Faculty Publications 2022

Jeffrey Herf | Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State 

Jeffrey Herf's new book, Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945 - 1949 is forthcoming from the Cambridge University Press in April 2022. According to the Cambridge University Press website: " Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international account, he explores the role of the United States, the Arab States, the Palestine Arabs, the Zionists, and key European governments from Britain and France to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland. His findings reveal a spectrum of support and opposition that stood in sharp contrast to the political coordinates that emerged during the Cold War, shedding new light on how and why the state of Israel was established in 1948 and challenging conventional associations of left and right, imperialism and anti-imperialism, and racism and anti-racism.

Pre-order the book here.

Piotr Kosicki | Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century: Catholic Christian Democrats in Europe and the Americas 

Piotr Kosicki's new book Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century: Catholic Christian Democrats in Europe and the Americas has been published in mid-March by the Cornell University Press. Kosicki co-edited this book with Wolfram Kaiser from the University of Portsmouth.

According to the publisher's website, "This book focuses on the political exile of Catholic Christian Democrats during the global twentieth century, from the end of the First World War to the end of the Cold War. Transcending the common national approach, the present volume puts transnational perspectives at center stage and in doing so aspires to be a genuinely global and longitudinal study." Pre-order the book here! 

Paul S. Landau | Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries

Paul S. Landau's new book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries has been published in the US by Ohio University Press. Reviewers have hailed the book as a "tour de force" which sheds much new light on the relationship between South African rebels against apartheid and violence. One reviewer wrote on the publisher's website: "Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries is one of the most important books on South Africa to appear in more than a generation. A masterpiece of analysis and careful historical reconstruction, Landau revisits a crucial moment in the country’s modern history, when a group of activists turned revolutionaries led by Nelson Mandela pursued the overthrow of the racist apartheid state."

See the publisher's website here.

Hayim Lapin | The Oxford Annotated Mishna, vol. 1-3

Hayim Lapin, with Shaye J.D. Cohen and Robert Goldenberg has published The Oxford Annotated Mishna, the first translation of that work, in three volumes.

The Mishnah is the foundational document of rabbinic law and, one could say, of rabbinic Judaism itself. It is overwhelmingly technical and focused on matters of practice, custom, and law. An expert group of translators and annotators have assemble da version of the Mishnah that can be read without specialist knowledge.

See the publisher's website HERE.

David Sicilia | Strands of Modernization: The Circulation of Technology and Business Practices in East Asia, 1850 - 1920 

David Sicilia has published a new book, Strands of Modernization: The Circulation of Technology and Business Practices in East Asia, 1850 - 1920 with the University of Toronto Press, a leading academic publisher of books on East Asian history. The book is co-edited with David G. Wittner. According to the publisher's website, "The core ambition driving Strands of Modernization is to illuminate processes of adaption, versus adoption, that occur when technology and business practices cross sociocultural boundaries."

In addition to co-editing the book, Sicilia is co-author of the introduction and author of a chapter on the role of multinational corporations in technology transfer. Order the book here.

Julie Taddeo | Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Period Drama 

Julie Taddeo has published an edited collection with Manchester University Press: Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Period Drama. Featuring original chapters on period television from the UK, the US, Spain, and Australia, Diagnosing History offers a global and multidisciplinary contribution to both televisual and medical history. Julie's chapter uses neo-Victorian dramas to examine the relationship between psychiatry, gynecological surgery, gender and class in 19th century Britain. Details for the new book are on the publisher's website here.

 

Julie Taddeo | Rape in Period Drama Television 

Julie Taddeo's new book has now been published by Rowman and Littlefield. Co-authored with Dr. Katherine Byrne (Ulster University, UK), this book examines international period drama television and how rape functions as a kind of “anti-heritage” device that dispels the nostalgia usually associated with period television and reflects back on the current cultural moment, in which the #MeToo and #Timesup movements have increased awareness of the prevalence of sexual abuse, but in which legal and political processes have not yet caught up. In doing so, Rape in Period Drama Television sets out to explore the assumptions and beliefs which audiences continue to hold about rape, rapists, and victims. Book details are at Rowman and Littlefield.

Stefano Villani | Making Italy Anglican 

Stefano Villani's new book, Making Italy Anglican: Why the Book of Common Prayer Was Translated into Italian was released by Oxford University Press in February as part of their series Oxford Studies in Historical Theology.

According to the publisher's website, "Making Italy Anglican tells the story of a fruitless encounter that helps us better to understand both the self-perception of the Church of England's international role and the cross-cultural and religious relations between Britain and Italy. Stefano Villani shows how Italy, as the heart of Roman Catholicism, was--over a long period of time--the very center of the global ambitions of the Church of England." See more information and order the book on publisher's website.

Thomas Zeller | Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters

Thomas Zeller's new book, Consuming Landscapes, was recently released by Johns Hopkins University Press. It is available both as  a printed book and in an open access version, thanks to a grant from the University of Maryland libraries. 

According to the publisher's website, "What we see through our windshields reflects ideas about our national identity, consumerism, and infrastructure.

For better or worse, windshields have become a major frame for viewing the nonhuman world. The view from the road is one of the main ways in which we experience our environments. These vistas are the result of deliberate historical forces, and humans have shaped them as they simultaneously sought to be transformed by them. In Consuming Landscapes, Thomas Zeller explores how what we see while driving reflects how we view our societies and ourselves, the role that consumerism plays in our infrastructure, and ideas about reshaping the environment in the twentieth century.

Zeller breaks new ground by comparing the driving experience and the history of landscaped roads in the United States and Germany, two major automotive countries. He focuses specifically on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the United States and the German Alpine Road as case studies. When the automobile was still young, an early twentieth-century group of designers—landscape architects, civil engineers, and planners—sought to build scenic infrastructures, or roads that would immerse drivers in the landscapes that they were traversing. As more Americans and Europeans owned cars and drove them, however, they became less interested in enchanted views; safety became more important than beauty.

Clashes between designers and drivers resulted in different visions of landscapes made for automobiles. As strange as it may seem to twenty-first-century readers, many professionals in the early twentieth century envisioned cars and roads, if properly managed, as saviors of the environment. Consuming Landscapes illustrates how the meaning of infrastructures changed as a result of use and consumption. Such changes indicate a deep ambivalence toward the automobile and roads, prompting the question: can cars and roads bring us closer to nature while deeply altering it at the same time?"

Ting Zhang | Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China 

Ting Zhang's recent book Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China (University of Washington Press, 2020) has been published May 2022 in Chinese. New Books in Law wrote that the English edition is: "a beautiful combination of legal history and print culture history....Wonderfully detailed, lucidly written, and packed full of fascinating books, this is a must-read for anyone interested in legal history, the history of the book, and in thinking about comparative histories of print culture and commercial publishing." According to China Review International, the book is "a must-read for scholars interested in the production and circulation of legal knowledge, popular reading culture, and commercial publishing history in late imperial China. Through the lens of legal culture and book history, Circulating the Code challenges an “orientalist” view on Chinese history and demonstrates that legal consciousness existed and thrived among various groups in late imperial China."