Benjamin A. Saltzman has developed a scholar’s version of a curse. For the past several years, the associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the English department has been perpetually on the lookout for a single, easily missed gesture in pictures and texts. It’s subtle yet recurs with striking consistency across centuries of art and literature, from classical philosophy to medieval manuscripts to Renaissance frescoes to contemporary photography.

The gesture Saltzman can’t help noticing is the act of turning away: an averted glance, a hand raised to the face, eyes shielded, the body angled aside from something overwhelming or unbearable. In Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Saltzman follows the gesture across art and literary history, unpacking what he finds to be one of the most densely meaningful ways humans respond to what we can’t fully face.

What’s so special about turning away? Part of his argument, Saltzman says, is that it’s “the most ambiguous gesture because it often entails covering up the face, and the face is a source of expression, a source of information.” That makes this action, he writes in the book, “a uniquely indeterminate one, uniquely evocative yet resistant to communication, uniquely conspicuous yet obscure.”

What’s more, turning away isolates the turner and yet, Saltzman argues, it is also intensely interrelational. In the gamut of strong emotions that it expresses—pity, grief, shame, disgust—turning away shows the “permeability of the self” to the suffering of others.

Saltzman’s interest in ancient texts took shape during his undergraduate years at Pace University in Manhattan, when he accidentally enrolled in a literature course and eventually found himself drawn to a small but vibrant group of medieval studies scholars working across New York. He began learning Old English, sought out mentors at nearby universities, and immersed himself in a field that was both rigorously technical and unexpectedly open-ended. He was especially interested in “the parts of language where there is ambiguity.”

That same interest in the ambiguous became the engine of Turning Away, which lets the gesture lead rather than exploring a particular emotional response it expresses. Saltzman begins each of the book’s five chapters with a scene or motif that he likens to a pebble thrown into the water, whose outward ripples he then tracks through periods, artists, and thinkers. In chapter 2, “Ambivalence,” for example, a scene from Plato’s Republic spills into discussions of Charles Darwin’s writings on disgust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thoughts on the nature of pity, and contemporary journalist Philip Gourevitch’s reflections on his own response to the Rwandan genocide.

The final chapter, “Retroversion,” hearkens back to the earliest germ of the book idea. A decade or so ago, Saltzman was studying an illustrated Old English poetic translation of the book of Genesis from around the year 1000 in which Adam and Eve cover their faces rather than their bodies. “I just thought this was interesting and strange,” he recalls, “and contrary to how I had imagined what their gestures might have been.”

Once Saltzman began looking for it, the gesture seemed to appear everywhere across the visual and literary canons. He traces it in The Republic, when Leontius recoils from a pile of corpses before giving in to the urge to look, and in The Third of May 1808, by Francisco Goya, which depicts Spanish civilians shielding their eyes from a firing squad during the Peninsular War. It appears as well in a 1938 Works Progress Administration poster showing a couple with their heads bowed in shame beneath the warning, “Syphilis: False shame and fear may destroy your future. Have your blood tested.” Saltzman also finds shielded eyes and averted gazes in portraits by queer Nigerian British photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode depicting nude Black men covering one or both of their eyes, their expressions at once vulnerable and defiant.

Saltzman cites these far-flung examples, among many others, to show how widely turning away can operate: as moral conflict, self-protection, vulnerability, fear, and despair. The precise meaning varies but the gesture is “never insignificant,” he says. “It’s always there to signal, ‘This is serious.’”

And the gesture’s ambiguity, Saltzman argues, is precisely what makes it ethically charged. Turning away is often condemned as indifference, especially in a culture that treats attention as virtue. In the aftermath of World War II, he argues, the language of moral failure hardened around aversion: Do not turn away. Attention became a guardrail against atrocity.

“There is truth to that,” reflects Saltzman. “A world where no one is paying attention suddenly is a world truly where atrocities will thrive.” But the logic has limits: “We can’t humanly pay attention to all of the terrible things that are happening.”

In the same way a word carries many meanings, Saltzman says, the act of turning away “also draws on its full range of meaning.” The book, he adds, seeks to “understand the human complexity of this gesture” and to encourage readers to ask why we return to it. Because when we are willing to investigate that question, he says, “we can have a more nuanced relation to ourselves and to the world.”