Book Party: Recognizing Faculty Authors in the Humanities

The Leslie Center for the Humanities hosts its third annual celebration of faculty books.

In 2017, faculty in the Arts and Humanities division published books on everything from Bob Dylan’s early song lyrics to the history of sexual science to how migrants are changing Italian culture.

And this term, for the third year in a row, the Leslie Center for the Humanities hosted a reception to celebrate their accomplishments.

Graziella Parati, the Paul D. Paganucci Professor of Italian Language and Literature and director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities, launched the annual author celebration two years ago. She says the event helps recognize work that can take years to come to fruition.

“It can take 10 years to write a book,” says Parati. “I wanted in particular the people in the humanities to be celebrated for their achievement.”

Dean of the Faculty Elizabeth Smith, who attended this year’s reception, says, “It’s a great event. We forget sometimes to pause and celebrate what we’ve accomplished. To be recognized by your peers is powerful—in a community of scholars, there’s almost no greater recognition.”

Parati herself is celebrating the publication of her latest volume, Migrant Writers and Urban Space in Italy: Proximities and Affect in Literature and Film, which examines how everyday life in Milan and Rome has been changed by waves of immigration beginning in the late 1970s.

Veronika Fuechtner, an associate professor of German studies, is celebrating the publication of A Global History of Sexual Science, a volume she co-edited with Professor of History Douglas Haynes.

The book examines the emergence of a science of sexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from sex reassignment surgery to the nature of orgasms to differences between genders. “Those are issues that are really being debated in the mid-19th and early 20th century. A lot of the understandings that were developed then are still very powerful today,” Fuechtner says.

Fuechtner calls the Leslie Center celebration an “awesome” event. “Often you’re not aware of what your colleagues in other departments are publishing, so this is a great way of engaging with each other’s research.”

Two books she’s eager to read: Eastern Europe Unmapped: Beyond Borders and Peripheries, edited by fellow German studies faculty Yuliya Komska and Irene Kacandes, and Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, by Mark Bray, a lecturer in history.

At the top of several faculty author reading lists: Professor of English Emeritus Louis Renza’s Dylan’s Autobiography of a Vocation: A Reading of the Lyrics 1965-1967.

Renza says the book—a close reading of the Nobel Laureate’s early songs as a kind of autobiography of the songwriter—is an “unorthodox take on Dylan,” and a culmination of sorts of Renza’s career, during which he famously taught an undergraduate seminar on Dylan for nearly 40 years.

“I first taught it back in 1972 as a freshman seminar, before they had the book of lyrics out,” he recalls. He and his students would play Dylan albums on a turntable in Sanborn House. “We’d spend a good portion of the time trying to figure out some of the words that he was saying,” Renza says.

Of his latest book, Renza says, “Really, it’s everything I wanted to do, my whole life.”

Novelist, poet, and children’s book author Kianny Antigua, a lecturer in Spanish, is celebrating the publication of her two most recent bilingual children’s books, Greña/Crazy Hair and Mía y el regalo de Guaguau/Mía and the Gift from Guaguau.

Antigua says she wrote Greña—a story about “a very, very happy girl called Ciara” who especially loves her wild hair—because she wants to give children models for cultivating self-esteem. “I want to talk to anybody that wants to listen about loving themselves—loving who you are, the way you are,” she says.

José Manuel del Pino, the Dartmouth Professor of Spanish, is celebrating the publication of an edited volume on the influence of America on three Spanish surrealist artists, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, and Luis Buñuel.

El impacto de la metropolis: La experiencia americana en Lorca, Dalí y Buñuel is the product of a conference del Pino hosted in Hanover in 2015, del Pino says. “I’m very satisfied with the result.”

James Dobson, a lecturer in English and in the Masters of Liberal Studies Program, is celebrating his new book, Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies.

“It’s a book about the relationship between new technologies in the late 19th century and autobiographical writing,” he says. “It tries to account for changes in autobiographical form produced by people’s interactions with new technologies, like the typewriter, telephone, telegraph, and the train, of all things.”

The Leslie Center event makes him feel, he says, “like the book’s finally done and out there.”

Books Published by Arts & Humanities Faculty in 2017

Kianny Antigua, lecturer in Spanish
Greña/Crazy Hair
Lauki

Mía y el regalo de Guaguau/Mía and the Gift from Guaguau
Ioqueleo

Ehud Benor, associate professor of religion
Ethical Monotheism: A Philosophy of Judaism
Routledge

Mark Bray, lecturer in history
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook
Melville House

Joshua Compton, associate professor of writing and rhetoric
Persuasion and Communication in Sport, Exercise, and Physical Activity (co-editor)
Routledge

José Manuel del Pino, the Dartmouth Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
El impacto de la metropolis: La experiencia americana en Lorca, Dalí y Buñuel (editor)
La Casa de la Riqueza: Estudios de la Cultura de España

James Dobson, lecturer in English and creative writing
Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies
Palgrave

Yasser Elhariry, assistant professor of French
Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation, & the Postfrancophone Lyric
Liverpool University Press

Mary Flanagan, the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and professor of film and media studies
Ghost Sentence
Atmosphere Press

Veronika Fuechtner, associate professor of German studies, and Douglas Haynes, professor of history
A Global History of Sexual Science (co-editors)
University of California Press

Lewis Glinert, professor of Hebrew studies
The Story of Hebrew
Princeton University Press

Julie Hruby, assistant professor of classical studies
From Cooking Vessels to Cultural Practices in the Late Bronze Age Aegean
Oxbow Books

Irene Kacandes, the Dartmouth Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, and Yuliya Komska, associate professor of German
Eastern Europe Unmapped: Beyond Borders and Peripheries (co-editors)
Berghahn Books

Sergei Kan, professor of anthropology and Native American studies
Death in the Early 21st Century: Authority, Innovation, and Mortuary Rites (co-editor)
Palgrave

Sara Muñoz-Muriana, assistant professor of Spanish
Andando se hace el camino: calle y subjetividades marginales en la España del siglo XIX
Iberamericano/Vervuert

Deborah Nichols, the William J. Bryant 1925 Professor of Anthropology
Rethinking the Aztec Economy (co-editor)
University of Arizona Press

Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs (co-editor)
Oxford University Press

Reiko Ohnuma, professor of religion
Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination
Oxford University Press

Graziella Parati, Paul D. Paganucci Professor of Italian Language and Literature and director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities
Migrant Writers and Urban Space in Italy: Proximities and Affect in Literature and Film
Palgrave

Lynn Patyk, assistant professor of Russian
Written in Blood: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture, 1861-1881
University of Wisconsin Press

David Plunkett, associate professor of philosophy
The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics (co-author)
Routledge

Louis Renza, professor of English emeritus
Dylan’s Autobiography of a Vocation
Bloomsbury Publishing