Books

In 2017 Emory joined the TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) initiative and committed to funding the publication of open access monographs by Emory faculty. TOME is a collaboration of the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses). 

The TOME@Emory subvention supports the publication of new open access digital monographs that provide evidence of significantly advancing a scholarly question or a field of research. It is offered as part of Emory’s Digital Publishing in the Humanities initiative, which is based at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

2022 Featured Authors

Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys across the Indian Ocean 

by Scott Kugle 

 

Against the sweeping backdrop of South Asian history, this is a story of journeys taken by sixteenth-century reformist Muslim scholars and Sufi mystics from India to Arabia. At the center is the influential Sufi scholar Shaykh ʿAli Muttaqi and his little-known network of disciples. Scott Kugle relates how ʿAli Muttaqi, an expert in Arabic, scriptural hermeneutics, and hadith, left his native South Asia and traversed treacherous seas to make the Hajj to Mecca. 

 

Hajj to the Heart was published as an enhanced open access edition in December 2021 by the University of North Carolina Press. 

For more information, visit the book’s project page at Digital Publishing in the Humanities. 

Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet State 

by Christina E. Crawford

 

Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making. 

Spatial Revolution was published open access in February 2022 by Cornell University Press. 

For more information, visit the book’s project page at Digital Publishing in the Humanities. 

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema: Racial Masquerade throughout the Golden Age

by Monica García Blizzard

 

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema theorizes the development of a unique form of racial masqueradethe representation of Whiteness as Indigeneityduring the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, from the 1930s to the 1950s. Mónica García Blizzard argues that this trope works to reconcile two divergent discourses about race in postrevolutionary Mexico: the government-sponsored celebration of Indigeneity and mestizaje (or the process of interracial and intercultural mixing), on the one hand, and the idealization of Whiteness, on the other.  

The White Indians of Mexican Cinema was published open access in April 2022 by SUNY Press. 

For more information, visit the book’s project page at Digital Publishing in the Humanities. 

Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires 

by Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas

 

In Genres of Listening Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas explores a unique culture of listening and communicating in Buenos Aires. She traces how psychoanalytic listening circulates beyond the clinical setting to become a central element of social interaction and cultural production in the city that has the highest number of practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts in the world. 

 

Genres of Listening was published open access in September 2022 by Duke University Press.  

For more information, visit the book’s project page at Digital Publishing in the Humanities. 

Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad: Volume II, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination

by Dianne Stewart

 

Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. In Volume II, Orisa, Stewart scrutinizes the West African heritage and religious imagination of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and explores their meaning-making traditions in the wake of slavery and colonialism.  

Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination was published open access in September 2022 by Duke University Press. 

 

For more information, visit the book’s project page at Digital Publishing in the Humanities. 

Karel van Mander and his Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting 

by Walter S. Mellion

 

Written by the poet-painter Karel van Mander, who finished it in June 1603, the Grondt der edel, vry schilderconst (Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting) was the first systematic treatise on schilderconst (the art of painting / picturing) to be published in Dutch (Haarlem: Paschier van Wes[t]busch, 1604). This English-language edition of the Grondt, accompanied by an introductory monograph and a full critical apparatus, provides unprecedented access to Van Mander’s crucially important art treatise. 

 

Karel van Mander and his Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting was published open access in October 2022 by Brill. 

For more information, visit the book’s project page at Digital Publishing in the Humanities.

2021 Featured Authors

The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Choson Korea

by Hwisang Cho

 

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an “epistolary revolution” in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices.

In The Power of the Brush Hwisang Cho, Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures, examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts.

The Power of the Brush was published open access in November 2020 by the University of Washington Press.

For more information, visit the book’s project page at Digital Publishing in the Humanities.

Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico

by Rocío Zambrana

 

In Colonial Debts Rocío Zambrana, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, develops the concept of neoliberal coloniality in light of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. With the largest municipal debt in US history and a major hurricane that destroyed much of the archipelago’s infrastructure, Puerto Rico has emerged as a key site for the exploration of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism. Drawing on decolonial thought and praxis, Zambrana shows how debt functions as an apparatus of predation that transforms how neoliberalism operates. Debt functions as a form of coloniality, intensifying race, gender, and class hierarchies in ways that strengthen the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.

Colonial Debts was published open access in June 2021 by Duke University Press.

For more information, visit the book’s project page at Digital Publishing in the Humanities.

REFLECTION ON OPEN ACCESS

Rocío Zambrana reflects on her decision to publish Colonial Debts as an open-access volume.

2020 Featured Authors

Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance

by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath

 

In Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Assistant Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History, focuses on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. The book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.

Impersonations was published in 2019 by the open access Luminos imprint of the University of California Press, with funding provided by the University of California Press Foundation and the Ahmanson Foundation Endowment Fund in Humanities.

IN CONVERSATION

In celebration of Open Access Week 2020, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath joins her colleague Julio Medina, Assistant Professor of Dance and Movement Studies at Emory University, in a conversation about her book. Their full discussion on September 23, 2020 explores the ways in which Kamath’s research resonates and intersects with Medina’s choreographic work and performance practice.

An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States

by Lauren F. Klein

 

An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States examines the gustatory origins of aesthetic taste in early American literature, showing how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the U.S. Lauren F. Klein, Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory and Methods, reframes the philosophical work of food and its meaning for those who prepare, serve, and consume it.

An Archive of Taste was published open access in 2020 by the University of Minnesota Press.

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IN CONVERSATION

In celebration of Open Access Week 2020, Lauren F. Klein joins in conversation with Michael W. Twitty, founder of the blog Afroculinaria and author of The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South (Amistad, 2017), which received the James Beard Award for Writing and Book of the Year in 2018. Their full discussion on September 15, 2020 explores the ways in which their unique investigations of culinary history at the nation’s founding intersect with and complement each other.

Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab

by Deboleena Roy

 

In Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab, Deboleena Roy, Senior Associate Dean at Emory College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology (NBB) and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), investigates science as feminism at the lab bench, engaging in an interdisciplinary conversation between molecular biology, Deleuzian philosophies, posthumanism, and postcolonial and decolonial studies. She brings insights from feminist theory together with lessons learned from bacteria, subcloning, and synthetic biology, arguing that renewed interest in matter and materiality must be accompanied by a feminist rethinking of scientific research methods and techniques.

Molecular Feminisms was published open access in 2018 by the University of Washington Press.

IN CONVERSATION

In celebration of Open Access Week 2020, Deboleena Roy joins in conversation with Tuomas A. Laitinen, an artist based in Helsinki, Finland, who works with moving image, sound, light, glass, chemical, and microbial processes, as well as algorithms, to explore the entanglements of multispecies coexistence. Their full discussion on October 11, 2020 explores the ways in which their unique investigations and practices resonate and intersect.

Uproarious: How Feminists and Other Subversive Comics Speak Truth

by Cynthia Willett and Julia Willett

 

Placing theorists in conversation with comedians, Uproarious: How Feminists and Other Subversive Comics Speak Truth offers a full-frontal approach to the very foundation of comedy and its profound political impact. Cynthia Willett, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, and Julie Willett, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of History at Texas Tech University, address the four major theories of humor—superiority, relief, incongruity, and social play—through the lens of feminist and game-changing comics Wanda Sykes, Margaret Cho, Hannah Gadsby, Hari Kondabolu, and Tig Notaro.

Uproarious was published open access in 2019 by the University of Minnesota Press.

IN CONVERSATION

In celebration of Open Access Week 2020, Cynthia Willett joins J Finley, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Middlebury College, in a conversation about Willett’s book. Their full discussion on September 23, 2020 explores the ways in which Willett’s research resonates and intersects with Finley’s research and performance practice as a stand-up comedian.

A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory

by Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson

 

The brilliant and complex theories of psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) have inspired the turn to affect in the humanities, social sciences, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, these theories are not well understood. With their extensive experience engaging and teaching Tomkins’s work, Adam J. Frank, Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, and Elizabeth A. Wilson, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, provide a user-friendly guide for readers who want to know more about the foundations of affect studies.

A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory was published open access in 2020 by the University of Minnesota Press.

IN CONVERSATION

In celebration of Open Access Week 2020, Elizabeth Wilson joins her coauthor Adam Frank and Joey Orr, Andrew W. Mellon Curator for Research, Integrated Arts Research Initiative (IARI), Spencer Museum of Art, in a conversation about A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. Their full discussion on September 29, 2020 explores the ways in which Wilson and Frank’s book, and Tomkins’s theory of affect, intersect with Orr’s curatorial practice.

War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible

by Jacob L. Wright

 

The Hebrew Bible is permeated with depictions of military conflicts that have profoundly shaped the way many think about war. Why does war occupy so much space in the Bible? In this book, Jacob Wright, Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible, Candler School of Theology, and associate faculty member at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, offers a fresh and fascinating response to this question: War pervades the Bible not because ancient Israel was governed by religious factors (such as “holy war”) or because this people, along with its neighbors in the ancient Near East, was especially bellicose. Instead, the reason is rather that the Bible is fundamentally a project of constructing a new national identity for Israel, one that can both transcend deep divisions within the population and withstand military conquest by imperial armies. Drawing on the intriguing interdisciplinary research on war commemoration, Wright shows how biblical authors, like the architects of national identities from more recent times, constructed identity in direct relation to memories of war, both real and imagined.

War, Memory, and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible was published open access in 2020 by Cambridge University Press.