Faculty & Staff Authors 2023
Each year, Special Collections hosts a celebration to honor Bryn Mawr authors from among faculty, staff, and research associates. This year's event will be on Friday, April 28, at 4:30 pm. Books by participating authors are available at the bookshop.
Co-Creating Equitable Teaching and Learning
by Alison Cook-Sather - Professor of Education
Co-Creating Equitable Teaching and Learning invites readers to help forge a more inclusive and accessible college education by incorporating student voices via pedagogical partnerships.
Alison Cook-Sather, a pioneer of this co-creative approach, draws on more than twenty years of experience developing student-teacher partnerships in higher education to offer a wise and generous work that speaks to both students and educators. As her research underscores, a co-creative learning environment, in which relationships and communication between students and teachers are prioritized, benefits the educational experience on many levels.
Cook-Sather demonstrates how pedagogical partnerships give students the tools to advocate for their own learning while giving educators the feedback they need to improve classroom experiences. She shows how the co-creative model helps to bring about inclusive spaces and equitable teaching practices that better foster student success, especially among underrepresented and minority student populations.
Offering actionable guidance, Cook-Sather advocates enacting the following four principles to structure student voice into higher education: embracing a commitment to equity and justice; providing structure rather than prescriptions for engagement; making rather than taking up space; and developing a partnership mindset. She grounds these principles in examples of practices drawn from an undergraduate education course; a faculty development program; and cross-disciplinary, cross-constituency institutional dialogues.
This work calls for readers to reimagine the higher education structure and to cultivate an environment in which all stakeholders can work together to advance inclusivity, accessibility, and equity. As the author argues, co-creation can be a catalyst for change throughout the system.
Perfect Copies
by Shiamin Kwa - Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures
City of Blows
by Tim Blake Nelson - Board of Trustee Member
"A travelogue of purgatory. Brutal, but minutely rendered--a chronicle of small betrayals and vicissitudes in a ruthless world. Losers, hustlers and delusional artists, all trapped in their pretense and hollow lives; making deals with the devil at the crossroads of Tinseltown." --Guillermo del Toro
Tim Blake Nelson's debut novel is an epic group portrait of four men grappling for control of a script in a radically changing Hollywood, or the City of Blows.
It's early 2020, and legendary producer Jacob Rosenthal is eager to make his next film, Coal, adapted from the bestselling novel by the celebrated writer Rex Patterson. The project--which takes on the controversial topic of race in America--is Jacob's envisioned magnum opus, and likely his swan song. He selects David Levit to direct, a major opportunity for the classically trained actor/director whose own films, while garnering critical acclaim, have not resulted in box office success.
But the announcement of David's hiring doesn't sit well with a producer from David's past, Brad Shlansky, who channels the last remaining vestiges of his creativity into a revenge plot that could very well scupper the making of Coal, and ruin the lives of its producer and director in the process.
A sprawling, character-driven depiction of the modern film industry, City of Blows reaches back decades to the formative experiences of each of the novel's central figures to explore what first motivated them to become involved in the quixotic and often venal world of movie-making. Driven by their diverse backgrounds, each must navigate the same huckstering circus that puts films on screen.
From the start, Tim Blake Nelson's sharp and unsparing voice holds a mirror up to America itself, using Hollywood to investigate the cultural and economic fault lines that have come to dominate and confound us all. You will find yourself unable to turn away from the ruthlessness and despair, the hubris and sheer evil, as City of Blows accelerates to its unimaginable yet inevitable crescendo.
Russian Syntax for Advanced Students
by Marina Rojavin - Visting Assistant Professor of Russian
Russian Syntax for Advanced Students is a textbook which illuminates relationships between words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.
Using this book, students will acquire conscious knowledge of how words function in various syntactical constructions as applied to discourse, such as specific verbal situations, based not only on the underlying linguistic phenomena, but also on the content of sociolinguistic situations. The book helps develop communicative skills for advanced mastery and constantly emphasizes the importance of accuracy in the use of syntactic structures.
Russian Syntax
is designed primarily as a textbook for classroom use for intermediate-high and advanced-level students. The text is also suitable for independent study by graduate students in linguistics or pedagogy, as well as being a valuable reference for instructors.12th Commandment
by Daniel Torday - Professor and Co-Chair of Creative Writing
Swirling with secrets and their consequences, exploring how revelation and redemption might be accessed through sin, and driven through twists and turns toward a startling conclusion, The 12th Commandment is a brilliant novel by award-winning author Daniel Torday.
The Dönme sect--a group of Jewish-Islamic adherents with ancient roots--lives in an isolated community on rural land outside of smalltown Mt. Izmir, Ohio. Self-sustaining, deeply-religious, and heavily-armed, they have followed their self-proclaimed prophet, Natan of Flatbush, from Brooklyn to this new land. But the brutal murder of Natan's teenage son throws their tight community into turmoil. When Zeke Leger, a thirty-year-old writer at a national magazine, arrives from New York for the funeral of a friend, he becomes intrigued by the case, and begins to report on the murder. His college girlfriend Johanna Franklin prosecuted the case, and believes it is closed. Before he knows it, Zeke becomes entangled in the conflict between the Dönme, suspicious local citizens, Johanna, and the law--with dangerous implications for his body and his soul.Research Directions in Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Topology
Edited by Lisa Traynor - Professor of Mathematics
The volume contains both original results and survey articles, presenting the results of collaborative research on a wide range of topics. These projects began at the Research Collaboration Conference for Women in Symplectic and Contact Geometry and Topology (WiSCon) in July 2019 at ICERM, Brown University. Each group of authors includedfemale and nonbinary mathematicians at different career levels in mathematics and with varying areas of expertise. This paved the way for new connections between mathematicians at all career levels, spanning multiple continents, and resulted in the new collaborations and directions that are featured in this work.
Trauma-Informed Principles in Group Therapy, Psychodrama, and Organizations
Dr. Scott Giacomucci - Lecturer in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research
This book presents trauma-informed principles for ethical, safe, and effective group work, psychodrama, and leadership.
Content will include practical guidelines, detailed instructions, and diverse examples for facilitating both trauma-informed and trauma-focused groups in treatment, community, and organizational leadership. Chapters focus on various topics including safety, empowerment, social justice, vicarious trauma, and leadership. Organizational leadership is approached through the lens of SAMHSA's guidance and the framework of group work leadership. The book includes significant focus on sociometry and psychodrama as strengths-based and experiential group approaches. Psychodrama's philosophies, theories, and interventions will be articulated through a trauma-informed lens offering psychodramatists, group workers, and organizational leaders new conceptual frameworks and action-based processes. Chapters contain a blend of theory, research, practical guidance, and examples from the author's experience.
This book will appeal to group workers, therapists, psychodramatists, creative arts therapists, organizational leaders, trainers, facilitators, supervisors, community organizers, and graduate students. This book offers group facilitators the insight and tools to lead engaging and meaningful groups. The potential for retraumatizing participants is addressed while promoting trauma-informed practice as an ethical imperative.
Reimagining Nabokov
Edited by José Vergara - Assistant Professor of Russian
Reimagining Nabokov takes a holistic approach to the many stumbling blocks in teaching Nabokov today. Especially intriguing about this volume is that through its essays a fresh picture of Nabokov emerges, not as an authoritarian and paranoid world-creator (an image long entrenched in Nabokov scholarship), but as someone who is tentative, hopeful, socially conscious, compassionate, and traumatized by the experience of exile....Reimagining Nabokov models pedagogical concepts that can be applied to teaching any literary text with a social conscience.--Alisa Ballard Lin, Modern Language Review Contributions by Galya Diment, Tim Harte, Robyn Jensen, Sara Karpukhin, Yuri Leving, Roman Utkin, José Vergara, Meghan Vicks, Olga Voronina, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, and Matthew Walker.
Russian through Film
by Irina Walsh - Senior Lecturer in Russian
Russian through Film: For Intermediate to Advanced Students is a multi-level textbook for learners of Russian that targets contemporary films in Russian. These films will deepen learners' understanding of today's lifestyles in the post-Soviet space as well as add to their understanding of Soviet and Russian history and culture. They represent a variety of genres ranging from romantic comedy to art-house cinema. These films present standard Russian and are appropriate for various audiences.
Russian through Film builds on students' listening, reading, speaking, and writing skills while also expanding their cultural literacy. The textbook aims at improving learners' ability to analyze films by carefully investigating the films' plot, structure, conflicts, and main characters. Through task-based, inquiry-based, and project-based activities, the textbook focuses on developing learners' skills in various modes of discourse (narration, description, comparison, explanation, and summary).
The textbook can serve as a primary text for a course on contemporary Russian films or a supplementary textbook in intermediate and advanced level classes. Separate chapters may be included in thematic classes on youth culture, Soviet history, sports, geography, folklore, contemporary social issues, and the arts.