Research

On May 25, 2023 Julie Taddeo published a review of "This is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s," a recent photo Exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The exhbit included 46 photos, most of them in black and white. Julie writes: "The exhibit gives us multiple versions of what it means to “be British” as a generation of socially conscious photographers expose issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality that threaten inclusivity during these two tumultuous decades." The exhibit also includes an hour-long film, Handsworth Songs, made in 1986 by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah for Channel Four’s series, Britain: The Lie of the Land. The newsreels and still photographs from the 1985 riots featured in Handsworth Songs provide context for the racism directed against the Black community in Birmingham in the 1980s. 

From the review: "This Is Britain is a powerful visual reminder that trash and runoff, like proudly displayed Union Jacks on bikes, furtive kisses, and power suits on posh Londoners, are just some of the “bits and bobs” that make this history worth revisiting."

The exhibit runs until June 11, 2023. Read the full review HERE.

Marlene Mayo's essay is among six which have been selected for publication in a recent e-book, Project Muse issue, University of Hawaii Press, 2022, entitled Celebrating 60+ Issues of "U.S.-Japan Women's Journal, edited by Alisa Freedman.

Her essay is "A Friend in Need:  Esther B. Rhoads, Quakers, and Humanitarian Relief in Allied Occupied Japan, 1946-1952," U.S.-Japan Women's Journal  50 (2016): 54. 

Find the e-book here.

Julie Taddo edited a special issue on Bridgerton for The Journal of Popular Television (Intellect, April 2023).  The issue contains her Introduction and articles on Bridgerton's interrogation of race, sex, and feminism in  Regency  England as well as contemporary fan culture's relationship to the Netflix TV series and the Regency romance genre as a whole.

See the issue here!

Co-edited with Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, and Joo-Cheong Tham, Julie Greene has published Global Labor Migration: New Directions with the University of Illinois Press. According to the publisher, "Around the world, hundreds of millions of labor migrants endure exploitation, lack of basic rights, and institutionalized discrimination and marginalization. What dynamics and drivers have created a world in which such a huge--and rapidly growing--group toils as marginalized men and women, existing as a lower caste institutionally and juridically? In what ways did labor migrants shape their living and working conditions in the past, and what opportunities exist for them today?

Global Labor Migration presents new multidisciplinary, transregional perspectives on issues surrounding global labor migration. The essays go beyond disciplinary boundaries, with sociologists, ethnographers, legal scholars, and historians contributing research that extends comparison among and within world regions. Looking at migrant workers from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the contributors illustrate the need for broader perspectives that study labor migration over longer timeframes and from wider geographic areas. The result is a unique, much-needed collection that delves into one of the world’s most pressing issues, generates scholarly dialogue, and proposes cutting-edge research agendas and methods."

See the publisher's website here for more information.

Julie Taddeo's new book has now been published by Lexington Books, co-edited with Jo Parnell. According to the publisher, Writing Australian History On-Screen: Television and Film Period Dramas "Down Under" "reveals the depths of Australian history from convict times to the present day. The essays in this book are thematically driven and take a rounded historical-cultural-sociological-psychological approach in analyzing the various selected productions. In their analyses and interpretations of the topic, the contributors interrogate the intricacies in Australian history as represented in Australian filmic period drama, taken from an Australian perspective. Individually, and together as a body of authors, they highlight past issues that, despite the society’s changing attitudes over time, still have relevance for the Australia of today. In speaking to the subject, the contributing writers show a keen awareness that addressing new areas arising from the humanities is key to learning; and hence to developing an understanding of the Australian culture, the society, and sense of the ever-unfurling flag of an Australian something that is not yet a national identity."

See the publisher's website here for more information.

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."

See the publisher's website here.

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.

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."

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.

Jeffrey Herf's new book, Israel's Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945 - 1949 has been published by 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.

Order the book here.