About the author: Nathan (she/they) is a Black transfemme writer. She is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder whose research explores Black transfemininity, speculative fictions and temporality. Their debut chapbook, small colossus, was published in 2021, and their fiction was shortlisted for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. She was a 2023 Lambda Literary Fellow in poetry.

About the book: "Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility."

To be released April 4, 2024

For more information on Dr. Moore's new book and a for a curated playlist to accompany the book .

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About the author: Kristie Soares is an Assistant Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I am also a performance artist. Both my research and my performance work explore queerness in Caribbean and Latinx communities.

About the book: Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, ������́������&�Բ�����;in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take political violence seriously.

Daring and original,  examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle.

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About the author: Julie Carr is a Professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the Department of English where she teaches courses in poetry and poetics from the eighteenth century to the present, and the chair of the Women and Gender studies department. A former dancer, she now collaborates regularly with dance-artist K.J. Holmes, and has created collaborative works with many other artists, dancers, and filmmakers. With Tim Roberts she helps run Counterpath, an independent literary press and a bookstore/gallery/performance space/community garden in Denver.

About the book:

"Populism has become a global movement associated with nationalism and strong-man politicians, but its root causes remain elusive. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts exposes one deep root in the soil of the American Great Plains. Julie Carr traces her own family’s history through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism’s tendency toward racism and exclusion.

Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: property, personhood, exclusion, and belonging. While recent books have taken seriously the experiences of poor whites in rural America, they haven’t traced the story to its origins. Carr connects Kem’s journey with that of America’s white establishment and its fury of nativism in the 1920s. Presenting crucial narratives of Indigenous resistance, interracial alliance and betrayal, radical feminism, lifelong hauntings, land policy, debt, shame, grief, and avarice from the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, Carr asks whether we can embrace the Populists’ profound hopes for a just economy while rejecting the barriers they set up around who was considered fully human, fully worthy of this dreamed society."

Check out Carr's  and  with NPR for more information.

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About the book:

In this emotionally powerful and intellectually  provocative blend of memoir, cultural criticism, and theory, scholar and essayist Samira Mehta reflects on many facets of being multiracial. The Racism of People Who Love You invites people of mixed race into the conversation on race in America and the melding of found and inherited cultures of hybrid identity.

About the author:

Samira K. Mehta is the Director of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. She is also the author of a newly released book of personal essays called The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023). Mehta’s current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the present and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. She is also beginning a project for Princeton University Press called A Mixed Multitude: Jews of Color in the United States. Mehta is the primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation funded project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures. She is  a member of the board of Feminist Studies in Religion, where she serves as the co-editor of the blog; co-chairs the steering committee of the North American Religions Program Unit at the American Academy of Religion; and is a Creative Editor at the journal American Religion. She holds degrees from Swarthmore College. Harvard University, and Emory University.

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About the author: Deepti Misri is an Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Department at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Book description:  The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies presents emerging critical knowledge frameworks and perspectives that foreground situated histories and resistance practices to challenge colonial and postcolonial forms of governance and state building. It politicizes discourses of nationalism, patriotism, democracy, and liberalism, and it questions how these dominant globalist imaginaries and discourses serve institutionalized power, create hegemony, and normalize domination. In doing so, the handbook situates Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship within global scholarly conversations on nationalism, sovereignty, indigenous movements, human rights, and international law.

Reviews:

"This crucial, timely volume not only explicates the political situation of Kashmir, it offers a paradigm-shifting example of place as relational praxis. From the critique of area studies and state-centric analytics to the attention to the ethics of knowledge and production, the editors and contributors make a trenchant case for why Kashmir both illuminates and connects with numerous other liberation movements around the world. As such, The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies is a brilliant envisioning of scholarship as a solidarity that draws together and transforms indigenous, decolonial, intersectional and transnational thought."

-Jasbir K. Puar, Professor and Graduate Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University; author of "Terrorist Assemblages" and "The Right to Maim."

"This pathbreaking interdisciplinary volume--grounded in feminist principles that are at once anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-caste --brilliantly speaks to the urgency of self-determination for Kashmir. Challenging statist and area studies frameworks that typically privilege international relations and security studies, this rich collection features crucial epistemological interventions that enable the decolonial knowledge production necessary for political liberation--the best in critical Kashmir Studies."

- J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Professor of American Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Anthropology at Wesleyan University; author of 'Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism.'

Publication date: September 2022

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Book description:  Travelers from Europe, North, and South America often perceive Mexico as a mythical place onto which they project their own cultures’ desires, fears, and anxieties. Gómez argues that Mexico’s role in these narratives was not passive and that the environment, peoples, ruins, political revolutions, and economy of Mexico were fundamental to the configuration of modern Western art and science. This project studies the images of Mexico and the ways they were contested by travelers of different national origins and trained in varied disciplines from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It starts with Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist whose fame sprang from his trip to Mexico and Latin America, and ends with Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean novelist whose work defines Mexico as an “oasis of horror.” In between, there are archaeologists, photographers, war correspondents, educators, writers, and artists for whom the trip to Mexico represented a rite of passage, a turning point in their intellectual biographies, their scientific disciplines, and their artistic practices.

Publication date: October 2021

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Book description:  The rate of interfaith marriage in the United States has risen so radically since the sixties that it is difficult to recall how taboo the practice once was. How is this development understood and regarded by Americans generally, and what does it tell us about the nation’s religious life? Drawing on ethnographic and historical sources, Samira K. Mehta provides a fascinating analysis of wives, husbands, children, and their extended families in interfaith homes; religious leaders; and the social and cultural milieu surrounding mixed marriages among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants.

Mehta’s eye-opening look at the portrayal of interfaith families across American culture since the mid-twentieth century ranges from popular TV shows, holiday cards, and humorous guides to “Chrismukkah” to children’s books, young adult fiction, and religious and secular advice manuals. Mehta argues that the emergence of multiculturalism helped generate new terms by which interfaith families felt empowered to shape their lived religious practices in ways and degrees previously unknown. They began to intertwine their religious identities without compromising their social standing. This rich portrait of families living diverse religions together at home advances the understanding of how religion functions in American society today.

Publication date: March 2018

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Book description: Using gender analysis and focusing on previously unexamined testimonies of women rebels, political scientist Lorraine Bayard de Volo shatters the prevailing masculine narrative of the Cuban Revolution. Contrary to the Cuban War story's mythology of an insurrection single-handedly won by bearded guerrillas, Bayard de Volo shows that revolutions are not won and lost only by bullets and battlefield heroics. Focusing on women's multiple forms of participation in the insurrection, especially those that occurred off the battlefield, such as smuggling messages, hiding weapons, and distributing propaganda, Bayard de Volo explores how gender - both masculinity and femininity - were deployed as tactics in the important though largely unexamined battle for the 'hearts and minds' of the Cuban people. Drawing on extensive, rarely-examined archives including interviews and oral histories, this author offers an entirely new interpretation of one of the Cold War's most significant events.

'Drawing upon impressive research, Lorraine Bayard de Volo has written a fascinating new history of the Cuban insurrection: a history from below. She convincingly shows that earlier political histories, with their focus on strategy and bullets, obscure the equally, or more, important story of ideas - efforts to capture hearts and minds - without which the revolutionaries would not have come to power.' Karen Kampwirth, Knox College, Illinois

'The Cuban revolution will never look the same after one reads Lorraine Bayard de Volvo's deeply researched, surprising account. She has made me look afresh at women's revolutionary activism outside the mountains, at Castro's tactical gender equity, and at Che Guevara's commitment to militarized masculinity. Everyone interested in war, revolution and feminist research will have their eyes opened by this new book. That's a promise.' Cynthia Enloe, author of The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy

Publication date: February 2018

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Book description: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita made landfall less than four weeks apart in 2005. Months later, much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast remained in tatters. As the region faded from national headlines, its residents faced a dire future.

Emmanuel David chronicles how one activist group confronted the crisis. Founded by a few elite white women in New Orleans, Women of the Storm quickly formed a broad coalition that sought to represent Louisiana’s diverse population. From its early lobbying of Congress through its response to the 2010 BP oil spill, David shows how members’ actions were shaped by gender, race, class, and geography. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation, and archival research, David tells a compelling story of collective action and personal transformation that expands our understanding of the aftermath of a historic American catastrophe.

“Women of the Storm pulls back the analytical curtain on one of the most unusual post-Katrina political movements. Drawing on firsthand observations and in-depth interviews, David reveals how privileged white New Orleans women used their philanthropic and volunteer skills to create a genuinely interracial alliance that could effectively pressure members of Congress to invest in the city’s and the whole coastal region’s revival. Here is a book for anyone doing intersectional digging into gendered social movements, congressional lobbying, or postdisaster politics.”—Cynthia Enloe, author of Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered

"Women of the Storm is an important 'studying up' investigation of privileged women in post-Katrina New Orleans. It offers a rare, in-depth look at the volunteer political labor of elite women. Engaging and well written, David focuses on micro-level processes and presents careful descriptions of events and dialogue to illuminate issues of power, inequality, diversity, gender, social class, and politics. Women of the Storm is a truly valuable addition to the field of gender and disaster."—Alice Fothergill, coauthor of Children of Katrina

"This fascinating book describes a courageous group of elite women who took the risk to bridge race and class divides, stand together, and take collective political actions that were fundamental to the recovery of New Orleans. David captures their hopes and deliberations, intelligence and limitations, and joie de vivre with candor and compassion—a beautiful achievement."—Rebecca E. Snedeker, coauthor of Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas

“The book’s unique focus centers on the well-orchestrated activities of an elite group of women as they defined and acted upon their roles as community leaders to invite, entice, and cajole national leaders to see for themselves the block-by-block evidence of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction. It makes a substantial contribution to the study of social class and women’s activism while raising important questions about inclusion and exclusion, and how a community represents itself.”—Beth Willinger, coeditor of Newcomb College, 1886-2006: Higher Education for Women in New Orleans

Publication date: October 2017

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Book description: Over the last two decades, the cross-generational transmission of trauma has become an important area of research within both Holocaust studies and the more broad study of genocide. The overall findings of the research suggest that the Holocaust informs both the psychological and social development of the children of survivors who, like their parents, suffer from nightmares, guilt, fear, and sadness. The impact of social memory on the construction of survivor identities among succeeding generations has not yet been adequately explained. Moreover, the importance of gender to the intergenerational transmission of trauma has, for the most part, been overlooked. In The Holocaust across Generations, Janet Jacobs fills these significant gaps in the study of traumatic transference.

The volume brings together the study of post-Holocaust family culture with the study of collective memory. Through an in-depth study of 75 children and grandchildren of survivors, the book examines the social mechanisms through which the trauma of the Holocaust is conveyed by survivors to succeeding generations. It explores the social structures—such as narratives, rituals, belief systems, and memorial sites—through which the collective memory of trauma is transmitted within families, examining the social relations of traumatic inheritance among children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.  Within this analytic framework, feminist theory and the importance of gender are brought to bear on the study of traumatic inheritance and the formation of trauma-based identities among Holocaust carrier groups.

Publication date: January 2017

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