Passionate Work: Choreographing a Dance Career

By Ruth Horowitz, AM’72, PhD’75; Stanford University Press, 2024

Sociologist Ruth Horowitz seeks to understand what drives the thousands of dancers who have careers as performers but never become stars. Drawing on interviews with dozens of dancers who spend years in the corps de ballet of a large company or build a portfolio of roles with smaller companies and in short-term projects, Horowitz explores how they balance financial stability and opportunities for artistic expression at every stage of their careers, from their earliest training decisions to their transition away from performing years later.

Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination

By Webb Keane, AM’84, PhD’90; Allen Lane, 2024

The emergence of new artificial intelligence tools has prompted ethical concerns about, for instance, the moral decision-making power of a self-driving car or our ability to bond with a chatbot. But such dilemmas are not new, Webb Keane argues. The anthropologist traces a sweeping history of encounters with near-human or nonhuman beings and inventions—the animals, robots, and gods of the book’s title as well as entities such as the environment. Keane brings together diverse views to explore how we live with ethically significant others and, ultimately, what makes us human.

Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness

By Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey, AM’91, PhD’93; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024

The name Jane Austen is synonymous with happy endings, but the neat resolutions to her novels, so often ending in marriage, belie a more ambivalent relationship between matrimony and happiness, according to Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey. She argues that the idiosyncratic qualities of the novels’ endings—the accelerated pace of the storytelling, the improbable coincidences—are techniques Austen uses to emphasize a different source of happiness: a woman’s moral growth.

Bad Hostage

Directed, edited, and coproduced by Mimi Wilcox, AB’16; The Film Fund, 2024

Mimi Wilcox’s grandmother was held hostage in her home with her five children in 1973. In this documentary Wilcox examines her grandmother’s experience alongside those of Kristin Enmark and Patty Hearst, two women involved in high-profile hostage situations during the same era. In Wilcox’s framing, all three women attempted to connect with their captors and as a result were condemned by law enforcement, the media, and their communities. Bad Hostage highlights the misogyny at the heart of the narratives created around them. Max Asaf, AB’16, also worked as a producer on the film.

Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema

By Pamela Robertson Wojcik, AM’88, PhD’93; University of California Press, 2024

Americans have an ambivalent view of homelessness, and it has shifted throughout the 20th and 21st centuries: Is it a personal or societal failure? A bold display of independence? Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines how unhomed, placeless, and mobile characters have been depicted in American film, from the silent era tramp movies to Nomadland (2020). By focusing on stories of precarity, Wojcik challenges the common assertion that narratives of success and social mobility are at the heart of American cinema.

For additional alumni book releases, use the link to the Magazine’s Goodreads bookshelf at mag.uchicago.edu/alumni-books.