Search results for ""yale university press""

Insightful and interdisciplinary, this book considers the movement of people around the world and how contemporary artists contribute to our understanding of it In this timely volume, artists and thinkers join in conversation around the topic of global migration, examining both its cultural impact and the culture of migration itself. Individual voices shed light on the societal transformations related to migration and its representation in 21st-century art, offering diverse points of entry into this massive phenomenon and its many manifestations. The featured artworks range from painting, sculpture, and photography to installation, video, and sound art, and their makers—including Isaac Julien, Richard Mosse, Reena Saini Kallat, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Do Ho Suh, among many others—hail from around the world. Texts by experts in political science, Latin American studies, and human rights, as well as contemporary art, expand upon the political, economic, and social contexts of migration and its representation. The book also includes three conversations in which artists discuss the complexity of making work about migration. Amid worldwide tensions surrounding refugee crises and border security, this publication provides a nuanced interpretation of the current cultural moment. Intertwining themes of memory, home, activism, and more, When Home Won’t Let You Stay meditates on how art both shapes and is shaped by the public discourse on migration.Published in association with the Institute of Contemporary Art/BostonExhibition Schedule:Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (October 23, 2019–January 26, 2020)Minneapolis Institute of Art (February 22–May 24, 2020)Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University (February 5–May 30, 2021)

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An award-winning historian’s revisionary account of the early modern world, showing how apocalyptic ideas stimulated political, religious, and intellectual transformations “A masterful synthesis of the prognostications of faith, knowledge, and politics on a global stage. Martin’s book illuminates one of the enduring themes that shaped the medieval and early modern world.”—Paula E. Findlen, Stanford University In this revelatory immersion into the apocalyptic, messianic, and millenarian ideas and movements that created the modern world, John Jeffries Martin performs a kind of empathic time travel, entering into the psyche, spirituality, and temporalities of a cast of historical actors in profound moments of discovery. He argues that religious faith—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—did not oppose but rather fostered the making of a modern scientific spirit, buoyed along by a providential view of history and nature, and a deep conviction in the coming End of the World. Through thoughtful attention to the primary sources, Martin re‑reads the Renaissance, excavating a religious foundation at the core of even the most radical empirical thinking. Familiar icons like Ibn Khaldūn, Columbus, Isaac Luria, and Francis Bacon emerge startlingly fresh and newly gleaned, agents of a history formerly untold and of a modern world made in the image of its imminent end.

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A brutally funny, carnivalesque novel about love, death, and survival, from the Czech Republic’s greatest living author Tab, an itinerant Czech actor, travels around Europe on the theater circuit with his partner, Soňa, and their two young sons, attending festivals and performing plays. Confronted with growing resentment toward foreigners, Tab decides to return home to the banks of the Sázava River, southeast of Prague. As soon as they arrive, Tab finds himself falsely accused of a terrible crime and forced to go on the run with his sons. Over the course of their journey, dodging authorities by car, foot, and raft, they encounter a motley cast of allies and enemies. The effects of Tab’s sudden reappearance and just-as-sudden disappearance ripple through the community, catalyzing a chaotic chain of events that reaches a final, raucous crescendo. Hailed as “a picaresque romp of black humor and fantasy” (Times Literary Supplement), this is an unforgettable novel about discovering sparks of humanity even in the bleakest of places, in which love or the longing to find it lies around every bend.

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A detailed look at a genre that combines virtuoso printmaking techniques, sophisticated imagery, and engaging, playful poetry This beautiful volume celebrates the tradition of the Japanese surimono print. Produced from around 1800 until 1840, during the Edo period, surimono (“printed things” in Japanese) combine intricate artwork and playful poetry, and their small print runs and exclusive audiences allowed for lavish yet subtle surface treatments, such as embossing and gilding. Enjoyed for their learned allusions to literature and contemporary culture, surimono continue to delight and perplex scholars with their visual puns and wordplay. Imagery ranges from delicate, domestic still lifes to spirited vignettes of the natural world, while the poems are often lighthearted takes on the classical Japanese waka form. With its rich text and scholarly apparatus—including names and titles in kanji characters as well as transliterations and translations of the poems on the catalogued prints—The Private World of Surimono serves as a critical resource for scholars of Japanese art and history and offers general readers insight into this rare and innovative print form.Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery

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At once engaging, personal, and analytical, this book provides the intellectual resources for the critical understanding of art Charles Harrison’s landmark book offers an original, clear, and wide-ranging introduction to the arts of painting and sculpture, to the principal artistic print media, and to the visual arts of modernism and post-modernism. Covering the entire history of art, from Paleolithic cave painting to contemporary art, it provides foundational guidance on the basic character and techniques of the different art forms, on the various genres of painting in the Western tradition, and on the techniques of sculpture as they have been practiced over several millennia and across a wide range of cultures. Throughout the book, Harrison discusses the relative priorities of aesthetic appreciation and historical inquiry, and the importance of combining the two approaches. Written in a style that is at once graceful, engaging, and personal, as well as analytical and exact, this illuminating book offers an impassioned and timely defense of the importance and value of the firsthand encounter with works of art, whether in museums or in their original locations.

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An experiment in interactive design and a bold reimaging of the museum exhibition This catalogue pioneers a new approach to the art museum exhibition, using the power of design to explore how we experience the world through our varied senses. Six international design teams have collaborated with experts in neuroscience and cognitive, motor, and sensory issues to create site-specific, immersive, and participatory environments—one of which is the publication itself. These revolutionary interpretations across various media will foster research intended to push our understanding of sensory perception and encourage new ways of conceiving, installing, and experiencing exhibitions. Designed by Laurie Haycock Makela, a leader in experimental graphic design, the book plays with the multiple meanings of the word “speechless,” exploring the evolution of the project, documenting the installations, and offering portraits of the creative individuals who defined this extraordinary undertaking. Topics range from personal connections to issues of inclusion, diversity, accessibility, and empathy.Distributed for the Dallas Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:Dallas Museum of Art (November 10, 2019–March 22, 2020)

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A deep—and darkly comic—dive into the nature of disasters, and the ways they shape how we think about ourselves in the world “In this brilliant book, David Thomson tells the story of how we came to make disaster and catastrophe our best friends—how we let terror cocoon and take over our imaginations to avoid seeing the things that really frighten us. Riveting and totally original.”—Adam Curtis, BBC filmmaker and political journalist “Erudite. . . . Engaging. . . . A cri de coeur about art’s struggle to keep up with reality.”—Kirkus Reviews Audiences swell with the scale of disaster; humans have always been drawn to the rumors of our own demise. In this searching treatment, noted film historian David Thomson examines iconic disasters, both real and fictional, exposing the slippage between what occurs and what we observe. With reportage, film commentary, speculation, and a liberating sense of humor, Thomson shows how digital culture commodifies disaster and sates our desire to witness chaos while suffering none of its aftereffects. Ranging from Laurel and Hardy and Battleship Potemkin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and from the epic San Andreas to the intimate Don’t Look Now, Thomson pulls back the curtain to reveal why we love watching disaster unfold—but only if it happens to others.

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An aesthetic and social history of art and dance in mid-20th-century New York interpreted by contemporary artist Nick Mauss Over the past decade, Nick Mauss (b. 1980) has pursued a hybrid mode of working that melds the roles of curator, artist, and scholar. Following his highly acclaimed 2018 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition Transmissions, this volume elaborates on the artist’s complex portrait of mid-century New York as seen through the prism of modernist ballet. By pairing installation views of the exhibition and photographs of its daily performances by Paula Court and Ken Okiishi with reproductions of artworks, ballet programs, and fashion magazines, Transmissions animates the vividly enmeshed social and artistic networks that shaped both modern art and modern ballet. Through his emphasis on the collaborations and intimacies between models, dancers, photographers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, publishers, critics, amateurs, and devotees, Mauss re-calibrates the standard narrative of American modernism to locate performance, spectatorship, and the eroticized body at its center.Transmissions features reproductions of documents and artworks—a number published here for the first time—by Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Dorothea Tanning, Carl Van Vechten, Isamu Noguchi, Pavel Tchelitchew, Walker Evans, Ilse Bing, PaJaMa, Man Ray, Maya Deren, Marcel Duchamp, Elie Nadelman, Eugene Berman, Peter Hujar, and many more. Additional texts address the subjects of ballet and the body, Mauss’s work as an artist and curator, and performance within museum spaces, while an extensive conversation with the sixteen dancers who participated in the Whitney exhibition brings rare insight into the labor of making performance-based work while negotiating diverging legacies of embodiment. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art and Dancing Foxes Press

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Selected writings from a leading critic of modern art, “the best art writer of his generation” (Art Newspaper) Michael Peppiatt, guest curator of the Royal Academy of Arts’ 2021 exhibition ‘Francis Bacon: Man and Beast’, has for more than 50 years written trenchant and lively dispatches from the centre of the international art world. In this collection of key essays, Peppiatt gives his unique insight into the making and interpretation of modern art, from Manet and Degas through to Kandinksy and Picasso to Freud and Hockney. Covering a whole spectrum of artists and art-world figures—from pioneers such as Klimt and Soutine, to collectors and dealers who played a pivotal role in the modern art world, to artists such as Jean Dubuffett, Francis Bacon and Zoran Music, with whom he had close relationships—Peppiatt interweaves personal anecdote with critical judgement. Each text is accompanied by a new introduction, written in the author’s signature vivid and jargon-free style, in which he contextualises his writings and reflects on significant moments in a lifetime of artistic engagement. This volume will provide readers with an exhilarating tour of the extraordinary reach and variety of modern art.

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Faced with relentless technological aggression that imperils democracy, how can Western nations fight back? Before the cyber age, foreign interference in democratic politics played out in a comparatively narrow arena. The rapid expansion of cyberspace has radically altered this situation. The hacking activities of Russian military agents in the 2016 US presidential election and other major incidents demonstrate the sophisticated offensive strategies pursued by geopolitical adversaries. The West is winning the technology race—yet losing the larger contest over cybersecurity. Lucas Kello reveals the failures of present policy to prevent cyberattacks and other forms of technological aggression. Drawing upon case studies and interviews with decision-makers, he develops a bold new approach: a concentrated and coordinated response strategy that targets adversaries’ interests and so recaptures the initiative. Striking Back provides an original solution to national security challenges in our era of intense technological rivalry.

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The recent work of Belgian abstract artist Yves Zurstrassen is explored in depth in this handsome volume, designed in close collaboration with the artist himself The decade of work produced between 2010 and 2019 by Belgian abstract painter Yves Zurstrassen (b. 1956) is the focus of this beautifully designed and illustrated book. Although he originally studied graphic art, Zurstrassen was inspired by Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to pursue painting. The book’s essays delve into the artist’s process and offer a critical analysis of the work. Also included are a detailed biography and insightful, informal conversations with the artist. Featuring full-page illustrations of Zurstrassen’s recent work, the book situates the artist both within abstract art and the broader context of contemporary painting.Distributed for MercatorfondsExhibition Schedule:Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (September 1–December 31, 2019)

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A brilliant introduction to the philosophical concept of materialism and its relevance to contemporary science and culture In this eye-opening, intellectually stimulating appreciation of a fascinating school of philosophy, Terry Eagleton makes a powerful argument that materialism is at the center of today’s important scientific and cultural as well as philosophical debates. The author reveals entirely fresh ways of considering the values and beliefs of three very different materialists—Marx, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein—drawing striking comparisons between their philosophies while reflecting on a wide array of topics, from ideology and history to language, ethics, and the aesthetic. Cogently demonstrating how it is our bodies and corporeal activity that make thought and consciousness possible, Eagleton’s book is a valuable exposition on philosophic thought that strikes to the heart of how we think about ourselves and live in the world.

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Explore the wonders of wild Mongolia through the eyes of a distinguished field biologist Mongolia became a satellite of the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s, and for nearly seven decades it effectively closed its doors to the outside world. Biologist George Schaller, who first visited the country in 1989, was one of the first Western scientists allowed to study and assess the conservation status of Mongolia’s many unique, native wildlife species. Schaller made a number of trips from 1989 to 2018 in collaboration with Mongolian and American scientists, witnessing Mongolia’s recovery and transition to a market economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This informative and fascinating new book provides a firsthand account of Schaller’s time in this little-known and remote country, where he studied and helped develop conservation initiatives for the snow leopard, Gobi bear, wild camel, and Mongolian gazelle, among other species. Featuring magnificent photographs from his travels, the book offers a critical, at times inspiring contribution for those who treasure wildlife, as well as a fresh perspective on the natural beauty of the region, which encompasses steppes, mountains, and the Gobi Desert.

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A deeply researched, analytically rich, and vivid account of England's early maritime empire Drawing on a wealth of understudied sources, historian Eleanor Hubbard explores the labor conflicts behind the rise of the English maritime empire. Freewheeling Elizabethan privateering attracted thousands of young men to the sea, where they acquired valuable skills and a reputation for ruthlessness. Peace in 1603 forced these predatory seamen to adapt to a radically changed world, one in which they were expected to risk their lives for merchants' gain, not plunder. Merchant trading companies expected sailors to relinquish their unruly ways and to help convince overseas rulers and trading partners that the English were a courteous and trustworthy "nation." Some sailors rebelled, becoming pirates and renegades; others demanded and often received concessions and shares in new trading opportunities. Treated gently by a state that was anxious to promote seafaring in order to man the navy, these determined sailors helped to keep the sea a viable and attractive trade for Englishmen.

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The history of Britain's complex relationship with Europe, untangled"The best short introduction to both the political realignment that produced the 2016 Referendum result and the immense fallout since.”—CapX, "Books of the Year" (2020)“[A] cool-headed, fair, and judicious analysis of Britain and the EU at a decisive period in history”— Thomas Gallagher, Brexit-Watch.org Is Britain a part of Europe? The British have been ambivalent on this question since the Second World War, when the Western European nations sought to prevent the return of fascism by creating strong international ties throughout the Continent. Britain reluctantly joined the Common Market, the European Community, and ultimately the European Union, but its decades of membership never quite led it to accept a European orientation. In the view of the distinguished political scientist Vernon Bogdanor, the question of Britain’s relationship to Europe is rooted in “the prime conflict of our time,” the dispute between the competing faiths of liberalism and nationalism. This concise, expertly guided tour provides the essential background to the struggle over Brexit.

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Concise, engaging, and highly intuitive—this accessible guide equips you with an understanding of all the basic principles of forecasting Making accurate predictions about the economy has always been difficult, as F. A. Hayek noted when accepting his Nobel Prize in economics, but today forecasters have to contend with increasing complexity and unpredictable feedback loops. In this accessible and engaging guide, David Hendry, Michael Clements, and Jennifer Castle provide a concise and highly intuitive overview of the process and problems of forecasting. They explain forecasting concepts including how to evaluate forecasts, how to respond to forecast failures, and the challenges of forecasting accurately in a rapidly changing world. Topics covered include: What is a forecast? How are forecasts judged? And how can forecast failure be avoided? Concepts are illustrated using real-world examples including financial crises, the uncertainty of Brexit, and the Federal Reserve’s record on forecasting. This is an ideal introduction for university students studying forecasting, practitioners new to the field and for general readers interested in how economists forecast.

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A beautifully written exploration of how cooperation shaped life on earth, from its single-celled beginnings to complex human societies In this rich, wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated volume, Egbert Leigh explores the results of billions of years of evolution at work. Leigh, who has spent five decades on Panama’s Barro Colorado Island reflecting on the organization of various amazingly diverse tropical ecosystems, now shows how selection on “selfish genes” gives rise to complex modes of cooperation and interdependence. With the help of such artists as the celebrated nature photographer Christian Ziegler, natural history illustrator Deborah Miriam Kaspari, and Damond Kyllo, Leigh explains basic concepts of evolutionary biology, ranging from life’s single-celled beginnings to the complex societies humans have formed today. The book covers a range of topics, focusing on adaptation, competition, mutualism, heredity, natural selection, sexual selection, genetics, and language. Leigh’s reflections on evolution, competition, and cooperation show how the natural world becomes even more beautiful when viewed in the light of evolution.

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The most complete picture to date of the moral worlds of the political left and right and how their different views relate to specific political issues The left and right will always have strong policy disagreements, but constructive debate and negotiation are not possible when each side demonizes the other. We need to move past our poisonous politics. In this book, social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman provides a new framework for understanding why and how we disagree. Janoff-Bulman asks readers to consider the challenging possibility that both liberalism and conservatism are morally based and reflect genuine concern for the country. Moral psychology is an invaluable lens for understanding the roots of political differences. She presents a “Model of Moral Motives” that maps the most fundamental motivations recognized by psychology—approach and avoidance—onto these differences. Liberal morality focuses on providing for the group’s well-being and ensuring social justice. Conservative morality focuses on protecting the group from threats and preserving order. These moralities can account for the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives and for why certain positions resonate on each side of the political spectrum. Why, for example, do conservatives oppose abortion and favor unfettered free markets while liberals favor a woman’s right to choose and economic regulation? Understanding that our political differences are rooted in two natural forms of morality can help us begin to detoxify our politics.

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An original account of the life and work of legendary designer Jan Tschichold and his role in the movement in Weimar Germany to create modern graphic design Richly illustrated with images from Jan Tschichold’s little-known private collection of design ephemera, this important book explores a legendary figure in the history of modern graphic design through the artists, ideas, and texts from the Bauhaus that most influenced him. Tschichold (1902–1974), a prolific designer, writer, and theorist, stood at the forefront of a revolution in visual culture that made printed material more elemental and dynamic. His designs were applied to everyday graphics, from billboard advertisements and business cards to book jackets and invoices. This handsome volume offers a new understanding of Tschichold’s work, and of the underlying theories of the artistic movement he helped to form, by analyzing his collections: illustrations, advertisements, magazines, and books by well-known figures, such as Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and László Moholy-Nagy, and lesser-known artist-designers, including Willi Baumeister, Max Burchartz, Walter Dexel, and Piet Zwart. This book also charts the development of the New Typography, a broad-based movement across Central Europe that included “The Ring,” a group formed by Schwitters in 1927. Tschichold played a crucial role in defining this movement, documenting the theory and practice in his most influential book, The New Typography (1928), still regarded as a seminal text of graphic design.Published in association with the Bard Graduate CenterExhibition Schedule:Bard Graduate Center, New York (02/15/19–07/07/19)

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The first theory of legitimate opposition in fifty years In political systems defined by legitimate opposition, those who hold power allow their rivals to peacefully challenge and displace them, and those who have lost power do not seek to sabotage the winners. Legitimate opposition came under assault at the American capitol on January 6, 2021, and is menaced by populists and autocrats across the globe. Alexander Kirshner provides the first sustained theory of legitimate opposition since the Cold War. On the orthodox view, democracy is lost when legitimate opposition is subverted. But efforts to reconcile opposition with democracy fail to identify the value of the frequently imperfect, unfair, and inegalitarian real-world practice. Marshaling a revisionist reconstruction of opposition’s history, Kirshner provides a new account of opposition’s value fit for the twenty-first century and shows why, given the difficult conditions of political life, legitimate opposition is an achievement worth defending.

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In a world where the making and consumption of art is constantly changing, the term "Islamic art" can be hard to define. Through the exploration of a wide array of media—from painting, sculpture, and photography to video and multimedia—an internationally renowned group of scholars, collectors, artists, and curators tackles questions such as whether the art has to come from the Middle East, whether it must have a religious component, and, indeed, whether the work of art must be made by a Muslim. Based on a series of papers presented at the 7th Biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art in 2017, the essays in this volume grapple with these questions from a range of viewpoints. These texts—including beautiful illustrations of major works by contemporary artists from the Muslim world, including Newsha Tavakolian, Shahzia Sikander, Hassan Hajjaj and Lalla Essaydi—invoke a lively discussion of how the arts of the Islamic lands link the past with the present and the future.Distributed for the Qatar Foundation, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar

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A book for architects, designers, planners, and urbanites that explores how cities can embrace improvisation to improve urban life The built environment in today’s hybrid cities is changing radically. The pervasiveness of networked mobile and embedded devices has transformed a predominantly stable background for human activity into spaces that have a more fluid behavior. Based on their capability to sense, compute, and act in real time, urban spaces have the potential to go beyond planned behaviors and, instead, change and adapt dynamically. These interactions resemble improvisation in the performing arts, and this book offers a new improvisation-based framework for thinking about future cities. Kristian Kloeckl moves beyond the smart city concept by unlocking performativity, and specifically improvisation, as a new design approach and explores how city lights, buses, plazas, and other urban environments are capable of behavior beyond scripts. Drawing on research of digital cities and design theory, he makes improvisation useful and applicable to the condition of today’s technology-imbued cities and proposes a new future for responsive urban design.

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“Doing is living. That is all that matters.”—Ruth Asawa Throughout her long and prolific career American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) developed innovative sculptures in wire, a medium she explored through increasingly complex forms using craft-based techniques she learned while traveling in Mexico in 1947. In 1949, after studying at Black Mountain College, Asawa moved to San Francisco and created dozens of wire works, among them an iconic bronze fountain—the first of many public commissions—for the city’s Ghirardelli Square. Bringing together examples from across Asawa’s full and extraordinary career, this expansive volume serves as an unprecedented reorientation of her sculptures within the historical context of 20th-century art. In particular, it includes careful consideration of Asawa’s advocacy for arts education in public schools, while simultaneously focusing on her vital—and long under-recognized—contributions to the field of sculpture. Insightful essays explore the intersection of formal experimentation and identity to offer a fresh assessment of this celebrated artist. Richly illustrated with exquisite new installation views, Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work introduces original scholarship that traces the dynamic evolution of form in the artist’s work.Published in association with the Pulitzer Arts FoundationExhibition Schedule:Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (09/14/18–02/16/19)

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An illuminating look at how the Pre-Raphaelite movement was embraced by a group of vanguard American artists Bringing together insights from a distinguished group of scholars, this beautiful book analyzes the history and historiography of the American Pre-Raphaelites, and how the movement made its way from England to America. Led by Thomas Charles Farrer—an English expatriate and acolyte of the hugely influential English critic John Ruskin—the American Pre-Raphaelite artists followed Ruskin’s dictum to depict nature close up and with great fidelity. Many members of the group (including Farrer, who served in the Union army during the American Civil War) were also abolitionists, and several created works with a rich political subtext. Featuring the work of artists such as Fidelia Bridges, Henry and Thomas Charles Farrer, Charles Herbert Moore, Henry Roderick Newman, and William Trost Richards, this generously illustrated volume is filled with insightful essays that explore the influence of Ruskin on the American artists, the role of watercolor and photography in their work, symbolism and veiled references to the Civil War, and much more.Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, WashingtonExhibition Schedule:National Gallery of Art, Washington (04/14/19–07/21/19)

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A compelling examination of the establishment of the secret police in Communist Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Eastern Germany ​This book examines the history of early secret police forces in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Molly Pucci delves into the ways their origins diverged from the original Soviet model based on differing interpretations of communism and local histories. She also illuminates the difference between veteran agents who fought in foreign wars and younger, more radical agents who combatted “enemies of communism” in the Stalinist terror in Eastern Europe.

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In this beautifully illustrated study, Paul Binski offers a new account of sculpture in England and northwestern Europe between c. 1000 and 1500, examining Romanesque and Gothic art as a form of persuasion. Binski applies rhetorical analysis to a wide variety of stone and wood sculpture from such places as Wells, Westminster, Compostela, Reims, Chartres, and Naumberg. He argues that medieval sculpture not only conveyed information but also created experiences for the subjects who formed its audience. Without rejecting the intellectual ambitions of Gothic art, Binski suggests that surface effects, ornament, color, variety, and discord served a variety of purposes. In a critique of recent affective and materialist accounts of sculpture and allied arts, he proposes that all materials are shaped by human intentionality and artifice, and have a “poetic.” Exploring the imagery of growth, change, and decay, as well as the powers of fear and pleasure, Binski allows us to use the language and ideas of the Middle Ages in the close reading of artifacts.Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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A mural renaissance swept the United States in the 1930s, propelled by the New Deal Federal Art Project and the popularity of Mexican muralism. Perhaps nowhere more than in New York City, murals became a crucial site for the development of abstract painting Artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Krasner created ambitious works for the Williamsburg Housing Project, Floyd Bennett Field Airport, and the 1939 World’s Fair. Modernism for the Masses examines the public murals (realized and unrealized) of these and other abstract painters and the aesthetic controversy, political influence, and ideological warfare that surrounded them. Jody Patterson transforms standard narratives of modernism by reasserting the significance of the 1930s and explores the reasons for the omission of the mural’s history from chronicles of American art. Beautifully illustrated with the artists’ murals and little-known archival photographs, this book recovers the radical idea that modernist art was a vital part of everyday life.

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How vagrancy, as legal and imaginative category, shaped the role of policing in colonialism, racial formation, and resource distribution In this innovative book demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, Nicolazzo offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. She argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. Her extensive research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, Nicolazzo’s work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.

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A revealing new look at modernist architecture, emphasizing its diversity, complexity, and broad inventiveness “[Frampton] remains a formidable force in architecture . . . The Other Modern Movement offers an opportunity to re-examine the Western canon of 20th-century architecture—which Frampton himself was crucial in establishing—and delve deeper into the work of lesser-known practitioners.”—Josephine Minutillo, Architectural Record Usually associated with Mies and Le Corbusier, the Modern Movement was instrumental in advancing new technologies of construction in architecture, including the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete. Renowned historian Kenneth Frampton offers a bold look at this crucial period, focusing on architects less commonly associated with the movement in order to reveal the breadth and complexity of architectural modernism. The Other Modern Movement profiles nineteen architects, each of whom consciously contributed to the evolution of a new architectural typology through a key work realized between 1922 and 1962. Frampton’s account offers new insights into iconic buildings like Eileen Gray’s E-1027 House in France and Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, California, as well as lesser-known works such as Antonin Raymond’s Tokyo Golf Club and Alejandro de la Sota’s Maravillas School Gymnasium in Madrid. Foregrounding the ways that these diverse projects employed progressive models, advanced new methods in construction techniques, and displayed a new sociocultural awareness, Frampton shines a light on the rich legacy of the Modern Movement and the enduring potential of the unfinished modernist project.

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A vivid portrait of Queen Victoria’s childhood, offering new insights into one of the most celebrated, but often misunderstood, monarchs in British history, 200 years after her birth This beautiful, extensively researched volume investigates the birth and early life of one of the most familiar British monarchs, Queen Victoria (1819–1901). A wealth of material, including many unexamined sources and unpublished images, sheds new light on Victoria’s youth. Included here are portraits of the queen as princess, childhood diaries and sketchbooks, clothing, jewelery, and correspondence. Deirdre Murphy paints a vivid picture of Victoria’s early years. Among her most surprising conclusions is the idea that the queen’s personal mythology of a childhood characterized by sadness and isolation is less accurate than is generally thought. Victoria’s personal relationships are brought brilliantly to life, from her affectionate but increasingly suffocating bond with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, to the controlling influence of Sir John Conroy, a man she came to despise, and her courtship with Prince Albert. Lesser-known figures are also explored, including Victoria’s first schoolmaster the Reverend George Davys, her governess Louise Lehzen, and her half-sister Feodora. This fascinating cast of characters enhances our image of Victoria, who emerges as both willful and submissive, fickle and affectionate, and with the explosive temper of her Hanoverian ancestors. Published in association with Historic Royal PalacesExhibition Schedule:Kensington Palace (May 24—December 2019)

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A timely and splendidly illustrated global exploration of the complex intersections of fashion and politics from the mid-19th century to the present day Taking a multifaceted look at a topic of widespread fascination, this pioneering book presents new research on the intersection of fashion and politics through incisive essays by the field’s leading voices, including both renowned and emerging fashion scholars. The texts unpack fashion between the mid-19th century and today as expressions of nationalism, terrorism, surveillance, and individualism, as well as a symbol of capitalism. The first section explores the political potential of fashion despite its immutable status as a commodity. The second section offers a historical account of the political nature of dress, such as the fashion of dissent within Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Black Panther movement. The ways bodies are defined by dress—the entanglement of oppression and expression—is the theme of the third section. A fourth and final section explores contemporary issues in the practice and theory of dress, from the processes of decolonizing museum collections to the recent sartorial styles of Europe’s political Left. The book’s incisive and beautifully illustrated essays provide a timely investigation of an underdeveloped topic through a variety of historical and current formats, including public and personal archives, fashion magazines, political newspapers, museum displays, art, and social media.

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A penetrating critique tracing how under-regulated trading between European and U.S. banks led to the 2008 financial crisis—with a prescription for preventing another meltdown There have been numerous books examining the 2008 financial crisis from either a U.S. or European perspective. Tamim Bayoumi is the first to explain how the Euro crisis and U.S. housing crash were, in fact, parasitically intertwined. Starting in the 1980s, Bayoumi outlines the cumulative policy errors that undermined the stability of both the European and U.S. financial sectors, highlighting the catalytic role played by European mega banks that exploited lax regulation to expand into the U.S. market and financed unsustainable bubbles on both continents. U.S. banks increasingly sold sub-par loans to under-regulated European and U.S. shadow banks and, when the bubbles burst, the losses whipsawed back to the core of the European banking system. A much-needed, fresh look at the origins of the crisis, Bayoumi’s analysis concludes that policy makers are ignorant of what still needs to be done both to complete the cleanup and to prevent future crises.

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“My husband Jan finished me on 17 June 1439. . . . My age was 33 years.” So speaks Margaret van Eyck from the frame of her portrait. This painted inscription honors its maker Jan van Eyck, even as it blurs the distinction between living subject and painted double. Frame Work, an in-depth study of paintings, sculpture, and manuscript illumination in their varied social settings, argues that frames and framing devices are central to how Renaissance images operate. In a period of rapid cultural change, framing began to secure the very notion of an independent “artwork,” and reframings could regulate the meaning attached to works of art—a process that continues in the present day. Highlighting innovations in framing introduced by figures such as Donatello, Giovanni Bellini, and Jean Fouquet, this original book shows how the inventive character of Renaissance frames responds to broader sociopolitical and religious change. The frame emerges as a site of beauty, display, and persuasion, and as a mechanism of control.

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A fresh, new translation of Augustine’s inaugural work as a Christian convert“Lively, engaging and accurate translations. . . . There is much in this dialogue and Foley’s presentation of it for contemporary readers to take seriously.”—Erik Kenyon, Bryn Mawr Classical Review The first four works written by St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion to Christianity are the remarkable “Cassiciacum dialogues.” In this first dialogue, expertly translated by Michael Foley, Augustine and his interlocutors explore the history and teachings of Academic skepticism, which Augustine is both sympathetic to and critical of. The dialogue serves as a fitting launching point for a knowledge of God and the soul, the overall subject of the Cassiciacum tetralogy.

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A richly illustrated, expansive mid-career survey of the stand-out American artist’s pioneering and influential work Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art that travels to Dallas and Los Angeles, this book on the work of Laura Owens (b. 1970) features an incisive introduction by Scott Rothkopf, critical essays, literary texts, and short commentaries on a variety of subjects related to the artist’s broad interests, which range from folk art and needlework to comics and wallpaper. Reflections by more than twenty of Owens’s fellow artists, collaborators, assistants, dealers, family members, and friends offer an array of perspectives on her work at different periods in her life, beginning with her high school years in Ohio and ending with her current exhibition. A rich trove of more than a thousand images, drawn from the artist’s personal archive and largely unpublished before now, includes personal correspondence, journals, academic transcripts, handwritten notes, source material, exhibition announcements, clippings, and installation photographs. Together, all of these elements provide a rare and intimate look at how an artist might make her way in the world as well as how art gets made, movements take hold, and relationships evolve over time. Each book includes a specially designed set of stickers that readers can use to customize their own cover.Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (11/10/17–02/04/18)Dallas Art Museum (03/25/18–07/29/18)The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (11/01/18–03/01/19)Dallas Museum of Art (03/25/18–07/29/18)The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (11/04/18–03/25/19)

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This sumptuous presentation of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s wide-ranging collection of Chinese art features one hundred works in various media spanning antiquity to the present day—including Ming gold vessels, a 15th-century Buddhist temple ceiling, imperial court robes, and an 18th-century bookcase made in Canton for a Dutchman. With striking new photography and engaging and informative discussions of individual works of sculpture, painting, furniture, textiles, ceramics, metalwork, and architecture, this volume provides a fascinating look into the breadth and diversity of Chinese artistic experience and material culture. An introductory essay by Hiromi Kinoshita delves into the history of the Philadelphia Museum’s Chinese collection—begun after the 1876 World’s Fair and continuing today with acquisitions of contemporary works by Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan—weaving together stories of intrepid and dedicated collectors, curators, and dealers. Both accessible to general readers and of interest to scholars, this book is a valuable resource for those captivated by the many manifestations of art from China.Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art

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A revealing look at how antislavery scientists and Black and white abolitionists used scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders “While recent historical literature has shown the complicity of the early science of man in the defense of slavery, Herschthal unearths an equally long intellectual tradition of antislavery science. This innovative book is timely, when science itself is under assault.”—Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition In the context of slavery, science is usually associated with slaveholders’ scientific justifications of racism. But abolitionists were equally adept at using scientific ideas to discredit slaveholders. Looking beyond the science of race, The Science of Abolition shows how Black and white scientists and abolitionists drew upon a host of scientific disciplines—from chemistry, botany, and geology, to medicine and technology—to portray slaveholders as the enemies of progress. From the 1770s through the 1860s, scientists and abolitionists in Britain and the United States argued that slavery stood in the way of scientific progress, blinded slaveholders to scientific evidence, and prevented enslavers from adopting labor‑saving technologies that might eradicate enslaved labor. While historians increasingly highlight slavery’s centrality to the modern world, fueling the rise of capitalism, science, and technology, few have asked where the myth of slavery’s backwardness comes from in the first place. This book contends that by routinely portraying slaveholders as the enemies of science, abolitionists and scientists helped generate that myth.

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A widely celebrated translator’s vivid, accessible, and elegantly concise rendering of an ancient English masterpieceBeowulf tells the story of a Scandinavian hero who defeats three evil creatures—a huge, cannibalistic ogre named Grendel, Grendel’s monstrous mother, and a dragon—and then dies, mortally wounded during his last encounter. If the definition of a superhero is “someone who uses his special powers to fight evil,” then Beowulf is our first English superhero story, and arguably our best. It is also a deeply pious poem, so bold in its reverence for a virtuous pagan past that it teeters on the edge of heresy. From beginning to end, we feel we are in the hands of a master storyteller. Stephen Mitchell’s marvelously clear and vivid rendering re-creates the robust masculine music of the original. It both hews closely to the meaning of the Old English and captures its wild energy and vitality, not just as a deep “work of literature” but also as a rousing entertainment that can still stir our feelings and rivet our attention today, after more than a thousand years. This new translation—spare, sinuous, vigorous in its narration, and translucent in its poetry—makes a masterpiece accessible to everyone.

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This book charts a geography of the art market and the art museum in the early 20th century through the legacy of one influential dealer. Born in Ireland, Hugh Lane (1875–1915) established himself in London in the 1890s. With little formal education or training, he orchestrated high-profile sales of paintings by the likes of Holbein, Titian, and Velázquez and described his life’s work as “selling pictures by old painters to buy pictures by living painters.” Lane assembled a collection of modern art for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, amassed a collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings for Cape Town, and gave his own collection of modern art to the National Gallery in London. He also donated paintings to the National Gallery of Ireland, where he was named director in 1914. Each chapter in this revelatory study focuses on an important city in Lane’s practice as a dealer to understand the interrelationship of event and place.Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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A rich, provocative, and lyrical study of one of Germany’s most important, world-famous, and imaginative writers “A concise, fast-paced biography of the German poet, critic, and essayist. . . . A discerning portrait of the writer and his times.”—Kirkus Reviews “Prochnik provides a jaunty narrative of Heine’s schooldays in Bonn and Göttingen, journalistic career in Berlin, and twenty-five-year exile in Paris, detailing his literary feuds, scraps with censors, and unwavering belief in political liberty.”—New Yorker Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was a virtuoso German poet, satirist, and visionary humanist whose dynamic life story and strikingly original writing are ripe for rediscovery. In this vividly imagined exploration of Heine’s life and work, George Prochnik contextualizes Heine’s biography within the different revolutionary political, literary, and philosophical movements of his age. He also explores the insights Heine offers contemporary readers into issues of social justice, exile, and the role of art in nurturing a more equitable society. Heine wrote that in his youth he resembled “a large newspaper of which the upper half contained the present, each day with its news and debates, while in the lower half, in a succession of dreams, the poetic past was recorded fantastically like a series of feuilletons.” This book explores the many dualities of Heine’s nature, bringing to life a fully dimensional character while also casting into sharp relief the reasons his writing and personal story matter urgently today.

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A richly illustrated exploration of how late Georgian gardens associated with medical practitioners advanced science, education, and agricultural experimentation As Britain grew into an ever-expanding empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new and exotic botanical specimens began to arrive within the nation’s public and private spaces. Gardens became sites not just of leisure, sport, and aesthetic enjoyment, but also of scientific inquiry and knowledge dissemination. Medical practitioners used their botanical training to capitalize on the growing fashion for botanical collecting and agricultural experimentation in institutional, semipublic, and private gardens across Britain. This book highlights the role of these medical practitioners in the changing use of gardens in the late Georgian period, marked by a fluidity among the ideas of farm, laboratory, museum, and garden. Placing these activities within a wider framework of fashionable, scientific, and economic interests of the time, historian Clare Hickman argues that gardens shifted from predominately static places of enjoyment to key gathering places for improvement, knowledge sharing, and scientific exploration.

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Investigating the rich architecture of post-Mao China and its broad cultural impact In the years following China’s Cultural Revolution, architecture played an active role in the country’s reintegration into the global economy and capitalist world. Looking at the ways in which political and social reform transformed Chinese architecture and how, in turn, architecture gave structure to the reforms, Cole Roskam underlines architecture’s unique ability to shape space as well as behavior. Roskam traces how foreign influences like postmodernism began to permeate Chinese architectural discourse in the 1970s and 1980s and how figures such as Kevin Lynch, I. M. Pei, and John Portman became key forces in the introduction of Western educational ideologies and new modes of production. Offering important insights into architecture’s relationship to the politics, economics, and diplomacy of post-Mao China, this unprecedented interdisciplinary study examines architecture’s multivalent status as an art, science, and physical manifestation of cultural identity.

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David Oppenheim (1664–1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders, and the contacts between Christians and Jews that books facilitated. From contact with the great courts of European nobility to the poor of Jerusalem, his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Containing works of law and literature alongside prayer and poetry, his library served rabbinic scholars and communal leaders, introduced old books to new readers, and functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. The story of his life and library brings together culture, commerce, and politics, all filtered through this extraordinary collection. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, Joshua Teplitsky’s book offers a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe.

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An urgently needed examination of the current cyber revolution that draws on case studies to develop conceptual frameworks for understanding its effects on international order The cyber revolution is the revolution of our time. The rapid expansion of cyberspace in society brings both promise and peril. It promotes new modes of political cooperation, but it also disrupts interstate dealings and empowers subversive actors who may instigate diplomatic and military crises. Despite significant experience with cyber incidents, the conceptual apparatus to analyze, understand, and address their effects on international order remains primitive. Here, Lucas Kello adapts and applies international relations theory to create new ways of thinking about cyber strategy. Kello draws on a broad range of case studies - including the Stuxnet operation against Iran, the cyberattacks against Sony Pictures, and the disruption of the 2016 U.S. presidential election - to make sense of the contemporary technological revolution. Synthesizing data from government documents, forensic reports of major events, and interviews with senior decision-makers, this important work establishes new theoretical benchmarks to help security experts revise strategy and policy for the unprecedented challenges of our era.

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An energy revolution is under way with far-reaching consequences for nations, companies, and the way we address climate change Low oil prices are sending shockwaves through the global economy, and longtime industry observer Dieter Helm explains how this and other shifts are the harbingers of a coming energy revolution and how the fossil fuel age will come to an end. Surveying recent surges in technological innovations, Helm’s provocative new book documents how the global move toward the internet-of-things will inexorably reduce the demand for oil, gas, and renewables—and prove more effective than current efforts to avert climate change. Oil companies and energy utilities must begin to adapt their existing business models or face future irrelevancy. Oil-exporting nations, particularly in the Middle East, will be negatively impacted, whereas the United States and European countries that are investing in new technologies may find themselves leaders in the geopolitical game. Timely and controversial, this book concludes by offering advice on what governments and businesses can and should do now to prepare for a radically different energy future.

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A renowned philosopher challenges long-held views on just wars, ethical conduct during war, why wars occur, how they alter people and societies, and more For residents of the twenty-first century, a vision of a future without warfare is almost inconceivable. Though wars are terrible and destructive, they also seem unavoidable. In this original and deeply considered book, A. C. Grayling examines, tests, and challenges the concept of war. He proposes that a deeper, more accurate understanding of war may enable us to reduce its frequency, mitigate its horrors, and lessen the burden of its consequences. Grayling explores the long, tragic history of war and how warfare has changed in response to technological advances. He probes much-debated theories concerning the causes of war and considers positive changes that may result from war. How might these results be achieved without violence? In a profoundly wise conclusion, the author envisions “just war theory” in new moral terms, taking into account the lessons of World War II and the Holocaust and laying down ethical principles for going to war and for conduct during war.

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Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, Anishanslin unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter. Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, Anishanslin makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history.

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