(courtesy of AdobeStock)
In addition to our Chapter & Verse feature on Michelle T. King, enjoy more books in the fall 2024 issue. Read the monthly “Bookmark This” feature by searching those terms on the College website.
Outraged: Why We Fight about Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground (Penguin Random House, January 2025) by Kurt Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience. Gray offers readers a groundbreaking new perspective on the moral mind that rewrites our understanding of where moral judgments come from — and how we can overcome the feelings of outrage that so often divide us. He draws on groundbreaking research and fascinating stories to provide a new explanation for our moral outrage and unpacks how to best bridge divides.
Ugly Productions: An Aesthetics of Greek Drama (University of Michigan Press, February 2025) by A.C. “Al” Duncan, assistant professor classics. Amidst a culture otherwise obsessed with beauty, the Greek theater provided a unique space for Athenians to play with ugliness — to try these anti-ideals on for size. Such imaginative play was considered dangerous by some, such as Plato, who feared its corrupting influence. Others, including Aristotle, saw the theater’s provocation and release of emotions as educational and even therapeutic. Duncan reframes the Greek concept of “the ugly” not as mere “anti-beauty,” but as an affective disposition positively associated with such painful emotions as pity, fear, grief and abjection.
One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion that Conquered America (Norton) by Benjamin C. Waterhouse, professor of history. What makes the dream of self-employment so alluring, so pervasive in today’s world? Waterhouse offers a provocative argument: the modern cult of the hustle is a direct consequence of economic failures — bad jobs, stagnant wages and inequality — since the 1970s. With original research, he traces a new narrative history of business in America, populated with vivid characters — from the activists, academics and work-from-home gurus who hailed business ownership as our economic salvation to the upstarts who took the plunge.
The Rebirth of Suspense: Slowness and Atmosphere in Cinema (Columbia University Press) by Rick Warner, associate professor and director of film studies in the department of English and comparative literature. In Warner’s wide-ranging book, he offers a redefinition of suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in the contemporary films that have been called “slow cinema.” He shows how slowness builds suspense through atmospheric immersion, narrative sparseness and the withholding of information, causing viewers to oscillate among boredom, curiosity and dread. He also investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and how suspense has changed in the era of digital streaming.
Monteverdi’s Voices: A Poetics of the Madgrigal (Oxford University Press) by Tim Carter, David G. Frey Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus. Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) was the most significant composer working in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy. Carter’s book offers the first comprehensive survey of the madrigals that he published in eight books between 1587 and 1638 (a ninth was issued posthumously). These are settings of Italian love-poetry by Petrarch, Tasso, Guarini and Marino, among others. Read a music department Q&A on the book.
Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State (UNC Press) by Kelly Alexander, assistant professor and George B. Tindall Fellow of American Studies. On a fragile planet with spreading food insecurity, food waste is a political and ethical problem. Examining the collaborative, sometimes scrappy institutional and community efforts to recuperate and redistribute food waste in Brussels, Belgium, Alexander reveals that it is also an opportunity for new forms of sociality. Read a Bookmark This feature on the book.
Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys toward French and American Selfhood (UNC Press) by Lloyd S. Kramer, professor of history emeritus. Traveling to Unknown Places presents a compelling analysis of how French and American writers reshaped their personal and collective identities as they traveled in foreign countries after the social upheavals of the 18th-century Atlantic revolutions. Delving into the experiences of renowned figures like Flora Tristan and Margaret Fuller alongside lesser-known postrevolutionary travelers, this book illuminates how cross-cultural encounters pushed writers to redefine their views of nationality, language, race, slavery, gender, religion, science and political ideologies.
Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir (UNC Press) by Bland Simpson, Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing. Through his long, celebrated writing career, Simpson has earned a reputation as the bard of North Carolina’s coasts and sound country. Here, for the first time, he trains his attention on Clover Garden, the Piedmont community where he has lived for some 50 years. With a naturalist’s eye, a storyteller’s mind, and a poet’s soul, Simpson guides readers into a deep engagement with the Piedmont, both as a material place and as an idea. Read a Bookmark This feature on the book.
Graveyard Shift: A Novella (Flatiron Books) by M.L. Rio (dramatic art and English ‘80, creative writing minor.) Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story. One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?
Devil Makes Three: A Novel (Flatiron Books) by Ben Fountain (English ’80) When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship and an international embargo threatening to destroy even the country’s most powerful players, some are looking to gain an advantage in the chaos — and others are just looking to make it through another day. Fountain delivered this fall’s Thomas Wolfe Lecture.
On the Way to Theory (Duke University Press) by Lawrence Grossberg, professor emeritus of communication. Grossberg introduces the major ways of thinking that provide the backstory for contemporary Western theory. Asking readers to “think about thinking,” Grossberg traces cultural and critical theory’s foundations from the contested enlightenments to modern and postmodern conceptualizations of power, experience, language and existence.
The Christian Origins of Tolerance (Oxford University Press) by Jed W. Atkins, director and dean of the School of Civic Life and Leadership. Setting aside the standard liberal history, The Christian Origins of Tolerancerecovers tolerance’s beginnings in a forgotten tradition forged by North African Christian thinkers of the first five centuries CE in critical conversation with one another — St. Paul, the rival tradition of Stoicism, and the political and legal thought of the wider Roman world.
Unmaking Russia’s Abortion Culture: Family Planning and the Struggle for a Liberal Biopolitics (Vanderbilt University Press) by Michele Rivkin-Fish, associate professor of anthropology. As the predominant form of birth control in Soviet society, abortion reflected key paradoxes of state socialism: women held formal equality but lacked basic needs such as contraceptives. With market reforms, Russians enjoyed new access to Western contraceptives and new pressures to postpone childbearing until economically self-sufficient. Rivkin-Fish examines the creative strategies of Russians who promoted family planning in place of routine abortion.
The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture (Wayne State University Press, December 2024) by Gabrielle Anna Berlinger and Ruth von Bernuth. Berlinger is an associate professor of American studies and folklore; Von Bernuth is a professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures. In museums, synagogues, antique stores and personal collections, Jewish objects are gathered, studied and passed down as material representations of a culture and faith. What defines these items as “Jewish,” and how does an item acquire or lose this characteristic throughout its life? This collection aims to answer these questions and reveal the life histories of Jewish things.
The Art of Diplomacy: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements that Changed the World (Rowan and Littlefield Publishers) by Stuart E. Eizenstat (political science ’64), former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union. In one readable volume, diplomat and negotiator Stuart E. Eizenstat covers every major contemporary international agreement, from the treaty to end the Vietnam War to the Kyoto Protocols and the Iranian Nuclear Accord. Written from the perspective that only a participant in top level negotiations can bring, Eizenstat recounts that events that led up to the negotiations, the drama that took place around the table and lessons from successful and unsuccessful strategies and tactics. The volume is based on interviews with over 60 key figures in American diplomacy. Read a story on Eizenstat’s visit to Carolina and his new book.
Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and its Legacies (The University of Chicago Press, January 2025) by Maggie M. Cao, David G. Frey associate professor in the department of art and art history. Painting US Empire is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and U.S. imperialism around the globe in the 19th century. Cao examines how artists agreed with or resisted ascendant imperialism, offering new readings of canonical works, including landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lives of imported goods, genre painting and ethnographic portraiture. Read a UNC Research Stories article on the book.
Published in the Fall 2024 issue | Chapter & Verse
Read More
When graduate students make all the difference
Larry Stacey (B.S. ’62, Ph.D. ’68) created the Vic and…
New faces on the dean’s leadership team
This summer, the College’s Dean’s Office welcomed two new leaders…