To celebrate the end of the academic year, the FAS Reporter invited FAS faculty, researchers, and staff to submit book titles they wrote and published during the past year for the inaugural Summer Reading Roundup. From thought-provoking research and captivating narratives to critical analysis and profound reflections, the Summer Reading Roundup collected a broad range of titles published in 2022-2023 that cater both to scholarly pursuits and summer adventures. Whether you are looking for recommendations for work or for leisure, the compilation below is a testament to the exceptional achievements and collective creativity of the FAS community.
To make corrections or add missing information, email FAS Communications.
Novel and poetry
“To 2040” (2023)
Jorie Graham, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory
In her fifteenth poetry collection, “To 2040”, Jorie Graham plots an apocalyptic world where rain must be translated, silence sings louder than speech, and wired birds parrot recordings of their extinct ancestors. In one poem, the speaker is warned by a clairvoyant that “the American experiment will end in 2030.” Graham shows us multiple potential futures — soundtracked by sirens among the ruins, contemplating the loss of those species who inhabited them and those who named them. An urgent open letter to the future, “To 2040” is narrated by a speaker who reflects on her own mortality.
“The Archivists: Stories” (2023)
Daphne Kalotay, Special Program Instructor, Division of Continuing Education
“The Archivists” are everyday people, but when private losses or the shocks of history set their worlds reeling, they find connection and liberation in surprising, buoyant ways. In this “beautiful, precise and at times bitingly funny” (New York Times Book Review) story collection, the reverberations of survival allow for transcendence and transformation. From the repercussions of the Holocaust and the Communist occupation of Eastern Europe to more recent upheavals and absurdities, “The Archivists” — winner of the Grace Paley Prize — captures our shared search for meaning in an off-kilter world.
TriQuarterly (Northwestern University Press)
“Minor Notes, Volume 1” (2023)
Jesse McCarthy, Assistant Professor of English and of African and African American Studies
Joshua Bennett, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College
“Minor Notes” is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As “Minor Notes” clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradition of the poet as witness, as prophetic voice, as communal bard, and as scholar of the everyday and the miraculous. The poets featured in Volume 1 are George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Anne Spencer, and Angelina Weld Grimké.
Biography and memoir
“A Map of Longings: The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali” (2023)
Manan Kapoor, Graduate Student (Department of English)
Agha Shahid Ali was one of the most celebrated American poets of the latter twentieth century, and his works have touched millions of lives around the world. In this biography, Manan Kapoor charts Ali’s life, his friendships with literary figures such as James Merrill, Salman Rushdie, and Edward Said and draws on unpublished materials and in-depth interviews to reveal the experiences and relationships that informed his poetry.
Yale University Press | HOLLIS
Science, technology, engineering, and math
“Leibniz on Binary: The Invention of Computer Arithmetic” (2022)
Harry R. Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science
Lloyd Strickland, Professor of Philosophy and Intellectual History, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
The first collection of Leibniz’s key writings on the binary system, newly translated, with many previously unpublished in any language.
“The Laboratory Mouse Third Edition” (2023)
Kathleen R. Pritchett-Corning, Director of the Office of Animal Resources, Attending Veterinarian
Mark A. Suckow, Associate Vice President for Research, Attending Veterinarian, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Kentucky
Sara Hashway, Director of the Office of Animal Resources, Attending Veterinarian, and Assistant Research Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado, Boulder
“The Laboratory Mouse” is the most accessible reference on the biology and care of the mouse in research settings. It serves as an ideal quick reference for investigators, technicians, and animal caretakers who care for or use mice in a research setting. This work is helpful to those who need to start research programs using mice since it provides a foundation in their biology, husbandry, and behavior, as well as giving details on subjects such as common research procedures and mouse medicine.
Humanities and social sciences
“They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria” (2022)
Daniel Agbiboa, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies
Accounts of corruption in Africa and the Global South are generally overly simplistic and macro-oriented, and commonly disconnect everyday (petty) corruption from political (grand) corruption. In contrast to this tendency, “They Eat Our Sweat” offers a fresh and engaging look at the corruption complex in Africa through a micro analysis of its informal transport sector, where collusion between state and nonstate actors is most rife. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and Africa’s largest city, Daniel Agbiboa investigates the workaday world of road transport operators as refracted through the extortion racket and violence of transport unions acting in complicity with the state. Steeped in an embodied knowledge of Lagos and backed by two years of thorough ethnographic fieldwork, including working as an informal bus conductor, Agbiboa provides an emic perspective on precarious labour, popular agency and the daily pursuit of survival under the shadow of the modern world system. Corruption, Agbiboa argues, is not rooted in Nigerian culture but is shaped by the struggle to get by and get ahead on the fast and slow lanes of Lagos. The pursuit of economic survival compels transport operators to participate in the reproduction of the very transgressive system they denounce. “They Eat Our Sweat” is not just a book about corruption but also about transportation, politics, and governance in urban Africa.
Oxford University Press | HOLLIS
“Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context” (2022)
Daniel Agbiboa, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies
In “Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency”, Daniel Agbiboa takes African insurgencies back to their routes by providing a transdisciplinary perspective on the centrality of mobility to the strategies of insurgents, state security forces, and civilian populations caught in conflict. Drawing on one of the world’s deadliest insurgencies, the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, this well-crafted and richly nuanced intervention offers fresh insights into how violent extremist organizations exploit forms of local immobility and border porosity to mobilize new recruits, how the state’s “war on terror” mobilizes against so-called subversive mobilities, and how civilian populations in transit are treated as could-be terrorists and subjected to extortion and state-sanctioned violence en route. The multiple and intersecting flows analyzed here upend Eurocentric representations of movement in Africa as one-sided, anarchic, and dangerous. Instead, this book underscores the contradictions of mobility in conflict zones as simultaneously a resource and a burden. Intellectually rigorous yet clear, engaging, and accessible, “Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency” is a seminal contribution that lays bare the neglected linkages between conflict and mobility.
University of Michigan Press | HOLLIS
“Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina” (2022)
Paulina L. Alberto, Professor of African and African American Studies and of History
Celebrities live their lives in constant dialogue with stories about them. But when these stories are shaped by durable racist myths, they wield undue power to ruin lives and obliterate communities. “Black Legend” is the haunting story of an Afro-Argentine, Raúl Grigera (‘el negro Raúl’), who in the early 1900s audaciously fashioned himself into an alluring Black icon of Buenos Aires’ bohemian nightlife, only to have defamatory storytellers unmake him. In this gripping history, Paulina Alberto exposes the destructive power of racial storytelling and narrates a new history of Black Argentina and Argentine Blackness across two centuries. With the extraordinary Raúl Grigera at its center, “Black Legend” opens new windows into lived experiences of Blackness in a ‘White’ nation and illuminates how Raúl’s experience of celebrity was not far removed from more ordinary experiences of racial stories in the flesh.
Cambridge University Press | HOLLIS
“Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine” (2022)
Emily Channell-Justice, Director, Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Ukrainian Research Institute
“Without the State” explores the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests – a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine – through in-depth ethnographic research with leftist, feminist, and student activists in Kyiv. The book discusses the concept of “self-organization” and the notion that if something needs to be done and a person has the competence to do it, then they should simply do it. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, including the author’s first-hand experience of the entirety of the Euromaidan protests, “Without the State” provides a unique analytical account of this crucial moment in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history.
University of Toronto Press | HOLLIS
“The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myŏng-sun The Flower Dream of a Woman Born Too Soon” (2023)
Jung Ja Choi, Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
“The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myŏng-sun” offers an introduction to Korea’s first modern woman writer to publish a collection of creative works, Kim Myŏng-sun (1896–ca. 1954). Despite attempts by male contemporaries to assassinate her character, Kim was an outspoken writer and an early feminist, confronting patriarchal Korean society in essays, plays, poems, and short stories. This volume is the first to offer a detailed analysis in English of Kim’s poetry. The poems examined in this volume can be considered early twentieth-century versions of #MeToo literature, mirroring the harrowing account of her sexual assault, and also subversive challenges to traditional institutions, dealing with themes such as romantic free love, same-sex love, single womanhood, and explicit female desire and passion. “The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myŏng-sun” restores a long-neglected woman writer to her rightful place in the history of Korean literature, shedding light on the complexity of women’s lives in Korea and contributing to the growing interest in modern Korean women’s literature in the West.
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature | HOLLIS
“Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire” (2022)
Caroline Elkins, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
Sprawling across a quarter of the world’s land mass and claiming nearly seven hundred million people, Britain’s twentieth-century empire was the largest empire in human history. For many Britons, it epitomized their nation’s cultural superiority. But what legacy did the island nation deliver to the world? Covering more than two hundred years of history, “Legacy of Violence” reveals an evolutionary and racialized doctrine that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve the nation’s imperial interests. It outlines how ideological foundations of violence were rooted in the Victorian era calls for punishing recalcitrant “natives,” and how over time, its forms became increasingly systematized, culminating in the post-WWII era of decolonization.
“Digital Medieval Studies: Practice and Preservation” (2022)
Sean Gilsdorf, Administrative Director and Lecturer on Medieval Studies
This volume highlights the exciting ways digital methods are expanding and redefining how we understand, represent, and teach the Middle Ages and provides a new model for how this work is cataloged and reused within the scholarly community. The work of its contributors offers valuable insights into how “the digital” continues to shape the questions medievalists ask and the ways they answer them, but also into how those questions and answers can lead to new tools, approaches, and points of reference within the field of digital humanities itself.
“The Collaborative Artist’s Book: Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art” (2023)
Alexandra J. Gold, Preceptor, Harvard College Writing Program
“The Collaborative Artist’s Book” offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present and highlights how the artist’s book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its five case studies engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race.
University of Iowa Press 2023 | HOLLIS
“Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature” (2022)
Annabel Kim, Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures
Readers and critics have long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, “Cacaphonies” reads key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality — a literary object and a reflection on literature itself — without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile.
University of Minnesota Press | HOLLIS
“State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya” (2023)
Egor Lazarev, Academy Scholar, The Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies
“State-Building as Lawfare” explores the use of state and non-state legal systems by both politicians and ordinary people in postwar Chechnya. The book addresses two interrelated puzzles: why do local rulers tolerate and even promote non-state legal systems at the expense of state law, and why do some members of repressed ethnic minorities choose to resolve their everyday disputes using state legal systems instead of non-state alternatives? The book documents how the rulers of Chechnya promote and reinvent customary law and Sharia in order to borrow legitimacy from tradition and religion, increase autonomy from the metropole, and accommodate communal authorities and former rebels. At the same time, the book shows how prolonged armed conflict disrupted the traditional social hierarchies and pushed some Chechen women to use state law, spurring state formation from below.
Cambridge University Press | HOLLIS
“The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance” (2022)
Jamie Martin, Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies
“The Meddlers” is a history of the first international institutions to govern the world economy, which emerged in the wake of the First World War. In a highly unequal world, they faced a new political challenge: was it possible to reach into sovereign states and empires to intervene in domestic economic policies without generating a backlash? “The Meddlers” follows the intense political conflicts provoked by the earliest international efforts to govern capitalism — from Weimar Germany to the Balkans, Nationalist China to colonial Malaya, and the Chilean desert to Wall Street. It shows how the fraught problems of sovereignty and democracy posed by institutions like the IMF are not unique to late twentieth-century globalization, but instead first emerged during an earlier period of global crisis.
Harvard University Press | HOLLIS
“A Miracle Creed: The Principle of Optimality in Leibniz’s Physics and Philosophy” (2022)
Jeffrey McDonough, Professor of Philosophy
This book introduces Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Principle of Optimality and argues that it plays a central role his physics and philosophy, with profound implications for both. Each chapter begins with an introduction to one of Leibniz’s groundbreaking studies in natural philosophy and explores the philosophical implications of optimal form for Leibniz’s broader philosophical system. Individual chapters include discussions of Leibniz’s defense of teleology, his understanding of the nature of bodies, the status of the laws of nature, and his conception of free will. The final chapter explores the legacy of Leibniz’s physics in light of his work on optimal form.
Oxford University Press | HOLLIS
“Saints, Heretics, and Atheists: A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion” (2022)
Jeffrey McDonough, Professor of Philosophy
Does God exist? What is the nature of evil, and where does it come from? Are humans free? Responsible? Immortal? Does it matter? “Saints, Heretics and Atheists” offers a historical introduction to fundamental questions in the philosophy of religion. Ranging from ancient times to the twentieth century, it is divided into twenty-five succinct, chronological chapters. Individual chapters discuss philosophies from history’s greatest thinkers including Plato, Augustine, al-Ghazali, Aquinas, Margarite Porete, Spinoza, Hume, Mary Shepherd, and Nietzsche. The book closes with an exploration of William James’s defense of the right to believe, the possible limitations of that right, and the nature of philosophical progress.
Oxford University Press | HOLLIS
“The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market” (2023)
Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science
Erik M. Conway, Historian, California Institute of Technology
In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big government” and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labor. They detail the ploys that turned hardline economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman into household names; recount the libertarian roots of the Little House on the Prairie books; and tune into the General Electric-sponsored TV show that beamed free-market doctrine to millions and launched Ronald Reagan’s political career. By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican and Democratic administrations, giving us a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and a baleful response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy.
Bloomsbury Publishing | HOLLIS
“Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art of K-Pop” (2023)
Martin Puchner, Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature
What good are the arts? Why should we care about the past? For millennia, humanity has sought to understand and transmit to future generations not just the “know-how” of life, but the “know-why”—the meaning and purpose of our existence, as expressed in art, architecture, religion, and philosophy. This crucial passing down of knowledge has required the radical integration of insights from the past and from other cultures. In “Culture”, acclaimed author, professor, and public intellectual Martin Puchner takes us on a breakneck tour through pivotal moments in world history, providing a global introduction to the arts and humanities.
“The Returns to Power: A Political Theory of Economic Inequality” (2023)
Thomas F. Remington, Visiting Professor of Government, Harvard University
“The Returns to Power: A Political Theory of Economic Inequality” argues that the high and rising economic inequality in the United States is the result of political choices of the past 40 years. The book examines the market reforms in Russia and China to shed light on the surge of inequality in the US. The book also discusses the postwar German “social market economy.” The book explains why rent-seeking fuels a self-reinforcing symbiotic relationship between wealthy economic interests and government. It shows how inequality fuels polarization and corrodes democracy. Finally, it proposes a new conception of economic and political liberalism.
“The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel and the Passage from Heaven to History” (2022)
Michael Rosen, Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government
Once in the West, our lives were bound by religion. Then we were guided out of the darkness of faith, we are often told, by the cold light of science and reason. Michael Rosen explains the limits of this story, showing that many modern and apparently secular ways of seeing the world were in fact profoundly shaped by religion. A seamless blend of philosophy and intellectual history, “The Shadow of God” is a profound exploration of secular modernity’s theistic inheritance.
Harvard University Press | HOLLIS
“From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities” (2022)
Alison Sant, Instructor, Division of Continuing Education
For decades, American cities have experimented with ways to remake themselves in response to climate change. These efforts, often driven by grassroots activism, offer valuable lessons for transforming the places we live. In “From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities”, design expert Alison Sant focuses on the unique ways in which US cities are working to mitigate and adapt to climate change while creating equitable and livable communities. She shows how, from the ground up, we are raising the bar to make cities places in which we don’t just survive, but where all people have the opportunity to thrive. The efforts discussed in the book demonstrate how urban experimentation and community-based development are informing long-term solutions. Sant shows how US cities are reclaiming their streets from cars, restoring watersheds, growing forests, and adapting shorelines to improve people’s lives while addressing our changing climate. The best examples of this work bring together the energy of community activists, the organization of advocacy groups, the power of city government, and the reach of federal environmental policy. Sant presents 12 case studies, drawn from research and over 90 interviews with people who are working in these communities to make a difference. For example, advocacy groups in Washington, DC are expanding the urban tree canopy and offering job training in the growing sector of urban forestry. In New York, transit agencies are working to make streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians while shortening commutes. In San Francisco, community activists are creating shoreline parks while addressing historic environmental injustice. “From the Ground Up” is a call to action. When we make the places we live more climate resilient, we need to acknowledge and address the history of social and racial injustice. Advocates, non-profit organizations, community-based groups, and government officials will find examples of how to build alliances to support and embolden this vision together. Together we can build cities that will be resilient to the challenges ahead.
“Sing and Sing On: Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora” (2022)
Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies
“Sing and Sing On” is a study of the forced migration of musicians out of the Horn of Africa dating from the 1974 Ethiopian revolution. Musicians were among the first to depart, their lives shattered by revolutionary violence and civil war. “Sing and Sing On” traces the challenges musicians faced and the critical role they played in building new communities abroad. Drawing on recollections of dozens of musicians and highlighting their many artistic and social initiatives, the book shows ways in which musicians are uniquely positioned to serve a sentinel role as both guardians and challengers of cultural heritage.
University of Chicago Press | HOLLIS
“Segregation and Resistance in the Landscapes of the Americas” (2023)
Thaïsa Way, Director of Garden and Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks
Eric Avila, Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles
With a focus on the Americas, the essays in this volume move across time and space to ask questions about place-making and community building. They explore landscapes and their hidden struggles between segregation and resistance. Drawing upon the collective work of the “Segregation and Resistance in America’s Urban Landscapes” symposium organized by Dumbarton Oaks in 2020, these histories of segregation and resistance consider how cultural and spatial practices of separation, identity, response, and revolt are shaped by place and, in turn, inform practices of place-making.
Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press | HOLLIS
“Dogs in the Athenian Agora” (Agora Picture Book 28, 2022)
Colin M. Whiting, Managing Editor of Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks
In this book, readers are shown how dogs fit into ancient Greek society with material from the last 90 years of excavations at the Athenian Agora by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Topics range from how ancient Greeks hunted with dogs and what they considered a proper dog’s name to the excavation of tender burials in the Agora and the sacrifice of dogs to the gods of the underworld. Anyone curious about dogs in antiquity and how they relate to dogs in the present day will be sure to find interesting material in this portable, affordable text.
American School of Classical Studies at Athens | HOLLIS
Education, culture, and society
“Museum Archives: Practice, Issues, Advocacy” (2023)
Sarah R. Demb, Senior Records Manager/Archivist, Harvard University Archives
Articulates museum archives work and impact, positioning archives as an indispensable knowledge hub within the organization. Twenty-seven records professionals, including Sarah R. Demb, now Senior Records Manager/Archivist, Harvard University Archives (HL AASC division), provide guidance on and strategies for effective information, records and archives management. Demb’s chapter is entitled “Information Governance: The Importance of Being an Archivist-Records Manager.” Contributing editor Harvard Art Museum Senior Archivist/Records Manager Megan Schwenke co-authored chapters on advocacy and oral history. Of interest to FAS museums staff, as well as FAS/GSAS professors and students across many disciplines and DCE’s Museum Studies certificate and degree programs.
Society of American Archivists | HOLLIS
Arts and design
“Poems of Our Climate” (2022)
Matt Saunders, Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies
Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities
This publication of artwork engages painting as a time-based medium through cameraless photography, animation, and innovative painting and printmaking processes. Focusing on experimentations with color, this volume ranges from Saunders’ first color film, Century Rolls (2012), to his more recent large-scale video installations. Moving image folds together with painting, photography, and print, enlivening our relationship to images and their capacity for uncanny returns, echoes, and ghosts. Alongside the images of work are new writing by Saunders as well as an essay by Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Jennifer L. Roberts.
Young Readers
“The Memory Eater” (2023)
Rebecca Mahoney, East Asian Languages Program Coordinator
A teenage girl struggles to make things right when she inadvertently releases her family legacy — the memory-devouring monster they’ve held captive for over 200 years — loose on her little beach town.
Razorbill/Penguin Young Readers
“The Streets of Newtowne: A Story of Cambridge, MA” (2023)
Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies
This is the story of Cambridge MA, the first planned city in North America from its Indigenous origins to the present, as told from the vantage of its varied pathways, waterways, and streets. The text engages the legacy of Indigenous life, Puritan life, the American Revolution, slavery, the Civil War, and the city’s industrial growth, new immigrant vitality, and famed universities. We witness the forces that made this city, state, and country what it became. Written for 4th-6th grade students and their adults, area residents and visitors in eight period-specific chapters and accompanying artwork by GSD graduate, Jim Blake.