Category: New Faculty Books

Professor Kevis Goodman’s Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics (Yale University Press, 2022) is released this month. Pathologies of Motion offers a new account of later eighteenth‑century medicine, aesthetics, and poetics as overlapping forms of knowledge increasingly worried about the relationship between the geographical mobility of persons displaced from home and the internal motions constituting the physiology...

Professor James Grantham Turner’s The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022) studies in depth, for the first time in English, a building that has enraptured admirers from Rubens and Fragonard to Goethe and Edith Wharton — a villa that Turner compellingly evokes as the most beautiful dwelling of the Renaissance. Drawing on a treasure...

Professor Elisa Tamarkin’s Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is released this month. Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin’s sweeping meditation on a key shift in consciousness: the arrival of relevance as the means to grasp how something that was once disregarded, unvalued, or lost to us becomes interesting...

In The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (MIT Press, 2021), English Department Lecturer Hannah Zeavin offers a history of psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud’s treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions. While therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation, psychotherapy has...

In Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD (Columbia University Press, 2021), Professor D.A. Miller watches digitally restored films by directors from Mizoguchi to Pasolini and from Hitchcock to Honda, looking to find not only what he saw in them as a young man, but also what he was then kept from seeing by quick camerawork, normal projection speed, missing...

A poet and a book artist take a train across the United States, creating and conversing along the way.  Cecil Giscombe and Judith Margolis recently published Train Music, a collaborative travelogue that explores race and gender with a mix of poetry, prose, and visual art.   In Train Music, Giscombe’s narrative disjunctions and Margolis’ figurative abstractions crisscross at a roundhouse (‘I’m not...

In the age of visual culture, why write fiction? For a wide array of contemporary writers from Toni Morrison to J.M. Coetzee, Professor Dorothy Hale suggests, the answer lies in the novel’s ethical power.  For these writers, novels not only illuminate ethical action in complex social worlds, but also task writers and readers, through the narrative problem of character representation,...