New Books in Art

Installed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1921 to commemorate the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Cyrus Dallin's statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit (leader) as a welcoming diplomat and participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. But after the statue's unveiling, Massasoit began to move and proliferate in ways one would not expect of generally stati...

In her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doing, she moves beyond a simple analysis of objectification to reveal the powerful role Ornamentalism plays in constituting modern ideas of personhood, racialized femininity and the figure of the Asian wom...

This is a magically journey about the mystery of the design process. Chip Sullivan's Cartooning the Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is about using your drawing skills to exercise and stretch your imagination. He takes you step by step through a process of creativity to enhance your own design and challenge your limitations. Why not? Where does creativity come? This book will help gu...

Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Barrett, Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University, draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roma...

Harold Holzer has written a biography of one of America’s greatest public artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Daniel Chester French.  In Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), Holzer chronicles the career of French, who became best known for his sculpture of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.  Fren...

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell h...

In one of history’s largest migrations, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians immigrated to North American during the 1800s and early 1900s. In addition to letters sent home, Norwegian-Americans often included photographs showcasing their new American lives. In her book, Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Dr. Sigrid Lien keenl...

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an inimitable work of critique: Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2017). Moving fluidly and with suspen...

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Pr...

Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bern...

What are the characteristics of the 21st Century arts leader? In From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century (Dahlia Publishing, 2019), Farhana Shaikh, a writer, publisher, and journalist, details lessons from key arts thinkers. The book covers issues including funding, networking, audience development, the challenge of digital, and diversity in the arts. Crucially the book confro...

Alexander Langlands is a British archaeologist, historian, writer, and broadcaster.  His most recent book, Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts, was published by Norton to great acclaim in 2017 and has just been reissued as a paperback.  Cræft is an antiquated spelling of “craft” and in the book, Langlands explores what the word meant when it first appeared in...

Andrew McClellan and Sally Anne Duncan’s book offers a behind-the-scenes exploration of the career of Paul J. Sachs (1878-1965) and the graduate program he developed at Harvard University and the Fogg Museum that came to be known as the “museum course.” Sachs and the course played a major role in training students who became museum directors and curators at American art museums from the late 1920s...

Nadia Amoroso’s Representing Landscapes: A Visual Collection of Landscape Architectural Drawings (Routledge, 2012) is a collaboration between landscape architecture professors and practitioners leading the field today. The inspiration for the book came from her design studios. She wanted to demonstrate to students how they too could produce beautiful graphics by utilizing a software workflow. The...

We know quite a bit about the physical signatures of urban “modernity” foisted upon Paris by Baron Haussmann in the late nineteenth century — the broad boulevards, networked infrastructures, connected apartment houses, and assorted monuments — but little scholarship has seized on its precursors in the half-century prior. In Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutiona...

A new book explores how and why New York City became a showcase for the art and architectural styles of ancient Greece and Rome. Classical New York: Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham (Empire States Editions, 2018), co-edited by Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Matthew McGowan (Fordham University Press, 2018), examines the Greco-Roman influence on buildings, monuments and public spaces from Rockefe...

Elizabeth A. Fraser's Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774–1839 (Penn State University Press, 2017) takes its readers on a journey through six illustrated travel albums covering territories held by the Ottomans in the Mediterranean basin and produced between 1774-1839. By decentring the importance of Europe, Elisabeth Fraser instead highlights the entangled...

With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris], Benoît Majerus uses an impressively wide range of visual sources, from religious images and architectural photographs to neuroleptic advertisements and administrative maps. These images...

New York City might have been the epicenter of the twentieth century American art scene, but Los Angeles was no slouch either, writes Kellie Jones in South of Pico: African American Artists in the 1960s and 1970s(Duke University Press, 2017). Dr. Jones, Professor of Art History at Columbia University and 2016 MacArthur Fellow, examines several African American artists and their work including Bett...

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French w...

In her book Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (Duke University Press, 2018), Catherine Russell defines "archiveology" as “the reuse, recycling, appropriation and borrowing of archival sounds and images by filmmakers”. In her book, she reviews specific film examples. She also discusses the related work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin and how his ideas coincide with the...

Sigmund Freud may have been the first to popularize the study of dreams, but several scholars since Freud have advanced our understanding of dreams in revolutionary ways. Among them is Mark Blechner, an interpersonal/relational psychoanalyst who first published his theories on dreams in his 2001 book The Dream Frontier. With his new book, The Mindbrain and Dreams: An Exploration of Dreaming, Think...

Pillow of Dreams (Nivedita Lakhera, 2017) is an intensely emotional and inspirational collection of poetry and art by Dr. Nivedita Lakhera. She experienced a stroke, divorce, and then a heartbreak all at the young age of 27. She is a doctor of Internal Medicine and is serving as a Hospitalist in San Jose, California. Her career in medicine has inspired some of her greatest work, such as a poem wri...

What can the Weimar Republic teach us about how democracies fail? How could the same vibrancy that gave us cultural touchstones spawn Nazism? In his new book Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eric D. Weitz challenges the belief that the fledgling democracy was doomed to fail. In an encompassing examination of the short-lived republic’s political, economic, int...

The Making of a Modern Art World: Institutionalization and Legitimization of Gouhua in Republican Shanghai (Brill, 2017) investigates the production and consumption of guohua (“national painting”) in Shanghai between 1929 and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Defining the art world as sociologically constructed, Pedith Chan’s systematically researched book focuses on collective...