Dr. Pablo Palomino, Assistant Professor of Latin American & Caribbean Studies and Mellon Faculty Fellow at Oxford College, has published The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History with Oxford University Press. The book charts how distinct musical styles of geographically and ethnically heterogeneous regions came to fall under the single category of “Latin American Music” by the mid-twentieth century. Palomino’s transnational study captures how music was a privileged field for the construction and dissemination of Latin Americanness throughout the region and in global cultural marketplaces. Read a review of The Invention of Latin American Music from Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Samuel N. Harper Professor of History at The University of Chicago, below.

“‘Latin America’, Palomino shows, was never a distinctive and coherent song or symphony; it has been a contentious key to play sundry very local and very global cultural trends. Palomino provides the first and best more-than-national account of the lasting background music of the 20th century, whose Latin Americanness was neither in the non-Westernness nor in the uniqueness of its musical scores or lyrics, but in the very struggle to play notes, to sing feelings, this way today, that other way tomorrow, producing thus collective memories which, albeit never wholly Latin American, gradually fulfilled Joaquim Nabuco’s old sense of being: ‘We are but a drop of water in the ocean. Let us be cognizant that we are water droplets, but let us also be aware that we are ocean.'” — Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Samuel N. Harper Professor of History, The University of Chicago

Congratulations to Dr. Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Associate Professor of History, on the publication of the co-edited volume Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (University of Nebraska Press). Armstrong-Partida’s collaborators are Alexandra Guerson (University of Toronto) and Dana Wessell Lightfoot (University of Norther British Columbia). The twelve-essay collection features groundbreaking work on the lives of women from a range of socioeconomic and religious positions in premodern Iberian societies. Elizabeth S. Cohen, Professor Emerita at York University, writes that “This well-conceived volume gathers and fruitfully juxtaposes fresh material from many sites and communities and provides an entrée into the specialized research of a rich range of scholars.”  Read more about Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia on the University of Nebraska page.

Dr. Kylie Smith, a historian at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, has published Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing with Rutgers University Press. Five years in the making, Talking Therapy traces the rise of modern psychiatric nursing in the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s. Through an analysis of the relationship between nurses and other mental health professions, with an emphasis on nursing scholarship, this book demonstrates the inherently social construction of “mental health,” and highlights the role of nurses in challenging, and complying with, modern approaches to psychiatry. After WWII, heightened cultural and political emphasis on mental health for social stability enabled the development of psychiatric nursing as a distinct knowledge project through which nurses aimed to transform institutional approaches to patient care, and to contribute to health and social science beyond the bedside. Nurses now take for granted the ideas that underpin their relationships with patients, but this book demonstrates that these were ideas not easily won, and that nurses in the past fought hard to make mental health nursing what it is today.