The following books were authored or edited by William & Mary faculty members and published in 2024. Books are listed in alphabetical order within the following categories: arts & sciences, education, fiction, law and wellness. Additional categories may be added throughout the year as more books are published. The information contained herein was submitted by the authors. Additional books may be submitted via this online form. – Ed.

Arts & Sciences

Activism in Hard Times in Central and Eastern Europe: People Power

Co-edited by Paula M. Pickering, Richard S. Perles Professor of Government, along with Patrice McMahon and Dorota Pietrzyk-Reeves

“Activism in Hard Times in Central and Eastern Europe” elevates the voices of civic activists from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and analyzes a wealth of information to generate new insights into how activism in the region manages to be vibrant, diverse, and consequential. Because of these countries’ unique historical trajectory, CEE activists have, in important ways, leap-frogged their counterparts in the West. Responses by CEE activists to the recent “hard times” – the shrinking of public space for civil society, democratic backsliding, polarization, and Russia’s war in Ukraine – provide important lessons for others confronting similar challenges around the world.

Published by Routledge | More information

Ambassadors of Social Progress: A History of International Blind Activism in the Cold War

By Maria Cristina Galmarini, Associate Professor of History

The book discusses the ways in which blind activists from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe entered the postwar international blind movement. It analyzes the intersectionality of disability and politics during the Cold War and the ways in which socialist disability activism was rooted in the socialist system of welfare.

Published by Northern Illinois University Press | More information

The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future

By Stephen E. Hanson, Lettie Pate Evans Professor of Government, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein

In “The Assault on the State,” political scientists Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein offer an impassioned plea to defend modern government against those who seek to destroy it. They dissect the attack on the machinery of government from its origins in post-Soviet Russia to the core powers of Western democracy. The dangers of state erosion imperil every aspect of our lives. Hanson and Kopstein outline a strategy that can reverse this destructive trend before humanity is plunged back into the pathological personalistic politics of premodern times.

Published by Polity | More information

The Child Witches of Olague

By Lu Ann Homza, James Pinckney Harrison Professor of History

“The Child Witches of Olague” features translations of newly-discovered archival documents from Navarre, Spain. It reveals what happened in the tiny village of Olague when witchcraft accusations surged there in 1611-1612.

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, “Magic in History” series | More information

A Data Engineering Approach to Wave Scattering Analysis with Applications in Radar, Sonar, Medical Diagnostics, Structural Flaw Detection and Intelligent Robotics

By Mark K. Hinders, Professor of Applied Science

“A Data Engineering Approach to Wave Scattering Analysis with Applications in Radar, Sonar, Medical Diagnostics, Structural Flaw Detection and Intelligent Robotics” applies scattering analysis to many applications including radar, sonar, medical diagnosis, intelligent robotics and more, enabling readers to implement new and better measurements with both novel instrumentation and artificial intelligence that automates the interpretation of various (and multiple) imaging data streams. Composed of 10 chapters, this book brings together separate scientific topics that share a common basis of knowledge and their unchanged mathematical techniques to ensure successful results.

Published by Wiley-IEEE Press | More information

Engaging Children in Vast Early America

Co-edited by Holly N.S. White M.A. ’12, Ph.D. ’17, Adjunct Lecturer of History, and Julia M. Gossard

“Engaging Children in Vast Early America” examines the often overlooked roles that children played in moments of contact between Indigenous groups, Europeans, and Africans in North and South America over the course of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This collaborative collection is the first of its kind to invite experts in the field of Vast Early America to engage with the history of childhood and youth. The result is nine innovative essays that expand our understanding of childhood and agentive children but also of empire and everyday life in Vast Early America.

Published by Routledge | More information

Euripides’ Alcestis: Introduction, Translation, Notes, and Essay

By Michael R. Halleran, Provost Emeritus and Professor of Classical Studies Emeritus

The book provides a new translation of Euripides’ drama Alcestis, with introduction, notes and interpretative essay.

Published by William & Mary Press | More information

Evangelist of Cinema: Yodogawa Nagaharu and Modern Japan

By Hiroshi Kitamura, Associate Professor of History/Director of International Relations

An in-depth study of Yodogawa Nagaharu, an “evangelist of cinema” who achieved nationwide fame as a writer, critic, editor, publicity agent and TV host in Japan. Tracing his life from birth to death, the book explores the critical role he played in the making of “modern Japan” through his active engagement with the movies.

Published by Nagoya University Press | More information

A Grammar of Arabic

Corinne Stokes, Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies, served as co-author/contributor

“A Grammar of Arabic” is a non-traditional reference grammar that is structured around patterns of Arabic language usage rather than prescriptive rules. Using data from Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and dialects spoken in Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, the Levant, Iraq and the Arabian Gulf, this grammar models a new framework for studying varieties of Arabic comparatively.

Published by Routledge | More information

A History of American Literature: 1900-1950

By Christopher MacGowan, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, Emeritus

A wide-ranging history of the literature, cultural context and major movements in the story of American literature in the first half of the 20th century.

Published by Wiley-Blackwell | More information

An Introduction to Decision and Game Theory

By William P. Fox, Visiting Teaching Professor of Mathematics

This book covers decision theory methods for risk, uncertainty, certainty, and competition. Multi-attribute decision-making, linear programming with data envelopment analysis. Both total conflict and partial conflict games are covered for simultaneous and sequential games.

Published by Taylor and Francis

Jacob van Ruisdael’s Ecological Landscapes

By Catherine Levesque, Associate Professor of Art & Art History

The 17th-century Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael is one of the foremost landscape painters of his time. This study examines how Ruisdael’s paintings, though fictive, pay close attention to the complexities of familiar environments that can be fruitfully considered “ecological.” His depiction of nature’s dynamism and generative force provided an alternative vision at an important moment when the lived landscape, increasingly manipulated and controlled, was most often considered property and investment.

Published by Amsterdam University Press | More information

Lure of the Supreme Joy: Pedagogy and Environment in the Neo-Confucian Academies of Zhu Xi

By Xin Conan-Wu, Associate Professor of Art & Art History

Focusing on landscape and environment, visuality and spatiality, in three 12th-century academies of philosopher Zhu Xi (1130–1200), this book introduces a reorientation of our understanding of the educational underpinnings of Neo-Confucianism — China’s most important cultural system of the past thousand years. It cross-examines the textual traces and their innate vision, the physical sites and their transhistorical milieux, the Eight Views and Nine Bends and their afterlives in China and Korea. It unfurls an academy education, mutually reinforced by classical learning and self-cultivation, and sustained by a lure of the Supreme Joy of Confucian sagehood.

Published by Brill | More information

The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration

By Brianna Nofil, Assistant Professor of History

“The Migrant’s Jail” examines how a century of political, ideological and economic exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the world’s largest system of migrant incarceration. From the incarceration of Chinese migrants in New York in the 1900s and 1910s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in Gulf South lockups of the 1980s and 1990s, federal immigration authorities provided communities with a cash windfall that they used to cut taxes, reward local officials and build bigger jails — which they then had incentive to fill. Migrant detention is not simply an outgrowth of mass incarceration; rather, it has propelled carceral state-building and fostered intergovernmental policing efforts since the turn of the 20th century.

Published by Princeton University Press | More information

Numerical Methods and Analysis through mathematical modeling

By William P. Fox, Visiting Teaching Professor of Mathematics, and Richard West

The book is an applied mathematical modeling book illustrating numerical analysis and methods to solve the models. The coverage includes discrete dynamical systems, interpolation, root finding, numerical methods to ODEs and PDEs, and single variable and multivariable numerical optimization methods.

Published by Taylor and Francis

Politicizing Islam in Austria: The Far-Right Impact in the Twenty-First Century

By Farid Hafez, Assistant Teaching Professor of International Relations at W&M, and Reinhard Heinisch, University of Salzburg

“Politicizing Islam in Austria” examines this anti-Muslim swerve in Austrian politics through a comprehensive analysis of government policies and regulations, as well as party and public discourses. In their innovative study, Hafez and Heinisch show how the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) adapted anti-Muslim discourse to their political purposes and how that discourse was then appropriated by the conservative center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). This reconfiguration of the political landscape prepared the way for a right-wing coalition government between conservatives and far-right actors that would subsequently institutionalize anti-Muslim political demands and change the shape of the civic conditions and public perceptions of Islam and the Muslim community in the republic.

Published by Rutgers University Press | More information

Popular Memory and Franco’s ‘Disappeared’ in Spain: Telling Stories of Mourning, Resistance, and Activism

By Francie Cate, Chair, Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures

This book examines a “people’s history of the Spanish Civil War’s anti-fascists who lost their 1936-1939 fight against far right military insurgents. The book argues that the regime’s 150,000 “disappeared” civilians have in fact since 1936 been the most visible protagonists safeguarded in the shared collective memory of the war’s losers. Narratives about the murdered victims — stories told in the form of memoirs, political speeches, visual art, film, novels, and the author’s recorded oral testimonies with family members in the province of Cádiz — form the centerpiece of this study.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan | More information

Practitioner’s Guide to Operations Research

By William P. Fox, Visiting Teaching Professor of Mathematics, and R. Burks

This book is a quantitative textbook for managers and practitioners in methods of operations research. The book illustrates methods and technology to solve many of these types of problems.

Published by Taylor and Francis

Privileging Place: How Second Homeowners Transform Communities and Themselves

By Meaghan Stiman, Assistant Professor of Sociology

In recent decades, Americans have purchased second homes at unprecedented rates. In “Privileging Place,” Meaghan Stiman examines the experiences of predominantly upper-middle-class suburbanites who bought second homes in the city or the country. Drawing on interviews with more than 60 owners of second homes and ethnographic data collected over the course of two years in Rangeley, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts, Stiman uncovers the motivations of these homeowners and analyzes the local consequences of their actions. By doing so, she traces the contours of privilege across communities in the 21st century.

Published by Princeton University Press | More information

Seamus Heaney’s Gifts

By Henry Hart, Mildred and J.B. Hickman Professor of Humanities

Throughout his career, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, maintained that poems came to him as gifts from a mysterious source. He also maintained that the recipient of gifts had an ethical obligation to share them with others. “Seamus Heaney’s Gifts” offers the first comprehensive examination of Heaney’s preoccupation with gifts, gift-giving, and gift-exchange rituals. Drawing on extensive research in Heaney archives, as well as three decades of correspondence with the poet, Hart presents a detailed study of Heaney’s life and work that foregrounds his commitment to the reception and distribution of gifts.

Published by Louisiana State University Press | More information

The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain

By Nicholas S. Popper, Professor of History and Interim Editor of Books, Omohundro Institute

The book argues that the expanded collection of political records and writings fueled political transformations from the Elizabethan era to the early 18th century. A wide range of early modern Britons – from elite counselors to aspiring clerks to ordinary subjects – eagerly acquired manuscripts and print works generated by the maelstrom of recording and preservation accelerating in this period. Their archives, the book shows, became sites of knowledge production analogous to the cabinets of curiosities, gardens, and museums that have drawn so much attention from early modern European historians. And the rampant circulation of political papers out of such collections, it argues, drove early modern Britain’s transformation into a complex media society, in which individuals’ political and epistemological attachments were conditioned by their information networks and communication practices.

Published by University of Chicago Press | More information

Trouble in Paradise: Twenty-Four Essays on the Social History of American Art

By Alan Wallach, Ralph H. Wark Professor of Art and Art History and Professor of American Studies Emeritus

Among the subjects Alan Wallach explores are the art of Thomas Cole, patronage of the Hudson River School, so-called “Luminism,” the rise of the American art museum, the historiography of American art, scholarship and the art market, as well as the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Rockwell Kent, Grant Wood, Philip Evergood, and Norman Rockwell. Throughout, Wallach employs a materialist approach to argue against traditional scholarship that considered American art and art institutions in isolation from their social, historical and ideological contexts.

Published by Brill (Hardcover and eBook), Haymarket Books (Paperback) | More information

Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea

By Andrea Wright, Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies

In the mid-20th century, the Arabian Peninsula emerged as a key site of oil production. International companies recruited workers from across the Middle East and Asia to staff their expanding oil projects. “Unruly Labor” considers the working conditions, hiring practices and, most important, worker actions and strikes at these oil projects. It illuminates the multiple ways workers built transnational solidarities to agitate for better working conditions, and how worker actions informed shifting understandings of rights, citizenship and national security.

Published by Stanford University Press | More information

Victorian Animals in Literature and Culture (audio book)

By Deborah Denenholz Morse, NEH Eminent Professor of English

“Victorian Animals in Literature and Culture” is a series of eight lectures that center on the literary and cultural representation of animals in the Victorian era and beyond, into contemporary fiction. The lectures are concerned with animal welfare and animal rights as well as literary and cultural representation.

Published on Audible for Great Courses | More information

Education

A Blueprint for Equity-driven Community College Leadership

By Pamela L. Eddy, Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs & Development at W&M, and Kim VanDerLinden, University of Buffalo

Drawing from interviews and surveys of longtime community college leaders as well as literature on community college leadership and social justice initiatives, Eddy and VanDerLinden outline a three-part model that can strengthen collaboration among institutional leaders and create resilient, equitable communities of practice. They advise stakeholders to increase self-awareness through reflective exercises and examination of personal bias. Their model directs leaders to develop contextual competency by evaluating external forces that influence focus in institutions of higher education, including employer and community needs; state and national campaigns and calls for graduates; and backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures.

Published by Harvard Education Press | More information

Exploring Complexities in College Student Development: Critical Lessons From Researching Students’ Journeys

By Patricia M. King, Rosemary J. Perez and James P. Barber, Senior Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Professor of Education

This book explores how college students address life challenges and develop the self-authoring capacities needed to deal with the ambiguities and complexities of life after graduation.

Based on the in-depth interview portion of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, this book draws on almost 1,000 interviews with a diverse cohort of 315 students from six institutions over four years. It traces these students’ journeys, documenting the wide variety of pathways they followed, the range of contexts in which their experiences took place, the liberal education outcomes associated with these experiences and the factors that affected quality and impact. The authors critique current student development theory and offer a new interactionist model to guide future study in the field, inviting readers to adopt five habits of mind to guide their praxis and practice to promote student development.

Published by Routledge | More information

Fiction

Fractured Frame

By Robert B. Archibald, Chancellor Professor of Economics

In 1968, Horace Narwhal commits a stupid crime and ends up paying for it by serving a stint in the Army. When his required enlistment ends, he returns home and finds a new job. A new life. He takes classes at night, gets his GED, and finds he has a natural talent creating whimsical sculptures. And he meets a police detective, a woman who captures his heart.

In 1980, Kenny Sturgis lives with his dad, an abusive loner, at a remote hunting camp. Barely out of high school, he spends his time working for his father, driving around town and target shooting. When he meets Maybell Wilcox, his luck seems to have changed. But why is she really interested in Kenny, and what kind of plan does she have for him?

By the time Horace Narwhal crosses paths with Kenny Sturgis, one man is dead and another is wrongly accused.

Published by Blue Fortune Enterprises LLC | More information

Law

Philosophical Foundations of Private International Law

By Michael S. Green, Woodbridge Professor of Law

The first interdisciplinary engagement between private international law (the conflict of laws) and philosophy. The book brings philosophers in conversation with private international law scholars to demystify the analytical tools of each discipline in relationship to the other.

Published by Oxford University Press | More information

Wellness

Art Therapy Directives: An Intervention Toolbox

By Sarah Balascio, Art Therapist & Adjunct Lecturer

“Art Therapy Directives: An Intervention Toolbox” is an all-inclusive manual of art therapy directives designed to be a comprehensive and organized resource for art therapists and other trained mental health professionals.

Published by Routledge Taylor & Francis | More information

Read the 2023 faculty book listing here.