Bryn Mawr Faculty
Augustine the African
$31.99
by Catherine Conybeare
Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies
Augustine of Hippo (354-430), also known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including the autobiographical Confessions and The City of God, helped shape the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy. But for many centuries, Augustine's North African birth and Berber heritage have been simply dismissed. Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, here puts the "African" back in Augustine's story. As she relates, his seminal books were written neither in Rome nor in Milan, but in Africa, where he had returned as a wanderer during a perilous time when the Western Roman Empire was crumbling. Using extant letters and other shards of evidence, Conybeare retraces Augustine's travels, revealing how his groundbreaking works emerge from an exile's perspective within an African context. In its depiction of this Christian saint, Augustine the African upends conventional wisdom and traces core ideas of Christian thought to their origins on the African continent.
ISBN/SKU:
9781631498527
Publication Date:
August 12, 2025
Publisher:
Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership
$35.00
by Alison Cook-Sather, Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor, Department of Education
Faculty and staff in higher education are looking for ways to address the deep inequity and systemic racism that pervade our colleges and universities. Pedagogical partnership can be a powerful tool to enhance equity, inclusion, and justice in our classrooms and curricula. These partnerships create opportunities for students from underrepresented and equity-seeking groups to collaborate with faculty and staff to revise and reinvent pedagogies, assessments, and course designs, positioning equity and justice as core educational aims. When students have a seat at the table, previously unheard voices are amplified, and diversity and difference introduce essential perspectives that are too often overlooked.In particular, the book contributes to the literature on pedagogical partnership and equity in education by integrating theory, synthesizing research, and providing concrete examples of the ways partnership can contribute to more equitable educational systems. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that partnership can only realize its full potential to redress harms and promote equity and justice when thoughtfully enacted. This book is a resource that will inspire and challenge a wide variety of higher education faculty and staff and contribute to advancing both practice and research on the potential of student-faculty pedagogical partnerships. Presenting a conceptual framework for understanding the various epistemological, affective, and ontological harms that face students from equity-seeking groups in postsecondary education, Promoting Equity and Justice Through Pedagogical Partnership applies this conceptual framework to current literature in partnerships, highlighting the promise of partnership as the way to redress these harms. The authors ground both the conceptual framework and the literature review by offering two case studies of pedagogical partnership in practice. They then explore the complexities raised by their framework, including the conditions under which partnerships themselves may risk reproducing epistemic, affective, or ontological harms. Applying the framework in this way allows them to propose strategies that make it more likely for these mediations to be successful. Finally, the authors focus on the future of pedagogical partnership and share their perspectives on new directions for inquiry and practice. After summarizing the overarching themes developed throughout the book, the authors leave the reader with a set of questions and recommendations for further inquiry and discussion.
A Series on Engaged Learning and Teaching Book. Visit the books' companion website, hosted by the Center for Engaged Learning, for book resources.
ISBN/SKU:
9781642672091
Publication Date:
June 24, 2021
Publisher:
Social Work Sociometry and Psychodrama
$37.49
$49.99
Sale 25% off 1 item
by Scott Giacomucci
This open access book outlines the intersections between social work and the methods of sociometry and psychodrama. Different sections offer essential practice wisdom for both trauma-focused and trauma-informed experiential work for individuals, groups, organizations, and communities. This text enriches the understanding of various action-based approaches and highlights how to enliven social work practice. The chapters include clinical vignettes and examples of structured sociometric prompts with diverse populations, topics, and social work settings to enhance the understanding of group practice, individual practice, and community practice. It provides social workers and other professionals with dynamic tools to improve assessment, intervention, activism, and leadership. Strength-based practical tools are offered to readers, along with guidance for theoretical conceptualizations. This integrative book is an essential read for students, practitioners, leaders, and scholars within the fields of social work, psychodrama, the creative art therapies, group therapy, community organizing, and social activism.
ISBN/SKU:
9789813363441
Publication Date:
February 24, 2021
Publisher:
Cambridge Companion to Gadamer
$34.99
by Robert Dostal, Rufus M. Jones Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) is widely recognized as the leading exponent of philosophical hermeneutics. The essays in this volume examine Gadamer's biography, the core of hermeneutical theory, and the significance of his work for ethics, aesthetics, the social sciences, and theology. There is full consideration of Gadamer's appropriation of Hegel, Heidegger and the Greeks, as well as his relation to modernity, critical theory and poststructuralism. This revised edition includes several new chapters on aspects of Gadamer's work, as well as updated chapters from the first edition and the most comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Gadamer available in the English language.
ISBN/SKU:
9781108816298
Publication Date:
August 12, 2021
Publisher:
Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at Dune and the Lord of the Rings
$39.95
by Willow DiPasquale
Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Program
Analyzing how the mythopoeic fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert portray the natural world
Finding the Numinous explores the premise that the environments depicted in The Lord of the Rings and the Dune saga are not only for the purpose of world-building; rather, these imagined worlds' environments are sacred spaces fundamental to understanding these texts and their authors' purposes. Willow Wilson DiPasquale applies Tolkien's three functions of fantasy--recover, escape, and consolation--to demonstrate how both authors' works are intrinsically connected to their ecocritical messages and overarching moral philosophies.
This book also compares Tolkien's Roman Catholic viewpoint with Herbert's Zen Buddhist perspective, arguing that the authors' religious beliefs and biographical, historical, and cultural influences impacted how they chose to craft their creative works and write about nature.
Applying various ecocritical positions to the text, Finding the Numinous explores descriptions of the natural landscapes in both authors' texts, as well as the relationships characters and communities have with those natural spaces. As our current society's relationships with nature are increasingly challenged and changed by various ecocrises, DiPasquale convincingly argues, these worlds offer readers various environmental models to critique, to condemn, or, in some cases, to adopt.ISBN/SKU:
9781606354926
Publication Date:
February 18, 2025
Publisher:
Bread and Circus
$26.00
by Airea D Matthews - Associate Professor and Co-Chair of Creative Writing
Author's website: www.aireadee.com
This is the 2023 hardcover edition of this collection. Click here to go to the 2024 paperback.
Drawing upon economics, theology, and psychology, Bread and Circus explores the lived experiences of those impacted by poverty and racial injustice. This poetry collection is innovative not only in its dissection of established ideals but also in its experimentation with poetic form, with a highlight being blackout poems made by subverting key words in economic texts. The final section of the collection is an especially moving series on collective grief and hope.
-Alyssa S., GSSWSR '24
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"Discerning and significant." --Poetry Foundation
"A sharp memoir in verse." --LitHub
This powerful and timely collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia's former Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class is a brilliant intellectual and artistic contribution to the ongoing conversation about American inequality.
As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith's magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Now, she presents a direct challenge to Smith's theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith and the French Marxist Guy Debord with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circuspersonally offers how self-interest fails when it reduces people to commodity and spectacle.
A layered collection to be read and reread, with poems that range from tragic to humorous, in forms as varied and nuanced as the ideas the book considers, Bread and Circus asks what it is to have survived, indeed to have flourished, and at what cost. "Full of humane wisdom, this powerful volume forces readers to acknowledge systemic inequity" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and is ideal for fans of Elizabeth Alexander, Natalie Diaz, Eve Ewing, and Gregory Pardlo.
ISBN/SKU:
9781668011454
Publication Date:
May 30, 2023
Publisher:
Queer Budapest, 1873-1961
$35.00
by Anita Kurimay
By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the "Pearl of the Danube," it boasted some of Europe's most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city's liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West. In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest is the riveting story of nonnormative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961. Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to regulate but also tolerate and protect queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality's political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Hungary's--and Europe's--modern incarnation.
ISBN/SKU:
9780226705798
Publication Date:
September 4, 2020
Publisher:
Perfect Copies
$32.95
by Shiamin Kwa - Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the "problem" of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa's Perfect Copies reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of "reproduction" in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers.
ISBN/SKU:
9781978826571
Publication Date:
January 13, 2023
Publisher:
Herodotus in the Anthropocene
$32.00
by Joel Alden Schlosser
We are living in the age of the Anthropocene, in which human activities are recognized for effecting potentially catastrophic environmental change. In this book, Joel Alden Schlosser argues that our current state of affairs calls for a creative political response, and he finds inspiration in an unexpected source: the ancient writings of the Greek historian Herodotus. Focusing on the Histories, written in the fifth century BCE, Schlosser identifies a cluster of concepts that allow us to better grasp the dynamic complexity of a world in flux. Schlosser shows that the Histories, which chronicle the interactions among the Greek city-states and their neighbors that culminated in the Persian Wars, illuminate a telling paradox: at those times when humans appear capable of exerting more influence than ever before, they must also assert collective agency to avoid their own downfall. Here, success depends on nomoi, or the culture, customs, and laws that organize human communities and make them adaptable through cooperation. Nomoi arise through sustained contact between humans and their surroundings and function best when practiced willingly and with the support of strong commitments to the equality of all participants. Thus, nomoi are the very substance of political agency and, ultimately, the key to freedom and ecological survival because they guide communities to work together to respond to challenges. An ingenious contribution to political theory, political philosophy, and ecology, Herodotus in the Anthropocene reminds us that the best perspective on the present can often be gained through the lens of the past.
ISBN/SKU:
9780226704845
Publication Date:
July 15, 2020
Publisher:
Bodies Unbound
$28.95
by Piper Sledge
Bodies Unbound is a comparative study showing how ideologies of gendered bodies shape medical care and the ways in which patients respond to these ideologies through decisions about their bodies using three cases: transgender men seeking preventative gynecological care, cisgender men diagnosed with breast cancer, and cisgender women with breast cancer who elect to undergo prophylactic mastectomies. Bodies Unbound is a story about how the relationship between bodies and gender becomes socially intelligible as well as how medical professionals use their position of relative authority over bodies to dictate which combinations of bodies and genders are legitimate or not. Drawing on the experiences of individuals whose bodies and gender identities don't match medical and social expectations for gynecological and breast cancer care, Sledge unravels the taken-for-granted alignment of bodies and gender that provide the foundation of medical care in the United States.
ISBN/SKU:
9781978815780
Publication Date:
March 12, 2021
Publisher: