Okay, time again for us HUPers to head home and hunker down for a spell while the campus gets taped off for its annual coat of crimson. There’ll be no blogging for a bit, so we’ll leave you with this look back at just some of what we’ve covered during this eventful year in our world.
Way back in January we had the pleasure of unveiling the design for the forthcoming Murty Classial Library of India, and of having designer Andrea Stranger walk us through her concept.
Also in January we spent some time with Brad Gregory’s book on the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation. The book, which helps us to understand modern society’s disaggregation, is one we’ve thought of many times through this year.
In February—and not for the last time—we took a look at the massive outpouring of books on Lincoln, this time in the form of a three-story tower of Lincoln lit gracing the lobby of the Ford’s Theatre’s new Center for Education and Leadership.
We also heard from historian Sydney Nathans on the incredible story of Mary Walker, an escaped slave who worked for years to be reunited with the children she’d felt forced to leave behind.
In March we learned of a resolution by the Russian Academy of Sciences to clear the name of mathematician Nikolai Luzin, condemned for his views since the 1930s. As it happened, an HUP book was instrumental in Luzin’s return to grace, a story we were more than happy to share.
Also in March we shared bits from a new article by Carol Gilligan, “Looking Back to Look Forward: Revisiting In a Different Voice,” that had Gilligan reflecting on her classic work thirty years after its publication.
In April we shared the nerdiest joke we know, talked transnational jazz with Robin Kelley, and marked the death of Levon Helm with a look at The Band’s civil war memory.
In May we invited a veteran of youth civic empowerment training to help us unpack Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind, a call to recover the civic purposes of public schools.
Then we quickly shifted gears, turning to the Dictionary of American Regional English with the hope of understanding why Rhode Islanders put ice cream and milk in a blender and call it a cabinet.
June was for spotting: John Rawls in the basement of the Seminary Co-op, and Adam Phillips in the work of Alison Bechdel.
In July, after American nuns took to the highways to protest Paul Ryan’s budget proposal—the very sort of agitation for which they were rebuked by the Vatican—we heard from Amy Koehlinger, author of The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s, who reminded us that there were nuns in station wagons before there were “Nuns on the Bus.”
Also in July the infectiously enthusiastic Paul Lockhart told us of the beauty of math, in a three-minute clip that’s racked up more views than anything else we’ve ever done.
In August we checked in with Matthew Kirschenbaum, a scholar using some of the most recent advances in digital scholarship to power his literary history of word processing software.
In September, a bit of political sloganeering inspired us to turn to Martha Nussbaum and the Capabilities Approach to get at the then-swirling question of whether Americans were better off than they’d been four years before.
In October, after the “Innocence of Muslims” film stirred unrest across much of the world, we shared an excerpt from Jamal J. Elias’s new book on religious art and perception in Islam.
And when the Vice Presidential debate gave us Joe Biden and Paul Ryan dueling on “crippling sanctions” vs military intervention in Iran, we looked to Joy Gordon’s study of the Iraq sanctions for a better understanding of exactly who such regulations cripple.
In November we celebrated University Press Week, with a post from Anthony Grafton on the value of university presses, and a roundup of some of the most insightful posts shared by our sister presses.
Also in November, we spent a bit of time with Hamid Dabashi’s book on the “mighty and majestic” world of Persian literature, which challenges us to move beyond a purely Western understanding of humanism.
And, finally, we’ve spent good chunks of December considering Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, including a survey of historians’ responses to the film, and a look at Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, a soon-to-be-published book that aims to break free of the territorial boundaries restricting so much modern consideration of America’s defining conflict.
And then here we are, already excited to begin another round in January. But until then: best wishes for a happy, healthy, and peaceful new year from all of us at HUP.
