Faculty and Staff Books

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Automation and Augmentation: Human Labor as an Essential Complement to Machines

Maureen Ebben PhD

Chapter 1 from Maintaining Social Well-Being and Meaningful Work in a Highly Automated Job Market, edited by Shalin Hai-Jew.

More about this chapter:

This chapter examines the nature of work where human labor is a complement to machines and considers its import for social well-being. While dominant portrayals about the effects of work automation are often characterized by discourses of fear and hype, these have limited utility. The chapter proposes moving beyond fear and hype to consider the ways in which automation alters the organization of work and the human role. It asserts that, although essential, the human role in automation is often obscured. Drawing on the concepts of “fauxtomation,” "heteromation," and human infrastructures, the chapter makes visible hidden forms of human labor in automated work and maintains that a positive strategy for social well-being is the recognition and revaluation of human work in automated processes.
The History of Cartography Volume 4: Cartography in the European Enlightenment

Matthew H. Edney PhD and Mary Sponberg Pedley PhD

Since its launch in 1987, the History of Cartography series has garnered critical acclaim and sparked a new generation of interdisciplinary scholarship. Cartography in the European Enlightenment, the highly anticipated fourth volume, offers a comprehensive overview of the cartographic practices of Europeans, Russians, and the Ottomans, both at home and in overseas territories, from 1650 to 1800.

The social and intellectual changes that swept Enlightenment Europe also transformed many of its mapmaking practices. A new emphasis on geometric principles gave rise to improved tools for measuring and mapping the world, even as large-scale cartographic projects became possible under the aegis of powerful states. Yet older mapping practices persisted: Enlightenment cartography encompassed a wide variety of processes for making, circulating, and using maps of different types. The volume’s more than four hundred encyclopedic articles explore the era’s mapping, covering topics both detailed—such as geodetic surveying, thematic mapping, and map collecting—and broad, such as women and cartography, cartography and the economy, and the art and design of maps. Copious bibliographical references and nearly one thousand full-color illustrations complement the detailed entries.
Creating a Multidirectional Memory for Healing in the Former Yugoslavia

Stephanie C. Edwards PhD

Book is Forthcoming: June 2020

Chapter from Healing and Peacebuilding after War: Transforming Trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina, edited by Julianne Funk and Nancy Good.

About the book:

This book brings together multiple perspectives to examine the strengths and limitations of efforts to promote healing and peacebuilding after war, focusing on the aftermath of the traumatic armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina,

This book begins with a simple premise: trauma that is not transformed is transferred. Drawing on multidisciplinary insights from academics, peace practitioners and trauma experts, this book examines the limitations of our current strategies for promoting healing and peacebuilding after war, while offering inroads into best practices to prevent future violence through psychosocial trauma recovery and the healing of memories. The contributions create a conversation which allows readers to critically rethink the deeper roots and mechanisms of trauma created by the war.

Collectively, the authors provide strategic recommendations to policymakers, peace practitioners, donors and international organizations engaged in work in Bosnia and Herzegovina— strategies that can be applied to other countries rebuilding after war.

This volume will be of much interest to students of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, social psychology, Balkan politics and International Relations in general.
The Ethics of the We in Hope Now: Sartre’s Final Interviews

Julien Murphy PhD

Chapter from The Sartrean Mind, edited by Matthew C. Eshleman and Constance M. Lui.

More about this title:

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His influence extends beyond academic philosophy to areas as diverse as anti-colonial movements, youth culture, literary criticism, and artistic developments around the world. Beginning with an introduction and biography of Jean-Paul Sartre by Matthew C. Eshleman, 42 chapters by a team of international contributors cover all the major aspects of Sartre’s thought in the following key areas:
- Sartre’s philosophical and historical context
- Sartre and phenomenology
- Sartre, existentialism, and ontology
- Sartre and ethics
- Sartre and political theory
- Aesthetics, literature, and biography
- Sartre’s engagements with other thinkers.
The Sartrean Mind is the most comprehensive collection on Sartre published to date. It is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, as well as for those in related disciplines where Sartre’s work has continuing importance, such as literature, French studies, and politics.
Speculative Punishment, Incarceration, and Control in 'Black Mirror'

David P. Pierson PhD

Book chapter from The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Media, edited by Marcus Harmes, Meredith Harmes, and Barbara Harmes.

More about this chapter:

This proposed chapter will conduct a sociocultural and close textual analysis of the following Black Mirror television episodes: “White Bear” (2/18/2013), “White Christmas” (12/16/2014), and “Black Museum” (12/29/2017) to examine their representations of speculative punishment, incarceration, and social and mental control. One guiding research question is whether these representations illustrate present-day issues and concerns in Western criminology and penal theory. Black Mirror (2011-present) is a British science fiction TV anthology series created by Charlie Brooker, which usually focuses on a range of fictional computer-human interface technologies along with their unintended human consequences. In “White Bear” state penal authorities erase the daily memories of a convicted woman in order that she can relive a nightmarish experience of being hunted down by a gang of masked hunters while bystanders act as passive voyeurs watching and recording everything around them. The bystanders turn out to be park visitors enjoying the violent spectacle of the convict’s routine punishment. In “White Christmas” (12/16/2014) a networked, interactive dating coach, who was responsible for a client’s death, is released by the police but is registered as a sex offender, which means that he will be visually and aurally blocked by everyone. He will appear as a red silhouette and will be unable to interact with anyone for the rest of his life. In this same episode, a murder suspect has his consciousness downloaded into a digital copy called a “Cookie,” which enables authorities to incarcerate him within a virtual creation of the crime scene (a snowbound cottage) and to sentence him to such severe, Draconian punishments as having him experience time at the rate of one thousand years per minute and having a Christmas song play on a continuous loop for the time period. The suspect gradually begins to lose his sanity. In “Black Museum,” a convicted murderer agrees to have his post-death consciousness downloaded into a Cookie only to find himself as a hologram in a museum display whereby he continues to experience the agony of the electric chair at the hands of visitors. This study argues that these near future representations are expressive of contemporary neoliberal governance and criminology, public shaming and humiliation, penal tourism, and criminal justice and punishment as entertainment. The episodes’ futuristic punishments exemplify the type of retributive justice that has come to characterize the neoliberal penal turn in criminal justice in the United States and in the United Kingdom over the past three decades. This new punitiveness includes mandatory imprisonment sentences, such as the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law, and zero tolerance school policies to schemes that provide for public humiliation and shaming for those under sentence (e.g., chain gangs) or ex-prisoners (“I am a sex offender” home warning signs). Mike Nellis (2006) affirms that dystopian penal imagery in American science fiction films approximately corresponds with markedly more punitive penal practices for the past 30 years. Some of these films as well as focus on the use of panoptic surveillance and digital technologies for disciplinary control and as agents of confinement express cultural anxieties about the increased capacity of these technologies for social and mental control. The aforementioned Black Mirror episodes intersect with these and other relevant discourses as they serve to imagine a technological future characterized by new forms of governance and social management, spectatorship punishment and confinement.
Cartography: The ideal and its history

Matthew H. Edney PhD

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include.

In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.
Gunpowder and the Creek-British Struggle for Power in the Southeast, 1763–1776

Jennifer Monroe McCutchen PhD
Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision

Brendan McQuade PhD

The United States has poured over a billion dollars into a network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers.” These centers were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism, but politicians, the press, and policy advocates have criticized them for failing on this account. So why do these security systems persist? Pacifying the Homeland travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion, looks beyond the apparent failure of fusion centers, and reveals a broader shift away from mass incarceration and toward a more surveillance- and police-intensive system of social regulation.

Provided with unprecedented access to domestic intelligence centers, Brendan McQuade uncovers how the institutionalization of intelligence fusion enables decarceration without fully addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. The result is a startling analysis that contributes to the debates on surveillance, mass incarceration, and policing and challenges readers to see surveillance, policing, mass incarceration, and the security state in an entirely new light.
Psalm-Singing at Home: The Case of Estienne Mathieu, a Burgundian Protestant

Kathleen M. Ashley PhD

The Biblical psalms have been central to western worship since the Middle Ages, when monks focused their devotions on the psalter and the later medieval laity incorporated them into their Books of Hours.¹ Roger Wieck points out that ‘the great armature for most prayers in the Book of Hours is Psalms. A total of thirty-seven Psalms form the Hours of the Virgin; these did not change. Nor did the seven of the Penitential Psalms or the twenty-two in the Office of the Dead’.² Virginia Reinburg adds that while Books of Hours were ‘largely liturgical’ (that is, drawn from monastic liturgical...
Bestial Oblivion: War, humanism, and ecology in Early Modern England

Benjamin Bertram PhD

Although war is a heterogeneous assemblage of the human and nonhuman, it nevertheless builds the illusion of human autonomy and singularity. Focusing on war and ecology, a neglected topic in early modern ecocriticism, Bestial Oblivion: War, Humanism, and Ecology in Early Modern England shows how warfare unsettles ideas of the human, yet ultimately contributes to, and is then perpetuated by, anthropocentrism. Bertram’s study of early modern warfare’s impact on human-animal and human-technology relationships draws upon posthumanist theory, animal studies, and the new materialisms, focusing on responses to the Anglo-Spanish War, the Italian Wars, the Wars of Religion, the colonization of Ireland, and Jacobean “peace.” The monograph examines a wide range of texts—essays, drama, military treatises, paintings, poetry, engravings, war reports, travel narratives—and authors—Erasmus, Machiavelli, Digges, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Coryate, Bacon—to show how an intricate web of perpetual war altered the perception of the physical environment as well as the ideologies and practices establishing what it meant to be human.
Costs of Corporate Conscience: How Women, Queers, and People of Color Are Paying for Hobby Lobby’s Sincerely-Held Beliefs

Megan Goodwin PhD

Chapter from Religion in the Age of Obama, edited by Juan Marcial Floyd-Thomas and Anthony Pinn.

About the book:

This is the first book to focus on the significance of religion during President Obama's years in the White House. Addressing issues ranging from identity politics, immigration, income inequality, Islamophobia and international affairs, Religion in the Age of Obama explores the religious and moral underpinnings of the Obama presidency and subsequent debates regarding his tenure in the White House. It provides an analysis of Obama's beliefs and their relationship to his vision of public life, as well as the way in which the general ethos of religion and non-religion has shifted over the past decade in the United States under his presidency.

Topics include how Obama has employed religious rhetoric in response to both international and domestic events, his attempt to inhabit a kind of Blackness that comforts and reassures rather than challenges White America, the limits of Christian hospitality within U.S. immigration policy and the racialization of Islam in the U.S. national imagination.

Religion in the Age of Obama shows that the years of the Obama presidency served as a watershed moment of significant reorganization of the role of religion in national public life. It is a timely contribution to debates on religion, race and public life in the United States.
The Boathouse: an Angus Quinn novel

Elaine Lohrman

The Boathouse is a suspenseful historical novel set in New York City during the early 1890s. The story unfolds as Hazel Chapman desperately searches for her missing husband, Lewis Chapman, while protecting their nineteen-year-old daughter, Nellie, from the truth that her father is wanted for murder. Hazel scours the Upper West Side, eventually crossing paths with a kindly Irish policeman, Sergeant Angus Quinn, and his rookie partner, Paulie Abbott. As the pair put their detective skills to work to find the killer before he strikes again, Hazel guards a secret about Lewis and their lives together, and vows to find her husband before the police can apprehend him. While Hazel fights exhaustion and is in danger of losing their family home, Sergeant Quinn makes a startling discovery about the leadership of the Twentieth Precinct police station. He puts his own life and that of his partner in danger as they fight the political powerhouse that controls city hall and the metropolitan police force. This thrilling story, the first in a series of novels featuring Sergeant Quinn and Patrolman Abbott, will compel readers to keep turning the pages right up to the very unexpected ending.
Gender Relations (American Indian)

Jennifer Monroe McCutchen PhD

Entry in The World of Antebellum America: A Daily Life Encyclopedia, edited by Alexandra Kindell.

About the book:

This set provides insight into the lives of ordinary Americans free and enslaved, in farms and cities, in the North and the South, who lived during the years of 1815 to 1860.
Throughout the Antebellum Era resonated the theme of change: migration, urban growth, the economy, and the growing divide between North and South all led to great changes to which Americans had to respond. By gathering the important aspects of antebellum Americans' lives into an encyclopedia, The World of Antebellum America provides readers with the opportunity to understand how people across America lived and worked, what politics meant to them, and how they shaped or were shaped by economics.

Entries on simple topics such as bread and biscuits explore workers' need for calories, the role of agriculture, and gendered divisions of labor, while entries on more complex topics, such as aging and death, disclose Americans' feelings about life itself. Collectively, the entries pull the reader into the lives of ordinary Americans, while section introductions tie together the entries and provide an overarching narrative that primes readers to understand key concepts about antebellum America before delving into Americans' lives in detail.
Hunting (American Indian)

Jennifer Monroe McCutchen PhD

Entry in The World of Antebellum America A Daily Life Encyclopedia, edited by Alexandra Kindell.
About the book:

This set provides insight into the lives of ordinary Americans free and enslaved, in farms and cities, in the North and the South, who lived during the years of 1815 to 1860.
Throughout the Antebellum Era resonated the theme of change: migration, urban growth, the economy, and the growing divide between North and South all led to great changes to which Americans had to respond. By gathering the important aspects of antebellum Americans' lives into an encyclopedia, The World of Antebellum America provides readers with the opportunity to understand how people across America lived and worked, what politics meant to them, and how they shaped or were shaped by economics.

Entries on simple topics such as bread and biscuits explore workers' need for calories, the role of agriculture, and gendered divisions of labor, while entries on more complex topics, such as aging and death, disclose Americans' feelings about life itself. Collectively, the entries pull the reader into the lives of ordinary Americans, while section introductions tie together the entries and provide an overarching narrative that primes readers to understand key concepts about antebellum America before delving into Americans' lives in detail.
Gender Reckonings: New Social Theory and Research

James W. Messerschmidt, Patricia Yancey Martin, Michael A. Messner, and Raewyn Connell

Edited by James W. Messerschmidt, Patricia Yancey Martin, Michael A. Messner, and Raewyn Connell

Since scholars began interrogating the meaning of gender and sexuality in society, this field has become essential to the study of sociology. Gender Reckonings aims to map new directions for understanding gender and sexuality within a more pragmatic, dynamic, and socially relevant framework. It shows how gender relations must be understood on a large scale as well as in intimate detail.

The contributors return to the basics, questioning how gender patterns change, how we can realize gender equality, and how the structures of gender impact daily life. Gender Reckonings covers not only foundational concepts of gender relations and gender justice, but also explores postcolonial patterns of gender, intersectionality, gender fluidity, transgender practices, neoliberalism, and queer theory.

Gender Reckonings

combines the insights of gender and sexuality scholars from different generations, fields, and world regions. The editors and contributors are leading social scientists from six continents, and the book gives vivid accounts of the changing politics of gender in different communities.
The Viability of Digital Spaces as Sites for Transnational Feminist Action and Engagement: Why We Need to Look at Digital Circulation

Jessica Ouellette PhD

Chapter in Composing Feminist Interventions: Activism, Engagement, Praxis.
Thin Rising Vapors

Seth Rogoff ABD, MA

Thin Rising Vapors by Seth Rogoff (author of First, the Raven: A Preface) is a richly psychological novel about enduring yet fragile friendship and the allure of nature and faith.
Environmental Site Plans and Development Review

Robert Sanford

The most effective way to participate in land stewardship and environmental management is to get involved in the review of proposed developments. In smaller communities, this review is primarily done by a planning board or commission made up of volunteer members, guided by professionals in certain aspects such as traffic, historic preservation, civil engineering, water supply, and wastewater disposal. In larger communities, professional planning staff with the assistance of municipal engineers conducts the review, which will then be presented to the planning commission. In either case, everyone—officials, volunteers, reviewers, consultants, neighbors, and the public in general—needs to know what is being proposed. The site plan itself is the primary tool for understanding the proposal.
Dr. Khalil Totah Arab-American Quaker Educator and Palestinian Nationalist Crusader

Amy M. Smith PhD

Born in Ramallah, Palestine, in 1886 Dr. Khalil Totah belonged to a generation of Syrians who grew up with an appreciation for the “modern” spirit that was sweeping the world.They looked forward to a social order that fostered Arab independence, but were also concerned with universal human problems. Totah’s life coincided with a period of tremendous transformation and change in the Middle East. Some historians, most recently Erez Manela, have argued that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson inspired a rising global consciousness and that his rhetoric fostered the spread of anti-colonial movements across the Middle East. Totah and his fellow intellectuals were not so much inspired by Wilson’s words, but rather they viewed them as support of a pre-existing sentiment. Greater Syrians had been developing ideas of freedom and democracy since their cultural and intellectual renaissance in the mid-19th century. Like many peoples across the globe they were not so much taken by Wilson’s “new” vocabulary as they were validated by it. There were many circumstances which influenced the political and nationalist movements of the Middle East. The story of Dr. Khalil Totah provides one small piece of a larger transformation in Syria. His writings show the evolution of Arab nationalism in Palestine during a transformative era. Totah and his contemporaries had an alternate vision of world order shaped by their own social experiences. This study also shows a clear difference between the interests of the United States political and economic elites, who preached about democracy, and intellectuals in emerging nations who sought independence. An examination of Totah’s views on the challenges facing Palestine during his lifetime offers a way to understand the development of Palestinian national consciousness in the first third of the 20th century.
Social Functions

Kathleen M. Ashley PhD

Chapter in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages, Volume 2.
The Cults of Sainte Foy and the Cultural Work of Saints

Kathleen M. Ashley PhD

Bringing together artifacts, texts and practices within an interpretive framework that stresses the cultural work performed by saints, Kathleen Ashley here presents a comparative study of the cults of the medieval Sainte Foy at a number of sites where she was especially venerated. This book analyzes how each cult site produced the saint it needed, appropriating whatever was required to that end. Ashley's approach is thoroughly interdisciplinary, incorporating visual, religious, medieval, and women's/gender studies as well as literary studies and social history. She uses theoretical framework of "cultural work" to analyze how the cult of Sainte Foy was sponsored and received in specific locales across Europe. The book is comprehensive in terms of historical as well as geographical range, tracing the history of the cult from the early Middle Ages into the present day. It also includes historiographic analysis, examining the way the cults of Sainte Foy have been represented in various historical accounts. Ashley's narrative challenges boundary between "elite" and "popular" culture, and complicates the traditional vernacular vs. Latin language binary. A chief aim of the study is to show how "art" objects always operated in conjunction with other cultural texts to construct a saint's cult. The volume is heavily illustrated, showing artifacts such as stained glass windows and wall paintings, which are not readily available from any other source.
A Region Apart: Representations of Maine and Northern New England in Personal Film, 1920-1940

Libby Bischof PhD

Chapter in Amateur Movie Making Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915–1960, edited by Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon.

About the book:

A compelling regional and historical study that transforms our understanding of film history, Amateur Movie Making demonstrates how amateur films and home movies stand as testaments to the creative lives of ordinary people, enriching our experience of art and the everyday. Here we encounter the lyrical and visually expressive qualities of films produced in New England between 1915 and 1960 and held in the collections of Northeast Historic Film, a moving image repository and study center that was established to collect, preserve, and interpret the audiovisual record of northern New England. Contributors from diverse backgrounds examine the visual aesthetics of these films while placing them in their social, political, and historical contexts. Each discussion is enhanced by technical notes and the analyses are also juxtaposed with personal reflections by artists who have close connections to particular amateur filmmakers. These reflections reanimate the original private contexts of the home movies before they were recast as objects of study and artifacts of public history.
Intoxication, Modernity, and Colonialism: Freud’s Industrial Unconscious, Benjamin’s Hashish Mimesis

Dušan I. Bjelić Ph.D.

This book depicts how Freud’s cocaine and Benjamin’s hashish illustrate two critiques of modernity and two messianic emancipations through the pleasures of intoxicating discourse. Freud discovered the “libido” and “unconscious” in the industrial mimetic scheme of cocaine, whereas Benjamin found an inspiration for his critique of phantasmagoria and its variant psychoanalysis in hashish’s mimesis. In addition, as part of the history of colonialism, both drugs generated two distinct colonial discourses and, consequently, two different understandings of the emancipatory powers of pleasure, the unconscious, and dreams. After all, great ideas don't liberate; they intoxicate.
Marsden Hartley's Maine

Donna M. Cassidy Ph.D., Elizabeth Finch, and Randall R. Griffey

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was a well-traveled American modernist painter, poet, and essayist, but it is his life-long artistic engagement with his home state of Maine that defines his career. Maine served as a creative springboard, a locus of memory and longing, a refuge, and a means of communion with other artists, such as Winslow Homer, who painted there. This is the first book to look at the artist's complex relationship with the Pine Tree State, providing a nuanced understanding of Hartley's impressive range in over 80 works, from the early Post-Impressionist interpretations of seasonal change to the late depictions of Mount Katahdin, the most dramatic and enduring series in his oeuvre.00Exhibition: The Met Breuer, New York, USA (14.03-18.06.2017); Colby College Museum, Waterville, USA (18.07-12.11.2017)