College of Arts and Humanities Faculty Bookshelf

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  Maritime Culture and Everyday Life in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Coastal Ghana: A Social History of Cape Coast

  Kwaku Nti, Georgia Southern University

  1-2-2024
  

  The communities along the coastline of Ghana boast a long and vibrant maritime culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the region experienced creeping British imperialism and incorporation into the British Gold Coast colony. Drawing on a wealth of Ghanian archival sources, historian Kwaku Nti shows how many aspects of traditional maritime daily life—customary ritual performances, fishing, and concepts of ownership, and land—served as a means of resistance and allowed residents to contest and influence the socio-political transformations of the era.

  Nti explored how the Ebusua (female) and Asafo (male) local social groups, especially in Cape Coast, became bastions ... Read more

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  The Anxiety Workbook

  Christina Olson, Georgia Southern University

  1-2023
  

  Georgia southern faculty member, Christina Olson published The Anxiety Workbook.

  
  

  The Anxiety Workbook explores contemporary anxiety, grief in its multitude of forms, and complicated familial dynamics via the lens of science and history while utilizing the language of therapy. These poems grapple with the ever-evolving collective and individual trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as seek answers and lessons from the natural world. The termination of a pregnancy, a distant father, the untimely death of a friend, our society’s obsession with Dateline and missing white girls, the estivation of the West African lungfish—The Anxiety Workbook covers these topics ... Read more

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  Jesuit Libraries

  Kathleen M. Comerford, Georgia Southern University

  11-17-2022
  

  The Society of Jesus began a tradition of collecting books and curating those collections at its foundation. These libraries were important to both their European sites and their missions; they helped build a global culture as part of early modern European evangelization. When the Society was suppressed, the Jesuits’ possessions were seized and redistributed, by transfer to other religious orders, confiscation by governments, or sale to individuals. These possessions were rarely returned, and when, in 1814, the Society was restored, the Jesuits had to begin to build new libraries from scratch. Their practices of librarianship, though not their original libraries, ... Read more

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  Journal of Second Language Writing: Special Issue on L2 Writing Assessment in the Digital Age

  Jinrong Li, Georgia Southern University and Mimi Li, Texas A & M University - Commerce

  2022
  

  The Special Issue on L2 Writing Assessment in the Digital Age was edited by Georgia Southern faculty member Jinrong Li and Mimi Li.

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  A Primer of Pastoral Spanish

  Michael J. McGrath, Georgia Southern University

  12-16-2022
  

  A Primer of Pastoral Spanish is designed to provide clergy, religious and laity alike with the tools to be pastoral among Spanish-speaking people. This primer is modeled after Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish (1953), whose author, Margarita Madrigal, bases her methodology on creating with the language instead of memorizing it. Previous knowledge of Spanish is not necessary, although, as you will discover, you already know thousands of words in Spanish. The vocabulary you know in English is the foundation on which you can build your knowledge of Spanish vocabulary. There are thousands of English words that become Spanish words if ... Read more

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  Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism since the New Deal

  Jonathan O'Neill, Georgia Southern University

  11-29-2022
  

  An intellectual history of American conservativism since the New Deal.
  
  The New Deal fundamentally changed the institutions of American constitutional government and, in turn, the relationship of Americans to their government. Johnathan O'Neill's Conservative Thought and American Constitutionalism since the New Deal examines how various types of conservative thinkers responded to this significant turning point in the second half of the twentieth century.

  O'Neill identifies four fundamental transformations engendered by the New Deal: the rise of the administrative state, the erosion of federalism, the ascendance of the modern presidency, and the development of modern judicial review. He then considers how various ... Read more

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  Music and the Brain for Musicians

  Laura A. Stambaugh, Georgia Southern University

  2022
  

  Musicians do amazing things. The wonders aren’t limited to the sounds they create. The wonders are also found in their brains. Music and the Brain for Musicians is a gateway for musicians to learn about the cognition and neuroscience that enables them to be outstanding performers. The book is situated in current theory and research but written for an audience who is less familiar with research jargon. The audience for Music and the Brain for Musicians is musicians of all kinds, music teachers, graduate and undergraduate students in music and psychology, and anyone who wants to learn how to apply ... Read more

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  Ecology, Spirituality, and Cosmology in Edwidge Danticat

  Joyce White, Georgia Southern University

  10-2022
  

  Ecology, Spirituality, and Cosmology in Edwidge Danticat: Crossroads as Ritual examines employs nature, literary tradition, and the cosmogram to examine Danticat's fiction as textual sites imbued with ritual and conducive for healing and clarifying Africana diasporic consciousness.

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  Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 2020

  Bryan A. Bank and Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University

  1-2021
  

  Summary: This volume comprises selected papers delivered at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Consortium of the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850, in convened in Tallahassee, Florida from 27-29 February 2020 under the sponsorship of the College of Arts and Sciences, and of the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, at Florida State University, with additional sponsorship by the Leon County Tourism Board and the Weider Family. All contributions published herein have undergone the peer-review process. The 2020 edition of the Selected Papers of the Consortium of the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850 was produced as a collaboration between the Consortium’s Board of ... Read more

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  Media Management and Sales

  Dean C. Cummings, Georgia Southern University

  2021
  

  Georgia Southern University faculty member, Dean C. Cummings wrote Media Management and Sales.

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  Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics

  Jason Hoelscher, Georgia Southern University

  10-2021
  

  In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference ... Read more

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  Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Nuanced Postnetwork Television

  Amanda Konkle, Georgia Southern University and Charles Burnetts, University of Western Ontario

  9-2021
  

  With an off-putting title and a decidedly retrograde premise, the CW dramedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a surprising choice for critical analysis. But, loyal viewers quickly came to appreciate the show’s sharp cultural critique through masterful parody, and this strategy has made it a critical darling and earned it several awards throughout its run. In ways not often seen on traditional network television, the show transcends conventional genre boundaries—the Hollywood musical, the romantic comedy, the music video—while resisting stereotypes associated with contemporary life.

  The essays in this collection underscore the show’s ability to distinguish itself within the current television market. Focusing ... Read more

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  Broadcast Announcing Worktext

  Mary E. Beadle, John Carroll University; Reed Smith, Georgia Southern University; and Alan R. Stephenson, John Carroll University

  5-14-2020
  

  Broadcast Announcing Worktext, now in its fifth edition, remains one of the best resources for those looking to gain the skills, techniques, and procedures necessary to enter the competitive field of broadcast performance.

  Written accessibly, with easy-to-digest modules and practice projects, this book encourages active participation from readers to help develop their talent on air. In addition to the principles of good performance, the book addresses the importance of the audience and how to communicate effectively to diverse groups. The book combines traditional teaching with practical experience, and includes sample scripts and self-study exercises to allow for a practical, hands-on ... Read more

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  Sources for Europe in the Modern World with Guided Writing Exercises

  Allison Scardino Belzer, Georgia Southern University and Jonathan S. Perry, University of South Florida

  7-2020
  

  Georgia Southern faculty member Allison Scardino Belzer co-edited Sources for Europe in the Modern World with Guided Writing Exercises.

  Extensively revised by new coeditor Allison Scardino Belzer, Sources for Europe in the Modern World with Guided Writing Exercises, Second Edition, includes more than 100 primary sources. Expertly edited for clarity and pedagogical utility, the sources range from letters, political tracts, memoirs, and fiction to essays, speeches, poems, legal documents, and visuals. Each document is accompanied by a headnote and reading questions. The second edition features fifty-two new and expanded sources and now includes images. Guided writing exercises, derived from the ... Read more

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  The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler

  Gregory Jerome Hampton and Kendra R. Parker, Georgia Southern University

  2-20-2020
  

  Octavia E. Butler is widely recognized today as one of the most important figures in contemporary science fiction. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering Butler's complete works from the bestselling novel Kindred, to her short stories and major novel sequences Patternmaster, Xenogenesis and The Parables, this is the most comprehensive Companion to Butler scholarship available today.

  
  The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including:
  
  · Cyborgs and the posthuman
  · Race and African American history
  · Afrofuturism
  · Gender and sexuality
  · New perspectives from Religious Studies, the Environmental ... Read more

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  Old Southern Cookery: Mary Randolph's Recipes from America's First Regional Cookbook Adapted for Today's Kitchen

  Christopher E. Hendricks, Georgia Southern University and Sue J. Hendricks

  5-1-2020
  
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  The Yudahua Business Group in China's Early Industrialization

  Juan Juan Peng, Georgia Southern University

  3-4-2020
  

  By tracing the history of Yudahua from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, this study analyzes a successful inland business model among textile companies in modern China. The steady growth of this enterprise relied primarily on its strategy to focus on low-end markets and to locate new mills in underdeveloped interior regions. This strategy further allowed the enterprise to pioneer industrialization in its host localities, demonstrating a major social and economic impact on the local societies. At the same time, Yudahua’s unique team leadership pattern—five leading families shared its ownership and management—made the business an ... Read more

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  After Life as a Human

  Laura Valeri, Georgia Southern University

  11-1-2020
  

  Located off of Florida's Forgotten Coast, Dog Island is a wild twin of St. George Island, a popular resort destination. Unlike St. George, however, Dog Island hosts less than 100 residents and a large nature preserve. Accessible only by boat or airplane, the island's pristine state attracts those who seek reprieve from the noise of modern life and those drawn to an ancient paradise untouched by commercial enterprises. Yet, with sea-level rising, industrial spills poisoning the wildlife, and climate change increasing the frequency of hurricanes, Dog Island is swiftly becoming a paradise lost, another casualty of humanity's reluctance to acknowledge ... Read more

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  The Culture of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment

  Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University

  5-2019
  

  Recent scholarly and popular attempts to define the Enlightenment, account for its diversity, and evaluate its historical significance suffer from a surprising lack of consensus at a time when the social and political challenges of today cry out for a more comprehensive and serviceable understanding of its importance. This book argues that regnant notions of the Enlightenment, the Radical Enlightenment, and the multitude of regional and religious enlightenments proposed by scholars all share an entangled intellectual genealogy rooted in a broader revolutionary "culture of enlightening" that took shape over the long-arc of intellectual history from the waning of the sixteenth-century ... Read more

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  Volume 6 ( 2019): Issue 3 (Aug 2019): The Culture of Jesuit Erudition in an Age of Enlightenment

  Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University

  2019
  
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  The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason

  Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University and Anton M. Matytsin, Kenyon College

  5-1-2019
  

  Although many historical narratives often describe the eighteenth century as an unalloyed 'Age of Reason', Enlightenment thinkers continued to grapple with the challenges posed by the revival and spread of philosophical skepticism. The imperative to overcome doubt and uncertainty informed some of the most innovative characteristics of eighteenth-century intellectual culture, including not only debates about epistemology and metaphysics but also matters of jurisprudence, theology, history, moral philosophy, and politics. Thinkers of this period debated about, established, and productively worked for progress within the parameters of the increasingly circumscribed boundaries of human reason. No longer considered innate and consistently perfect, reason ... Read more

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  American Public Memory and the Holocaust: Performing Gender, Shifting Orientations

  Lisa A. Costello, Georgia Southern University

  10-2019
  

  The recent rise of global antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and American white nationalism has created a dangerous challenge to Holocaust public memory on an unprecedented scale. This book is a timely exploration of the ways in which next-generation Holocaust survivors combine old and new media to bring newer generations of audiences into active engagement with Holocaust histories. Readers have been socialized to expect memorialization artifacts about the Holocaust to come in the form of diaries, memoirs, photos, or documentaries in which gender is often absent or marginalized. This book shows a complex process of remembering the past that can positively shift ... Read more

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  Savannah's Midnight Hour: Boosterism, Growth, and Commerce in a Nineteenth-Century American City

  Lisa L. Denmark, Georgia Southern University

  2019
  

  Savannah's Midnight Hour argues that Savannah's development is best understood within the larger history of municipal finance, public policy, and judicial readjustment in an urbanizing nation. In providing such context, Lisa Denmark adds constructive complexity to the conventional Old South/New South dichotomous narrative, in which the politics of slavery, secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction dominate the analysis of economic development. Denmark shows us that Savannah's fiscal experience in the antebellum and postbellum years, while exhibiting some distinctively southern characteristics, also echoes a larger national experience. Her broad account of municipal decision making about improvement investment throughout the nineteenth century offers ... Read more

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  Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe

  Amanda Konkle, Georgia Southern University

  2-4-2019
  

  Book Summary:

  Although she remains one of the all-time most recognizable Hollywood icons, Marilyn Monroe has seldom been ranked among the greatest actors of her generation. Critics have typically viewed her film roles as mere extensions of her sexpot star persona. Yet this ignores both the subtle variations between these roles and the acting skill that went into the creation of Monroe’s public persona.
  
  Some Kind of Mirror offers the first extended scholarly analysis of Marilyn Monroe’s film performances, examining how they united the contradictory discourses about women’s roles in 1950s America. Amanda Konkle suggests that Monroe’s star persona resonated ... Read more

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  The Last Mastodon

  Christina Olson, Georgia Southern University

  2019
  

  In summer of 2017, Christina Olson was invited to serve as poet-in-residence for apaleontology conference and exhibition (“The Valley of the Mastodons”) at the Western Science Center in Hemet, California. These poems, exploring the nature of history, assembly, and ownership, were inspired by that time spent among the paleontologists as well as Olson’s observations of the museum’s collections of fossils, particularly Max the Mastodon.