Faculty Bookshelf

The Marseille Mosaic: A Mediterranean City at the Crossroads of Cultures

Formerly the gateway to the French empire, the city of Marseille exemplifies a postcolonial Europe reshaped by immigrants, refugees, and repatriates. The Marseille Mosaic addresses the city’s past and present, exploring the relationship between Marseille and the rest of France, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Proposing new models for the study of place by integrating approaches from the humanities and social sciences, this volume offers an idiosyncratic “mosaic,” which vividly details the challenges facing other French and European cities and the ways residents are developing alternative perspectives and charting new urban futures.

Quand on n'a que la terre : et autres recueils

Abdourahman Waberi's poetry invites both an internal dialogue and a discovery of the Other. Faced with the tragedy of our contemporary world in crisis, his poetry transports us toward beauty and the universe's hidden meaning. A nod to Jacques Brel, Quand on n'a que la terre teaches us to love our planet, a love that turns out to be contagious.

ГОЛОСА: A Basic Course in Russian Book One 6th Edition (Routledge, 2022)

A Basic Course in Russian (Sixth Edition) by Richard M. Robin, Karen Evans-Romaine, and Galina Shatalina, strikes a true balance between communication and structure. It takes a contemporary approach to language learning by focusing on the development of functional competence in the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing), as well as the expansion of cultural knowledge. It also provides comprehensive explanations of Russian grammar along with the structural practice students need to build accuracy.

Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle

This book by Christopher Britt and co-author Eduardo Subirats reveals the sense in which our postmodern societies are characterized by the obscene absence of the intellectual. Spectacle fills the resulting moral and intellectual vacuum with electronic technologies of control, punishment, and destruction. The apotheosis of the spectacle explains the intellectual void that lies at the heart of our postmodern decadence and accounts for the need to recuperate the humanist values of enlightenment promoted by the modern intellectual tradition.

Popular Literature from Nineteenth-Century France: French Text

Professor of French Masha Belenky collaborated with Anne O'Neil-Henry on this collection of popular French texts which encapsulates one of the liveliest eras in French history. Each work in this volume offers a lively, humorous look into the daily lives of the citizens of France during the 19th century. From literary guidebooks to examinations of fashion and society, Belenky provides a window into the time period and the authors that defined it.

Gente: A Task-Based Approach to Learning Spanish

María J. de la Fuente, professor of Spanish, is the author of Gente, the only task-based, Spanish language learning textbook in the US. The 4th edition of the textbook: Gente: a Task-based approach to learning Spanish, coauthored with Carola Goldenberg, instructor of Spanish, is a research-based curricular revision of the program that aligns learning objectives with ACTFL Standards and introduces a new, task-based, proficiency testing program. The textbook is widely used in top-ranked Elementary and Intermediate Spanish language programs in US colleges.

Convent Paradise

Lynn Westwater, professor of Italian, collaborated with Meredith K. Ray to edit and translate this work by the seventeenth-century Venetian nun Arcangela Tarabotti. Convent Paradise presents a nuanced exploration of monastic life and showcases Tarabotti’s markedly feminist spirituality. Ray and Westwater’s edition enriches our understanding of Tarabotti’s writing while also providing a window into the spiritual practices of early modern women.

Engine of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Masha Belenky, associate professor of French, examines the connection between public transportation and popular culture in 19th-century Paris through a focus on the omnibus — a horse-drawn vehicle of urban transport.

Treffpunkt Deutsch

Margaret Gonglewski, associate professor of German, takes a student-centered, communicative approach to teaching German. Her textbook, co-authored with Beverly Moser and Cornelius Partsch, aims to transform the classroom into a Treffpunkt — a meeting place where students get to know one another, as well as the German-speaking countries, by using German.

Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France

Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kathryn Kleppinger's Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France offers a critical assessment of the ways in which French writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists descended from immigrants from former colonial territories bring their specificity to bear on the bounds and applicability of French republicanism, "Frenchness" and national identity and contemporary cultural production in France.

Naming the Dawn

Abdourahman A. Waberi, assistant professor of French and Francophone literature, authored a new volume of poetry which is introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond — with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets and with the landscapes in which those poets and Waberi himself have walked.

Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction Intellectuals, World Disorder and the Politics of Empire

Co-author Christopher Britt, associate professor of Spanish, formulates a new understanding of a common concept (enlightenment) by framing it as a trans-historical and cross-cultural phenomenon. This book reveals the ways in which modern enlightenment, rather than liberating humanity from tyranny, has subjected us to new servitude imposed by systems of mass manipulation, electronic vigilance, compulsive consumerism and the horrors of a seemingly unending global war on terror.

Ippolita Maria Sforza: Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples: Letters and Orations

Lynn Westwater, professor of Italian, collaborated with Diana Robin to edit this volume. It presents in translation 100 previously unknown letters of Ippolita Maria Sforza (1445–1488), daughter of the Duke of Milan, who was sent at age 20 to marry the son of the infamously brutal King Ferrante of Naples. Her letters display the adroit diplomacy she used to strengthen the alliance between Milan and Naples, then the two most powerful states in Italy.

Harvest of Skulls

Professor of French Language and Literature Abdourahman A. Waberi wrote about the Rwandan Genocide twenty years after the event, providing an indisputable resource for discussions on the power of the moral imagination and how survivors can rebuild a society haunted by the ghost of its history.