The War on Tenure

By Deepa Das Acevedo, AM’09, PhD’13, JD’16; Cambridge University Press, 2025

Tenure at American universities is the subject of much debate, but what often gets lost in these conversations, writes Deepa Das Acevedo, is that tenure is an employment protection. Reframing tenure as a contractual agreement makes the practice easier to understand, writes Acevedo, who is an expert in employment law. It also offers a concreteness that other discussions of tenure, which rely on more abstract values like free expression, may lack. Acevedo combines empirical data and individual stories to clear up common misconceptions about life as a tenure-track faculty member. She defends tenure as an important counter to at-will employment, which prevails in the United States.

Internships in the Private Sector: How You Can Find, Prepare for, and Thrive in Them

By Charles A. Fishkin, AB’82; University of Chicago Press, 2026

Drawing on his four decades working in global capital markets and mentoring young professionals, Charles A. Fishkin guides college and graduate students through their first internship. Focusing especially on structured programs run by recruitment departments at major employers in the private sector, Fishkin provides concrete advice on how to find the right fit and successfully apply for internships. He goes on to show readers what to expect from an internship, how to build the skills most valued by employers, and how to turn what they learn from the internship into a rewarding career.

Bind Me Tighter Still

By Lara Ehrlich, AM’04, CER’07; Red Hen Press, 2025

Many years ago the siren Ceto gave up her tail to live on land as a human. She built Sirenland from a roadside curiosity into a thriving theme park and trained other women to work there, performing in a mermaid burlesque and posing for seaside photo ops with eager tourists. When Lara Ehrlich introduces readers to these characters, Ceto is doing her best to maintain dignity and control over her little kingdom. But her 15-year-old daughter, Naia, has begun to chafe against the confines of this world and to question her mother’s authority. Then a death occurs at Sirenland, and everything becomes uncertain.

Therapeutic Inequalities: Mood Disorder Self-Management in Chicago

By Talia Rose Weiner, AM’07, AM’11, PhD’17; New York University Press, 2025

Self-management, a clinical modality that enables patients to control their own symptoms, originated as a treatment for physical ailments like arthritis but has since been promoted for the treatment of psychiatric illness. While it can be empowering, Talia Rose Weiner argues that self-management is not always a realistic way to treat illnesses like mood disorders. In an ethnographic study of the mental health care landscape in Chicago, Weiner follows patients and therapists engaged in various forms of self-management. This approach is often treated as apolitical, but Weiner shows that it is in fact heavy with political, socioeconomic, and historical assumptions and, as a result, has disparate outcomes for patients based on context and class. Once we identify the limits of self-management, Weiner argues, we can begin to imagine more effective systems.

In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City

By Arnika Fuhrmann, PhD’08; Duke University Press, 2026

Set primarily in 1960s Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love was actually shot almost entirely in Bangkok. Arnika Fuhrmann uses the film as a jumping-off point to study the cultural exchange and aesthetic blending between Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Shanghai today. As Thailand’s capital undergoes major transformation, architects, designers, and advertisers are adopting the Western-inflected aesthetics of 20th-century Shanghai and Hong Kong. Focusing on hotels, bars, clubs, film, and literature from Bangkok, Fuhrmann explores the different ways Chineseness manifests across Southeast Asia.