The Architecture of Barry Byrne: Taking the Prairie School to Europe

Vincent L. Michael, AB’82, AM’82 Author Influenced by his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright, architect Barry Byrne built on Wright’s prairie school foundations to create a taut, planar modernism. A designer of Catholic churches across the United States, Byrne was also the only prairie school architect to build in Europe, designing the Church of Christ the King in Cork, Ireland. Vincent L. Michael, professor of historic preservation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, guides the reader through Byrne’s life and work in nine chapters and more than 125 photographs.  

An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema

James Chandler, AM’72, PhD’78 Author The term “sentiment” emerged in 18th-century European culture as a new ethical and aesthetic category, argues James Chandler—akin to “opinion” but more closely tied to the emotions. Chandler, the Franke distinguished service professor of English and director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, traces the sentimental mode from Samuel Richardson through Dickens into 20th-century film, notably the work of Frank Capra. It has shaped not only our culture, he claims, but also the very ways we experience the world.  

Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South After the Civil War

Carole Emberton, AB’97 Author The Civil War left a nation in tatters, and public speech in the first few months after the April 1865 surrender at Appomattox Courthouse was saturated with talk of redemption. Carole Emberton, assistant professor of history at the University of Buffalo, examines ideas of redemption among the groups that stood at the end of the Civil War, from newly freed slaves to the white supremacists who would form the Ku Klux Klan, and how these conflicting ideas contributed to the violence of Reconstruction.  

Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992

Charles K. Armstrong, PhD’94 Author The foreign relations of the “Hermit Kingdom” often seem mysterious. In a book that aims to reveal the motivations and strategies of North Korean foreign relations, Charles K. Armstrong, professor of history at Columbia University, details the isolated nation’s navigation of global politics from its inception to the fall of the Soviet Union. Armstrong shows how North Korea was able to sustain a doctrine of self-reliance and manage its alliances with other communist states.  

Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil

Victoria Langland, AB’92, AM’95 Author Student activism was a key form of opposition to the military dictatorship that took power in Brazil in 1964. Victoria Langland, assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis, asks what made students engage in national politics and act as directly as they did. Langland examines the forms that their activism took and how these developed against the backdrop of the Cold War and an increasingly violent government, arguing that the pivotal year of 1968 altered the notion of activism itself in the country.  

Centering Animals in Latin American History

Martha Few, AB’86, AM’89 Editor Coedited by Martha Few, associate professor of colonial Latin American history at the University of Arizona, this book reintroduces animals into the history of Latin America after the Spanish conquest. Essays in the collection demonstrate how human and animal interactions helped to shape the region’s history and culture. The contributors examine animals’ role in culture and colonialism; their relationship to medicine, science, and public health; and their political meanings in postcolonial Latin America.  

Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz

Joanna Trzeciak, AM’92, PhD’05 Translator One of Poland’s most celebrated contemporary writers, Tadeusz Różewicz is known for his absurdist plays and for poetry that pares down language to convey the horrors he witnessed as a member of the Polish resistance during World War II. This collection, translated by Joanna Trzeciak, associate professor of Russian and Polish translation at Kent State University, makes an extended selection of his poetry available in English for the first time.