ACLS Fellows' Publications

Exploring the Kingdom of Saturn: Kircher’s Latium and its Legacy by Harry B. Evans G'76 now available from the University of Michigan Press. 

Exploring the Kingdom of Saturn assesses a pioneering study of ancient Latium by one of the most interesting figures in the history of learning, the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. Although Kircher’s Latium, published in 1671, is not without errors in its reading of the ancient monuments and topography of the area around Rome, this highly influential work launched future topographical study of the Roman campagna. Harry B. Evans investigates Kircher’s Latium, its methods and accuracy, its possible use as a reference now, the scholarly quarrel between Kircher and rival scholar Raffaello Fabretti, and the Vatican’s publications committee’s involvement with Latium.

While Kircher himself is well known for his many publications on a wide variety of subjects—Egyptian hieroglyphs, linguistics, natural science, musicology, and the history of China—his work as an archaeologist and topographer has often been dismissed. But his Latium is worth a detailed assessment: not only was it an early attempt to link ancient literary and historical sources to physical evidence, with splendid illustrations and maps, but the book spurred enormous interest in the region, prompting a more sophisticated study of it by Kircher’s contemporaries and later generations. Anyone interested in the history of archaeology, the world of seventeenth-century Italian antiquarians and scholars, and the fascinating region of Latium itself will want to learn more about Kircher’s achievements and the scholarly legacy of his book.

Machine Art, 1934 by Jennifer Jane Marshall F'04 now available from the University of Chicago Press. 

In 1934, New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged a major exhibition of ball bearings, airplane propellers, pots and pans, cocktail tumblers, petri dishes, protractors, and other machine parts and products. The exhibition, titled Machine Art, explored these ordinary objects as works of modern art, teaching museumgoers about the nature of beauty and value in the era of mass production.

Telling the story of this extraordinarily popular but controversial show, Jennifer Jane Marshall examines its history and the relationship between the museum’s director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., and its curator, Philip Johnson, who oversaw it. She situates the show within the tumultuous climate of the interwar period and the Great Depression, considering how these unadorned objects served as a response to timely debates over photography, abstract art, the end of the American gold standard, and John Dewey’s insight that how a person experiences things depends on the context in which they are encountered. An engaging investigation of interwar American modernism, Machine Art, 1934 reveals how even simple things can serve as a defense against uncertainty.

(Source: press.uchicago.edu)

K. O. Mbadiwe: A Nigerian Political Biography, 1915-1990 by Hollis R. Lynch F'78, G'75 now available from Palgrave MacMillan.

This book offers a comprehensive political biography of Kingsley Ozuomba Mbadiwe, (1915-1990), a central figure in Nigerian political history for more than forty years. Starting in 1936 as a protégé of Nnamdi Azikiwe, then Nigeria’s most renowned nationalist, Mbadiwe himself by the 1950s became a frontline nationalist. And next to Tafawa Balewa from the North who became Prime Minster in 1957, he was the most important figure in the Nigerian Federal Government between 1952 and Nigeria’s first military coup in 1966. During this time he held a succession of important Cabinet positions and was Parliamentary Leader of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), which was in a ruling alliance with the Northern People’s Congress (NPC). In contrast, his older prominent political contemporaries, Azikiwe of the Eastern Region, Igbo Leader of the NCNC; Obafemi Awolowo of the Western Region, Yoruba Leader of the Action Group (AG); and Ahmadu Bello of the Northern Region, Fulani Leader of the NPC, all carved out their political careers totally or largely at the regional level. Throughout his political career Mbadiwe’s focus was always at the national level. Truly, it has been stated that Mbadiwe was one of the founding fathers of the Nigerian State. Nonetheless, Mbadiwe’s ambition for himself—to lead Nigeria—and for his nation—to set it on the path to greatness—faced insuperable difficulties. In a country of widespread poverty, high illiteracy, and a grossly underdeveloped private sector, there were fierce ethnic and regional conflicts for the control of governments and resources, leading to massive corruption and serious instability. This in turn led to prolonged military rule—twenty years in Mbadiwe’s lifetime—which was often more corrupt and repressive than civilian rule, and was bitterly deprecated by Mbadiwe.

Selected Writings of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Volume 5, Unbought Grace: An Elizabeth Fox Genovese Reader edited by Rebecca Fox and Robert L. Paquette F'90 now available from the University of South Carolina Press. 

History and Women, Culture and Faith is a five-volume collection of eighty essays and journal articles spanning the extraordinary intellectual career of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1941–2007). A working scholar for more than three decades, Fox-Genovese made significant contributions to European and Southern American history and became one of the most provocative scholars and educators of her time as she evolved intellectually from a Marxist to a feminist to a pro-life Roman Catholic. Although she authored or coauthored many well-received books, her prolific output as an essayist is less well known. This multivolume collection celebrates the scope of her scholarship and invites a fresh assessment of her legacy and influence.

Concluding this multivolume series of Fox-Genovese’s fugitive works, Unbought Grace: An Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Reader draws on earlier volumes in the series to provide an overview of fundamental intellectual concerns that shaped her writings. Divided into two parts—sixteen essays written by Fox-Genovese and ten remembrances of her life—the contents of this volume demonstrate her remarkable range of subjects, methods, and audiences as she examined both historical and contemporary issues.

(Source: sc.edu)

Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World edited by Dana Leibsohn F'12 and Jeanette Favrot Peterson now available from Ashgate Press.

What were the possibilities and limits of vision in the early modern world? How did political expansion, cross-cultural trade, scientific exploration and discrete religious practices require new ways of rendering the unknown visible, and of making what was seen knowable? Drawing upon experiences forged in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Seeing Across Cultures argues that distinctive ways of habituating the eyes in the early modern period had epistemic consequences: in the realm of politics, daily practice and the imaginary. The essays here consider prints and panoramas, sculpted works of stone and corn pith cane - and their physical presence in the lived world – calling attention to the materiality and sensuality of visual experience. Anchored in writings on art history and visual culture, Seeing Across Cultures also engages histories of transcultural encounters and vision.

(Source: ashgate.com)

Coffee Life in Japan by Merry I. White F'90 now available from the University of California Press.

This fascinating book—part ethnography, part memoir—traces Japan’s vibrant café society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan’s coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White’s book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the café in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality , dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public.

(Source: ucpress.edu)

The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law edited by Leonard V. Kaplan and Rudy Koshar F'82 now available from Lexington Books.

The Weimar Moment’s evocative assault on closure and political reaction, its offering of democracy against the politics of narrow self-interest cloaked in nationalist appeals to Volk and “community”—or, as would be the case in Nazi Germany, “race”—cannot but appeal to us today. This appeal—its historical grounding and content, its complexities and tensions, its variegated expressions across the networks of power and thought—is the essential context of the present volume, whose basic premise is unhappiness with Hegel’s remark that we learn no more from history than we cannot learn from it. The challenge of the papers in this volume is to provide the material to confront the present effectively drawing from what we can and do understand.

(Source: rowman.com)

Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan by Amy Dru Stanley F'91 now available from the University of California Press.

This book traces the social history of early modern Japan’s sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of “selling women” transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes’ economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large.

(Source: ucpress.edu)

The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers by George M. Young F'78 now available from Oxford University Press.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a controversial school of Russian thinkers emerged, convinced that humanity was entering an advanced stage of evolution and must assume a new, active, managerial role in the cosmos. In the first account in English of this fascinating school, George M. Young offers a dynamic and wide-ranging examination of the lives and ideas of the Russian Cosmists. Although they wrote as scientists, theologians, and philosophers, Young shows that the Cosmists addressed topics traditionally confined to occult and esoteric literature. Their writings explored the extension of the human life span to establish universal immortality; the restoration of life to the dead; the regulation of nature so that all manifestations of blind natural force were under rational human control; the effect of cosmic rays and other particles of energy on human history; and practical steps toward eventual human control over the flow of time. Suppressed during the Soviet period and little noticed in the West, the ideas of the Cosmists have in recent decades been rediscovered and embraced by many Russian intellectuals.

(Source: ukcatalogue.oup.com)