Faculty Bookshelf

Beauty shot of Ayres Hall on October 31, 2018. Photo by Steven Bridges

Derek Alderman, Professor of Geography

Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum

Published by UGA Press, 2022

“What the authors successfully do is offer guides, site managers, and visitors a window into the plantation interpretation experience outside of their own, as well as points of reflection for guides and site managers revising interpretation strategies . . . . Remembering Enslavement makes a significant contribution to cultural geography, plantation/slavery tourism, and public history.”

—Jodi Skipper, coeditor of Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region


Álvaro A. Ayo, Associate Professor of Spanish

Conquistando la leyenda negra: imperio, fraternidad universal y el individuo moderno en Pardo Bazán y Blasco Ibáñez (1898-1914). (Conquering the Black Legend: Empire, Universal Fraternity, and the Modern Individual in Pardo Bazán and Blasco Ibáñez (1898-1914)). 

Published by Juan de La Cuesta-Hispanic Monographs


Justin Arft, Assistant Professor of Classics

Arete and the Odyssey’s Poetics of Interrogation: The Queen and Her Question

Published by Oxford University Press

Arft “offers the first book-length study centered on Arete, the Phaeacian queen, and her central role in the epic’s construction of Odysseus’ kleos and provides a major reinterpretation of the Odyssey’s central Phaeacian episode and adds significant dimension to the characters and generic diversity of performances within it.”


Brook Bauer, Assistant Professor of History

Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840

Published by The University of Alabama Press

“Brooke M. Bauer’s Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 is the first book-length study of the role Catawba women played in creating and preserving a cohesive tribal identity over three centuries of colonization and cultural turmoil. Bauer, a citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, weaves ethnohistorical methodologies, family history, cultural context, and the Catawba language together to generate an internal perspective on the Catawbas’ history and heritage in the area now known as the Carolina Piedmont.”


Timothy Gill, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Encountering US Empire in Socialist Venezuela:  The Legacy of Race, Neo-Colonialism, and Democracy Promotion

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press

“In this timely and urgent study, Timothy Gill exposes the latest sordid chapter in the shameful history of US intervention in Latin America. He untangles the labyrinth of programs and organizations that the United States has assembled, under the banner of ‘promoting democracy,’ to undermine the effort by the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela to construct a democracy that would actually empower the broad masses. This is a must-read for students of Latin American and international politics and US foreign policy. Encountering US Empire in Socialist Venezuela will also be of great interest to all those concerned with building a more just and equitable international order.”

—William I. Robinson, author of Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-pandemic


Kyung Joon Han, Associate Professor of Political Science

Rationality of Irrationality Political Determinants and Effects of Party Position Blurring

Published by University of Michigan Press

“Rationality of Irrationality is a highly promising book on position blurring as a partisan strategy and how voters respond to this strategy. Han expands on this recent wave of literature on position blurring with original ideas and inspiring analyses. A must-read for anyone interested in party strategies and their electoral effects.”

—Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Aarhus University


Jan Simek, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology

A Dark Pathway: Precontact Native American Mud Glyphs From 1st Unnamed Cave, Tennessee

Published by UT Press

Jan Simek and his colleagues present two decades of research at a precontact dark zone cave art site in East Tennessee. Discovered in 1994, 1st Unnamed Cave ushered in an extensive and systematic effort to research precontact cave art sites in the Eastern Woodlands, where the tradition of cave art production was widespread among ancient peoples. Indeed, when a preliminary report about 1st Unnamed Cave was first published in 1997, there were only seven known cave art sites across the Southeast; today, that number exceeds ninety.


Helene Sinnreich, Professor of Religious Studies

The Atrocity of Hunger: Starvation in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow Ghettos during World War II

Published by Cambridge University Press

During World War II, the Germans put the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland into ghettos which restricted their movement and, most crucially for their survival, access to food. The Germans saw the Jews as ‘useless eaters,’ and denied them sufficient food for survival. The hunger which resulted from this intentional starvation impacted every aspect of Jewish life inside the ghettos. This book focuses on the Jews in the Łódź, Warsaw, and Kraków ghettos as they struggled to survive the deadly Nazi ghetto and, in particular, the genocidal famine conditions. Jews had no control over Nazi food policy but they attempted to survive the deadly conditions of Nazi ghettoization through a range of coping mechanisms and survival strategies. In this book, Helene Sinnreich explores their story, drawing from diaries and first-hand accounts of the victims and survivors.