Faculty and Staff Books

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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 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.
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.
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)
All About Process: The Theory and Discourse of Modern Artistic Labor

Kim Grant PhD

In recent years, many prominent and successful artists have claimed that their primary concern is not the artwork they produce but the artistic process itself. In this volume, Kim Grant analyzes this idea and traces its historical roots, showing how changing concepts of artistic process have played a dominant role in the development of modern and contemporary art.

This astute account of the ways in which process has been understood and addressed examines canonical artists such as Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, and De Kooning, as well as philosophers and art theorists such as Henri Focillon, R. G. Collingwood, and John Dewey. Placing “process art” within a larger historical context, Grant looks at the changing relations of the artist’s labor to traditional craftsmanship and industrial production, the status of art as a commodity, the increasing importance of the body and materiality in art making, and the nature and significance of the artist’s role in modern society. In doing so, she shows how process is an intrinsic part of aesthetic theory that connects to important contemporary debates about work, craft, and labor.

Comprehensive and insightful, this synthetic study of process in modern and contemporary art reveals how artists’ explicit engagement with the concept fits into a broader narrative of the significance of art in the industrial and postindustrial world.
Catastrophic Consequences: The Link Between Rural Opioid Use and HIV/AIDS

Jennifer Lenardson MHS and Mary Lindsey Smith PhD, MSW

This chapter from HIV/AIDS in Rural Communities compares the rural–urban prevalence of HIV and opioid use, treatment, and harm reduction, and highlights efforts to control HIV and opioid use in rural states and communities. Rural persons who use opioids appear to have lower perceived risks of contracting HIV and lower perceived consequences associated with heroin use. Close social networks in rural communities and high-risk sex and injection drug use practices may facilitate exposure and transmission of HIV. Rural persons who use opioids may experience numerous potential barriers to HIV and substance abuse treatment and harm reduction activities. Given the challenges of studying a small population of opioid users and dealing with confidential information like HIV status and drug use, studies comparing rural and urban persons within the same state or nationwide will be important going forward.
First, the Raven: A Preface

Seth Rogoff

Sy Kirschbaum has spent almost twenty years in Prague translating legendary Czech dissident Jan Horak’s samizdat masterpiece, Blue, Red, Gray. On the cusp of finishing, he is called back to his Maine hometown to see his troubled former lover, Ida Fields, now the wife of their childhood friend Gabe Slatky. But before he can see her, Sy must meet with Gabe for an evening at a local bar, an encounter that becomes a test of their old friendship and their dueling accounts of reality. In the conversation that follows, narratives of past and present—of art and life—interweave with perfect inevitability, yet with unpredictable, even shocking consequences, spiraling Sy and Gabe into confusion, doubt, and despair, without quite eroding, perhaps, the possibility of hope.

First, the Raven: A Preface is a quietly yet profoundly radical work, as ingenious as a print by Escher or a Möbius strip: the Reader must glide along its whole immaculately ramified length before realizing how deeply life, despite its unceasing, nearly flawless appearance of normalcy, is upside down.
Walking

Henry David Thoreau and Adam Tuchinsky

Introduction by Adam Tuchinsky

"In Wildness is the preservation of the World," wrote Henry David Thoreau in his iconic deathbed essay "Walking." Published posthumously in 1862, "Walking" became a seminal influence in the environmental movement. "Above all," wrote Thoreau, "we cannot afford not to live in the present." He extolled walking as a delightful and necessary idleness, an antidote to the burdens of civilization, a means of immersing ourselves in nature and awakening to the moment. "Walking" is widely recognized as Thoreau's "other" masterpiece, Walden in a more concise form. Each reading of "Walking" offers new epiphanies from a writer and thinker who, two centuries after his birth in 1817, remains a towering figure in American nature writing. In the introduction to this book, Adam Tuchinsky accessibly and engagingly unpacks the essay's nineteenth-century associations and highlights the startling modernity of its sentiments.
Brush, Seal and Abacus: Troubled Vitality in Late Ming China’s Economic Heartland, 1500–1644

Jie Zhao PhD

This book is a study of the social and cultural change in Ming China's lower Yangzi delta region from about 1500 to 1644. It takes three social groups—literati, scholar-officials, and merchants—as the framework for discussing the political, socio-economic, and cultural forces that coalesced and reinforced one another to influence and facilitate the region's change. A still wider perspective reveals how the region's political ties with the state and commercial links with external markets impacted the region for better and for worse. The book also discusses the literati's reflection and discourse, which their participation in the change generated, on the issues of morality, money, politics, and disorder. The book evokes the richly textured social and cultural life of Ming China's heartland in an age of commercial and cultural vigor, which then descended into distress and despair. For scholars and for others conversant with Chinese history, and Ming history in particular, the extensive use of literati sources and the references to contemporary scholarship will be of interest.
Maine Photography: A History, 1840-2015

Elizabeth M. Bischof, Susan Danly, and Earle G. Shettleworth Jr.

Maine has always played a rich and varied role in the art of photography. For over a century, photographers, like other artists, have made their way to Maine to capture the natural beauty and human culture of the state. So, too, have many photographers come from Maine, and many contributions by Mainers have been made to the medium. Maine in Photography is the first comprehensive overview of the history of photography in the state. Providing basic knowledge of the most important people and institutions to have promoted photography, this volume also studies the ways in which photography has informed the understanding of the social and cultural history of Maine.

Beginning with the earliest daguerreotype portraits of the 1840s, this history traces the growth of the medium—emphasizing key contributions, such as the Stanley brothers’ invention of the dry plate process—through to the present. Key topics addressed throughout the book include the importance of photography in documenting labor and economic life, the close relationship between photography and the growth of tourism, and the role of Maine photographers in advancing the medium as a fine art form. Published in conjunction with the Maine Photo Project, this is a unique and timely addition to the body of work on the importance of Maine to American art.
Seaweed in Health and Disease Prevention

Joel Fleurence and Ira Levine

Seaweed in Health and Disease Prevention presents the potential usage of seaweed, macroalgae, and their extracts for enhancing health and disease. The book explores the possibilities in a comprehensive way, including outlining how seaweed can be used as a source of macronutrients and micronutrients, as well as nutraceuticals. The commercial value of seaweed for human consumption is increasing year-over-year, and some countries harvest several million tons annually. This text lays out the properties and effects of seaweeds and their use in the food industry, offering a holistic view of the ability of seaweed to impact or effect angiogenesis, tumors, diabetes and glucose control, oxidative stress, fungal infections, inflammation and infection, the gut, and the liver.
- Combines foundational information and nutritional context, offering a holistic approach to the relationship between sea vegetables, diet, nutrition, and health
- Provides comprehensive coverage of health benefits, including sea vegetables as sources of nutraceuticals and their specific applications in disease prevention, such as angiogenesis, diabetes, fungal infections, and others
- Includes Dictionary of Terms, Key Facts, and Summary points in each chapter to enhance comprehension
- Includes information on toxic varieties and safe consumption guidelines to supplement basic coverage of health benefits
Experiencing Music Composition in Grades 3-5

Michele Kaschub and Janice Smith

This book provides a unique and practical series of materials that help music teachers connect music education to young composers' everyday emotions and activities. Authors Michele Kaschub and Janice Smith, both veteran music educators, offer new ways to promote not only creative intuition in children but also independent thought, preparing students for a fulfilling relationship with music.
Masculinities in the Making: From the Local to the Global

James Messerschmidt PhD

In Masculinities in the Making, James W. Messerschmidt unravels the mysteries surrounding the question of how masculinities are actually “made.” One of the most respected scholars on the subject of masculinities, Messerschmidt brings together three seemingly disparate groups—wimps, genderqueers, and U.S. presidents—to examine what insight each has to offer our understanding of masculinities. The book is unique in its coverage, including a revised structured action theory; an intersectional analysis of sex, gender, and sexuality; and an examination of the differences among masculinities from the local to the global. Messerschmidt provides a fresh, accessible, and provocative argument that significantly advances our knowledge on masculinities.
Masculinities, Structure, and Hegemony

James B. Messerschmidt PhD and Stephen Tomsen PhD

Chapter from The Routledge Companion to Criminological Theory and Concepts.

A comprehensive one-stop reference text, this Companion will find a place on every bookshelf, whether it be that of a budding scholar or a seasoned academic. Comprising over a hundred concise and authoritative essays written by leading scholars in the field, this volume explains in a clear and inviting way the emergence, context, evolution and current status of key criminological theories and conceptual themes. The Companion is divided into six historical and thematic parts, each introduced by the editors and containing a selection of accessible and engaging short essays written specifically for this text: Foundations of Criminological Thought and Contemporary Revitalizations; The Emergence and Growth of American Criminology; From Appreciation to Critique; Late Critical Criminologies and New Directions; Punishment and Security; Geographies of Crime Comprehensive cross-referencing between entries will provide the reader with signposts to later developments, to critiques and to associated theoretical developments explored within the book and lists of further reading in every entry will encourage independent thinking and study. This book is an essential reference to criminology students at all levels and is the perfect companion for courses on criminological theory.
The Politics of Transindividuality

Jason Read Ph.D.

The Politics of Transindividuality re-examines social relations and subjectivity through the concept of transindividuality. Transindividuality is understood as the mutual constitution of individuality and collectivity, and as such it intersects with politics and economics, philosophical speculation and political practice. While the term transindividuality is drawn from the work of Gilbert Simondon, this book views it broadly, examining such canonical figures as Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, as well as contemporary debates involving Etienne Balibar, Bernard Stiegler, and Paolo Virno. Through these intersecting aspects and interpretations of transindividuality the book proposes to examine anew the intersection of politics and economics through their mutual constitution of affects, imagination, and subjectivity.
Vexation Lullaby

Justin Tussing

Peter Silver is a young doctor treading water in the wake of a breakup a-man whose girlfriend called him a mama's boy and whose best friend considers him a homebody, a squanderer of adventure. But when he receives an unexpected request for a house call, he obliges, only to discover that his new patient is the aging, chameleonic rock star Jimmy Cross. Soon Peter is compelled to join the mysteriously Ailing celebrity, his band, and his entourage as they travel from state to state. On the road the supposed first physician embedded in a rock tour is thrust into a way of life that embraces disorder and risk rather than order and discipline. Trailing the band at every tour stop is Arthur Pennyman, Cross's number-one fan. Pennyman has not missed a performance in twenty years, sacrificing his family and job to chronicle every show on his website. Cross insists that being a fan is how we teach ourselves to love, and, in the end, Pennyman does learn. And when he hears a mythic, as-yet-unperformed song, he starts to piece together the puzzle of Peter's role in Cross's past
Future Nostalgia: Performing David Bowie

Shelton Waldrep PhD

Although David Bowie has famously characterized himself as a "leper messiah," a more appropriate moniker might be "rock god": someone whose influence has crossed numerous sub-genres of popular and classical music and can at times seem ubiquitous. By looking at key moments in his career (1972, 1977-79, 1980-83, and 1995-97) through several lenses-theories of sub-culture, gender/sexuality studies, theories of sound, post-colonial theory, and performance studies Waldrep examines Bowie's work in terms not only of his auditory output but his many reinterpretations of it via music videos, concert tours, television appearances, and occasional movie roles. Future Nostalgia looks at all aspects of Bowie's career in an attempt to trace Bowie's contribution to the performative paradigms that constitute contemporary rock music.
The Dissolution of Place: Architecture, Identity, and the Body

Shelton Waldrep PhD

Postmodern architecture - with its return to ornamentality, historical quotation, and low-culture kitsch - has long been seen as a critical and popular anodyne to the worst aspects of modernist architecture: glass boxes built in urban locales as so many interchangeable, generic anti-architectural cubes and slabs. This book extends this debate beyond the modernist/postmodernist rivalry to situate postmodernism as an already superseded concept that has been upended by deconstructionist and virtual architecture as well as the continued turn toward the use of theming in much new public and corporate space. It investigates architecture on the margins of postmodernism -- those places where both architecture and postmodernism begin to break down and to reveal new forms and new relationships. The book examines in detail not only a wide range of architectural phenomena such as theme parks, casinos, specific modernist and postmodernist buildings, but also interrogates architecture in relation to identity, specifically Native American and gay male identities, as they are reflected in new notions of the built environment. In dealing specifically with the intersection between postmodern architecture and virtual and filmic definitions of space, as well as with theming, and gender and racial identities, this book provides provides ground-breaking insights not only into postmodern architecture, but into spatial thinking in general
Windscapes: A Global Perspective on Wind Power

James Aber, Susan Aber, and Firooza Pavri

Wind power has emerged in the twenty-first century as a viable and significant component of global energy production. And while embraced in some sectors, resistance remains to its full implementation in other situations.

Windscape is the authors' term for the variety of elements that feed in to the harnessing of wind power. They include the combination of local climate and geography, environmental and ecological conditions; the mix of public policies; human land use and available infrastructure. Just as a variety of factors combine to create a landscape, so these factors combine, the authors argue, to create a windscape.

In developing the concept, the authors look at the history of wind energy and its modern emergence as a viable power source; the technology of converting wind into electricity; public policy as regards wind power. Importantly, the authors do not shy away from examining some of the environmental and aesthetic negatives attached to the subject of wind power. Case studies illustrating the authors' arguments are derived from Europe, Asia and the USA, and the book concludes with a review of the current status of wind power. This book will be particularly useful to students on all kinds of renewables/sustainability courses, as well as for researchers, educators and developers working in the general area of wind engineering.
Hogarth's Art of Animal Cruelty: Satire, Suffering and Pictorial Propaganda

Piers Bierne PhD

This book analyses the animal images used in William Hogarth's art, demonstrating how animals were variously depicted as hybrids, edibles, companions, emblems of satire and objects of cruelty. Beirne offers an important assessment of how Hogarth's various audiences reacted to his gruesome images and ultimately what was meant by 'cruelty'.
Lizzie Borden on Trial : Murder, Ethnicity, and Gender

Joseph A. Conforti

Most people could probably tell you that Lizzie Borden "took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks," but few could say that, when tried, Lizzie Borden was acquitted, and fewer still, why. In Joseph A. Conforti's engrossing retelling, the case of Lizzie Borden, sensational in itself, also opens a window on a time and place in American history and culture.

Surprising for how much it reveals about a legend so ostensibly familiar, Conforti's account is also fascinating for what it tells us about the world that Lizzie Borden inhabited. As Conforti--himself a native of Fall River, the site of the infamous murders--introduces us to Lizzie and her father and step-mother, he shows us why who they were matters almost as much to the trial's outcome as the actual events of August 4, 1892. Lizzie, for instance, was an unmarried woman of some privilege, a prominent religious woman who fit the profile of what some characterized as a "Protestant nun." She was also part of a class of moneyed women emerging in the late 19th century who had the means but did not marry, choosing instead to pursue good works and at times careers in the helping professions. Many of her contemporaries, we learn, particularly those of her class, found it impossible to believe that a woman of her background could commit such a gruesome murder.

As he relates the details, known and presumed, of the murder and the subsequent trial, Conforti also fills in that background. His vividly written account creates a complete picture of the Fall River of the time, as Yankee families like the Bordens, made wealthy by textile factories, began to feel the economic and cultural pressures of the teeming population of native and foreign-born who worked at the spindles and bobbins. Conforti situates Lizzie's austere household, uneasily balanced between the well-to-do and the poor, within this social and cultural milieu--laying the groundwork for the murder and the trial, as well as the outsize reaction that reverberates to our day. As Peter C. Hoffer remarks in his preface, there are many popular and fictional accounts of this still-controversial case, "but none so readable or so well-balanced as this."
Strip Cultures: Finding America in Las Vegas

Stacy M. Jameson, Karen Klugman, Jane Kuenz PhD, and Susan Willis

On the Las Vegas Strip, blockbuster casinos burst out of the desert, billboards promise "hot babes," actual hot babes proffer complimentary drinks, and a million happy slot machines ring day and night. It’s loud and excessive, but, as the Project on Vegas demonstrates, the Strip is not a world apart. Combining written critique with more than one hundred photographs by Karen Klugman, Strip Cultures examines the politics of food and water, art and spectacle, entertainment and branding, body and sensory experience. In confronting the ordinary on America’s most famous four-mile stretch of pavement, the authors reveal how the Strip concentrates and magnifies the basic truths and practices of American culture where consumerism is the stuff of life, digital surveillance annuls the right to privacy, and nature—all but destroyed—is refashioned as an element of decor.
Why be Moral?

Robert B. Louden Ph.D. and Beatrix Himmelmann

What reasons do we have to be moral, and are these reasons more compelling than the reasons we have to pursue non-moral projects? Ever since the Sophists first raised this question, it has been a focal point of debate. Why be Moral? is a collection of new essays on this fundamental philosophical problem, written by an international team of leading scholars in the field.