June 23, 2022 University Press Issue

Marina Warner

Wimple Networks

The scholars in Relations of Power argue that a method borrowed from literary criticism can shift our historical understanding of medieval women’s spheres of influence.

Relations of Power: Women’s Networks in the Middle Ages

edited by Emma O. Bérat, Rebecca Hardie, and Irina Dumitrescu

Larry Rohter

An Eternal Symbol of Black Resistance

Gayl Jones’s novel Palmares sees the legendary Brazilian slave haven as a story to which all descendants of Africans brought forcibly to the Americas can lay claim.

Palmares

by Gayl Jones

Song for Almeyda and Song for Anninho

by Gayl Jones

Jarrett Earnest

A Proliferation of Beauties

The critic Dave Hickey almost single-handedly remade the practice of writing about art in the 1980s and 1990s, even as he provoked outrage in the institutional art world.

Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art

by Daniel Oppenheimer

The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded

by Dave Hickey

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy

by Dave Hickey

Sophie Pinkham

A Hotter Russia

The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that Russia will be a relative winner in climate change, but a new book argues that the country will find itself in trouble.

Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change

by Thane Gustafson

Lynn Hunt

I, the People

Was Robespierre proof that violent revolution in the name of rights and social justice could only result in terror and authoritarianism?

Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most

by Marcel Gauchet, translated from the French by Malcolm DeBevoise, with a foreword by David A. Bell and Hugo Drochon

Laura Kolbe

Where Does It Hurt?

Three new books attempt to locate the origin of pain and its vocabulary.

The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain

by Haider Warraich

An Anatomy of Pain: How the Body and the Mind Experience and Endure Physical Suffering

by Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen

Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose

by Leigh Cowart

Richard Sieburth

Alban Berg’s Dissonances

Berg’s music, with its lyrical combination of tonal and atonal techniques, is closer to late Romanticism than to the strict modernism of his contemporaries Schoenberg and Webern.

Berg

by Bryan Simms and Charlotte Erwin

James Mann

A new biography of Robert Welch traces the origins and history of the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist John Birch Society and, in the process, provides historical perspective on the far-right populism of the Trump era.

A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism

by Edward H. Miller

Catherine Nicholson

Improving Paradise

For Milton, innocence was interesting—a significant innovation on his biblical source material.

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

by Katie Kadue

Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England

by Timothy M. Harrison

Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton

by Nicholas McDowell

Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton

by Joe Moshenska

James Quandt

A Camera Light as a Pen

A film series and two recent books expand the canon of the French New Wave.

Forgotten Filmmakers of the French New Wave

a film series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 4–June 5, 2022; and the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 6–June 19, 2022

The Legacy of the New Wave in French Cinema

by Douglas Morrey

French New Wave: A Revolution in Design

by Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh, and Christopher Frayling

Peter E. Gordon

In Search of Recognition

The philosopher Axel Honneth argues that the act of recognizing one another forms the scaffolding of our personal and social world.

Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas

by Axel Honneth, translated from the German by Joseph Ganahl

Scott W. Stern

Dire Straits

Toxic Debt, Josiah Rector’s history of Detroit’s struggles for clean air and water, argues that municipal debt and austerity have furthered an ongoing environmental catastrophe.

Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit

by Josiah Rector

Diane Seuss