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Faculty Bookshelf
Wesleyan faculty contribute regularly to scholarly and public discourse on matters of importance. Here you’ll find a sample of their recent books (published in 2010–2012). Information on articles, papers, and other work can be found on individual faculty members’ Web pages, on WesScholar, and in the Wesleyan Connection. Most Wesleyan faculty develop their ideas in courses before publishing them; thus students become partners at early stages in the publication process. Scroll down and see what has interested Wesleyan faculty and may interest you.

The Rise of Planning in Industrial America, 1865–1914

Richard Adelstein, Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of Economics
Routledge, 2012
Central economic planning is often associated with failed state socialism, and modern capitalism celebrated as its antithesis. This book shows that central planning is not always, or even primarily, a state enterprise, and that the giant industrial corporations that dominated the American economy through the 20th century were, first and foremost, unprecedented examples of successful, consensual central planning at a very large scale. Adelstein explores the remarkable transformation undergone by business in the United States over the half-century following the Civil War—from small sole proprietorships and partnerships to massive corporations possessing many of the same constitutional rights as living men and women. Approaching this story through historical, philosophical, legal and economic lenses, he traces the big business boom to three historic developments: a major managerial achievement within the firms themselves; an ill-conceived and ill-timed attempt by legislators to rein in rapidly expanding firms; and the Supreme Court’s understated—but immensely consequential—decision granting constitutional rights to corporations separate from those of their owners.

Nathaniel Purple

F. D. Reeve, Professor of Letters Emeritus
Voyage, 2012
A feud, a fire, an affair. Cows in the pasture, men at the lunch counter, violets in an old cream bottle. This is Vermont—passionate, pastoral, pungent, which forms a rich, vivid canvas for an intimate portrayal of village life. But human nature is a bit out of joint. Years of living on the “bony” land has led the village people to jealousies and forbidden couplings. Reeve draws us into his world through the sharp eyes of Nathaniel Purple, who, as the town’s librarian, is the link to the world of books and rational thinking. He is also an everyman, a native Vermonter, able to embrace the town’s practical justice. The novel celebrates the strength and timelessness of the natural world above the daily struggle and quotidian quarrels of everyday existence. People live out their destinies while the seasons turn.

The School Mission Statement: Values, Goals and Identities in American Education

Steven Stemler (with Damian J. Bebell), Assistant Professor of Psychology
Eye on Education, 2012
This book contains an extensive review of mission statements from a diverse range of schools, including public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, vocational schools, parochial schools and Native American schools. Stemler and Bebell developed a coding rubric to classify the mission statements according to eleven broad themes (e.g., Foster cognitive development; foster social development; foster emotional development; integrate into global community). Based on their review of mission statements, Stemler and Bebell conclude that the purpose of American schools extends well beyond the cognitive domain. However, testing is limited almost exclusively to the cognitive, meaning schools are not being held accountable in the same way for these other, equally important, goals. If schools truly value developing these other competencies in students, then they should do so in a measurable way, they argue.

Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

Kari Weil, University Professor of Letters
Columbia University Press, 2012
Weil provides a critical introduction to the field of animal studies as well as an appreciation of its thrilling acts of destabilization. Examining real and imagined confrontations between human and nonhuman animals, she charts the presumed lines of difference between human beings and other species and the personal, ethical, and political implications of those boundaries. Weil’s considerations recast the work of such authors as Kafka, Mann, Woolf, and Coetzee, and such philosophers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Agamben, Cixous, and Hearne, while incorporating the aesthetic perspectives of such visual artists as Bill Viola, Frank Noelker, and Sam Taylor-Wood and the “visual thinking” of the autistic animal scientist Temple Grandin. She addresses theories of pet keeping and domestication; the importance of animal agency; the intersection of animal studies, disability studies, and ethics; and the role of gender, shame, love, and grief in shaping our attitudes toward animals.

La Sala Bologna nei Palazzi Vaticani: Architettura, cartografia e potere nell’età di Gregorio XIII

Nadja Aksamija (with Francesco Ceccarelli), Assistant Professor of Art History
Marsilio Editori, 2011
The Sala Bologna is one of the most inaccessible and fascinating spaces in the Vatican Palace, located between the Pope’s private apartments and the Secretariat of the Vatican State. Originally used for ceremonial purposes, it was built and decorated for the Jubilee of 1575 for the Bolognese pope Gregory XIII, Ugo Boncompagni. It was conceived as part of an ambitious visual program that sought to celebrate the scientific and religious accomplishments of Gregory XIII’s court. The Sala Bologna’s majestic interior was frescoed by Lorenzo Sabatini and artists in his workshop with monumental terrestrial and celestial maps, including the map of the city of Bologna—the largest “portrait” of a city painted during the Renaissance. This book presents for the first time the architecture and pictorial decoration of this magnificent space, which is studied from a variety of angles by a group of internationally renowned scholars. The extraordinary images published in the book are a result of an exhaustive photographic campaign by the Madrid studio Factum Arte that were also used for the production of a facsimile of the map of the city of Bologna for the new Museo della Storia di Bologna.

The Prestige of Violence: American Fiction. 1962–2007

Sally Bachner, Assistant Professor of English
University of Georgia Press, 2011
Bachner argues that, starting in the 1960s, American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be represented. She demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language, on the one hand, and a violence that appears to be prelinguistic and unquestionable, on the other. Genocide, terrorism, war, torture, slavery, rape, and murder are major themes, yet the writers insist that such events are unspeakable. Bachner takes issue with the claim made within trauma studies that history is the site of violent trauma inaccessible to ordinary representation. Instead, she suggests that both trauma studies and the fiction to which it responds institutionalize an inability to address violence.

Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians

Ron Cameron, Editor (with Merrill P. Miller), Professor of Religion
Society of Biblical Literature, 2011
This second volume of studies by members of the Society of Biblical Literature Seminar on Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins reassesses the agenda of modern scholarship on Paul and the Corinthians. The contributors challenge the theory of religion assumed in most New Testament scholarship and adopt a different set of theoretical and historical terms for redescribing the beginnings of the Christian religion. They propose explanations of the relationship between Paul and the recipients of 1 Corinthians; the place of Paul's Christ-myth for his gospel; the reasons for a disinterest in and rejection of Paul's gospel and/or for the reception and attraction of it; and the disjunction between Paul's collective representation of the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians and the Corinthians' own engagement with Paul in mythmaking and social formation, including mutual (mis)translation and (mis)appropriation of the other's discourse and practices.

Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict

Erica Chenoweth (with Maria J. Stephan), Assistant Professor of Government
Columbia University Press, 2011
For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Chenoweth and Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents’ erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. 

The authors conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war.

The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts: Postcolonial Historical Archaeologies

Sarah Croucher, Editor (with Lindsay Weiss), Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Springer, 2011
This book explores the complex interplay of colonial and capital formations throughout the modern world. The editors present a critical approach to this topic, trying to shift discourses in the theoretical framework of historical archaeology of capitalism and colonialism through the use of postcolonial theory. This work does not suggest a new theoretical framework as such, but rather suggests the importance of revising key theoretical terms employed within historical archaeology, arguing for new engagements with postcolonial theory of relevance to all historical archaeologists as the field de-centers from its traditional locations.

The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment

Andrew Curran, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011
This volume examines the Enlightenment-era textualization of the Black African in European thought. Curran rewrites the history of blackness by replicating the practices of 18th-century readers. Surveying French and European travelogues, natural histories, works of anatomy, pro- and anti-slavery tracts, philosophical treatises, and literary texts, he shows how naturalists and philosophes drew from travel literature to discuss the perceived problem of human blackness within the nascent human sciences, describes how a number of now-forgotten anatomists revolutionized the era's understanding of black Africans, and charts the shift of the slavery debate from the moral, mercantile, and theological realms toward that of the "black body" itself. In tracing this evolution, he shows how blackness changed from a mere descriptor in earlier periods into a thing to be measured, dissected, handled, and often brutalized.

Kazan Revisited

Lisa Dombrowski, Editor, Associate Professor of Film Studies
Wesleyan University Press, 2011
Elia Kazan was one of the most important directors of postwar American cinema, renowned for such landmark films as A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden. His reputation has been established by his Academy Award-winning work with actors, his provocative depiction of sexual, moral, and generational conflict, and his controversial decision to name former colleagues as Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Yet much of Kazan’s influential work remains unexplored. Dombrowski has edited a fascinating essay collection that takes a closer look at the social, political, industrial, and aesthetic significance of his films. with contributions from such established film critics and scholars as Jeanine Basinger, Leo Braudy, Mark Harris, Kent Jones, Victor Navasky, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Richard Schickel.

Cavaillé-Coll’s Monumental Organ Project for Saint Peter’s, Rome: Bigger Than Them All

Ronald Ebrecht, Artist-in-Residence, Music
Lexington Books, 2011
Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) is often referred to as the greatest organ builder of all time. The pipe-organ, being the most complicated musical instrument mechanically and tonally, as well as the most expensive, adds significantly to that world's greatest designation. The talents required to be such a person range far from music-making to advanced physics, architecture, and engineering. That, plus the obvious knack to raise vast sums of money. Ebrecht’s book is the story of the quest to build the largest-ever mechanical-action organ in the biggest church at the time. Cavaillé-Coll’s model for that organ and the book he wrote outlining his proposal are the core of Ebrecht’s discussion.

Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances

Peter Gottschalk, Editor (with Mathew N. Schmalz), Professor of Religion
State University of New York Press, 2011
Focusing on boundaries, appropriations, and resistances involved in Western engagements with South Asian religions, this volume considers both the pre- and postcolonial period in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It pays particular attention to contemporary controversies surrounding the study of South Asian religions, including several scholars’ reflections on the contentious reaction to their own work. Other issues explored include British colonial epistemologies, Hegel’s study of South Asia, Hindu-Christian interactions in charismatic Catholicism and the canonization of Francis Xavier, feminist interpretations of the mother of the Buddha, and theological controversies among Muslims in Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Ethics and Animals: An Introduction

Lori Gruen, Professor of Philosophy
Cambridge University Press, 2011
In this comprehensive introduction to animal ethics, Gruen weaves together poignant and provocative case studies with discussions of ethical theory, urging readers to engage critically and empathetically reflect on our treatment of other animals. In clear and accessible language, she provides a survey of the issues central to human-animal relations and a reasoned new perspective on current key debates in the field. Gruen analyses and explains a range of theoretical positions and poses challenging questions that directly encourage readers to hone their ethical reasoning skills and to develop a defensible position about their own practices.

Arnheim for Film and Media Studies

Scott Higgins, Editor, Associate Professor of Film Studies
Routledge, 2011
Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) was a pioneering figure in film studies, best known for his landmark book on silent cinema Film as Art. He ultimately became more famous as a scholar in the fields of art and art history, largely abandoning his theoretical work on cinema. However, his later aesthetic theories on form, perception and emotion should play an important role in contemporary film and media studies. In this enlightening new volume edited by Higgins, an international group of leading scholars revisits Arnheim’s legacy. In 14 essays, the contributors bring Arnheim’s later work on the visual arts to bear on film and media, while also reassessing the implications of his film theory to help refine our grasp of Film as Art and related texts. The contributors discuss a broad range topics including Arnheim’s film writings in relation to modernism, his antipathy to sound as well as color in film, the formation of his early ideas on film against the social and political backdrop of the day, the wider uses of his methodology, and the implications of his work for digital media.

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