We offer this virtual space in addition to our AAA booth to showcase our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of anthropology publishing at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Anthropology titles with discount code S23XAAA through our virtual exhibit ».
Continue reading "American Anthropological Association Conference 2023" »
How Brown v. Board of Education became both a weapon and an ameliorative
Next spring will mark the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Brown decision declaring legalized racial segregation unconstitutional is among the most well-known and impactful rulings in the Court’s history. Indeed, at a time when the justices vigorously disagree on virtually every cultural topic, everyone affirms their agreement that Brown was correctly decided. But this unanimity is misleading. Scratch the surface and there are chasms among today’s justices about what Brown means.
This summer, a divided 6-3 Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions in a pair of cases brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The plaintiffs in the case had argued that the universities’ consideration of race, albeit as one of many factors in a holistic process, violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. In 1954, it had been that same equal protection clause that the Court used in Brown to end Jim Crow segregation in schools, a system of racialized exclusion of Black students from educational opportunities. While the cases were about affirmative action in the 21st century, there was an underlying battle among the various opinions offered by six different justices about which side better aligned with the spirit of a case nearly 70 years old.
On one side was a colorblind interpretation in the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts and concurrences by Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. By this view, Brown prohibited any consideration of race by universities no matter what the purpose. On the other side were dissents from Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson who claimed that the universities’ efforts were part of a broader demand for racially equal educational opportunities, like Brown itself.
This debate goes back to the initial aftermath of the Court’s revolutionary decision in 1954. Segregationists argued that Brown merely required removal of the racial designations of schools, simply getting the law out of mandating racially separate schools. By this argument, single race schools could persist after Brown, so long as student assignment policies were not explicitly based on race. This position was just short of outright defiance of Brown and led to years of delays in integrating schools in many communities.
Continue reading "Racial Equality, Affirmative Action, and the Supreme Court" »
A Q&A with My Body, Their Baby author Grace Y. Kao
I didn’t go into carrying and delivering a baby for my friends thinking that I’d ever turn my story into a book! Basically when folks around me would find out I was expecting a child for someone else, they’d gently pepper with me questions like “What does your husband think about this?” or “Aren’t you scared you’ll grow attached to the baby and not want to give it up?” I’d address their concerns, we’d sometimes launch into an extended conversation about childbearing, infertility or related topics, and then several of my interlocutors who were also academics would often ask if I’d consider publishing or speaking publicly about what I had just shared.
I eventually came to realize something my colleagues had grasped before I had—that the world of former surrogates who are also trained ethicists has got to be very small. Through my hyper-visibility as an “advanced maternal age” pregnant woman and my openness about the baby not being mine, I saw firsthand how folks around me had so many questions and misconceptions about the practice. It thus became important to me to research them, investigate whether popular fears about surrogacy were well-founded, and then do what I could to set the record straight.
I wrestled with two primary things. The story of how and why I became a surrogate was inextricably tied to my friends’ struggle to have their first child. So my first challenge was to work out how I could truthfully convey my surro-mom experiences—both the joys and the difficult parts—without sharing some details that my friends didn’t want to appear in print. I ended up self-censoring in early drafts, deleting some material in the penultimate draft at their request, and explaining in the intro the difference between speaking about vs. speaking for them.
The second challenge was more meta—how to oscillate between writing about my feelings and experiences in a manner appropriate for memoir-style reflections and also offering judgments about the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in a style consistent with good academic writing. As readers of My, Body, Their Baby » will see, I decided not only to open each chapter with a personal anecdote connected to the themes to be explored in the pages to follow, but also sometimes marble in my experiences elsewhere in ways that hopefully elucidate a point or provide a fuller picture of what surrogacy is like from someone who has gone through it firsthand.
A recommended reading list on toys, the atomic bomb, and the unlikely intersection of the two
Continuously in demand since its first, prize-winning edition was published in 1975, this is the classic history of the development of the American atomic bomb, the decision to use it against Japan, and the origins of U.S. atomic diplomacy toward the Soviet Union.
In his Preface to this new edition, the author describes and evaluates the lengthening trail of new evidence that has come to light concerning these often emotionally debated subjects. The author also invokes his experience as a historical advisor to the controversial, aborted 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. This leads him to analyze the impact on American democracy of one of the most insidious of the legacies of Hiroshima: the political control of historical interpretation.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off recent SUP Sociology titles with discount code S23XASA through our virtual exhibit ».
The Subterranean in practice and popular imagination
In May 2023, researchers for the International Ocean Discovery Program, or IODP (a collaborative effort that draws funding from multiple government institutions across four continents), retrieved core samples from the planet’s mantle. The achievement is over sixty years in the making; in 1961, scientists and engineers aboard the barge CUSS I practiced an experimental drilling routine off Guadalupe Island in preparation for reaching the mantle. The official attempt, known as Project Mohole, proved a disappointing failure. The company selected to conduct the drilling—Brown & Root, a construction firm with no offshore experience—delivered minimal results and a blown budget. Although core samples from sediment beneath the ocean floor yielded some valuable information, the drilling failed to reach the earth’s mantle, which would remain out of reach for decades.. The Deep Sea Drilling Project (the predecessor of the IODP) struggled for years to succeed where Mohole had not, until the team aboard the JOIDES Resolution, the IODP’s flagship vessel operated out of Texas A&M University, cracked the case, extracting “a core of rock more than 1 kilometer long.” The discovery is of no small significance, carrying with it the potential for unlocking subterranean secrets long inaccessible. In geochemist Jessica Warren’s words, “We’re finally going to see the Wizard of Oz.”
The resurgence of American censorship and book bans
Anthony Comstock is back in the news. More than a century after his death, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and the law he inspired – the 1873 “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” more commonly known as the “Comstock Act” – have emerged once again as players in America’s cultural wars, cited by right-wing judges in 2023 to support banning books, drag shows, and the medical abortion drug mifepristone.
Comstock was active throughout the end of the 19th century and into the 20th. He opposed women’s suffrage, the dissemination of any information regarding birth control or abortion, and pornography or other “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. Thousands were arrested under the Act and Comstock himself boasted that 15 people were driven to suicide by his actions. After his death in 1915, Comstock’s work was carried on by his successor at the NYSSV, John Sumner.
As I discuss in my book, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity », it was Sumner who had Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap arrested in 1920 in New York for publishing an excerpt of James Joyce’s Ulysses in their literary magazine, The Little Review. In January of that same year, Prohibition became law in the US after the Volstead Act passed. In April, Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested for the murder of a Boston-area paymaster in what many believed was a politically motivated action based on their anarchist political beliefs. And perhaps most importantly, in 1920 the 19th Amendment became law, guaranteeing women the right to vote, sending Sumner into a frenzy over the fear that “radical feminists” would upend American society. In the midst of these social and cultural changes, Anderson and Heap were convicted, narrowly escaped a prison sentence, and were fined fifty dollars each (about $750 today). Joyce’s Ulysses was effectively banned from the United States. Copies of The Little Review that contained excerpts of it were taken to the official government incinerator and burned. Fortunately, copies already in the hands of purchasers survived to be digitized for us today.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S23XBCHW through our virtual exhibit ».
Pious Peripheries: Runaway Women in Post-Taliban Afghanistan
SONIA AHSAN-TIRMIZI
Continue reading "Berkshire Conference of Women, Genders and Sexualities 2023" »
How revolutionary values survive repression in postwar Dhufar
The Dhufar region of Oman was famous in ancient times for its frankincense. Visitors today can learn about this past in “The Museum of the Frankincense Land” near the ruins of the former port city where medieval traveler Ibn Battuta sojourned. Visitors can later enjoy a frankincense flavor ice cream at a peaceful café that looks out from the edge of Dhufar’s mountain interior, across its coastal plain, to the city of Salalah and the Arabian Sea beyond. But it was not always frankincense that brought Dhufar renown, nor did the mountains, plain, and coast always offer such peaceful landscapes.
From 1965 to 1976, Dhufar captured global attention for its anti-colonial revolutionaries and their liberation movement. Fighting against the British-backed al-Busaid dynasty of Sultans, the front pursued political and social emancipation, initially for Dhufar but later for Oman and the Arabian Gulf under formal and informal British colonialism. The increasingly internationalized, British-led counterinsurgency militarily defeated the movement in 1976. This campaign deployed indiscriminate violence such as airstrikes and food and water blockades that destroyed Dhufari lives and livelihoods. Subsequently, the Sultanate expunged the revolution, and other episodes of dissent, from official history.
In postwar Oman, former revolutionaries have lived, worked, raised families, and buried peers while living under the authoritarian rule of the very government that they once opposed. As such, theirs is a predicament reminiscent of that of later generations of disappointed activists and sympathizers of the revolutions in Southwest Asia and North Africa that met with backlash, repression, counterinsurgency, and counterrevolution. Taking a close look at the postwar lives of former revolutionaries in Dhufar offers the opportunity to ask: what happens to the ideas and values of revolution after military defeat and repression?
Please enjoy this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Law at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP Law titles with discount code S23XLSA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
Continue reading "Law and Society Association Conference 2023" »
Embracing the flexibility of an under-utilized resource
Your table of contents is not just an outline–it is an overlooked, underappreciated marketing and sales tool. An editor will use your table of contents to evaluate your book proposal. They will share it with marketing colleagues and their Editorial Board, to rally support. Your publisher’s sales team will share it with retailers. Marketers will post it to Amazon and online stores around the world. Foreign language rights managers will use it to persuade publishers in China, Germany, or Brazil to translate your book into their language.
But you also want a captivating table of contents for your most important audience–your reader. Readers deciding whether or not to buy your book will look at the cover and the marketing copy, and perhaps skim chapter 1, but they will also browse your table of contents. Will it grab their interest or not? I’m a business book editor, and when I’m working with an author, I ask them to picture a browsing reader scanning the table of contents online or in a bookstore, deciding whether or not the book is worth their valuable time. A book I published called The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy received a rave review in the New York Times, including praise for the author’s “beguilingly titled subchapters.” That’s the response we want from a reader browsing the table of contents!
Creating a polished, marketing-oriented, reader-friendly table of contents, is a way of getting to know your audience better.
So I encourage you to put on your marketing/copywriter hat for an hour and finesse your chapter titles. This requires a mental shift, since you have been thinking about the internal coherence and narrative flow of your argument. You don’t want frothy chapter titles that undercut the scholarly rigor of your work. But you strongly believe in your book and you care about connecting deeply with your reader and their concerns. Think about which of your book’s topics, ideas, claims, and themes your readers care about most. Whatever those are…they should show up, stated clearly, in your chapter titles.
Continue reading "Your Table Of Contents is a Marketing Tool" »
We hope you enjoy this virtual space showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Latin American Studies at SUP.
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off select SUP Latin American Studies titles .
To use the discount select titles from our virtual exhibit », and enter coupon code S23XLASA-FM at checkout.
Continue reading "Latin American Studies Association 2023" »
Top Films from SUP Authors
Contrary to popular belief, we’re not always buried in a book. Sometimes, we’re buried in a film. We reached out to a few of our authors to tell us about some of their favorite films – films that inspired their research, or films that they just happened to enjoy.
In Elia Suleiman’s debut feature, the director plays a version of himself, E.S., an expat Palestinian filmmaker attempting to piece together the fragmented story of a journey home and match it up with hilarious and poignant vignettes of life under occupation. Suleiman opts for deadpan humor to convey trauma and absurdity. An inheritor of Chaplin, Keaton, and Tati, Suleiman speaks volumes even though E.S. hardly utters a word in the entire film. When asked for a speech, E.S. finds himself drowned out by feedback from the microphones that are supposed to amplify his voice.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a visionary 21st century filmmaker, whose debut feature, Mysterious Object at Noon, was released in the year 2000. Memoria is nominally about an investigation into a mysterious loud sound that awakens Jessica (Tilda Swinton), an expat living in Columbia. Her search for an explanation leads her on an inner and outer journey that explores various secular and supernatural origins for the possible source of the uncanny sound. Personal and collective trauma bleeds into haunted places and lives whose histories are somehow joined across the world. There is no return home, only further openings into the unknown.
Contributed by J. M. Tyree, author of Vanishing Streets: Journeys in London.
Joshua recently contributed his own top ten list to the BFI.
You can explore his top picks here.
A Q&A with authors Bradley L. Kirkman and Adam C. Stoverink about building resilient teams.
We started thinking about the concept of team resilience over 10 years ago. We are teams researchers, and so we’re always thinking about ways to take a concept that applies to individuals and then see how it might work in teams. For individual resilience, there has been over 50 years of research on what makes individual people resilient. For example, people are more able to bounce back from adversity when they are more optimistic, have higher self-esteem, have social support, and are more satisfied with their lives. So, the key question driving our research on team resilience was: is it enough just to pick a bunch of resilient individuals, put them on a team together, and then just sit back and watch the team resilience magic happen? Or, is it something more than that?
What we found in our research is that, of course, when building a team you’d like to have everyone on the team be highly resilient individuals. That’s not going to hurt team resilience. However, that’s not enough. And the reason is that collective resilience is more than just individual resilience added up. That is, team resilience emerges over time based on exchanges and processes that occur between team members. In other words, team resilience can rise and fall based on the quality of exchanges team members have between one another.
In the end, we found that team resilience is made possible by four key team resources:
Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off these and other recent SUP History titles with discount code S23XOAH-FM through our virtual exhibit ».
Shelley S. Lee wrote a special entry on our blog about Koreatown, L.A. and landmarks. Given that OAH is in Los Angeles this year, we hope this entry is of special interest.
Start reading KOREATOWN LANDMARKS OF THE PAST AND PRESENT »
Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, newspapers in the United States—even newspapers which were not published by a religious denomination or organization—made frequent recourse to the Bible. Newspapers printed sermons and Sunday school lessons. They featured jokes whose punchlines required familiarity with the Bible and aired political commentary that cited the Bible on all sides of a given issue.
America's Public Bible is an interactive scholarly work that uncovers the history of the Bible in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. When the Bible was cited on one side or the other of an issue, only rarely was its meaning explicated rather than assumed. Those who cited the text most typically thought that their readers would understand its meaning precisely as they did. But the multiple and mutually exclusive ways in which newspapers used the Bible test that assumption. By identifying and studying quotations in American newspapers, the site offers a commentary on how the Bible was used in public life, uncovering trends and patterns that would be invisible to a single scholar's reading of these documents.
Continue reading "Organization of American Historians Meeting 2023" »
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The SUP blog showcases new books and Press news in addition to serving as a forum for our authors—past and present—to expound on issues related to their scholarship. Views expressed by guest contributors to the blog do not necessarily represent those of Stanford University or Stanford University Press, and all guest contributions are denoted by a byline and an author bio.
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