Faculty Bookshelf

Faculty in GW's Romance, German and Slavic Languages and Literatures Department author a wide range of books, published in multiple languages around the globe.

 

Gendering the Renaissance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy

Gendering the Renaissance: Text and Context in Early Modern Italy

March 30, 2023
The essays in this volume revisit the Italian Renaissance to rethink spaces thought to be defined and certain: from the social spaces of convent, court, or home, to the literary spaces of established genres such as religious plays or epic poetry. Repopulating these spaces with the women who occupied them but have often been elided in the historical record, the essays also remind us to ask what might obscure our view of texts and archives, what has remained marginal in the texts and contexts of early modern Italy and why.
Marseille Mosaic

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

January 13, 2023
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.
Choreographing Mexico book cover

Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation

September 20, 2022
Manuel Cuellar details the integration of Indigenous and regional dance styles into centennial celebrations, civic festivals, and popular films. Much of the time, this was a top-down affair, with cultural elites seeking to legitimate a hegemonic national character by incorporating traces of indigeneity.
Quand on n'a que la terre : et autres recueils

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

September 02, 2022
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.
Dis-moi pour qui j'existe cover, book cover

Dis-moi pour qui j'existe?

August 24, 2022
A new novel by Abdourahman Waberi: When his six-year-old daughter falls ill, Aden must face this unexplained suffering as well as old wounds that he thought were forgotten. He must confront his past, remember and investigate: is Béa's illness his own? Can they be saved together?
Golosa textbook cover

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

July 29, 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.
Sustainability Teaching

Education for Sustainable Development in Foreign Language Learning

November 29, 2021
This unique volume utilizes the UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) framework to illustrate successful integration of sustainability education in post-secondary foreign language (FL) learning.
Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle Cover

Intellectuals in the Society of Spectacle

October 02, 2021
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.
The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan 1925–1991

The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan 1925–1991: An Uneasy Legacy (Lexington Books, 2021)

February 01, 2021
This monograph by Peter Rollberg traces the history of Kazakh filmmaking from its conception as a Soviet cultural construction project to its peak as fully-fledged national cinema to its eventual re-imagining as an art-house phenomenon. The author’s analysis places leading directors—Shaken Aimanov, Abdulla Karsakbaev, Sultan-Akhmet Khodzhikov, Mazhit Begalin—in their sociopolitical and cultural context.
cover art for popular literature from nineteenth century France

Popular Literature from Nineteenth-Century France: French Text

January 07, 2021

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.

The Regal Lemon Tree, Juan José Saer

The Regal Lemon Tree

October 13, 2020

Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Waisman, professor of Spanish and international affairs, The Regal Lemon Tree is one of the late Juan José Saer's most beloved novels. Set during the day and night of New Year's Eve — building up a barbecue that takes on ritual significance — the novel focuses on a couple in the north of Argentina who lost their only son six years prior.

Gente: A Task-Based Approach to Learning Spanish, Cuarto Edicion

Gente: A Task-Based Approach to Learning Spanish

September 10, 2020
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.
A Musical Education, translated by Sergio Waisman

A Musical Education

August 12, 2020

Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Waisman, professor of Spanish and international affairs, A Musical Education is a compilation of poems by Yaki Setton. Setton was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has authored seven books of poetry.

Convent Paradise

Convent Paradise

February 01, 2020
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.
Cover art for Sarra Copia including a portrait of Sarra Copia

Sarra Copia Sulam: A Jewish Salonnière and the Press in Counter-Reformation Venice

December 20, 2019
Professor of Italian Lynn Westwater authored this first biography of Sarra Copia Sulam, the 17th-century Jewish poet and polemicist who for almost a decade at the height of the Counter-Reformation hosted a salon at her home in the Venetian ghetto, providing one of the most public and enduring forums for Jewish-Christian interaction in early modern Venice.
Cover art for engine of modernity

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

December 17, 2019
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.
Pourquoi tu danses quand tu marches? book cover

Pourquoi tu danses quand tu marches?

August 21, 2019
Abdourahman  Waberi se souvient de son enfance, à Djibouti, une enfance inscrite dans sa mémoire et dans son corps qui boite, qui «  danse  ». Il cherche, enquête, fait revivre les moments lointains où tout a basculé. Il raconte aussi l’histoire d’un pays fascinant qu’on appelait Côte Française des Somalis puis Territoire français des Afars et des Issas jusqu’à l’indépendance en 1977. 
Treffpunkt Deutsch: Seventh Edition

Treffpunkt Deutsch

February 08, 2019

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.

El Encargo

El Encargo

January 01, 2019

¿Qué tienen en común, Iván Kohen, traductor estadounidense, y Sergio Mancino, periodista?: Un tren equivocado, un recorrido por distintos pueblos de la provincia argenti

Cover art for Post Migratory Cultures

Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France

December 01, 2018

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.

Cultures of the Fragment, Heather Bamford cover

Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100-1600

June 18, 2018
The majority of medieval and 16th-century Iberian manuscripts contain fragments or are fragments — isolated bits of manuscript material with a damaged appearance, or a piece of a larger text that was intended to be a fragment. Heather Bamford, assistant professor of Spanish literature, investigates the vital role these fragments played in medieval and early modern Iberian manuscript culture. 
Cover art for Naming the Dawn

Naming the Dawn

May 15, 2018

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.

Imperial Idiocy: A Reflection on Forced Displacement in the Americas.

Imperial Idiocy: A Reflection on Forced Displacement in the Americas

April 12, 2018

Accepting the ancient Greeks’ definition of the idiot as a privatized man and expanding on Tocqueville’s understanding that in modern democracies it is mass idiocy that invites tyranny, argues Christopher Britt, associate professor of Spanish. This book aims to pierce through the layers of comfort, security and prosperity that numb imperial idiots in the United States of America to the suffering of the displaced in Colombia and Mexico.

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

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

February 08, 2018

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.

Puntos de Encuentro cover

Puntos de encuentro: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Advanced Spanish

September 30, 2017

María J. de la Fuente, professor of Spanish, rethinks Advanced Spanish collegiate instruction by combining task- and content-based language pedagogy. Based on current research on Instructed Second Language Acquisition, this program emphasizes the analysis of spoken and written texts drawn from real-world sources, selected to introduce students to relevant and engaging issues in the Spanish-speaking world, such as the environment, human rights, indigenism, immigration and bilingualism. Students analyse complex, contemporary issues as a means to achieve advanced proficiency in Spanish, which results in more language production, increased multicultural understanding and enhanced critical thinking skills. This groundbreaking approach makes Puntos de encuentro unique among advanced Spanish textbooks.

Cover art for Ippolita Maria Sforza

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

July 11, 2017
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.
Cover art for French Cultural Studies

French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century

March 30, 2017
Masha Belenky, associate professor of French, and Kathryn Kleppinger, assistant professor of French and Francophone studies, co-edited this volume that brings together current scholarship — from postcards and menus to literary magazines — on the practice of French cultural studies.
Cover art for Harvest of Skulls

Harvest of Skulls

February 20, 2017
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.
Cover art for Branding the Beur Author

Branding the 'Beur' Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France

January 01, 2016
Kathryn Kleppinger, assistant professor of French and Francophone studies, focuses on the mainstream media promotion of literature written by the descendants of North African immigrants to France (often called beurs). Her findings bring to light the explosion of racism in the 1980s and the purported role of Islam in French society in the 1990s.
Cover art for La Divine Chanson

La Divine Chanson

January 08, 2015

Abdourahman Waberi, assistant professor of French, authored this novel that delves into the life of Gil Scott-Heron, an African American poet, singer, and songwriter born in Chicago in 1949.