Spring 2025 University Press Recommendations

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

Spring 2025 Book Recommendations by . . .

General Interest
World Cultural Studies
American Studies
Ancient / Medieval / Early Modern
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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Adib-Moghaddam, The Myth of Good AI: A Manifesto for Critical Artificial Intelligence (Manchester)

Baker, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard)

Bourbonnais, The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History (Chicago)

Chaudhuri and Ward, eds., The Witch Studies Reader (Duke)

Christian, The Global Journey of Racism (Stanford)

Comitta, People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia)

Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History (California)

Dwidar, Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy (Chicago)

Fallace, You Are Not a Kinesthetic Learner: The Troubled History of the Learning Style Idea (Chicago)

Fissell, Abortion: A History (Hurst)

Griffiths, Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film (Columbia)

Gump, How to Review Scholarly Books: Reading, Writing, Relishing (Princeton)

Johnston, et al., Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea (Stanford)

Klarén, On Becoming Neighbors: The Communication Ethics of Fred Rogers (Pittsburgh)

Long, The Last Mixtape: Physical Media and Nostalgic Cycles (Chicago)

Lotz, After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-First Century (NYU)

Marez, Producing Precarity: The Costs of Making TV in Poor Places (NYU)

Martinez and Smith, The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement (NYU)

McLauchlan, The Bagpipes: A Cultural History (Hurst)

Plain, Agatha Christie: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford)

Rosenfeld, The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (Princeton)

Scheidel, What Is Ancient History? (Princeton)

Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy (Verso)

Simmons, CTRL HATE DELETE: The New Anti-Feminist Backlash and How We Fight It (Policy Press)

Snyder, Leisure: Its Rise, Fall, and Potential Rebirth (SUNY)

Spring, SPAM: A Global History (Reaktion)

Srinivasan, Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (Columbia)

Street, et al., Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of English Protest Songs, 1600–2020 (McGill-Queen’s)

Ten Indian Classics (Murty Classical Library of India) (Harvard)

Tolan, Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present (Princeton)

Varouxakis, The West: The History of an Idea (Princeton)

Vázquez, Decolonial Environmentalisms: Climate Justice and Speculative Futures in Latinx Cultural Production (Texas)

Wannamaker, How to Read Like an Anti-Fascist: Storytelling and Narrative Literacy for Young People (Fordham)

Whitson, Marketing the Wilderness: Outdoor Recreation, Indigenous Activism, and the Battle over Public Lands (Minnesota)

Wyatt, Afterlife: The Strange Fate of Literary Remains (LSU)

World Cultural Studies

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Ajari, trans. Fagan, Afro-Decolonial Manifesto (Seagull Books)

Al-Rustom, Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide (Columbia)

Allison, The Films of Aleksandr Rou: Father of Soviet Fairy-Tale Cinema (Intellect)

Beizer and Komaromi, A Time to Sow: Refusenik Life in Leningrad, 1979–1989 (Toronto)

Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation (Princeton)

Bessel, Postwar Europe: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford)

Bowlby, Émile Zola: Writing Modern Life (Oxford)

Brumfield, From Forest to Steppe: The Russian Art of Building in Wood (Duke)

Burchett, The Captains’ Coup: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Portugal (1974-1976) (Verso)

Chang, A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US Occupation (Harvard)

Chung, The Sensational Proletarian: Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea (Stanford)

Commins, Saudi Arabia: A Modern History (Yale)

Dufour, trans. Henzi, “Québec Was Born in My Country!”: A Diary of Encounters between Indigenous and Québécois Peoples (Wilfrid Laurier)

Ferreira, Worlds of Unfreedom: West Central Africa in the Era of Global Abolition (Princeton)

Gregor, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany (Chicago)

Handman, Circulations: Modernist Imaginaries of Colonialism and Decolonization in Papua New Guinea (California) (OA)

Harris, The Rise of the Neighbourhood in Canada, 1880s–2020s (Toronto)

Ivermee, Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India (Hurst)

Jafri, Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (Minnesota)

Janzen, An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging between Africa and the Caribbean (Duke)

Jones, Rebecca’s Country: A Welsh Story of Riot and Resistance (Wales)

Jōo, Peony Lantern Tales: Ghostly Encounters in the Early Modern Sinosphere (Hawai’i)

Kalé and Novetzke, The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India (Columbia)

Kegel, The Struggle for Liberation: A History of the Rwandan Civil War, 1990-1994 (Ohio University)

Kinder, World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age (Chicago)

Kontje, Global Germany Circa 1800: A Revisionist Literary History (Penn State)

Kushner, The Jewish Pedlar: An Untold Criminal History (Manchester)

Lee, The Rise of Tzu Chi: The Making of a Global Buddhist Movement (British Columbia)

Léger, Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Decolonial Imagination (Vanderbilt)

Lempert, Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema (Minnesota)

López Fadul, The Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire (Johns Hopkins)

Lopez, Buddhism: A Journey through History (Yale)

Lynn, Ireland’s Opportunity: Global Irish Nationalism and the South African War (NYU)

Macola, A Violent History: Power and Conflict in the Congo Basin from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Leuven)

McCormack, Becoming Métis in Northern Alberta (Athabasaca)

McCumber, Bad Nature: How Rat Control Shapes Human and Nonhuman Worlds (Chicago)

Mimica, Imacoqwa’s Arrow: On the Biunity of the Sun and Moon in a Papuan Lifeworld (HAU)

Nakamura, Trading Locomotives: The Global Economy and the Development of Japan’s Railroads, 1869–1914 (Columbia)

Norman, ed., Land Back: Aboriginal Land Rights in New South Wales, Today and Always (New South Wales)

O’Neill, The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery (Penn Press)

Ochoa, México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality (Arizona)

Phan, Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese & the Origins of the Vietnamese Language (Harvard)

Rabow-Edling, The First Russian Revolution: The Decembrist Revolt of 1825 (Reaktion)

Reichert, Literature for the Masses: Japanese Period Fiction, 1913–1941 (Hawai’i)

Roos, The Not-Quite Child: Colonial Histories, Racialization, and Swedish Exceptionalism (Washington)

Sarkar, Religion and Women in India: Gender, Faith, and Politics, 1780s–1980s (SUNY)

Shahar, Kings of Oxen and Horses: Draft Animals, Buddhism, and Chinese Rural Religion (Columbia)

Simpson, German Empires and Decolonial Fantasies, 1492–1942 (Michigan)

Singaravélou, Tianjin Cosmopolis: An Alternative History of Globalization (Columbia)

Smith, Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic (Duke)

Sommer, The Concentration Camp Brothel: Forced Sexual Labor under Nazi Rule (Fordham)

Swart, The Lion’s Historian: Africa’s Animal Past (Ohio University)

Teru, trans. Kuplowsky, Whispers from a Storm: Fragments from a Japanese Esperantist in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (Hawai’i)

Trotter, The Sound of Welsh Patagonia: Performance, Subjectivity, and Music in Y Wladfa, Patagonia, Argentina (Wales) [OA]

Truschke, India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent (Princeton)

Urwin, Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia (Washington)

Wang, Gendered Memories: An Imaginary Museum for Ding Ling and Chinese Female Revolutionary Martyrs (Michigan)

Weisenfeld, The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan (Duke)

Zhang, The Quest for Liberation: Philosophy and the Making of World Culture in China and the West (Fordham)

American Studies

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Batzell, Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery: Global Inequality, Racial Boundaries, and the Rise of Unions in American and British Capitalism, 1870–1929 (Chicago)

Benes, 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times (Kansas)

Berenson, Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia (Yale)

Bill, Fighting for the Puyallup Tribe: A Memoir (Washington)

Blecha, Stomp and Shout: R&B and the Origins of Northwest Rock and Roll (Washington)

Bogdan, Before We Disappear into Oblivion: San Francisco’s Russian Diaspora from Revolution to Cold War (McGill-Queen’s)

Brauer, The Age of Discontent: How Workers and Farmers Reinvented American Democracy (Georgetown)

Brockmole, Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way into the Driver’s Seat (Johns Hopkins)

Burke, Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region (Washington)

Curts, Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America (NYU)

Daddis, Faith and Fear: America’s Relationship with War since 1945 (Oxford)

De Leon, Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity (California)

Eyring, Saltwater: Grief in Early America (North Carolina)

Fishkin, Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade (Yale)

Fitzgerald, Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency (North Carolina)

Frey, Rising Above: Language Revitalization in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (Nebraska)

Gillette, Nazis in the New World: German Students in the United States, 1933–1941 (Johns Hopkins)

Goings, Red Harbor: Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest (Washington)

Hartman, Karl Marx in America (Chicago)

Haslam, Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War against Ukraine (Harvard)

Hejtmanek, The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon (NYU)

Hill, Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books (Nebraska)

Himes, In-Law Country: How Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Their Circle Fashioned a New Kind of Country Music, 1968-1985 (Illinois)

Isenberg, The Age of the Borderlands: Indians, Slaves, and the Limits of Manifest Destiny, 1790–1850 (North Carolina)

Johnson, Texas: An American History (Yale)

Johnson, Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America (Illinois)

Juster, A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America (North Carolina)

Krysko, Contested Airwaves: American Radio at Home and Abroad, 1914-1946 (Illinois)

Kushner, Cherokee Nation Citizenship: A Political History (Oklahoma)

Kwoba, Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism (North Carolina)

Lowry, Lumbee Pipelines: American Indian Movement in the Residue of Settler Colonialism (Nebraska)

Manley, Imagining the Tropics: Women, Romance, and the Making of Modern Tourism (Rutgers)

Mann, You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song (LSU)

McDonald, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States (Penn Press)

McIlhenny, American Socialist: Laurence Gronlund and the Power behind Revolution (LSU)

McKercher and Stevenson, Building a Special Relationship: Canada-US Relations in the Eisenhower Era, 1953–61 (British Columbia)

Mendiola, The Mosquito Confederation: A Borderlands History of Colonial Central America (Georgia)

Menrisky, Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature (Minnesota)

Messner, The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024 (Rutgers)

Morris, Dismal Freedom: A History of the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp (North Carolina)

Nachescu, The National Alliance of Black Feminists: A History (Illinois)

Narrett, The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670–1840 (Harvard)

Noll, The 1968 Florida Teachers’ Strike: Public Sector Unionism and the Fight against Sunshine State Conservatism (LSU)

Parker, City of Black Souls: Chicago, Ethiopianism, and the Black Apocalyptic Imagination (Penn Press)

Patterson, American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana (LSU)

Pratt, et al., Osage Language and Lifeways (Oklahoma)

Rabin, The Jewish South: An American History (Princeton)

Raymond, Mohawk Rebel: Shelley Niro’s Art and New York State (SUNY)

Reaser, et al., Language and Life on Ocracoke: The Living History of the Brogue (North Carolina)

Rhee, Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970 (Chicago)

Romesburg, Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School (Rutgers)

Sandweiss, The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West (Princeton)

Schenk, Ojibwe Ethnogenesis, 1640–1740 (Nebraska)

Selgin, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 (Chicago)

Simons, Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm (Minnesota)

Smith, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (Oxford)

Stacks, The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song after 1968 (Illinois)

Stephens, Broads, Sisters, Exes: Feminist Millennial Television (Wayne State)

Thelen, Attention, Shoppers!: American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy (Princeton)

Tseng, Empanadas, Pupusas, and Greens on the Side: Language and Latinidad in the Nation’s Capital (Georgetown)

Williams, Steven Spielberg’s Children (Rutgers)

Zeavin, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century (MIT)

Ziedrich, First Fruits: The Lewellings and the Birth of the Pacific Coast Fruit Industry (Oregon State)

Ancient / Medieval / Early Modern

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Adams, The Minoans: Lost Civilizations (Reaktion)

Armstrong, Children of Mars: The Origins of Rome’s Empire (Oxford)

Bond, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire (Yale)

Bonsall, Women and Magic in Medieval Romance: Genre, Intertextuality and Power (Boydell & Brewer)

Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings (Oxford World Classics) (Oxford)

Cortese, The Fatimids: Portrait of a Dynasty (Reaktion)

Gillhammer, Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy (Reaktion)

Harpur, Dazzling Darkness: The Lives and Afterlives of the Christian Mystics (Hurst)

Hauser, Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It (Chicago)

King, The House of the Satrap: The Making of the Ancient Persian Empire (California)

McGrady, Joan of Arc: The Life of a French Cultural Icon (Boydell & Brewer)

More Utopia (Oxford World Classics) (Oxford)

Nabel, The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding in Roman-Parthian Relations (California) (OA)

Nyord, Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (Chicago)

Otaño Gracia, The Other Faces of Arthur: Chivalric Whiteness in the Global North Atlantic (Penn Press)

Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (Chicago)

Parsons, Introducing Medieval Animal Names (Wales)

Roeck, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton)

Shakeshaft, Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato (Princeton)

Singer, Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature (Chicago)

Stewart, The Celts: A Modern History (Princeton)

Wisnom, The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World (Chicago)

Zhao, The Whirlpool That Produced China: Stag Hunting on the Central Plain (SUNY)

SF / Fantasy / Horror Studies

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Aveni, Aliens Like Us? An Anthropologist’s Field Guide to Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life (New Mexico)

Borwein, ed., Global Indigenous Horror (Mississippi)

Boyd and Briand-Boyd, Superhero Comics and Scottish Identity: The Comics Art of Frank Quitely (Leuven)

Bumatay, On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power (Ohio State)

Carter, I’d Just as Soon Kiss a Wookiee: Uncovering Racialized Desire in the Star Wars Galaxy (Texas)

Chez, Potter Stinks: Gender and Species in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series (Mississippi)

Cooper, Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact (Reaktion)

Cormack, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult (Hurst)

Dark, Everyday Apocalypse: Art, Empire, and the End of the World (Vanderbilt)

Davies and Rifkind, Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfrid Laurier)

Díaz-Basteris and Urcaregui, eds., Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Crossings (Rutgers)

Dika, Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th and the Films of the Stalker Cycle (Wales)

DiPasquale, Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at Dune and The Lord of the Rings (Kent State)

Earle, Silence in the Quagmire: The Vietnam War in U.S. Comics (Nebraska)

Gil′Adí, Doom Patterns: Latinx Speculations and the Aesthetics of Violence (Duke)

Gooch, Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film (Minnesota)

Jezyk, Contemporary Slavic Horror across Media: Cursed Zones (Manchester)

Kotsko, Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era (Minnesota)

Larkin, Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature (Ohio State)

Magistrale and Blouin, King Noir: The Crime Fiction of Stephen King (Mississippi)

McKee, The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker (MIT)

Melby, Invasions: Fears and Fantasies of Imagined Wars in Britain, 1871-1918 (Manchester)

Morseau, Mapping Neshnabé Futurity: Celestial Currents of Sovereignty in Potawatomi Skies, Lands, and Waters (Arizona)

Nyong’o, Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (California)

Parker, Understanding Octavia E. Butler (South Carolina)

Roh, et al., Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions (Rutgers)

Ruberg, How to Queer the World: Radical Worldbuilding through Video Games (NYU)

Saldarriaga and Manini, Monsters vs. Patriarchy: Toxic Imagination in Global Horror Cinema (Rutgers)

Santos and Lawrence, eds., Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics (Texas)

Sottilotta, Seekers of Wonder: Women Writing Folk and Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century Italy and Ireland (Princeton)

Tabet, Beyond the Lesbian Vampire: Reclaiming the Violent Lesbian in Contemporary Queer Horror (Wales)

Taylor, The Superhero Blockbuster: Adaptation, Style, and Meaning (Mississippi)

Taylor, The Weird South: Ecologies of Unknowing in Postplantation Literature (Georgia)

Tyner, Mutants, Androids, and Aliens: On Being Human in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Mississippi)

Verne, Journey to the Moon (Oxford World Classics) (Oxford)

Winn, Futuring Black Lives: Independent Black Institutions and the Literary Imagination (Vanderbilt)

Wu Jianren, New Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese Science Fiction Novel (Columbia)

Yang, Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse (Oxford)