Frontpage Article - Brandeis University Press

A groundbreaking collection of Black women’s literary work

May 24, 2023/in Frontpage Article/by Marie Comuzzo

Kristin Waters’s and Carol B. Conaway’s landmark edited collection Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds offers sophisticated commentary on primary sources and their vital traditions. In fact, this volumes brings forth a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based in social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America.

Named the 2007 Winner of The Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award for Best Anthology by the Association of Black Women Historians.

Named to Blackfeminisms.com Fall 2017 fifty recommended books on black feminism.

This anthology represents a new paradigm for understanding the historical and contemporary intellectual production of African American women.
—The Journal of African American History

About the Editors

Kristin Waters is Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Worcester State University, a Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, and the author of Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought (University Press of Mississippi, 2022).
Carol B. Conaway is Associate Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire and an expert on the press and race relations.

Robinson Roxana, Georgia O'Keeffe, Cover

Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time

May 24, 2023/in Frontpage Article/by Marie Comuzzo

This is without question the best book ever written on O’Keeffe, and an invaluable resource not only for scholars but for the general public. It is accurate, insightful, and beautifully written.

_{The New Yorker}

To See Takes Time, and we hope you’ll take the time to view the historic works in MoMA’s new retrospective Georgia O‘Keeffe: To See Takes Time.

You can read more about Georgia O‘Keeffe‘s life and influence in Roxana Robinson’s “Georgia O‘Keeffe: A Life.”

About the Author

Roxana Robinson is an art historian and novelist. Among her books of fiction are This Is My Daughter, Asking for Love and Other Stories, Summer Light, and A Glimpse of Scarlet.

More about the Book

One of the greatest and most admired artists of the twentieth century, Georgia O’Keeffe led a life rich in intense relationships—with family, friends, and especially with fellow artist Alfred Stieglitz.

Her extraordinary accomplishments, such as the often eroticized flowers, bones, stones, skulls, and pelvises she painted with such command, are all the more remarkable when seen in the context of the struggle she waged between the rigorous demands of love and work.

When Roxana Robinson’s definitive biography of O’Keeffe was first published in 1989, it received rave reviews and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. This new edition features a new foreword by the author setting O’Keefe in an artistic context over the last thirty years since the book was first published, as well as previously unpublished letters of the young O’Keeffe to her lover, Arthur MacMahon.

It also relates the story of Robinson’s own encounter with the artist. As interest in O’Keeffe continues to grow among museum-goers and scholars alike, this book remains indispensable for understanding her life and art.

INTERVIEW: JOY LADIN, THE SOUL OF THE STRANGER FOR GEEKSOUT

May 23, 2023/in Frontpage Article/by Marie Comuzzo

Joy Ladin, author of The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah From a Transgender Perspective, sat down with Michele Kirichanskaya of GeeksOut to speak about her writing, career, and relationship to Judaism as a member of the LGBTQ community.

Speaking with Kirichanskaya, Ladin called The Soul of the Stranger “a book of intimate theology that grew out of a lifetime of thinking about and talking with God.” She continued: “I wanted the book to demonstrate that, contrary to what many think, trans experience is not opposed to religious experience or even religious tradition, that, as in my life, each could sustain and illuminate the other.”

The Soul of the Stranger explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another.

Read the full interview with Ladin here and learn more about The Soul of the Stranger here.

About the Author

Joy Ladin holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University.

More about the book

Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another.

Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah, a collection of ancient texts that assume human beings are either male or female, speaks both to practical transgender concerns, such as marginalization, and to the challenges of living without a body or social role that renders one intelligible to others—challenges that can help us understand a God who defies all human categories.

These creative, evocative readings transform our understanding of the Torah’s portrayals of God, humanity, and relationships between them.

Mary’s little lamb gets a makeover in The Lamb Cycle

May 11, 2023/in Frontpage Article/by Marie Comuzzo

“The Lamb Cycle made me laugh with delight even as it delivered a masterclass on poetic form.”

— Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Tweet

In The Lamb Cycle, David Ewbank achieves the unthinkable—he writes so convincingly in the style of the great English poets that one could be lulled into thinking that Shakespeare himself was inspired to muse upon the subject of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Ewbank captures not only the style of each of the poets he chooses, but also their preoccupations and subject matter. So D.H. Lawrence’s Mary longs for her lamb as any woman longing for her lover, whilst T.S. Eliot’s Mary is recollected by an old man looking back on his life. Alexander Pope writes an “An Essay on Lambs,” and Tennyson’s lotus eaters become “The Clover Eater.”

Brilliantly written, sophisticated, and laugh-out-loud funny, these poems, enhanced by Kate Feiffer’s charming illustrations, will enchant anyone who has ever read an English poem.

When Freedom Speaks, your guide to the First Amendment

May 9, 2023/in Frontpage Article/by Marie Comuzzo

“Greenky’s easy-to-read primer offers general readers and students a telling history and framework for understanding the basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methodologies courts commonly use to negotiate clashing and competing constitutional values and individual rights to free speech.”

—Library Journal Tweet

When Freedom Speaks: The Boundaries and the Boundlessness of our First Amendment Right chronicles the stories that narrate our First Amendment right to speak our minds. Greenky’s background gives her a unique perspective upon which to teach and write about the protection we have from laws that abridge our right to the freedom of speech. Rhetoricians focus on language and how it influences perception and moves people to action, this book values a rhetorical approach to teach the concepts as moral narratives that proscribe the boundaries of our constitutionally protected right. Using the characters and drama embedded in the cases that elucidate First Amendment principles, When Freedom Speaks makes the concepts easier to understand and applicable to our lives. The aim of this book is to engage today’s increasingly politically active audience and introduce them to the theories, the landmark Supreme Court cases, and recent lower court cases that guide First Amendment jurisprudence.

An intimate conversation with forty women across the world

May 9, 2023/in Frontpage Article/by Marie Comuzzo

“Reading Ellen Warner’s The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty is like having one of those intimate conversations with each of 40 women from around the world as they share their formative experiences and advice for younger generations. Their insights are particularly valuable in a country where intergenerational learning is often lost…”

— Maria Leonard Olsen, The Washington Post Tweet

The Washington Post has published an in-depth review of Ellen Warner’s The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty. This book is a collection of photographic portraits and interviews, depicting how the second half of life is experienced by women from many different cultures. From a French actress to a British novelist, from an Algerian nomad to a Saudi Arabian doctor, and an American politician, Ellen Warner traveled all over the world interviewing women about their lives.

A new documentary brings Dan Pallotta’s Uncharitable to life

May 9, 2023/in Frontpage Article/by Marie Comuzzo

“Dan Pallotta has written the clearest and most articulate critique I have read of the system of values that our charities and other nonprofit organizations are supposed to follow.”

— Derek Bok, Former President of Harvard University Tweet

Uncharitable goes where no other book on the nonprofit sector has dared to tread. This Spring, the bestselling “nonprofit sector manifesto” (The Stanford Social Innovation Review) is leaping from page to screen in a landmark documentary directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal and featuring Chris Anderson (CEO of Ted) and Edward Norton (Actor and Founder of Crowdrise), among other movers and shakers in the world of philanthropy.

Where other texts suggest ways to optimize performance inside the existing paradigm, Uncharitable suggests that the paradigm itself is the problem and calls into question our fundamental canons about charity. By declaring our independence from these obsolete ideas, Pallotta theorizes, we can dramatically accelerate progress on the most urgent social issues of our time.