Bryn Mawr Authors

Jiny Lan is an avant-garde Chinese artist based in Germany. A founding member of the feminist art collective "Bald Girls," she infuses astute, politically charged, and iconoclastic criticism into her conceptual and visual art. Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion provides a hermeneutic and critical analysis of Lan's idiosyncratic, provocative, and ingenious artwork. "Subversion" refers not only to her political and cultural subversiveness but also to her iterative technique of reproduction and repainting, which she uses to create a series of genealogically related "sub-versions" of her own paintings.

As an émigré and immigrant artist, Lan is profoundly influenced by both eastern and western cultures and traditions. Her immersive experience and extensive knowledge of two contrasting national histories, cultures, and political systems endows her with a unique intersectional positionality. Her artwork is at once figurative and abstract, realistic and fantastic, chaotic and logical, appropriative and creative. It interrogates serious issues such as censorship, authoritarianism, democracy, human rights, sexism, racism, war, migration, and Covid-19, but in a dynamic and often humorous manner. This book lays a foundation for evaluating Lan as an artist whose work invites discussions about portraiture, power, temporality, space, corporality, and sex.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

A wily young thief must use her wits to survive futuristic, alternate history Beijing in this Les Misérables-inspired young adult cyberpunk "fast-paced heist [that] balances lofty ideals of change with snappy dialogue and pulse-pounding action" (Publishers Weekly).

When Zhong Ning'er takes the job, she expects a smash-and-grab burglary she's doing to make rent and help out a friend. What she doesn't expect: a sad-eyed army boy who dreams of insurrection, a former rebel leader trapped inside a secret lab, a group of aspiring revolutionaries who are first collaborators, then compatriots, and then, perhaps, friends.

But this is Beijing, nearly a hundred and fifty years after General Yuan Shikai successfully declared himself emperor in 1915. His descendants rule the country from their seat in the imperial city, their gendarmerie--the Beiyang Army--run the streets, aided by cyborgs and the Brocade Guard. Walls have risen, dividing the city into districts called Rings--nominally only by geography, but in truth by class. Earthquakes devastate the northern farmlands, crops drown in the southern typhoons, and all over the country people are hooked on a drug they call Complacency.

As a Sixth Ring girl who watched previous uprisings crushed brutally by the court, Ning'er isn't much of an optimist, and she's certainly no revolutionary. But that might not be up to her--as the stakes get higher, the time for passivity is quickly running out, and she must decide if she wants to sit idly in her cynicism, or embrace the breathless, terrible possibility of hope.

In the late 1930s, Tor, a seasoned beluga whaler, and his wife Astrid, a trained botanist, venture to a remote Arctic whaling station. Stranded by unforeseen ice conditions, they face a harrowing winter where the twenty-four-hour darkness is only one of their challenges. As they struggle against violent storms, brutal cold, and the threat of polar bears, Astrid discovers she is pregnant, adding another layer of complexity to their already strained marriage.

The Last Whaler is more than a survival story; it's a meditation on grief, guilt, and the human impact on pristine environments. Can Tor and Astrid find redemption amidst the desolation, or will the Arctic's harsh beauty claim them both? Perfect for readers seeking atmospheric historical fiction with a touch of suspense.

In August 1918 a Massachusetts-born woman named Margaret Hall boarded a transport ship in New York City that would take her across the Atlantic to work with the American Red Cross in France, then in the devastating grips of the First World War. Working at a canteen at a railroad junction close to the Western Front, Hall aided both Allied and German soldiers. While there she was regularly forced to seek shelter from German bombardments. After the Armistice, Hall explored the destruction of the surrounding region; her diary entries, letters, and photos reveal a world of ruins and human remains.

After Hall returned to the United States, she wrote a memoir that she shared privately with friends and family. Published here for the first time, Hall's words offer a first-hand account of life on the Western Front in those last months of the war and its immediate aftermath. Balancing her deeply held convictions about the horror of this conflict with both wry humor and a sense of urgency, Hall's narrative gives the reader an unusually immediate and individualized testimony, one that rivals those of similar but better-known war memoirs, such as those by Vera Brittain and Edith Wharton.

The book features dozens of Hall's striking and never-before-published photographs, including of the movement of troops through town, women working just behind the front lines, and the landscape left when the war was "over." The pairing of Hall's remarkable images with her vivid reporting results in an invaluable, and uniquely personal, account of one of the most cataclysmic events in history.

Distributed for the Massachusetts Historical Society