter with Harpoon / Chasseur au harpon (McGill-Queen’s)
Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (North Carolina)
Ramírez, Assimilation: An Alternative History (California)
Ramirez and Peterson, Ignored Racism: White Animus Toward Latinos (Cambridge)
Rana, Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream (North Carolina)
Reid and Valasik, Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White (California)
Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (Fordham)
Sakakibara, Whale Snow: Iñupiat, Climate Change, and Multispecies Resilience in Arctic Alaska (Arizona)
Sell, Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (North Carolina)
Snyder-Young, Privileged Spectatorship: Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy (Northwestern)
Steckley, Forty Narratives in the Wyandot Language (McGill-Queen’s)
Stirrup, Picturing Worlds: Visuality and Visual Sovereignty in Contemporary Anishinaabe Literature (MSU)
Stovall, White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton)
Whiteman, The Invisible Muslim: Journeys Through Whiteness and Islam (Oxford)
American Studies
August, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Temple)
Boyle, American War Stories (Rutgers)
Carroll, America and the Making of an Independent Ireland: A History (NYU)
Carson, American Exceptionalism as Religion: Postmodern Discontent (Ohio State)
Charbonneau, Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World (Cornell)
Clark, The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism (Oxford)
Contois, Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (North Carolina)
Cottam, Hubbell Trading Post Trade, Tourism, and the Navajo Southwest (Oklahoma)
Critchlow, In Defense of Populism: Protest and American Democracy (Pennsylvania)
D’Arcangelis, Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility (Rutgers)
Etulain, Thunder in the West: The Life and Legends of Billy the Kid (Oklahoma)
Fainberg, Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines (Johns Hopkins)
Giggie and Huebner, eds., Dixie’s Great War: World War I and the American South (Alabama)
Goode, The Turkish Arms Embargo: Drugs, Ethnic Lobbies, and US Domestic Politics (Kentucky)
Hanshaw, Re-Membering and Surviving: African American Fiction of the Vietnam War (MSU)
Hart, American Catholic: The Politics of Faith during the Cold War (Cornell)
Inscoe, Movie-Made Appalachia: History, Hollywood, and the Highland South (North Carolina)
Johnson, Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West (North Carolina)
Keddie, Republican Jesus: How the Right Has Rewritten the Gospels (California)
Kim, The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War (NYU)
Klein, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion (California)
Lee, From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors: Constructing American Boyhood in Postwar Hollywood Films (Rutgers)
Maloney, Emergency War Plans: The American Doomsday Machine, 1945-1960 (Nebraska)
Miklitsch, I Died a Million Times: Gangster Noir in Midcentury America (Illinois)
Mills, The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire (Pennsylvania)
Oberlin, Creating the Creation Museum: How Fundamentalist Beliefs Come to Life (NYU)
Parsons, Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era (North Carolina)
Riismandel, Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001 (Johns Hopkins)
Schreier, The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity (Pennsylvania)
Vine, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (California)
Wallis, Reimagining the Promised Land: Israel and America in Post-war Hollywood Cinema (Bloomsbury)
Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard)
Williams, Author Under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London, 1902-1907 (Nebraska)
World Cultural Studies
Banerjee and Castilo, eds., South of the Future: Marketing Care and Speculating Life in South Asia and the Americas (SUNY)
Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke)
Besteman, Militarized Global Apartheid (Duke)
Birkenmaier, ed., Caribbean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism (Rutgers)
Cleveland, A History of Tourism in Africa: Exoticization, Exploitation, and Enrichment (Ohio University)
Elliott, The Corrupter of Boys: Sodomy, Scandal, and the Medieval Clergy (Pennsylvania)
Gao, Saving the Nation through Culture: The Folklore Movement in Republican China (UBC)
Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Harvard)
House, A Military History of the Cold War, 1962–1991 (Oklahoma)
Isaacman and Isaacman, Mozambique’s Samora Machel: A Life Cut Short (Ohio University)
Kerry, Unite, Proletarian Brothers! Radicalism and Revolution in the Spanish Second Republic (London)
Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817-2020 (Chicago)
Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India (Oxford)
Landas, Cold War Resistance: The International Struggle Over Antibiotics (Nebraska)
Longkumer, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast (Stanford)
Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Harvard)
McLeod, Gaelic in Scotland: Policies, Movements, Ideologies (Edinburgh)
Meyskins, Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China (Columbia)
Ogundiran, The Yoruba: A New History (Indiana)
Sheller, Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke)
Staples, Sacred Cows and Chicken Manchurian: The Everyday Politics of Eating Meat in India (Washington)
Stavans, with etchings by Eko, A Pre-Columbian Bestiary: Fantastic Creatures of Indigenous Latin America (Penn State)
Stur, Saigon at War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties (Columbia)
von Hahn, The Discovery of Albania: Travel Writing and Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century Balkans (Bloomsbury)
SF / Fantasy / Horror Studies
Banerjee, Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity (Wales)
Beil, et al., eds., Playing Utopia: Futures in Digital Games (Transcript-Verlag)
Blouin, Stephen King and American Politics (Wales)
Botting, Artificial Life After Frankenstein (Pennsylvania)
Brooks, et al., eds., Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict (Nebraska)
Brownie, Spacewear: Weightlessness and the Final Frontier of Fashion (Bloomsbury)
Clayton, See! Hear! Cut! Kill! Experiencing Friday the 13th (Mississippi)
Cornils, Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Camden House)
Demos, Beyond the World′s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke)
Demos, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse / Chronopolitics / Justice to Come (MIT)
Denson, Discorrelated Images (MIT)
Determann, Islam, Science Fiction, and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World (Bloomsbury)
Eller, Bradbury Beyond Apollo (Illinois)
Elliott-Smith and Browning, New Queer Horror Film and Television (Wales)
Faber, The Computer’s Voice: From Star Trek to Siri (Minnesota)
Falvey, et al., eds., New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror (Wales)
Ford, Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic (Mississippi)
Goldberg, et al., eds., Bollywood Horrors: Religion, Violence and Cinematic Fears in India (Bloomsbury)
Greenaway, Theology, Horror, and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury)
Greve and Zappe, The American Weird: Concept and Medium (Bloomsbury)
Harrison, The Empire Strikes Back (BFI Film Classics / Bloomsbury)
Humphreys, Manifest Destiny 2.0: Genre Trouble in Game Worlds (Nebraska)
Hunt, The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the Invention of Wonderland (Bodleian)
Japtok and Jenkins, eds., Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler’s Work (Palgrave)
Kannas, Giallo! Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema (SUNY)
Kendal, et al., eds., Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction (Palgrave)
Lavender and Yaszek, eds., Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (Ohio State)
Lenhardt, Savage Horrors: The Intrinsic Raciality of the American Gothic (Transcript-Verlag)
Liao, Post-9/11 Historical Fiction and Alternate History Fiction: Transnational and Multidirectional Memory (Palgrave)
Mann, Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film (Edinburgh)
Moylan, Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation (Bloomsbury)
Nardi and Sweet, eds., The Transmedia Franchise of Star Wars TV (Palgrave)
Peirse, Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre (Rutgers)
Potter, Gothic Chapbooks, Bluebooks and Shilling Shockers, 1797–1830 (Wales)
Raghunath, Possible Worlds Theory and Counterfactual Historical Fiction (Palgrave)
Scribner, Merpeople: A Human History (Reaktion)
Sites, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (Chicago)
Tung, Modernism and Time Machines (Edinburgh)
Venkatesh, Capitán Latinoamérica: Superheroes in Cinema, Television, and Web Series (SUNY)
Vick, Renegades and Rogues: The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Howard (Texas)
Wang, et al., eds., Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context: Texts, Ideas, Spaces (Hong Kong)
Comics Studies
Brown, Panthers, Hulks and Ironhearts: Marvel, Diversity and the 21st Century Superhero (Rutgers)
Calonne, R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self (Mississippi)
Crespi, Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn (California)
De Dauw, Hot Pants and Spandex Suits: Gender Representation in American Superhero Comic Books (Rutgers)
De Dauw and Connell, Toxic Masculinity: Mapping the Monstrous in Our Heroes (Mississippi)
Elder, Hemingway in Comics (Kent State)
Giddens, Critical Directions in Comics Studies (Mississppi)
Kruse, Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity (Mississppi)
Linke, Good White Queers? Racism and Whiteness in Queer U.S. Comics (Transcript-Verlag)
Magnussen, Historical and Cultural Perspectives (Berghahn)
McKinney, Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics (Leuven)
Peppard, ed., Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero (Texas)
Szép, Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability (Ohio State)
Vaz, Empire of the Superheroes: America’s Comic Book Creators and the Making of a BIllion-Dollar Industry (Texas)
Sean Guynes 