FAS Faculty Featured Books
The FAS Featured Books series announces new book publications by FAS faculty members to the FAS as well as the wider community at Yale. FAS faculty can inform us of their book’s publication through this webform.
New Books by FAS Faculty
A Cultural History of Western Music, Volume I
Bloomsbury Publishing, November 2023
Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays & Other Writings
Library of America, September 2023
Adrienne Kennedy has been a force on the American stage since the premiere of her groundbreaking, Obie Award–winning Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964. Her haunting and powerful plays, filled with unexpected juxtapositions and startling transfigurations, dramatize interior realities “in a dreamlike fashion, never taking a straight path from one event to another if a more beautiful route is available,” in the words of actor Natalie Portman. This Library of America volume presents, for the first time, a collected edition of Adrienne Kennedy’s writing, spanning six decades and including five uncollected and ten previously unpublished works.
Marc Robinson is Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English in FAS.
……And the Dogs Were Silent (Translated and with an Introduction by Alex Gil)
Duke University Press, 2024
Available to readers for the first time, Aimé Césaire’s three act drama …..And the Dogs Were Silent dramatizes the Haitian Revolution and the rise and fall of Toussaint Louverture as its heroic leader. This bilingual English and French edition—written during the Vichy regime in Martinique in 1943—was lost until 2008 and stands apart from Césaire’s more widely known 1946 closet drama.
Alex Gil is Senior Lecturer II in and Associate Research Scholar in Spanish and Portuguese in FAS.
An Eternal Pitch: Bishop G. E. Patterson, Broadcast Religion, and the Afterlives of Ecstasy
University of California Press, October 2023
An Eternal Pitch examines the homiletic life and afterlife of Bishop G. E. Patterson, the dynamic spiritual leader of the Church of God in Christ from 2000 to 2007. Although Patterson died in 2007, his voice remains a staple of radio and television broadcast, and his sermons have taken on a life of their own online, where myriad YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok users enact innovative forms of religious broadcasting.
Braxton D. Shelley is Associate Professor of Music, of Sacred Music, and of Divinity
Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution
The University of North Carolina Press, 2023
In Awakening the Ashes, Marlene L. Daut situates famous and lesser-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Haitian revolutionaries, pamphleteers, and political thinkers within the global history of ideas, showing how their systems of knowledge and interpretation took center stage in the Age of Revolutions. While modern understandings of freedom and equality are often linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the US Declaration of Independence, Daut argues that the more immediate reference should be to what she calls the 1804 Principle that no human being should ever again be colonized or enslaved, an idea promulgated by the Haitians who, against all odds, upended French empire.
Marlene Daut is Professor of French and of African American Studies in FAS.
Beautyland: A Novel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 2024
Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth. At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, Adina Giorno is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.
Marie-Helene Bertino is Lecturer in English in FAS.
Bogle Corbet: or The Emigrants
Edinburgh University Press, September 2023
Through the life-story of its eloquent but depressive narrator, this new edition of Bogle Corbet, edited by Katie Trumpener, links the industrial revolution in Scotland to the French Revolution, Jamaica’s plantation economy to the settlement of English Canada. Galt’s vivid vignettes show Britain and key British colonies at moments of political unrest and transition, and explore the ambivalences of a world newly governed by industrialism, capitalism, globalisation, and mass displacement.
Katie Trumpener is Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English in FAS.
Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment
Duke University Press, December 2022
In Cooling the Tropics, Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart charts the social history of ice in Hawaiʻi to show how the interlinked concepts of freshness and refreshment mark colonial relationships to the tropics. From chilled drinks and sweets to machinery, she shows how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses.
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart is Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration in FAS.
Criticism and Truth: On Method and Literary Studies
University of Chicago Press, December 2023
In Criticism and Truth, Jonathan Kramnick offers a new and surprising account of criticism’s power by zeroing in on its singular method: close reading. Long recognized as the distinctive technique of literary studies, close reading is the critic’s way of pursuing arguments and advancing knowledge, as well as the primary skill taught in the English major. But it is also more than that—a creative, immersive, and transformative writing practice that fosters a unique kind of engagement with the world. Criticism and Truth is a call to arms, making a powerful case for the necessity of both literature and criticism within a multidisciplinary university.
Jonathan Kramnick is Professor of English in FAS.
Day: A Novel
Random House, November 2023
April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, Dan and Isabel, husband and wife, are slowly drifting apart—and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. And then there is Nathan, age ten, while his sister, Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.
April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled sleights and frustrated sighs. And dear Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.
April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—and with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.
Michael Cunningham is Professor in the Practice of Creative Writing in FAS.
Holler: A Poet Among Patriots
Unbound Edition Press, December 2023
A tour de force of prose style, Holler is poet Danielle Chapman’s moving and provocative portrait of her Southern, military childhood — and an unflinching reckoning with what such an inheritance means now. A crucial book for anyone with a racial conscience in today’s divided America, Holler is one woman’s account of “the miraculous catastrophe” of being human in an inhumane world, and proof that it’s possible to fully face who we are while searching for forgiveness.
Danielle Chapman is Lecturer in English in FAS.
Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire
University of Chicago Press, November 2023
In Imperial Material, Alvita Akiboh reveals how US national identity has been created, challenged, and transformed through embodiments of empire found in US territories, from the US dollar bill to the fifty-star flag. These symbolic objects encode the relationships between territories—including the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam—and the empire with which they have been entangled.
Alvita Akiboh is Assistant Professor of History in FAS.
In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece
Oxford University Press, August 2023
In Blood and Ashes provides the first historical study of the development and dissemination of ritualized curse practice from 750-250 BCE, documenting the cultural pressures that drove the use of curse tablets, charms, spells, and other private rites. This book expands our understanding of daily life in ancient communities, showing how individuals were making sense of the world and coping with conflict, vulnerability, competition, anxiety, desire, and loss, all while conjuring the gods and powers of the Underworld.
Jessica Lamont is Assistant Professor of Classics in FAS.
In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour
In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles
Duke University Press, 2024
In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities.
Lisa Messeri is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in FAS.
In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life
The University of Chicago Press, 2024
Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from Saint Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis explores the significance of the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition and the methods they used to attempt to “cure” it, and argues that those claims were essential to the expansion of psychiatric power and authority in the mid-twentieth-century U.S.
Regina Kunzel is the Larned Professor of History and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences
Springer Link, 2023
Co-authored by Professor Mochrie and Claudia De Grandi, this classroom-tested textbook is an innovative, comprehensive, and forward-looking introductory undergraduate physics course. While it clearly explains physical principles and equips the student with a full range of quantitative tools and methods, the material is firmly grounded in biological relevance and is brought to life with plenty of biological examples throughout. It is currently being used as the textbook for Yale’s Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences sequence, PHYS 170/171.
Simon Mochrie is Professor of Physics and Applied Physics in FAS.
Inverno: A Novel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 2024
Inverno is a love story that stretches across decades. Inverno is also the story of Caroline, waiting in Central Park in a snowstorm for her phone to ring, yards from where, thirty years ago, Alastair, as a boy, hid in the trees. Will he call? Won’t he? The story moves the way the mind does: years flash by in an instant—now we are in the perilous world of fairy tale, now stranded anew in childhood, with its sorrows and harsh words. Ever-present are the complicated negotiations of the heart. This startling and brilliantly original novel by Cynthia Zarin, the author of An Enlarged Heart, is a kaleidoscope in which the past and the present shatter.
Cynthia Zarin is Senior Lecturer in English in FAS.
Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism
Cambridge University Press, 2023
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.
Samuel Hodgkin is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in FAS.
They Flew: A History of the Impossible
Yale University Press, September 2023
Using as his case studies stories about St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and three disgraced nuns, Eire challenges readers to imagine a world animated by a different understanding of reality and of the supernatural’s relationship with the natural world. The questions he explores—such as why and how “impossibility” is determined by cultural contexts, and whether there is more to reality than meets the eye or can be observed by science—have resonance and lessons for our time.
Carlos Eire is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies in FAS.
This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and The Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity
Viking Press, October 2023
In This Exquisite Loneliness, Richard Deming turns an eye toward that unwelcome feeling, both in his own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, to find the context of loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate this profound sense of discomfort. Within the back stories to Melanie Klein’s contributions to psychoanalysis, Zora Neale Hurston’s literary and ethnographic writing, the philosophical essays of Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans’s photography of urban alienation, Egon Schiele’s revolutionary artwork and Rod Serling’s uncanny narratives in The Twilight Zone, Deming explores how loneliness has served as fuel for an intense creative desire that has forged some of the most original and innovative art and writing of the twentieth century.
Richard Deming is Senior Lecturer in English and Director of Creative Writing in FAS.
Thoreau's Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture
Princeton University Press, January 2023
Caleb Smith is Professor of English and American Studies in FAS.