Course Adoptable Titles from University of Michigan Press
Here at the University of Michigan Press, we pride ourselves on texts that are educational, accessible, and interesting. It’s important to us that those texts make their way into students’ and teachers’ hands. Our books are meant to be read and discussed in academic settings, and instructors putting those books onto their syllabi makes that happen. Below is just a small selection of our course adoptable titles from a wide array of subject areas. These books have already been widely used in syllabi across the country.
American Studies
Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Ferguson
Black males are disproportionately "in trouble" and suspended from the nation’s school systems. Bad Boys offers a richly textured account of daily interactions between teachers and students in order to demonstrate how a group of eleven- and twelve-year-old males construct a sense of self under adverse circumstances. This new edition includes a foreword by Pedro A. Noguera, and an afterword and bibliographic essay by the author, all of which reflect on the continuing relevance of this work nearly two decades after its initial publication.
Classical Studies
Ceremony and Power: Performing Politics in Rome between Republic and Empire by Geoffrey Sumi
In Ceremony and Power , Geoffrey Sumi is concerned with the relationship between political power and public ceremonial in the Roman Republic, with particular focus on the critical months following Caesar's assassination and later as Augustus became the first emperor of Rome. Ultimately, Sumi shows that the will of the people strongly influenced the decisions and actions of Roman aristocrats.
Disability Studies
Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body by Michael Davidson
This book is at the cutting edge of the expanding field of disability studies, offering a wide range of essays that investigate the impact of disability across various art forms—including literature, performance, photography, and film. Written in a fluid, accessible style, Concerto for the Left Hand will appeal to both specialists and general audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book should appeal not only to scholars of disability studies but to all those working in minority art, deaf studies, visual culture, and modernism.
International Relations
Democratic Peace: A Political Biography by Piki Ish-Shalom
The Democratic Peace Thesis holds that democracies rarely make war on other democracies. Political theorist Piki Ish-Shalom sketches the origins and early academic development of this theory, and then focuses on the ways in which various Democratic Peace Theories were used by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both to shape and to justify U. S. foreign policy, particularly the U. S. stance on the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the War in Iraq. Ish-Shalom boldly confronts the question of how much responsibility theoreticians must bear for the political uses—and misuses—of their ideas.
Media Studies
Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead by Bruce McClelland
In contemporary Western popular culture, the vampire has evolved into one of the most recognizable symbols of evil. Yet less has been said—and even less has been understood—about its nemesis, the vampire slayer. Slayers and Their Vampires is the first work to explore how the vampire slayer began, and it goes further to ask why the true history of the vampire slayer has been so long ignored.
Performing Arts
Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood
This book is the first gathering of the late Dwight Conquergood’s work in a single volume, tracing the evolution of one scholar’s thinking across a career of scholarship, teaching, and activism, and also the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies. His research has inspired an entire generation of scholars invested in performance as a meaningful paradigm to understand human interaction, especially between structures of power and the disenfranchised.
Political Science
Analysts and pundits from across the American political spectrum describe Islamic fundamentalism as one of the greatest threats to modern, Western-style democracy. Yet very few non-Muslims would be able to venture an accurate definition of political Islam. Fully revised and updated, this second edition of The Many Faces of Political Islam thoroughly analyzes the many facets of this political ideology and shows its impact on global relations.
Literary Studies
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Sheila Glaser
The first full-length translation in English of an essential work of postmodernism. Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra—the copy without an original—and simulation. These terms are crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to the extent that they address the concept of mass reproduction and reproducibility that characterizes our electronic media culture. This book represents a unique and original effort to rethink cultural theory from the perspective of a new concept of cultural materialism, one that radically redefines postmodern formulations of the body.
