Books & Profiles

Early Modern Écologies is the first collective volume to offer perspectives on the relationship between contemporary ecological thought and early modern French literature.

Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, and aftermath. Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by the stories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows how works of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with our often unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe.

Astrid M. Eckert’s West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945.

Drawing on Continental theory and various cultural objects, On an Ungrounded Earth constructs an eclectic geosophy describing Earth as a dynamic engine materially invading and upsetting our attempts to reduce it to merely the ground beneath our feet.

This collection of essays maps the heterogeneous and asymmetrical ecologies within which we are enmeshed, a material world that makes the human possible but also offers difficulties and resistance.

Through speculative, poetic, and provocative texts, thirteen writers and artists have come together to reflect on human relationships with other species and the planet.

This collection of studies provides valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing Latin America.

Object Oriented Environs takes its cue from the philosophical movement Object-Oriented Ontology in the hope of provoking a conversation about how early modernists, or humanists in general, parse the question of matter, of things. This collection emerged from a session of the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in 2014.

Through histories of extremely cold environments, this volume makes a novel intervention in Cold War historiography.

This volume offers a rich and thoroughly researched history of how hurricanes have shaped and reshaped New Orleans from the colonial era to the present day.