University of Minnesota Press

From his first days as a rookie firefighter and emergency medical technician to his command of a company as a twenty-year veteran, Jeremy Norton has made regular, direct encounters with the sick, the dying, and the dead. In his memoir, Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response , Norton documents the life of an emergency responder in Minneapolis, revealing the stark re...

Unfolding amid an atmosphere of profound anxiety and disillusionment, the new American war film demonstrates a breakdown of the prevailing cultural narratives that had come to characterize conflict in the previous century. In the wake of 9/11, both the nature of military conflict and the symbolic frameworks that surround it have been dramatically reshaped.   The New American War Film charts societ...

In Gramsci at Sea , author Sharad Chari asks how the environmental crisis of the oceans is linked to legacies of capitalism and imperialism across and within the oceans. Chari reads Antonio Gramsci as a thinker of the oceanic crisis, drawing on the philosopher’s prison notes and questions concerning waves of imperial power in the inter-war oceans of his time. Here, Chari is joined in conversation...

Focusing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception of the life sciences of his day (including concerns with insects and the emergent social properties they exhibit) and his reflections on technology—research areas as central to Nietzsche’s work as they are to posthumanism—Edgar Landgraf provides fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of posthumanist and transhumanist philosophies in his new book, Nie...

In Noah’s Arkive , Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate change catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, this book uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative and surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequen...

As military and other forms of political violence become the planetary norm, On Posthuman War traces the expansion of war as manifest within humanity’s individual, sociocultural, and biological existence. Author Mike Hill identifies three human-focused disciplines newly turned against humanity (demography, anthropology, and neuroscience) and questions the very notion of society. This episode bring...

In the 2010s cities and counties across the US witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor m...

Lichens are composite organisms made of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex organisms, remarkable for their symbiosis, diversity, longevity, and adaptability, as models for relations rooted in collaboration and nonhierarchical structures. Author A. Laurie Palmer channels the personal, the scientific, the phi...

The first biography of Robert Smithson, Inside the Spiral deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Author Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story with great sensitivity to the experiences of...

Modern environments are awash with pollutants. The book Citizens of Worlds is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to monitor and respond to air pollution. Drawing on data from the Citizen Sense research group, which worked with communities in the US and the UK to develop digital-sensor toolkits, author Jennifer Gabrys argues that citizen sensing prom...

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema, Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. A new book by Nicholas de Villiers, CRUISY, SLEEPY, MELANCHOLY, offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films and reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Here, the author is joined in conversation with Beth Tsai...

Are you feeling merry as a grig? Or merry as a pismire? Pert as a pearmonger? Fit as a fiddle? Where do these idioms come from? Do they make life more fun? If you’ve ever wanted to be in a room full of expert etymologists, this is your ticket. Anatoly Liberman, author of TAKE MY WORD FOR IT: A Dictionary of English Idioms, is joined in conversation by Ari Hoptman and J. Lawrence (Larry) Mitchell....

In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words. Smilges...

In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies to experiment with art and technology and subvert conceptions of freedom and control. ARTE PROGRAMMATA is a book that describes how Italy’s distinctive political climate fueled the group’s engagement with computers, cybernetics, and information theory, creating a broad range of immersive environments, kinetic sculpt...

A lot of societal structures have been permanently upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re here to talk about two: air travel and dog ownership. Margret Grebowicz, author of Rescue Me, talks about the abundance of pet adoptions during the pandemic and the existential and social implications of this trend. Christopher Schaberg, author of Grounded, discusses contemporary air travel and the broad cul...

Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas, analyzing how media culture instructs viewers to act and feel in accordance with new racial norms created for an era supposedly defined by an end to legal racism. Author Allison Page examines U.S. media from the 1960s to today and argues that visual culture works throu...

“White people passed laws specifically in order to take away this land from our people. And then we did these other things in order to try to survive.” ALLOTMENT STORIES is a volume that collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance, highlighting how Indigenous peoples have consistently engaged creativity to sustain collective ties, kinship relations, and c...

How is it possible that you are—simultaneously—cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, and an element in the gravitational whirl of galaxies? Joshua DiCaglio’s SCALE THEORY provides a foundational theory of scale that explains how scale works, the parameters of scalar thinking, and how scale reconfigures objects, subje...

In the 1960s, Christopher Isherwood gave an unprecedented series of lectures at California universities about his life and work. During this time, Isherwood spoke openly for the first time about his craft and spirituality. The release of the updated edition of ISHERWOOD ON WRITING includes the long-lost conclusion to the second lecture, including its discussion of A Single Man and A Meeting by the...

In a time when online classrooms and meetings have become both indispensable and mundane features of the university, STUDIOUS DRIFT asks: What kind of university becomes possible when digital tools are not taken for granted but hacked into and tinkered with in order to set study adrift? In part a meditation on the essence of the studio space, this book looks at ways we can creatively and criticall...

The new book ‘Cacaphonies’ takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view 20th- and 21st-century French literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim argues for feces as a figure of radical equality. ‘Cacaphonies’ reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life. He...

ON THE WANDERING PATHS is Sylvain Tesson’s literary adventure and philosophical reflection during a three-month journey of solitude and personal contemplation while walking along vast stretches of mountain ranges and rivers, ancient bridges and villages, of France’s countryside. This exquisite chronicle through landscapes that continue to resist urbanization and technology is a thoughtful and thou...

Exploring new concepts of the relationship between form and function while thinking through object-oriented ontology (OOO), Graham Harman (ARCHITECTURE AND OBJECTS) deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO’s influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture. Art after Nature is a series from University of Minnesota Press that engage...

How do educational policy studies need to shift to remain adequate to the emergence of powerful forms of technology? In ALGORITHMS OF EDUCATION, Kalervo N. Gulson, Sam Sellar, and P. Taylor Webb explore how, for policy makers, big data creates the illusion of greater control over educational futures. They propose that schools and governments are increasingly turning to “synthetic governance”—where...

“Capitalism defeated traditional societies because it was more exciting than they were. But now there is something more exciting than capitalism: its destruction.” In the face of things with true power (capitalism, the law, public opinion, etc.), philosophy is not provisioned to battle them head-on. But it can wage “a guerrilla campaign against them,” writes Andrew Culp (referencing Deleuze) in hi...