Fall 2023 University Press Recommendations

All past and future seasonal recommendation lists can be found here.

Fall 2023 Book Recommendations by . . .

General Interest
World Cultural Studies
American Studies
Ancient and Medieval Studies
SF / Fantasy / Horror Studies

Some notes about my recommendations:

• The lists below are organized alphabetically by the author surname.

• These recommendations reflect my personal interests as well as my scholarly ones, and as such cannot wholly capture all the many hundreds of interesting, worthwhile, and significant books put out by university presses this season.

General Interest

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Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way (Basic Books)

Anderson, Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (Cambridge)

Becker, Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia (Harvard)

Brown, The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West (Hurst)

Connor, Styles of Seriousness (Stanford)

Frétigné, To Live Is to Resist: The Life of Antonio Gramsci (Chicago)

Hardt, The Subversive Seventies (Oxford)

Jaffee, Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice (California)

Jewell, Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio (North Carolina)

Kramnick, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago)

Masters, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (North Carolina)

McKevitt, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America (North Carolina)

McKinnon, Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History (MIT)

Nguyen, Mean Girl Feminism: How White Feminists Gaslight, Gatekeep, and Girlboss (Illinois)

Nielsen, Brand Antarctica: How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent (Nebraska)

O’Connor, Culture Is Not An Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common Good (Manchester)

Sapiro, trans. Bedecarre and Libman, The Sociology of Literature (Stanford)

Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature (Columbia)

Stanley and Beaver, The Politics of Language (Princeton)

Thompson, Remotely: Travels in the Binge of TV (Yale)

Viswanathan, The Deliberate Doctorate: A Values-Focused Journey to your PhD (British Columbia)

Wurgaft and White, Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture (California)

Xue Mo, Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia (SUNY)

World Cultural Studies

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Alsford, Taiwan Lives: A Social and Political History (Washington)

Anderson, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism (Hurst)

Banchs, Scream for Me, Africa! Heavy Metal Identities in Post-Colonial Africa (Intellect)

Cheng, et al., A Chinese Rebel beyond the Great Wall: The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner Mongolia (Chicago)

Conochie, A Tiger Rules the Mountain: Cambodia’s Pursuit of Democracy (Monash)

Daut, Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (North Carolina)

David-Fox, The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations (Pittsburgh)

Deutsch, Gendering Antifascism: Women’s Activism in Argentina and the World, 1918-1947 (Pittsburgh)

Foltz, A History of the Tajiks: Iranians of the East (Bloomsbury)

Frohman, The Politics of Personal Information: Surveillance, Privacy, and Power in West Germany (Berghahn)

Fugazzola, Words like Water; Queer Mobilization and Social Change in China (Temple)

Gibson, Hungry and Starving: Voices of the Great Soviet Famine, 1928–1934 (McGill-Queen’s)

Gray, Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia (Bloomsbury)

Gray, In the Shadow of the Seawall: Coastal Injustice and the Dilemma of Placekeeping (California)

Hornsby, The Soviet Sixties (Yale)

Horton, Don’t Need No Thought Control: Western Culture in East Germany and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Berghahn)

Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany (Basic Books)

Johnson, Where Cloud Is Ground: Placing Data and Making Place in Iceland (California)

Kater, After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany (Yale)

Khazanov, The Russia That We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse (Wisconsin)

Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Hurst)

Kuzuoğlu, Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia)

Labba, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi

Li, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia)

Marinaj, Teach Me How to Whisper: Horses and Other Poems (Syracuse)

Meghji, A Critical Synergy: Race, Decoloniality, and World Crises (Temple)

Melber, The Long Shadow of German Colonialism: Amnesia, Denialism, and Revisionism (Hurst)

Mujanović, The Bosniaks: Nationhood After Genocide (Hurst)

Paliwal, India’s Near East: A New History (Hurst)

Partner, Koume’s World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration (Columbia)

Pite, Sharing Yerba Mate: How South America’s Most Popular Drink Defined a Region (North Carolina)

Prasse-Freeman, Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar(Stanford)

Reid, Fighting Retreat: Winston Churchill and India (Hurst)

Rodriguez, et al., eds. Mesquite Pods to Mezcal: 10,000 Years of Oaxacan Cuisines (Texas)

Ruble, Entangled Emancipation: Women’s Rights in Cold War Germany(Toronto)

Simonetto, A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina (Texas)

Šipka, Water, Whiskey, and Vodka: A Story of Slavic Languages (Georgetown)

Stephenson, Llamas beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World (Texas)

Tharoor, B.R. Ambedkar: The Man Who Gave Hope to India’s Dispossessed (Manchester)

Toyota, Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980–2020 (Temple)

Ward, East German Film and the Holocaust (Berghahn)

American Studies

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Akiboh, Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire (Chicago)

Alpers, Happy Days: Images of the Pre-Sixties Past in Seventies America (Rutgers)

Aune, Indian Wars Everywhere: Colonial Violence and the Shadow Doctrines of Empire (California)

Barnett and Harvey, Kugels and Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina (South Carolina)

Boulton and Gibson, eds., Red Reckoning: The Cold War and the Transformation of American Life (LSU)

Brickman, Suffering Sappho! Lesbian Camp in American Popular Culture (Rutgers)

Brown, The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West (Oxford)

Burden-Stelly, Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (Chicago)

Campbell and Forman, Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production (Intellect)

Cheng, Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (Washington)

Clark, Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War (Ohio State)

Coddington, How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race (California)

Cram, Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility (California)

Cravens, Yes Gawd! How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States (Temple)

Edwards, Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom (LSU)

Filindra, Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (Chicago)

Firth, Feeding New Orleans: Celebrity Chefs and Reimagining Food Justice (North Carolina)

Fraser, Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class (Princeton)

Frohlich, From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (California)

Goldberg, Radical Play: Revolutionizing Children’s Toys in 1960s and 1970s America (Duke)

Hardy, ed., The Annotated Book of Mormon (Oxford)

Harris, Rise Up! Indigenous Music in North America (Nebraska)

Horowitz, The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War (Illinois)

Kenny, Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU)

Koehler, Comics and Conquest: Political Cartoons and a Radical Retelling of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute (Johns Hopkins)

Leidig, The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization (Columbia)

Li, Transpacific Cartographies: Narrating the Contemporary Chinese Diaspora in the United States (Rutgers)

Li, Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America (Minnesota)

Lichtenstein and Stein, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism(Princeton)

Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates: A Cultural History (Oxford)

Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (Columbia)

Marshall, The Drinking Curriculum: A Cultural History of Childhood and Alcohol (Fordham)

Mayorga, Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism (North Carolina)

Mohun, American Imperialist: Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa (Chicago)

Payne, God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford)

Price, Cold War Deceptions: The Asia Foundation and the CIA (Washington)

Robinson, with van Harmelen, The Unknown Great: Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History (Washington)

Rogers, Precision: A History of American Warfare (Manchester)

Tongson, Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us (NYU)

Wanhalla, Of Love and War: Pacific Brides of World War II (Nebraska)

Winslow, Revolutionary Feminists: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Seattle (Duke)

Winston, Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision (Chicago)

Wise, Native Foods: Agriculture, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism in American History (Arkansas)

Youngs, Framing Nature: The Creation of an American Icon at the Grand Canyon (Nebraska)

Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern Studies

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Fox, Homer and His Iliad (Basic Books)

Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium(Oxford)

Rawson, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China (Washington)

Rix, The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy (Cambridge)

Sarris, Justinian: Emperor, Soldier, Saint(Basic Books)

Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins (Cambridge)

SF / Fantasy / Horror Studies

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Ahmed, The Cambridge Companion to Comics (Cambridge)

Bickford, Understanding Margaret Atwood (South Carolina)

Bowman, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill: Alien Encounters, Civil Rights, and the New Age in America (Yale)

Brokaw, Monsters on Maple Street: The Twilight Zone and the Postwar American Dream(Kentucky)

Carroll, The Medieval Worlds of Neil Gaiman: From Beowulf to Sleeping Beauty (Iowa)

Clements, Anime: A History (Bloomsbury)

Colebrook, Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (Nebraska)

de Martino, The End of the World: Cultural Apocalypse and Transcendence (Chicago)

Deman, The Claremont Run: Subverting Gender in the X-Men (Texas)

Diffrient, Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film (Mississippi)

Dove-Viebahn, There She Goes Again: Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises (Rutgers)

Gershenson, New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre(Rutgers)

González, Ready Player Juan: Latinx Masculinities and Stereotypes in Video Games (Arizona)

Hantke, Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema (Mississippi)

Kabo, Utopia Beyond Capitalism in Contemporary Literature: A Commons Poetics (Bloomsbury)

Kennell, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation (Hawai’i)

Marshall, Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century (Chicago)

McBride, Financial Gothic: Monsterized Capitalism in American Gothic Fiction (Wales)

Murphy, William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark (Bloomsbury)

Nair, Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror(California)

Newton, ed., The Origins of Science Fiction (Oxford)

Petrocelli, Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator (Wales)

Roberts, Milner, and Murphy, Science Fiction and Narrative Form (Bloomsbury)

Rosenthal and de Lara Molesky, eds., Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction (Virginia)

Smith, Afrocentricity in AfroFuturism: Toward Afrocentric Futurism (Mississippi)

Song, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia)

Stefanapoulou, The Science Fiction Film in Contemporary Hollywood: A Social Semiotics of Bodies and Worlds (Bloomsbury)

Wiebe and Woodman, The Cancer Plot: Terminal Immortality in Marvel’s Moral Universe (Alberta)

Williams, Night Mother: A Personal and Cultural History of The Exorcist (Ohio State)

Worcester, A Cultural History of The Punisher: Marvel Comics and the Politics of Vengeance (Intellect)