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Liberal Arts are the foundation of the traditional college education, and so much more. CoLA includes Schools and Programs across the humanities and social sciences that encourage students to explore their passions, embrace new ideas and ways of understanding, and to work collaboratively with one another.

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Recent and Upcoming Faculty Books

bugsy book coverDr. Rafael Frumkin's (Assistant Professor, Creative Writing) recent book, Bugsy and Other Stories, was published by Simon and Schuster in February, 2024. (From the publisher): Frumkin’s latest book is a deliciously entertaining collection of five genre-defying stories that range from downright hilarious to brilliantly unhinged. Taken together, they celebrate a wide variety of human experiences...With incredible insight, compassion, and honesty, Frumkin unravels each story with tantalizing precision. Sexy and raw—and compulsively readable—this collection offers a look at our innermost selves as we all try to make sense of the world and our place in it. 

 

book over of Morphology Dr. Jeff Punske (Associate Professor, Linguistics) wrote a textbook, Morphology: A Distributed Morphology Introduction that was published by Wiley-Blackwell in October, 2023. (From the publisher): The first comprehensive morphology textbook written in the framework of Distributed Morphology, firmly grounded in cross-linguistic theory. Distributed Morphology is the theoretical framework that views morphology as syntactic, proposing that there is no divide between the construction of words and the construction of sentences. The first text of its kind, Morphology: A Distributed Morphology Introduction provides a thorough overview of Distributed Morphology using data and problem sets from a diverse selection of the world's languages.

 

book cover of masculinity in transitionDr. Allison Hammer's (Assistant Professor; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) monograph Masculinity in Transition was published by the University of Minnesota Press and available on October 17th, 2023. (From the publisher): Focusing on “toxic masculinity,” which has assumed new valence since 2016, K. Allison Hammer traces its roots to a complex set of ideologies embedded in the histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and political fraternity, and finds that while toxic strains of masculinity are mainly associated with straight, white men, trans and queer masculinities can be implicated in these systems of power.

 

book cover of xenolinguisticsDr. Jeff Punske (Associate Professor, Linguistics) co-edited Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language, published by Routledge and available in September, 2023. (From the publisher): Xenolinguistics brings together biologists, anthropologists, linguists, and other experts specializing in language and communication to explore what non-human, non-Earthbound language might look like. The 18 chapters examine what is known about human language and animal communication systems to provide reasonable hypotheses about what we may find if we encounter non-Earth intelligence.

 

 

Sensationalism and the Jew book coverDr. David Anthony's (Professor, Early American Literature): Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature was published by Oxford University Press in September, 2023. (From the publisher): This book contends that, as the figure who embodies money and capitalism in the antebellum imagination, the sensational Jew is the character who most fully represents a felt anxiety about the increasingly unstable nature of a range of social categories in the antebellum US, and the sense of loss and self-hatred so often lurking in the background of modern Gentile identity.

 

 

Transimperial Anxieties book coverDr. José Najar's (Assistant Professor, History) book was recently published by the University of Nebraska Press: Transimperial Anxieties: The Making and Unmaking of Arab Ottomans in São Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1940. (From the publisher): In Transimperial Anxieties José D. Najar analyzes how overlapping transimperial processes of migration and return, community conflicts, and social adaption shaped the gendered, racial, and ethnic identity politics surrounding Arab Ottoman subjects and their descendants in Brazil. 

 

 

Confidence book coverDr. Rafael Frumkin's (Assistant Professor, Creative Writing) second book was published in March, 2023 by Simon & Schuster: Confidence. (From the publisher): Best friends (and occasional lovers) Ezra and Orson are teetering on top of the world after founding a company that promises instant enlightenment in this “propulsive, cheeky, eat-the-rich page-turner” (The Washington Post) about scams, schemes, and the absurdity of the American Dream.