New & Noteworthy

Your BMC Bookshop uses this page to highlight new books published within the past few months by BMC alums, faculty and staff.  Please email us at bookshop@brynmawr.edu if you have a new release.

Augustine the African

Augustine the African
$27.19
$31.99
Sale 15% off 1 item

by Catherine Conybeare
Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies


Publishes August 12, 2025 - Pre-Order now!


 

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

Earthborn Democracy

Earthborn Democracy
$32.00

by Joel Alden Schlosser et al
Associate Professor of Political Science

Ecological crises threaten all forms of life on earth. Democracy too is endangered, as popular discontent, elite malfeasance, and unresponsive institutions imperil its survival. Present political concepts have proven inadequate to meeting these challenges, and their inadequacies are themselves symptoms of the failures of prevailing political, cultural, and ecological stories and practices.

This book offers a new vision of ecological and participatory democratic life for a time of crisis. Identifying myth and ritual as key resources for contemporary politics, Earthborn Democracy excavates practices and narratives that illustrate the interdependence necessary to inspire ecological renewal. It tells stories of multispecies agency and egalitarian political organization across history, from ancient Mesopotamia and the precolonial Americas to contemporary social movements, emphasizing Indigenous traditions and resistance. Resonating across these practices and stories past and present is a belief that we are all--human as well as nonhuman--earthborn, and this can serve as the basis for reimagining democracy. Allying visionary political theory with environmental activism, Earthborn Democracy provides a foundation and a guide for collective action in pursuit of earthly flourishing.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780231216425
Publication Date: 
September 10, 2024

Blue Yodel

Blue Yodel
$20.00
A new poetry collection from Eleanor Stanford that is musical, sexy, and darkly funny.

These poems take the reader from Mexico City to West Philadelphia to Karachi. The works wade into the difficult joys of mothering, self-exploration, and romantic entanglement in midlife. Throughout, Eleanor Stanford embraces the mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen, the abjection of Tammy Wynette, and the wry self-appraisal of Sylvia Plath, fashioning it all into something entirely its own.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780887487057
Publication Date: 
October 29, 2024

Brightwood Code

Brightwood Code
$18.99
In a breathless, haunting, and rich historical mystery, New York Times bestselling author Monica Hesse speaks to the depths of trauma and the power of memory.

Seven months ago, Edda was on the World War I front lines as one of two hundred "Hello Girls," female switchboard operators employed by the US Army. She spent her nights memorizing secret connection codes to stay ahead of spying enemies, and her days connecting vital calls between platoons and bases and generals, all trying to survive--and win--a brutal war. Their lives were in Edda's hands, and one day, in fateful seconds, everything went wrong.

Now, Edda is back in Washington, DC, working as an American Bell Telephone operator, the picture of respectability. But when her shift ends, Edda is barely hanging on, desperate to forget the circumstances that cut her time overseas short. When she receives a panicked phone call from someone who utters the fateful code word "Brightwood," Edda has no choice but to confront her past. With precious few clues and help only from Theo, a young man bearing his own WWI scars, Edda races to uncover what secrets may have followed her across the ocean.

Timely and unforgettable, The Brightwood Code sheds light on hidden history and the brutality of being a woman in a war built by men.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780316045650
Publication Date: 
May 14, 2024

Broken

Broken
$29.95

by Lisa Young Larance - Assistant Professor at GSSWSR

Author's Website: www.lisayounglarance.com

In the United States, the second-wave feminist fight to achieve legal and societal recognition of men's violence against women leaned heavily on the victim-offender binary, which has since become inscribed in funding schemes, legal remedies, and intervention approaches. In Broken, scholar-practitioner Lisa Young Larance draws on her extensive in-depth qualitative inquiry and practice experience with women who have participated in antiviolence intervention to explain how this binary erases the trauma histories of those who both survive and cause harm. Calling for a more holistic conception of interpersonal violence, Broken illuminates the connections across race, class, and sexual orientation that facilitate women's healing and repair.
ISBN/SKU: 
9780520392335
Publication Date: 
August 6, 2024

Disquieting Death of Emma Gill

Disquieting Death of Emma Gill
$28.99
"The narrative unfolds like a high-stakes crime novel."--Kirkus Reviews

In 1898, a group of schoolboys in Bridgeport, Connecticut discovered gruesome packages under a bridge holding the dismembered remains of a young woman.

Finding that the dead woman had just undergone an abortion, prosecutors raced to establish her identity and fix blame for her death. Suspicion fell on Nancy Guilford, half of a married pair of "doctors" well known to police throughout New England.

A fascinated public followed the suspect's flight from justice, as many rooted for the fugitive. The Disquieting Death of Emma Gill takes a close look not only at the Guilfords, but also at the cultural shifts and social compacts that allowed their practice to flourish while abortion was both illegal and unregulated.

Focusing on the women at the heart of the story--both victim and perpetrator--Biederman reexamines this slice of history through a feminist lens and reminds us of the very real lives at stake when a woman's body and choices are controlled by others.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781641608565
Publication Date: 
January 23, 2024
Author: 
Publisher: 

First 50 Years: A History of the Bryn Mawr Bookstore in Cambridge

$6.00
ISBN/SKU: 
BMBKST50

Glorious Bodes

Glorious Bodes
$27.50
A prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds.

In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert's invaginated Jesus and Milton's gestational Adam to the ungendered "glorious body" of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery.

In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative account of theology's value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780226835006
Publication Date: 
September 4, 2024
Author: 

Modern Guide to Human Design

Modern Guide to Human Design
$27.99

Wouldn't it be great if we were handed an instruction manual, not only for ourselves but the people we love? Our Human Design chart is this blueprint for navigating life as our true selves, releasing outside pressures and beliefs, and allowing our innate magic to shine.

The world teaches us that the truth comes from outside of us--family, friends, experts, institutions--and that we make our best decisions with logic. Human design proposes a new reality: We each have a built-in navigation system. We are each wired for our own unique purpose!

Have you realized that things go smoothly when you trust your gut? You might be a Generator. Do you need to "sleep on it" when making a big decision? You might have Emotional Authority. Has anyone ever told you that you give the best advice? You could be a Projector. Do you bristle when others tell you what to do because you know you're here to impact the world by doing things your way? You may have a Manifestor aura. Have you always just felt more sensitive and different than everyone around you? You might be part of the 1% as a rare Reflector.

The best thing about human design is that it recognizes something we all know but often forget: We are all different. Our human design chart is the tangible blueprint for moving away from living the life that society expects of us and stepping into our special gifts and magic. Wouldn't it be incredible to have an instruction manual explaining how to have the best relationship with your child, partner, friends, or coworkers? This guide empowers us to allow everyone, including ourselves, to be who they are truly meant to be.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781423664024
Publication Date: 
October 3, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: 

Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea

Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea
$28.00

by Michelle Francl - Frank B. Mallory Professor of Chemistry

Author's website: www.michellefrancldonnay.com

Signed copies are available now, the perfect gift this holiday season!

 



Beginning with a leaf to cup introduction, this book looks at the molecular makeup of different types of tea, discusses brewing and steeping, and the age-old question of when, or even whether, to add milk.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781839165917
Publication Date: 
January 24, 2024