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
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.
Chaplaincy and Seafarers
by Wendy Cadge et al
President and Professor of Sociology
This book explores the faith, work, and lives of port chaplains and seafarers.
It draws on archive materials, fieldwork in ports and on cargo ships, and interviews with chaplains in the UK and overseas. The volume presents a detailed picture of seafarers' attitudes to working in mixed faith crews, their understandings of their own faith and its role and negotiation in a life at sea, and their needs with regard to faith and more general welfare support. In addition, it describes the daily life and work of port chaplains, how they understand their roles in relation to their own faith, and how they manage their work in a multi-faith environment. In producing this rich account, the perspectives of relevant stakeholders and the historical underpinnings of port chaplaincy have also been considered, alongside the ways in which port chaplaincy compares with other forms of chaplaincy about which rather more has, hitherto, been known.
Finding the Numinous: An Ecocritical Look at Dune and the Lord of the Rings
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.
'Kiss' and the Medicine of Love
by Tommaso Ghezzani
Visiting Assistant Professor of Transnational Italian Studies
This is a revised critical edition of philosopher and scientist, Francesco Patrizi's manuscript, Il Delfino, overo del bacio (c.1555), with an English translation and commentary. Il Delfino, or 'The Kiss' survives in a single manuscript, compiled by an assistant and interspersed with autograph corrections by Patrizi himself. The only modern critical edition of the text, edited by Danilo Aguzzi Barbagli (1975), is known to contain many errors that prevent a correct understanding of the work. This book therefore fills this historiographical gap and at the same time provides a reliable text for further translations of Patrizi's work into other languages.
Glorious Bodies
by Colby Gordon
Associate Professor of Literatures in English
Aqua's Aquarium
by C.C. McKee
Assistant Professor of History of Art and Director of the Center for Visual Culture
"I'm a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie world," the ubiquitous refrain that dominated the airwaves in summer 1997. Aqua's single from their debut album Aquarium spread like wildfire, topping charts across the globe. With their erotically charged lyrics and dance beats, Aqua moved beyond their Danish Eurodance beginnings and achieved global renown in the late 1990s. In the US, however, they are an infamous "one hit wonder," remembered for their highly publicized lawsuit with Mattel. Although Aqua's fame waned at the turn of the millennium, the 25th anniversary of their debut precipitated a resurgence in their popularity.
This book unwraps a bubblegum dance classic to offer the first in-depth examination of what lies beneath Aqua's sticky-sweet veneer. It traces the history of Aquarium alongside interpretations of the album's singles informed by queer theory and covers by contemporary musicians commissioned for the book. Peeling back the layers of Aquariumreveals a confection rife with unexpected contradictions and possibilities; videos permeated by seemingly innocuous articulates of heteronormativity are held in tension with suggestions of queerness, fetishism, and adolescent lust when heard through the ironic lens of camp.