During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of men were injured, and underwent amputation of hands, feet, limbs, fingers, and toes. As the war drew to a close, their disabled bodies came to represent the future of a nation that had been torn apart, and how it would be put back together again. In her authoritative and engagingly written new book, Sarah Chinn claims that amputation spoke both corporeally and metaphorically to radical white writers, ministers, and politicians about the need to attend to the losses of the Civil War by undertaking a real and actual Reconstruction that would make African Americans not just legal citizens but actual citizens of the United States. She traces this history, reviving little-known figures in the struggle for Black equality, and in so doing connecting the racial politics of 150 years ago with contemporary debates about justice and equity.

Can you tell us something about the research and writing process?

Researching this book was an unusual pleasure, despite the topic. One of my major sources was the collected photographs of Reed B. Bontecou, a surgeon during the Civil War, who photographed every soldier he worked on and gathered the pictures in several sets of albums to illustrate the effects of gunshot wounds. I was giving a talk at Cornell, and my host, Prof. Shirley Samuels, showed me the Bontecou volumes in their rare books collection. The photographs were astounding: crisp and clear, labeled with the survivor’s name and injury (and sometimes information about his regiment and the battle in which he was injured). I had already been working on the book, but this opened up a whole new arena of research for me.

The second infusion of energy into my writing came in the summer of 2020. The explosion of Black Lives Matter expanded ongoing efforts to remove Confederate war monuments. My main argument in the book is that white radical intellectuals saw amputation as a metaphor for the rot of slavery that the Civil War excised, and the amputee as a guarantee that America would never go back to the past. Part of that guarantee was Black citizenship and the destruction of white supremacy, both of which would be ensured by Reconstruction. After Reconstruction was fully dismantled, statues celebrating Confederate generals went up around the South as an expression of white dominance. I saw the destruction of these monuments in 2020 as a new kind of amputation, a new Black-led multiracial effort to exorcise the legacy of the Confederacy and Jim Crow.  My conclusion analyzed what this all meant, and ended on a cautiously hopeful note. Now the book is out in the world, it already seems out of date.

Where can we learn about your book?

I have a blogpost “Amputation Nation: Loss, Memory, and Reconstructing the Racial Order” on the Cambridge UP blog connecting the themes of my book to the backlash against Black Lives Matter. I’m working on a short video about the book as well.

What’s your next read for 2025? 

I’m really looking forward to using January to read the pile of academic books I’ve been collecting over the course of 2024. Outside of that, I don’t know what my next read is — there’s a Little Free Library box a block from my house, which has yielded a trove of jewels over the past year. Who knows what gems it will offer up in the months to come!

📚 Sarah Chinn, Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction | Cambridge University Press

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Cara Furman (Curriculum and Teaching), Teaching from an Ethical Center: Practical Wisdom for Daily Instruction

Furman illustrates how the focus on core values that emerges from this practice can be applied to everyday teaching dilemmas such as student behavior concerns and conflict management. Offering tips for adapting activities to different audiences, she shows how student participation in such inquiry supports hermeneutics, cultivates student voice, and helps build a culture of trust and interdependence through classroom collaboration. Furman’s tools and methods offer continuous opportunities for reflection and affirmation, enhancing educators’ ability to adapt to new challenges and, when necessary, to resist.

Can you tell us something about the research and writing process? 

Many years ago I had a transformative experience. I typically teach methods courses such as k-2 literacy but I had the rare opportunity to teach a class on theories of early childhood education. My doctorate is in philosophy and education and I was always a teacher who read philosophy and so I took on this class as an opportunity to share philosophy with a group of early childhood educators. Some of my colleagues were skeptical of the class as were many of the students who mostly too the class only because it fit in their schedule. I wanted the course to stay on the books and so I knew it had to be good. I loved philosophy and found it deeply pertinent and I so hoped that they would too. The stakes were high. Week by week, slowly, we asked big questions (philosophical questions) about works of art, more traditional philosophical texts, curriculum, and even lesson plans. By the end of the semester, a number of students expressed with delight that this was possibly the most important class they had taken because it helped them figure out why they were teaching and what mattered. The class left my rotation but I was transformed. Bolstered by my students’ adamant claim that this course was essential (and yet an elective that wasn’t regularly offered), I set out to infuse every course I taught with ethics at its core. This commitment has centered my teaching ever since. Knowing something special had occurred as soon as that course was done, I promised a core group of students (mentioned in the dedication) that I would write a book about the course and they would be in it. This is the book and they are, indeed, both the inspiration and quoted throughout its pages. Since that initial course, the work has grown as I have read and taught and conducted research on teaching from an ethical center but the book remains dedicated to my students (those who inspired it originally) and those I teach now at Hunter who inspire me to this day. 

Where can we learn more about your book?

In this series of videos (about Teaching from an Ethical Center, on Using Practical Wisdom in Schools, and on How to Practice Philosophical Thinking), this article “Teaching According to Your Core Values” on Edutopia, and the podcast Teaching from an Ethical Center: An inquiry Among Friends.

What’s your next read for 2025?

Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.

📚 Cara E. Furman, Teaching from an Ethical Center: Practical Wisdom for Daily Instruction | Harvard Education Press

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Ernst Toller, A Youth in Germany, Translated by Eoin and Eva Bourke, Edited by Christiane Schönfeld and Lisa Marie Anderson (German)

It was such a pleasure to work on this project as part of an editorial team. When I joined on, the first draft of the translation was already finished. Still, it took my Ireland-based collaborators and me years to revise and polish all the chapters, to research and write explanatory notes, to hunt down and photograph our illustrations, and to prepare appendices that contextualize the translation for readers not already familiar with the historical period. One funny thing about the experience: after months and months of back-and-forth about whether to pitch our translation in British or American English, we ended up with a Canadian publisher!

What’s your next read for 2025? 

I’m looking forward to reading Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ new biography of Audre Lorde. While her Hunter connections have gotten a lot more attention recently (yay!), many people I talk to still don’t know what a formative influence she had on Afro-German identity and communities, thanks to the time she spent in Berlin.

📚 Ernst Toller, A Youth in Germany, Translated by Eoin and Eva Bourke, Edited by Christiane Schönfeld and Lisa Marie Anderson | Broadview Press

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Re-thinking Assimilation and Integration: Essays in Honour of Richard Alba, edited by Paul Statham and Nancy Foner (Sociology)

I am currently working on two books which are scheduled to be published in 2026: 1) Immigration and History: A New Perspective on Past and Present, for Polity Press and 2) Immigrant City: How the Newest Immigrants Have Transformed New York, an edited volume for NYU Press.

📚 Re-thinking Assimilation and Integration: Essays in Honour of Richard Alba, edited by Paul Statham and Nancy Foner | Routledge

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Gary Mallon (Social Work), Bruno & Frida Go to Mexico City

Where can we learn more about your book?

There is a website which hosts photos of children who love the books.  I have done several book signings in bookstores and coffee shops and they are also available on Amazon.

What’s next? 

Children who read the books are always offering suggestions on where Bruno & Frida should go next. They sometimes write to me or send me an email to make their suggestions known. They love being part of Bruno & Frida’s adventures. The next in the series will be Bruno and Frida Go to Egypt. It should be available sometime in 2025.

📚 Gary Mallon, The Adventures of Bruno and Frida, the French Bulldogs: Bruno & Frida Go to Mexico City / Bruno y Frida Van a Cuidad de Mexico | Bruno and Frida

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Kelly I. Aliano and Dongshin Chang (Theatre), Teaching Writing Through Theatre: A Performative Approach to Pedagogy  

Can you tell us something about the research and writing process?

We have been collaborating on pedagogy, articles, and conference sessions for more than a decade. Kelly was initially assigned as TA and then Writing Fellow for Dongshin’s World Theatre courses at Hunter College and from this initial collaboration, we began a continued exploration of pedagogy, particularly for courses that require a significant writing assignment. Even when we were not preparing a publication or presentation, we would meet to discuss recent scholarship on pedagogy and to share about our successes and failures in our own classes. From our many conversations and research endeavors, we realized that we could put together a book that brings our expertise as theatre scholars to a broader discussion of classroom instruction.

Over the course of three years, we met regularly to discuss chapter topics and overall themes for the book and then each worked independently to draft segments of the book, which the other would then review and revise. Chapters were built collaboratively, with Dongshin focusing on the literature review and Kelly on the actual practices, in most cases. If Kelly drafted a section, Dongshin would then read it and add his own content and vice versa. Dongshin took on the labor of putting together the citations and reference lists, while Kelly was the point person for most correspondence with the publishing team. And we each reviewed all of the material throughout the production process.

What’s your next read for 2025? 

Kelly is continuing to indulge her love of romance novels and planning to read The Rom-Commers. Dongshin is re-reading and finding much inspiration from Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty (Newark: John Wiley & Sons, 2014) by Elizabeth F. Barkley, Claire Howell Major, and K. Patricia Cross.

📚 Kelly I. Aliano and Dongshin Chang, Teaching Writing Through Theatre | Springer Nature

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Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, edited by Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha, Jonathan Shannon (Anthropology), Søren Møller Sørensen, Virginia Danielson

What’s your next read for 2025? 

• Alesssandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi (in Italian if I can manage it, otherwise in English trans.)
• Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth.
• Vitigni rari e antichi (for my new research project).

📚 Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, edited by Maria M. Rijo Lopes da Cunha, Jonathan Shannon, Søren Møller Sørensen, Virginia Danielson | Springer Nature

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Social Work Education and the COVID-19 Pandemic: International Insights toward Innovation and Creativity, edited by Yael Latzer and Liat Shklarski (Social Work)

The book is part of the Routledge Research in Education series, which aims to present the latest research from right across the field of education. This book explores how the shift to remote teaching during the global pandemic in March 2020 sparked innovation and creativity in social work education. It examines how temporary changes became standard practices, drawing on narratives from 20 social work leaders across 17 countries. Each chapter highlights key themes and lessons learned, offering case studies on coping mechanisms, the transition to remote teaching, and the creative solutions developed during this period. By adopting an international perspective, this book contributes to the global scholarship on social work education, detailing how institutions adapted to remote learning and how these experiences continue to shape current practices. It is an essential resource for social work educators, researchers, and field instructors interested in experimental curricula and evolving teaching methodologies.

Can you tell us something about the research and writing process?

This book builds on the foundation laid by Rethinking Social Work Education in Light of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned from Social Work Scholars and Leaders, published in 2023 by Shklarski & Latzer, which focused on Schools of Social Work USA and Canada. Inspired by a series of mixed-method studies conducted in the USA and Israel with social work students and instructors, we examined the pandemic’s impact through the theoretical lens of loss and grief. The research highlighted the pandemic’s transformative effects on social work education, leading us to take a broader, macro-level approach in this book. By including perspectives from leaders worldwide, we sought to capture the global shifts in teaching and field practice, offering a more comprehensive view of the pandemic’s long-term implications on social work education.

What’s your next read for 2025?

Any articles related to the impact of ChatGPT on social work education and practice!

📚 Social Work Education and the COVID-19 Pandemic: International Insights toward Innovation and Creativity, edited by Yael Latzer and Liat Shklarski | Routledge

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Michael Lobel (Art and Art History), Van Gogh and the End of Nature

Van Gogh and the End of Nature offers a radical revisioning of nearly the full span of the artist’s career, considering Van Gogh’s artistic process, his choice of materials, and some of his most beloved and iconic pictures. Merging a timely sense of environmental urgency with bold new readings of the work of one of the world’s most acclaimed artists, this book weaves together detailed historical research and perceptive analysis into an illuminating portrait of an artist and his changing world.

Can you tell us something about the research and writing process? 

At the outset, I didn’t plan to write a book about Van Gogh, industrial pollution, and climate change. I had been researching Van Gogh and his work for some time, and conceived of a book that would be built around chapters focusing on some of the major locales where he lived and worked, including The Hague, Nuenen, Paris, and Arles. The Arles chapter began coalescing around a certain set of themes, and kept getting longer and longer, until at one point I realized it could be an entire book unto itself. That’s how the project took shape, which is true of a lot of my work: I tend not to know exactly where I’m going from the start, but see it instead as a process of trying things out and experimenting until a structure emerges that I can then build on.

Where can we learn about your book?

In this interview with art critic David Ebony about the book, Nature and Artifice: A Portrait of Vincent van Gogh Not Seen Before, and this interview on the Modern Art Notes podcast.

What’s your next read for 2025? 

I’m very curious about Percival Everett’s James, so that may be my next read in 2025.

📚 Michael Lobel, Van Gogh and the End of Nature | Yale University Press

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Ellen Kombiyil (English), Love as Invasive Species: Poems

Love as Invasive Species traces the poet’s matrilineal line to interrogate learned inheritances. The poet deftly resurrects (her) dead to interrogate memory, accuracy, the way images overlap and combine to tell parts of the story, and touches upon trauma and the difficulty of reassembling “truth”. Ultimately, the book transcends its cast of characters to explore larger cultural themes of gendered power dynamics, expectations, reproductive rights, femininity, and female desire to ask—What grows from complex soil of inheritance? How do we (all) learn to love?

As the book tells a narrative of repetition and repeated patterns, the reassembled story is conceptually realized in the book-as-art-object design: Love as Invasive Species is formatted as a tête-bêche or “double book.” The poems in Side A and Side B mirror and respond to each other in list order.

Can you tell us something about the research and writing process? 

The writing of this book very much has its roots at Hunter. I wrote drafts of most of the poems while a graduate student in the MFA program, working closely with Donna Masini, Tom Sleigh, and Catherine Barnett. Post graduation, it took me a few more years to revise the poems and figure out that it really needed to be told in the tête-bêche structure. After I figured that out, the book got picked up quickly (in four days!) by Cornerstone Press out of the University of Wisconsin.

In terms of research, I conducted interviews with living family members to help me piece together bits of the narrative. The book, however, is not meant to be considered memoir or non-fiction. It is still a work of poetry and although rooted in lived experiences, I gave myself permission to let the poems develop as they needed to and the book to evolve as it needed to.

Where can we learn more about your book?

You can read a review of Love as Invasive Species here. More information and reviews can be found on my website.

What’s your next read for 2025? 

Nox by Anne Carson.

📚 Ellen Kombiyil, Love as Invasive Species: Poems | Cornerstone Press

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Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects, edited by Claudia Orenstein (Theatre) and Tim Cusack (Theatre)

Interestingly, we realized when we were close to finalizing the second volume that, while the first volume was quite evenly balanced among spiritual traditions, the second volume featured a preponderous of images and themes related to Christianity, suggesting the extent to which that particular religious worldview has steeped itself into our collective Western consciousness—even among those artists making otherwise secular work. Nonetheless, both volumes include a wide diversity of belief systems, revealing how using materials in performative practice is a deeply human tendency around the world. It finds its roots in the oldest cultures and continues today in the most cutting-edge cultural spheres. Puppetry, which some might consider a marginalized art form, has been and continues to be a central cultural practice.

Can you tell us something about the research and writing process? 

In many ways these books arose out of Claudia’s long-standing scholarly interests in both Asian theatre and puppetry/material performance. As she was doing fieldwork throughout India, Thailand, and Japan and engaging with their many performance traditions that also have important religious and ritual functions, she found herself wondering if there could be such a category as a “ritual puppet.” Tim had been her grad student here at Hunter (in the Theatre Department’s MA program, which is being reconstituted), as well as the assistant editor on the first two volumes of collected essays that she had coedited (The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance  and Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations). This felt like the right project for him to step up to a new level of responsibility given his dual interests in various types of performance and spirituality. We issued a request for proposals, slightly worried that only a few scholars would be interested in our slightly quirky book project. To our amazement, we were overwhelmed by the response, which is what led us to two volumes. So many of our colleagues from around the world were eager to write about this topic, relieved to finally have a platform that would allow them to publish about a subject that in many ways flies in the face of Western academic empirical discourse. After all, what concrete, objective evidence do we have for spirit? In many ways, by its very essence it is a subject that defies language.

What was so inspiring about working on these books was that this linking of puppetry to spirituality created space for a whole community of academics and artists to converge in communitas and share their interest in a wide range of topics: anthropology, music, performance studies, visual art, religious studies, philosophy, history, sociology, even politics. In these pages we feature one artist who is openly and proudly an Evangelical, born-again Christian and who was trained in puppetry by Carol Spinney (none other than Big Bird himself). She shares these pages with another artist who was actually slightly uncomfortable being included since he is adamantly opposed to organized religion of any kind and resists any readings of his highly personal theatre pieces combining postmodern dance and object manipulation that would categorize them as “spiritual.”

We start the first book with an article on the Korean female shamans known as mansin, who have mediated between humans and the spirit world for centuries (often by manipulating puppet-like paper figures), and we end the second book with the über twenty-first–century crass commercialism of the Body Worlds traveling exhibits, where plasticized human remains are manipulated into frozen tableaux paradoxically teaming with puppet-like mania. It’s these productive collisions between past and present, entertainment and contemplation, believer and skeptic that charges these books with whatever spiritual force they might possess. Perhaps the puppets and other material objects presented in their pages suggest a different, more holistic way of navigating the wonderous existential puzzle that is human existence. That was certainly our experience in bringing them to fruition.

Where can we learn more about your book?

We were interviewed by puppeteer and scholar Paulette Richards (who is also a contributor to the second volume of the project) about the first book. We also include two pictures from the books. The first is by our doctoral lecturer colleague in the Theatre Department, Deepsikha Chatterjee, from her chapter on the bhaona mask-puppet tradition of northeast India in the first volume. The second is from Ana Martinez’s chapter in the second volume on visual and performance representations of material objects left behind in the US-Mexico borderlands by undocumented migrants. Ana is a graduate of CUNY Graduate Center and currently teaches at Texas State University.

 

 

What’s your next read for 2025? 

Claudia: Apart from the final manuscript of Making Meaning in Puppetry: Materials, Practice, Perception, another co-edited book I am completing with colleagues Dassia Posner and Alissa Mello, and the articles coming in for the upcoming issue of Puppetry International Research, an online scholarly journal devoted to puppetry and related arts that I edit (on the CUNY Academic Commons), the next book I hope to get to is Prehistoric Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic, by Douglass Bailey from 2005, recommended to me by a friend from Turkey and also referenced in a paper in the Making Meaning book.

I am interested in looking at models from both archeology and art history that explore how materiality expresses culture, geography, construction, and other elements, pointing to origins and cultural contexts. I wonder if these can offer insights into tracing genealogies for some early Japanese puppet traditions that I was introduced to during my Fulbright research on Japanese ritual puppetry in 2021–22, where there is speculation about other cultural influences but no concrete evidence. I am looking forward to learning more about how other disciplines deal with material observation and investigation.

Tim: I’m currently reading Dear White People: Letter to a New Minority by Tim Wise as a way of practicing mental health self-care in the face of the catastrophic presidential election. Even though it was published a dozen years ago and was very much written within the historical context of the Tea Party reaction to the Obama administration, it’s all still sadly relevant to our present Age of MAGA. While I’m well acquainted with the past historical and sociological conditions he discusses that continue to negatively impact Black, brown, and Indigenous people in our country to this day, the plain-spoken simplicity of his prose rings with moral clarity and resolve—qualities we desperately need as we face the uncertainties of what’s to come, while daring to dream of a society healed of its racist wounds.

I will also be reading Jack Halberstam’s seminal theoretical text The Queer Art of Failure (2011) as I prepare my applications for PhD programs. I plan to do my doctoral research on the ten-year period from 1987–1997 when Everett Quinton was artistic director of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company after inheriting that mantle when his life and creative partner Charles Ludlam succumbed to AIDS. From the viewpoint of conventional commercial success, the RTC was a “failure” in that it eventually shut its doors, but from another perspective Quinton was a spectacular success at training a new generation of young theatre artists in the improvisatory material strategies (including the use of puppetry) that bring Ludlam’s complexly layered, bricolage texts to vivid comic life.

📚 Puppet and Spirit: Ritual, Religion, and Performing Objects, edited by Claudia Orenstein and Tim Cusack | Routledge

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Addressing Anti-Asian Racism with Social Work, Advocacy, and Action, edited by Meirong Liu and Keith Chan (Social Work)

This book fills a critical gap in scholarship from social workers in the effort to eradicate anti-Asian racism through exploration in the historical and current political context. Asian Americans are the fastest growing population among all racial and ethnic groups. Recent events have highlighted incidents of anti-Asian racism which has a long history tied to various marginalized identities in the U.S. This book examines the experiences and impacts of racism from the perspective of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and delves into evidence-based micro, mezzo, and macro solutions. This book intends to serve as a timely and comprehensive resource for social work educators, researchers and practitioners committed to eliminating anti-Asian racism experienced by a population that will no longer accept the label of being “invisible.”

This book is the first of its kind to systematically examine the history of anti-Asian racism in the U.S., its impact on the intersectionality of different marginalized identities within Asian American communities, and provides innovative, evidence-based solutions that social work educators, practitioners, and researchers can adopt to dismantle anti-Asian racism.

Can you tell us something about the research and writing process? 

This book was a labor of love that began as a conversation among social work researchers and scholars from the AAPI community during the height of anti-Asian racism at the time of the COVID pandemic. Many of us had been doing the work on addressing anti-Asian racism in our scholarship for over a decade. However, there was a general sense that there had not been a venue for us to share our research on this important topic. Through a collaboration with Dr. Meirong Liu who is Professor of the School of Social Work at Howard University, she and I submitted a proposal to Oxford University Press to compose a volume that can serve as an outlet for our collective scholarship on addressing anti-Asian racism. We then mapped out the book to comprehensively examine the history and context of anti-Asian racism in the United States, the different intersecting identities of the AAPI community in response to anti-Asian racism, and finally the solutions that we as social workers can offer to this problem. When we started to reach out to potential contributors, the response was enthusiastic because there are those of us in the social work profession who yearned (I believe) for years to use our voice to address this issue.

Where can we learn more about your book?

Dr. Liu and I organized a series of panel presentations with contributors to our book at the October 2024 Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) Annual Conference. We plan to also produce a podcast about the book, so please stay tuned.

What’s your next read for 2025? 

I have two books I am looking forward to reading over winter break and they are both graphic novels. The first is The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, by Thi Bui. The second is They Called Us Enemy by George Takei. I hope to produce a graphic novel someday to further illustrate the Asian American experience.

📚 Addressing Anti-Asian Racism with Social Work, Advocacy, and Action, edited by Meirong Liu and Keith Chan | Oxford University Press

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