Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place

Esther Sullivan, AB’04

For US mobile home residents, the land-lease system known as divided-asset ownership—most own their homes but rent the land beneath it—makes housing affordable but precarious, with evictions frequent due to property redevelopment. In a nation where 18 million people live in these homes, argues Esther Sullivan, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver, their stories reflect how a significant portion of America’s poor struggle to survive. Based on interviews with informants in Florida and Texas, where she took up mobile home residency during her fieldwork, Sullivan’s ethnography focuses on the people facing eviction and the nature of their losses.

The Water Diviner and Other Stories

Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer, AM’94, PhD’02

In this collection’s title story, a widowed grandmother living in the United States is torn between a televangelist’s apocalyptic vision and the potential companionship of a man in her native Sri Lanka. Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer, clinical associate professor of psychology at New York University, pursues this theme in her stories about Sri Lankan immigrants and their children, whose lives often pull them back toward the old world.

My Butch Career: A Memoir

Esther Newton, AM’64, PhD’68

“What does it mean to have a career, and why did I want one?” asks Esther Newton, retired Purchase College anthropologist and University of Michigan professor of women’s studies and American culture. Her memoir recounts the first half of her life, from rejecting “compulsory girlhood” in the 1950s to helping make gay and lesbian studies a field in the 1980s. Forging that academic career was no less difficult than claiming a queer identity, and just as essential to resolving a “discordant sense of self,” which Newton channeled in an influential UChicago dissertation on drag queens.

Managing Country Risk in an Age of Globalization: A Practical Guide to Overcoming Challenges in a Complex World

Charles A. Fishkin, AB’82

Whether you are an international investor or simply a private citizen participating in the global economy, your finances are affected by the risk that political and economic turmoil will destabilize a particular country’s savings and debt obligations. This guide to the challenges of country risk, coauthored by Charles A. Fishkin, an adjunct professor of financial engineering at the Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York, explains how the problem is expanding into new dimensions, such as cybersecurity, and how best to mitigate its effects.

A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile

Judith Friedlander, AB’66, AM’69, PhD’73

In 1933, when New School for Social Research founder and president Alvin Johnson established the school’s University in Exile, his efforts to provide a safe haven for European refugee scholars won an ally in UChicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins. Links between the two institutions surface throughout this history of the New School by Judith Friedlander, professor emerita of anthropology at Hunter College and former dean of the New School’s Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science. Marking the school’s centenary, her account highlights scholars who taught there and at UChicago, including Jacob Marschak, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt.

Up Is Down: Mid-Century Experiments in Advertising and Film at the Goldsholl Studio

Corinne Granof, PhD’95

This exhibition catalog features nine essays on the postwar Chicago firm Goldsholl Design Associates, whose husband-and-wife founders, Morton and Millie Goldsholl, used Bauhaus aesthetics to create “total design” brand identities for such corporate clients as Revlon, 7-Up, and Motorola. It showcases the Goldsholls’ work in print, moving images, packaging, and trademarks, and includes an essay by exhibition cocurator Corinne Granof on Millie Goldsholl’s contributions to 20th-century design and filmmaking.

Art Paul of Playboy: The Man behind the Bunny

Jennifer Hou Kwong (Jian Ping), CER’07, CER’11

“I took the job because it was an opportunity to form the look and feeling of a magazine from its beginning,” said the late Art Paul, Playboy’s founding art director from 1953 until 1982. In her feature-length directorial debut, writer and teacher Jennifer Hou Kwong documents how Paul took that opportunity and transformed the visual culture of American magazine publishing.