Collection preserves books by current and former faculty and staff.
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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 -
The Last Mastodon
Christina Olson, Georgia Southern University
1-1-2019
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.
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L’Isola del Silenzio
Laura Valeri, Georgia Southern University
1-1-2019
Non occorre spostarsi troppo per viaggiare molto. Sette miglia, appena, nelle acque verdeazzurre del Golfo del Messico, a bordo di un traghetto che fa la spola tra il villaggio costiero di Carrabelle e la sottile striscia di terra di Dog Island. In questo lembo quasi intatto della Florida meridionale, battuto da ricorrenti uragani, privo di negozi, refrattario a connessioni internet e abitato da un centinaio di coraggiosi residenti, approdano una scrittrice americana di antica stirpe mediterranea e il suo compagno fotografo. È il contesto ideale per lasciarsi alle spalle l’esasperato efficientismo del Sogno Americano e ascoltare il silenzio, scoprendo quel ... Read more
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A History of the Muslim World Since 1260
Vernon O. Egger, Georgia Southern University
2018
A History of the Muslim World since 1260 continues the narrative begun by A History of the Muslim World to 1750 by tracing the development of Muslim societies, institutions, and doctrines from the time of the Mongol conquests through to the present day. It offers students a balanced coverage of Muslim societies that extend from Western Europe to Southeast Asia. Whereas it presents a multifaceted examination of Muslim cultures, it focuses on analysing the interaction between the expression of faith and contemporary social conditions.
This extensively updated second edition is now in full colour, and the chronology of the book ... Read more
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Chivalry in Westeros: The Knightly Code of A Song of Ice and Fire
Carol Parrish Jamison, Georgia Southern University
1-1-2018
George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has sparked a renewed interest in things medieval. The pseudo-historical world of Westeros delights casual fans while offering a rich new perspective for medievalists and scholars. This study explores how Martin crafts a chivalric code that intersects with and illuminates well known medieval texts, including both romance and heroic epics. Through characters such as Brienne of Tarth, Sandor Clegane and Jaime Lannister, Martin variously challenges, upholds and deconstructs chivalry as depicted in the literature of the Middle Ages.
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Assessment Across Online Language Education
Stephanie Link, Oklahoma State University and Jinrong Li, Georgia Southern University
2-26-2018
Georgia Southern faculty member Jinrong Li co-authored Assessment Across Online Language Education.
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Memory in a Time of Prose: Studies in Epistemology, Hebrew Scribalism, and the Biblical Past
Daniel Pioske, Georgia Southern University
9-2018
Memory in a Time of Prose investigates a deceptively straightforward question: what did the biblical scribes know about times previous to their own? To address this question, the following study focuses on matters pertaining to epistemology, or the sources, limits, and conditions of knowing that would have shaped biblical stories told about a past that preceded the composition of these writings by a generation or more. The investigation that unfolds with these interests in mind consists of a series of case studies that compare biblical references to an early Iron Age world (ca. 1175–830 BCE) with a wider constellation ... Read more
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Three Dashes Bitters
Jack Simmons, Georgia Southern University
7-13-2018
When Tim Schmidt returns to New Orleans to attend his sister’s debutante ball, he finds that nothing has changed during his three-year hiatus in Boston.
He is still in love with Jane, a hard-drinking iconoclast, too well bred to join the ranks of the Generation X slackers, yet unable to accept the standards of her high society upbringing. Happily, it seems Jane might still harbor feelings for him.
But over drinks at The Columns Hotel, things get messy, and Tim’s grand return to the city of his birth soon unravels—the very sort of thing that inspired Tim to leave NOLA ... Read more
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The Dead Still Here
Laura E. Valeri, Georgia Southern University
6-5-2018
Book Summary: Mapping stories set in Europe and America, The Dead Still Here skillfully paces through eleven short stories about friends-with-benefits typed relationships, vicious divorces and thievery, the loss of a child, the loss of a mother, and the Coast Guard and the Navy rescuing refugees from a bad storm at sea. Laura Valeri writes one single breathtaking sentence about sex, Dear John emails, and Christmas presents in “Liabilities of a Love Misguided” and displays a sharp sense of paranoia based on everyone looking at the narrator, laughing, whispering in “What They Know.” Along with characters that are irrevocably locked ... Read more
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From Rome to Zurich, from Ignatius to Vermigli: Essays in Honor of John Patrick Donnelly, S.J.
Kathleen M. Comerford, Georgia Southern University; Gary W. Jenkins, Eastern University; and Torrance Kirby, McGill University
2-20-2017
Book Summary: From Rome to Zurich, between Ignatius and Vermigli brings notable scholars from the fields of Reformation and Early Modern studies to honor their friend, mentor, and colleague, John Patrick Donnelly with essays commensurate with his own broad interests and scholarship. Touching Protestant scholasticism, Reformation era life writing, Reformation polemics – both Protestant and Catholic – and with several on theology proper, inter alia, the essays collected here by a group of international scholars break new ground in Reformation history, thought, and theology, providing fresh insights into current scholarship in both Reformation and Catholic Reformation studies. The essays take ... Read more
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Raising Our Voices, Communicating Our Existence
Elizabeth Desnoyers-Colas, Georgia Southern University
5-25-2017
Book Summary: Raising Our Voices provides complete and thorough coverage of the study and practice of public speaking, the seventh edition offers students theory and practical skills, presenting public speaking as an art form for transactional communication between speaker and audience.
The goal of this text is to make it one that will prepare students to become effective public speakers in any of the various speaking situations they may encounter in their lives. Whether they are presenting in a professional capacity, speaking as a community leader, offering a tribute to a retiring colleague, eulogizing a friend, delivering a commencement address, ... Read more
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A History of the Muslim World to 1750: The Making of a Civilization
Vernon O. Egger, Georgia Southern University
2017
A History of the Muslim World to 1750 traces the development of Islamic civilization from the career of the Prophet Muhammad to the mid-eighteenth century. Encompassing a wide range of significant events within the period, its coverage includes the creation of the Dar al-Islam (the territory ruled by Muslims), the fragmentation of society into various religious and political groups including the Shi'ites and Sunnis, the series of catastrophes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that threatened to destroy the civilization, and the rise of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires.
Including the latest research from the last ten years, this ... Read more
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The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage
Jared Yates Sexton, Georgia Southern University
8-15-2017
"An impressionistic and often disturbing account of the 2016 presidential race . . . Sexton grapples with the Trump campaign from the perspective of the crowds reveling in the candidate's presence and message. It is a useful vantage point given the increasingly blatant bigotry in the months since the election . . . This book reveals the incremental nature of public displays of hatred, growing from harsh chants and bumper stickers to, say, an open and unmasked gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville . . . His] dispatches are bracing." --The Washington Post
When he agreed to cover the 2016 ... Read more
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Cecil Brown: The Murrow Boy Who Became Broadcasting’s Crusader for Truth
Reed W. Smith, Georgia Southern University
12-5-2017
Book Summary: The son of Jewish immigrants, war correspondent Cecil Brown (1907–1987) was a member of CBS’ esteemed Murrow Boys. Expelled from Italy and Singapore for reporting the facts, he witnessed the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia and the war in North Africa, and survived the sinking of the British battleship HMS Repulse by a Japanese submarine. Back in the U.S., he became an influential commentator during the years when Americans sought a dispassionate voice to make sense of complex developments. He was one of the first journalists to champion civil rights, to condemn Senator McCarthy’s tactics (and President Eisenhower’s reticence), ... Read more
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Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, 1532-1621
Kathleen M. Comerford, Georgia Southern University
10-13-2016
Book Summary: Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, 1532-1621 focuses on the cooperation between two new foundations, the last Medici state and the Society of Jesus, spanning nearly a century, concentrating on the Jesuit foundations in Florence, Siena, and Montepulciano. As the Medici built and centralized their power in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, they sought to control both the civic and religious behavior of their citizens. They found partners in the Jesuits, whose educational program helped establish social order and maintain religious orthodoxy. Via a detailed investigation of both minor and major Italian Jesuit colleges, and of multiple Medici rulers, ... Read more
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I Am the Oil of the Engine of the World
Jared Yates Sexton, Georgia Southern University
2-23-2016
Narcissism. Sexism. Consumerism and technological fetishism. The cult of media and the rot of war. In his third collection of stories, Jared Yates Sexton turns his eye to the ravages of the American Disease with twenty-five of his wildest and most experimental pieces. Told in raving mad prose fit for these savage times, Sexton skewers every sacred cow in an attempt to diagnose the sickness of Now.
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Eighteenth-Century Thought, 5
Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University
2-28-2015
Book Summary: Eighteenth-Century Thought is aninternational, interdisciplinary annual founded for the purpose of advancing the study of the long eighteenth century from c. 1650 to the end of the Atlantic and European Revolutionary Era (c. 1750–1850). The annual publishes research pertinent to the fields of Revolutionary Europe, the history of the Atlantic world, the Enlightenment, the globalization of thought and culture between c. 1650–1850, the history of political thought and philosophy, eighteenth-century cultural and literary studies, history of science, legal history, the intersection of Enlightenment and religion, as well as economic thought and the human sciences as they were conceived ... Read more
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Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 2012
Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University; Karl Roider; Suzanne Marchand; and Alexander Mikaberidze
2015
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The Jesuit Suppression in Global Context: Causes, Events, and Consequences
Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University and Jonathan Wright, University of Oxford
10-29-2015
Book Summary: In 1773, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus, a dramatic, puzzling act that had a profound impact. This volume traces the causes of the attack on the Jesuits, the national expulsions that preceded universal suppression, and the consequences of these extraordinary developments. The Suppression occurred at a unique historical juncture, at the high-water mark of the Enlightenment and on the cusp of global imperial crises and the Age of Revolution. After more than two centuries, answers to how and why it took place remain unclear. A diverse selection of essays - covering France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, ... Read more
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WOVENText: Georgia Tech’s Custom Bedford Book of Genres
Lisa Dusenberry, Georgia Southern University
8-1-2015
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Bring Me The Head of Yorkie Goodman
Jared Yates Sexton, Georgia Southern University
2-19-2015
“Who’s Yorkie Goodman?” asks Wallace, an enforcer for an East Coast drug cartel. “Just a fella” says his boss, who goes by the name Boss. Just a fella … but Boss wants Yorkie Goodman taken out. He wants it so badly, he’ll risk sending Wallace into Wallace’s own past where a beautiful woman he abandoned years before still holds a bewitching power over him like some ancient siren song. He wants it so badly, he's sending along his deadliest assassin, Carp, to make sure the job is done right. And he wants proof … proof in the form of Goodman’s ... Read more
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The Hook and The Haymaker
Jared Yates Sexton, Georgia Southern University
1-5-2015
In the follow-up to his critically lauded debut An End To All Things, Jared Yates Sexton presents twenty-three new stories that pick up where his first book left off. Whether they're set in a sweat-saturated sparring ring, the backroom of a gas station speakeasy, or in the kitchen of the house down the street, these are glimpses into an America that too-often goes unseen. Witness here the untold tales of the losers and the should've-beens, the dreamers and the hustlers, all of them just spoiling for their turn at glory or the inevitable one-two punch that puts them down for ... Read more
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London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549-1687
Robert Batchelor, Georgia Southern University
1-6-2014
Book Summary: If one had looked for a potential global city in Europe in the 1540s, the most likely candidate would have been Antwerp, which had emerged as the center of the German and Spanish silver exchange as well as the Portuguese spice and Spanish sugar trades. It almost certainly would not have been London, an unassuming hub of the wool and cloth trade with a population of around 75,000, still trying to recover from the onslaught of the Black Plague. But by 1700 London’s population had reached a staggering 575,000—and it had developed its first global corporations, as well ... Read more
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Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History
Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University and Ulrich L. Lehner, Marquette University
5-30-2014
Book Summary: In recent years, historians have rediscovered the religious dimensions of the Enlightenment. This volume offers a thorough reappraisal of the so-called “Catholic Enlightenment” as a transnational Enlightenment movement. This Catholic Enlightenment was at once ultramontane and conciliarist, sometimes moderate but often surprisingly radical, with participants active throughout Europe in universities, seminaries, salons, and the periodical press.
In Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History, the contributors, primarily European scholars, provide intellectual biographies of twenty Catholic Enlightenment figures across eighteenth-century Europe, many of them little known in English-language scholarship on the Enlightenment and pre-revolutionary eras. These figures represent ... Read more
