Here are 100 books that Permanent Crisis fans have personally recommended if you like
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I started my career as a historian of historiography and now hold a chair in the history of the humanities at Leiden University. What I like about this field is its comparative agenda. How does art history relate to media studies, and what do Arabists have in common with musicologists? Even more intriguing, as far as I’m concerned, is the question of what holds the humanities together. I think that history can help us understand how the humanities have developed as they have, differently in different parts of the world. As the field called history of the humanities has only recently emerged, there is plenty of work to do!
If anyone has helped establish the history of the humanities as a field of study, it is Rens Bod. His New History of the Humanitiesis a monument of erudition, covering the study of human meaning-making across disciplines, centuries, and cultures. It is admittedly a difficult pill to swallow for someone who believes that all understanding starts with in-depth listening and careful contextualization. Nonetheless, I admire the book for two reasons. Against the prevalent view that the humanities are a product of the nineteenth or twentieth century, Bod argues that we are late heirs to “a centuries-old humanistic tradition.” Also, Bod encourages his readers to step outside of their professional comfort zones. Historians of the humanities need to be comparativists, unafraid of tracing ideas or practices across time and space.
Many histories of science have been written, but A New History of the Humanities offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present. There are already historical studies of musicology, logic, art history, linguistics, and historiography, but this volume gathers these, and many other humanities disciplines, into a single coherent account.
Its central theme is the way in which scholars throughout the ages and in virtually all civilizations have sought to identify patterns in texts, art, music, languages, literature, and the past. What rules can we apply if we wish to determine whether a tale about…
I started my career as a historian of historiography and now hold a chair in the history of the humanities at Leiden University. What I like about this field is its comparative agenda. How does art history relate to media studies, and what do Arabists have in common with musicologists? Even more intriguing, as far as I’m concerned, is the question of what holds the humanities together. I think that history can help us understand how the humanities have developed as they have, differently in different parts of the world. As the field called history of the humanities has only recently emerged, there is plenty of work to do!
Whether or not one wants to make a case for the modern humanities deriving from the studia humanitatisin Renaissance Italy, it is undeniable that Renaissance humanism has been a source of endless fascination for humanities scholars.I enjoyed this book partly because it shows how this fascination led seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars to “recapitulate practices and mentalities that Italian Renaissance humanists pioneered.” It is such borrowing and reapplying that explains how a “humanistic tradition” could take shape. Another intriguing point is Celenza’s argument that this tradition has historically revolved as much around wisdom as about knowledge. While we modern academics know very well how to produce knowledge, what has happened to the wisdom part? Can the humanities survive, Celenza asks, without “reflection on the self and on life”?
Christopher Celenza is one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Renaissance. His ambitious new book focuses on the body of knowledge which we now call the humanities, charting its roots in the Italian Renaissance and exploring its development up to the Enlightenment. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the author shows how thinkers like Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano developed innovative ways to read texts closely, paying attention to historical context, developing methods to determine a text's authenticity, and taking the humanities seriously as a means of bettering human life. Alongside such novel reading practices, technology - the invention of…
I started my career as a historian of historiography and now hold a chair in the history of the humanities at Leiden University. What I like about this field is its comparative agenda. How does art history relate to media studies, and what do Arabists have in common with musicologists? Even more intriguing, as far as I’m concerned, is the question of what holds the humanities together. I think that history can help us understand how the humanities have developed as they have, differently in different parts of the world. As the field called history of the humanities has only recently emerged, there is plenty of work to do!
How can the humanities offer a space for moral reflection if they are heirs of a tradition that has often been discriminatory, oppressive, and blatantly Eurocentric? Archaeology of Babel offers a much-needed corrective to books like Celenza’s by drawing attention to colonial abuses of philological scholarship (with grammars, dictionaries, and translations serving as instruments of colonial rule).The book’s subtitle is, of course, exaggerated: the humanities are better conceived of as a multi-layered heritage than as an edifice built on a single foundation. But the exaggeration serves a purpose: Ahmed invites us to “see ourselves as inheritors of a colonial legacy.” Apparently, the humanist tradition to which we are heirs is a mixed bag. Continuing it requires careful stock-taking: what do we want to take with us into the future?
For more than three decades, preeminent scholars in comparative literature and postcolonial studies have called for a return to philology as the indispensable basis of critical method in the humanities. Against such calls, this book argues that the privilege philology has always enjoyed within the modern humanities silently reinforces a colonial hierarchy. In fact, each of philology's foundational innovations originally served British rule in India.
Tracing an unacknowledged history that extends from British Orientalist Sir William Jones to Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said and beyond, Archaeology of Babel excavates the epistemic transformation that was engendered on a global scale by…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
By
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
I started my career as a historian of historiography and now hold a chair in the history of the humanities at Leiden University. What I like about this field is its comparative agenda. How does art history relate to media studies, and what do Arabists have in common with musicologists? Even more intriguing, as far as I’m concerned, is the question of what holds the humanities together. I think that history can help us understand how the humanities have developed as they have, differently in different parts of the world. As the field called history of the humanities has only recently emerged, there is plenty of work to do!
Fortunately, we are not the first generation that faces the challenge of rethinking and remaking the humanities in light of new concerns. If this volume shows anything, it is how thoroughly the postwar American humanities changed in just a couple of decades, due to increasing enrollment numbers, political demands for area studies (e.g., Soviet studies, Chinese studies), and the rise of fields like women’s studies and Black studies. What I find stimulating about this collection of essays is also its rich array of methodologies, from quantitative approaches (how did enrollment numbers change?) to curriculum analysis (what textbooks were assigned?) We need more books like this, about other periods and different parts of the world, if only to remind us that the humanities are always subject to remaking and reimagining.
The role played by the humanities in reconciling American diversity-a diversity of both ideas and peoples-is not always appreciated. This volume of essays, commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, examines that role in the half century after World War II, when exceptional prosperity and population growth, coupled with America's expanded political interaction with the world abroad, presented American higher education with unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The humanities proved to be the site for important efforts to incorporate groups and doctrines that had once been excluded from the American cultural conversation. Edited and introduced by David Hollinger, this…
I’m an emeritus professor living in Portland, Oregon, officially retired, but still writing articles and books. Although I am a lifelong US citizen, I spent the heart of my career as the Canada Research Chair of Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. Most of my books are about aspects of rationality, especially cognitive biases. I have also worked on tools for measuring individual differences in rationality. Lately, I have focused on ways to reduce political polarization by taming the myside bias that plagues all human thought, and by reforming institutions (especially universities) that are currently failing in their role as knowledge adjudicators.
Ellis chronicles the history of how the university turned from an institution of open inquiry into a political monoculture that requires those in it to adhere to a particular ideology. Ellis is particularly good at showing how the strengths of the traditional university were turned into weaknesses and allowed it to be captured by the adherents of identity politics. Old-style independent scholars are hard to organize, Ellis points out, because they are just that—independent. But these truly independent scholars were no match for the politically organized groups that wanted to use the university to advance a political agenda.
A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis.
Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past fifty years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this time, from mildly left-leaning to almost exclusively leftist. He explains how astonishing historical luck led to the success of a…
I have been an organizational psychologist and executive coach for more than two decades, advising high-level executives, including Fortune 500 leaders, to build workplace cultures in which all employees can flourish. Yet, for many employees of color, the workplace is so challenging that many feel professionally stifled. I realized many years ago that to accomplish my own goals; I needed to take control of my career and not depend upon the vagaries of individual leaders. I needed to set goals, take a long game view, be honest with myself and my leaders, and help leaders understand how changing some habits could help them and me succeed in a disrupted world.
The message of Leadership Reckoning is that we need do a better job of developing human-centered business leaders who can meet the challenges of a disrupted world. I believe the approach in this book will also achieve the goal of building more inclusive organizational cultures in which all employees can thrive, regardless of their variations.
Since its inception, higher education in the U.S. has claimed to develop leaders. This bold claim appears in college mission statements and mottos, and it is reinforced in recruiting materials and ad campaigns. But is this claim justified? Leadership Reckoning takes to task American colleges and universities for their haphazard, incoherent, evidence-free approaches to developing students as leaders and offers a principle-driven, outcome-oriented blueprint for how effective leader development can occur. Higher education has both the opportunity and the responsibility to take leader development seriously and create the leaders we need. It's high time that happens, and Leadership Reckoning points…
From the author of Washington’s Spies, the thrilling story of two rival secret agents — one Confederate, the other Union — sent to Britain during the Civil War.
The South’s James Bulloch, charming and devious, was ordered to acquire a clandestine fleet intended to break Lincoln’s blockade, sink Northern…
I grew up in Brooklyn in a family that often faced financial difficulties and started working in my early teens in my father’s grocery store. These experiences made me painfully aware of the great disparities in education, security, material well-being, and opportunity in our society. I saw how these inequalities caused some people to become cynical, resigned, or indifferent—while others became determined to overcome them. I became fascinated by them. I felt that if I wanted to live in a more just and productive society, I first had to understand how it worked. My recommended books inspired me further and helped me to gain that understanding.
I believe education (what economists call “human capital”) is the key to a more productive, equitable, and happier society. After all, many rich nations, like Switzerland, Japan, and Israel, have almost no natural resources but do have well-educated populations, and many poor nations, like the Congo, Venezuela, and Nigeria, have extremely valuable natural resources but do not have well-educated populations. Therefore, I am concerned about the state of education in America and am particularly troubled that our best universities may not be achieving as much for our society as they could. This book is a searing critique of their role and makes the case that we should expect so much more from them, given their huge resources.
An eye-opening look at how America's elite colleges and suburbs help keep the rich rich-making it harder than ever to fight the inequality dividing us today
The front-page news and the trials that followed Operation Varsity Blues were just the tip of the iceberg. Poison Ivy tells the bigger, seedier story of how elite colleges create paths to admission available only to the wealthy, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Evan Mandery reveals how tacit agreements between exclusive "Ivy-plus" schools and white affluent suburbs create widespread de facto segregation. And as a college degree continues to be the surest route to…
As a teacher of US women’s history and educational history, I have long been interested in women’s colleges—in their faculties, administrators, students, alumnae, goals, and achievements. Most recently, as the biographer of a woman educator (a dean of Barnard College in the early 20th century), I became more deeply involved with the literature on single-sex schools. Major books focus on the older women’s colleges, the “Seven Sisters,” but devote attention to other colleges as well. I am impressed with the talents of historians, with their skill at asking questions of their subjects, with the intensity of mission at the women’s schools, and with changing styles of campus culture.
Recent concern with intersectionality (instances where categories of race and gender overlap) makes research into Black women’s colleges vital. Founded in 1881 as a Baptist female seminary in Atlanta, Georgia, Spelman College became a leading women’s liberal arts college. The book tracks the impact of four college presidents from the outset to the 1950s. The authors show how the formal academic curriculum, extra-curriculum (college-sponsored activities), and hidden curriculum (informal and even inadvertent influences) instilled an imperative to excel.
Presents the history of Spelman's foundation through the tenure of its fourth president, Florence M. Read, in1953. The story is brought up to date by the contributions of Spelman's current president, Beverly Daniel Tatum, and by Johnnetta B. Cole.
The book chronicles how the vision each of these women presidents, and their response to changing social forces, both profoundly shaped Spelman's curriculum and influenced the lives and minds of thousands of young Black women.
Marybeth Gasman has been writing about African American history – within the educational setting – since 1994 when she began research that led to on an intellectual biography of African American sociologist, Harlem Renaissance architect, and Fisk University president Charles Spurgeon Johnson. Over the years, her work has explored many topics, including the history of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Black medical schools, African American philanthropy, and the production of Black scientists. She is the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Professor in Education & a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and also serves as the Executive Director of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, & Justice.
Joy Williamson-Lott has a powerful voice and perspective the permeates every sentence in this book. She doesn’t waste a word. And, her research skills are superb. For anyone wanting to learn how to write beautiful history, this book is a model. She is also particularly good at showcasing the voices of African American students who were instrumental to the Black freedom struggle. You can feel their energy and frustration in her passages, and their commitment to freedom and justice comes alive.
This is a profoundly moving story of Black colleges in Mississippi during a watershed moment in their history. It is also the story of young Americans trying to balance their pursuit of higher education with the parallel struggle for civil rights. ""Radicalizing the Ebony Tower"" examines colleges against the backdrop of the black freedom struggle of the middle twentieth century, a highly contentious conflict between state agents determined to protect the racial hierarchy and activists equally determined to cripple white supremacy. Activists demanded that colleges play a central role in the Civil Rights Movement (a distinct challenge to the notion…
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
I have been involved with teaching in prison for the last 22 years, and have taught everything from creative writing to meditation to college classes across carceral facilities in New York, California, and Massachusetts. As the founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative at Emerson College’s campus at Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, I constantly work with faculty and students who are navigating the teaching and learning environment under some of the most adverse circumstances. These books have helped me feel less alone in this work.
McMay and Kimble’s edited volume brings together a wide range of case studies looking at some form of higher education behind bars. Meant to showcase many different forms of higher education in prison, this book underscores the diversity of what higher education in prison can look like. In each case study, strengths and challenges of a given approach are visible and provide an honest look at how to support learners in a range of circumstances.
Numerous studies indicate that completing a college degree reduces an individual's likelihood of recidivating. However, there is little research available to inform best practices for running college programs inside jails or prisons or supporting returning citizens who want to complete a college degree. Higher Education Accessibility Behind and Beyond Prison Walls examines program development and pedagogical techniques in the area of higher education for students who are currently incarcerated or completing a degree post-incarceration. Drawing on the experiences of program administrators and professors from across the country, it offers best practices for (1) developing, running, and teaching in college programs…
