Fall 2019 Books
The following is a list of books published by alumnae and faculty, or about alumnae, and received at the Alumnae Quarterly offices since the publication of the summer 2019 issue. To submit your work, please email quarterly@mtholyoke.edu.
Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor
The University of Virginia Press
“Epic Landscapes,” the first study devoted to architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s substantial artistic oeuvre from 1795, when he set sail from Britain to Virginia, to late 1798, when he relocated to Pennsylvania, offers the only extended consideration of Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors, including a series of complex trompe l’oeil studies and three significant illustrated manuscripts. Though Latrobe’s architecture is well known, his watercolors have received little critical attention. “Epic Landscapes” rediscovers Latrobe’s watercolors as an ambitious body of work and reconsiders the close relationship between the visual and spatial sensibility of these images and his architectural designs. It also offers a fresh analysis of Latrobe within the context of creative practice in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century as he explored contemporary ideas concerning the form of art for Republican society and the social impacts of revolution.
Julia Sienkewicz ’01 is assistant professor of art history at Roanoke College.
Messages from Mooseville: A Year in Alaska
Kathryn Rabinow
Happily living a suburban matron’s life in Texas, Kitty Eppston is shocked when her husband announces that they will be moving to Alaska. Once settled in the “last frontier,” Kitty writes to her friends about her many adventures. As she learns the gourmet complexities of muktuk and the challenges presented when penned up in a stall with a young musk ox, the reader will delight in her humorous escapades.
Kathryn Eppston Rabinow ’64 is a Houston-based photographer, a community activist and a board member of the Houston Public Library Foundation and the Children’s Museum of Houston.
Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success, Second Edition
The University of Chicago Press
This workbook takes overwhelming task of writing scholarly articles and breaks it into small, manageable steps. For the past decade, this guide has been the go-to source for those creating articles for peer-reviewed journals. It has enabled thousands to overcome their anxieties and produce the publications that are essential to succeeding in their fields. With this new edition, Belcher expands her advice to reach beginning scholars in even more disciplines and those writing from scratch. This edition also includes more targeted exercises and checklists, as well as the latest research on productivity and scholarly writing.
Wendy Laura Belcher ’84 is Associate Professor of African literature at Princeton University with a joint appointment in the department of comparative literature and the Center for African American Studies. Before becoming a professor, she worked for several years as the director of UCLA Chicano Studies Research Press and a freelance academic editor for Oxford University Press, University of California Press and several others.
Daughter of Fire: Conspiracy of the Dark
Ylva Publishing
For Aeryn, a girl born to the remote, wintry Ice Crown region of Ilirya, the outside world is a fantasy: a series of wonderful stories told by occasional passing travellers. She never imagines anything for her life beyond following in her parents’ footsteps. But the discovery that she has the rare gift of magic shatters her isolated world. Aeryn can create and tame fire. It’s an intoxicating, raw, and thrilling power, but it also sets her apart. And her gift attracts attention.
She is whisked from her home in the wilds to train at Windhall University and master her magic. There, Aeryn slowly learns the truth about the real world, with its strange mix of people and powers, and so many intertwining threads of shadows and light. She’s drawn to unattainable Lyse, a beautiful healer in training who makes Aeryn’s heart soar. But she also senses a creeping darkness all around that could threaten the future of the kingdom itself.
Karen Frost ’08 is an armchair pop culture pundit and blogger whose articles have been spread internationally by actresses, production companies, directors, and news outlets. She writes YA high fantasy and lives just outside of Washington, D.C.
Black Wings
Veliz Books
Spanning two continents, “Black Wings” is the story of Laila and Yasmeen, a mother and daughter, struggling to meet across the generations, cultures, and secrets that separate them. Their shared grief, as well as the common bond of unhappiness in their marriages, allows them to reconnect after 17 years of frustration, anger and misunderstandings.
Sehba Sarwar ’86 creates essays, stories, poems and art that tackle displacement, migration and women’s issues. Her writings have appeared in publications including New York Times Sunday Magazine, Asia: Magazine of Asian Literature, Callaloo and others. Born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, in a home filled with artists and activities, Sarwar is currently based in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.
David Mitchell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
Bloomsbury Publishing
“David Mitchell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives” brings together leading scholars of contemporary fiction to guide readers through the full range of the author’s writings. The authors explore Mitchell’s genre-hopping techniques, world-making aesthetics and engagements with key contemporary issues such as globalization, empire, the environment, disability, trauma and technology.
Courtney Hopf ’01 is Lecturer and Programme Manager for Liberal Studies and Creative Arts at New York University London, UK. She has previously published work on “Cloud Atlas” in “David Mitchell: Critical Essays” (2011), as well as essays in “Alluvium” and “Rhizomes.”
Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance
The University of North Carolina Press
This volume considers the interconnection of racial oppression in the U.S. South and West, presenting thirteen case studies that explore the ways in which citizens and migrants alike have been caged, detained, deported, and incarcerated, and what these practices tell us about state building, converging and coercive legal powers, and national sovereignty. As these studies depict the institutional development and state scaffolding of overlapping carceral regimes, they also consider how prisoners and immigrants resisted such oppression and violence by drawing on the transnational politics of human rights and liberation, transcending the isolation of incarceration, detention, deportation and the boundaries of domestic law.
David Hernández is Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies at Mount Holyoke College. His research focuses on immigration enforcement, in particular, the U.S. detention regime. Hernández is coeditor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press).
African Americans and Africa: A New History
Yale University Press
What is an “African American” and how does this identity relate to the African continent? This book provides an introduction to the relationship between African Americans and Africa from the era of slavery to the present, mapping several overlapping diasporas. The diversity of African American identities through relationships with region, ethnicity, slavery, and immigration are all examined to investigate questions fundamental to the study of African American history and culture.
Nemata Blyden ’87 is Associate Professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. She is the author of “West Indians in West Africa, 1808–1880: The African Diaspora in Reverse.”
November 4, 2019
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