Tag: “new faculty publications”

New Book by Debarati Sanyal

Posted on by Claude Potts

cover

Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges investigates the consequences of unfolding catastrophes across the world and the displacement they continue to produce. Through recent narratives and media representations of the refugee “crisis” at Europe’s edges, it tells a new story about those on the move, the technologies unleashed on them at borders, the racialized and colonial histories that inform these technologies, and the artistry with which migrants and allies bear witness to displacement. The book reorients us toward the creativity and movement of migrants themselves– their “arts of the border”—as well as toward the political force of the arts that represent them, whether in literature, documentary film, or art installations.

Sanyal proposes kino-aesthetics as a framework for capture and fugitivity at borders. From kino—to set in motion—and aesthetics— relating to sensory perception—kino-aesthetics conveys the force of bodies in motion and the image in its circulation. The book examines the simultaneity of capture and escape at thresholds of illegalization, from airport detention zones to Calais’s “jungle” and the Euro-African border at Ceuta and Melilla. What emerges throughout these case studies is a portrayal of border violence in its racial and colonial forms as well as an archive of refusal, fugitivity, and un-bordered imagining.

[from publisher’s site]

Debarati Sanyal is Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and Professor of French (affiliated with Critical Theory, The Center for Race and Gender, and European Studies). Debarati’s research and teaching interests range from 19th-century French literature to contemporary critical refugee studies. Her first book, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Johns Hopkins, 2006), reclaimed Baudelaire’s aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Her second book, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (Fordham, 2015), addressed the transnational circulations of memory and complicity in the aftermath of the Shoah, from post-WWII to the present. It was translated in French as Mémoire et complicité: Au Prisme de la Shoah (PUV, 2018) with a preface by Éric Fassin. A Guggenheim Fellow (2021-2022), she  is completing a book on migrant resistance, biopolitics and aesthetics in Europe’s current refugee “crisis.”

Arts of the Border: Fugitive Bodies at Europe’s Edges. New York: Fordham University Press, 2025.

New Faculty Publication from Shiben Banerji

Posted on by Nina Bayley

Check out Lineages of the Global City, the new publication by new faculty member, Shiben Banerji.  It is available to view online through UC Library Search.

Lineages of the Global City

From University of Texas Press:

This is a beautifully researched and realized work of scholarship, which unveils a remarkable archive of urban images that connect occultism, modernism, globality, and architecture. It will be of great value to historians, architects, planners, and scholars of cultural modernity due to its powerful argument for the cosmological underpinnings of modern urban thought.

~Arjun Appadurai, New York University, author of The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition

In the contemporary era of climate crisis, growing concerns about the exploitation of nature, resurgent nationalism, and what is looking to be a new global political and economic order that will impact not just nations but also cities, this provocative book will spark considerable debate about what kinds of urban habitats we want to build and whether historical models relegated to the dustbin of twentieth-century architectural history can indeed offer new food for thought in these turbulent times.

~Diane E. Davis, Harvard Graduate School of Design; CIFAR Fellow and Project Co-Director, Humanity’s Urban Future

You can read the abstract here.

 

 

New Publication from Art History Faculty Todd Olson

Posted on by Nina Bayley

Ribera's Repititions

Check out Professor Todd Olson’s newest publication, Ribera’s Repetitions: Paper and Canvas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Naples

“Todd Olson carefully considers the diverse contexts for Ribera’s artistic practice, such as empire-building, materiality, and myth, and thus assesses the complexity of Ribera’s creativity through the lenses of repetition, rotation, and experimentation. This novel, interdisciplinary study reexamines the originality of Ribera’s praxis as engaged in a visual culture shaped by science, history, and belief in early modern Naples.”—Lisandra Estevez, editor of Collecting Early Modern Art (1400–1800) in the U.S. South

“Much more than a mere study on Jusepe de Ribera, Olson’s book is an essay on materiality, technique, and their meanings; on imperial circulation and its discontents; and on knowledge, memory, and loss. This piece of cultural history, never losing touch with the artworks and their visual particularities, is beautifully written and at times moving, reminding us of the potentialities of art history as a literary and philosophical genre.”—Itay Sapir, author of Ténèbres sans leçons: Esthétique et épistémologie de la peinture ténébriste romaine, 1595-1610

-From Penn State University Press

 

New book by Jeroen Dewulf

Posted on by Claude Potts

Nova Historia

Nova História do Cristianismo Negro na África Ocidental e nas Américas makes a historiographical intervention aimed at the history of black Catholicism and black religion in the Americas in a broader way. Dewulf’s central and well-documented assertion is that black Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, has roots in pre-Tridentine Portuguese Catholicism. Even before the advent of the slave trade, Catholicism had become an indigenous African religion, at times assuming pre-Tridentine and syncretic forms that have become irreconcilable for the Europeans of the post-Tridentine period. This argument has significant historiographical consequences; the long-standing confusion about the religiosity of the enslaved people is, at least in part, the result of assumptions that Africans knew little about Christianity before their enslavement. On the contrary, Dewulf traces these religious forms to the slave ships that transported human “cargo” to the Americas. This book is a timely salute to the Catholic and Christian studies that has for a long time portrayed Christians of African descent as marginalized and atypical people, rather than important global actors. (Citation of the Committee of the Prize John Gilmary Shea of ​​the year 2023)

[from publisher’s site]

Jeroen Dewulf is Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies at the UC Berkeley Department of German and a Professor at Berkeley’s Folklore Program and an affiliated member of the Center for African Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies. He recently completed his long-term role as director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies where he is chair of the Center for Portuguese Studies. His main area of research is Dutch and Portuguese colonial history, with a focus on the transatlantic slave trade and the culture and religion of African-descended people in the American diaspora. He also publishes in the field of Folklore Studies and about other aspects of Dutch, German, and Portuguese literature, culture, and history.

Nova História do Cristianismo Negro na África Ocidental e nas Américas. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2024.

New Publication from Faculty Lisa Pieraccini

Posted on by Nina Bayley

Consumption, Ritual, Art, and Society Interpretive Approaches and Recent Discoveries of Food and Drink in Etruria

Art History Faculty Lisa Pieraccini has a new publication out titled Consumption, Ritual, Art and Society: Interpretive Approaches and Recent Discoveries of Food and Drink in Etruria (2023)

It will soon be available from UC Berkeley Library for loan.

From the Publisher:

Food determines who we are. We are what we eat, but also how we eat, with whom we eat, where we eat and, in some cases, even why we eat. Food production and consumption in the ancient world can express multiple dimensions of identity and negotiate belonging to, or exclusion from, cultural groups. It can bind through religious praxis, express wealth, manifest cultural identity, reveal differentiation in age or gender, and define status. As a prism through which to investigate the past, its utility is manifold. The chapters gathered together in this ground-breaking book explore the intersections between food, consumption, and ritual within Etruscan society through a purposeful cross-disciplinary approach. It offers a unique and innovative selection of up-to-date analysis from a variety of Etruscan food-related topics. From banqueting, feasting, fish rites, and symbolic consumption to bio-archaeological data, this volume explores a new and exciting field in ancient Italian archaeology.

 

New Publication from Faculty Julia Bryan-Wilson

Posted on by Nina Bayley
Liza Lou
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, has a new book out, available at the UC Berkeley Library.

The most comprehensive book on the work of Liza Lou, whose popular and critically acclaimed installations made entirely of beads consider the important themes of women, community, and the valorization of labor.

Liza Lou first gained attention in 1996 when her room-sized sculpture Kitchen was shown at the New Museum in New York. Representing five years of individual labor, this groundbreaking work subverted standards of art by introducing glass beads as a fine art material. The project blurred the rigid boundary between fine art and craft, and established Lou’s long-standing exploration of materiality, process, and beauty. Working within a craft métier has led the artist to work in a variety of socially engaged settings, from community groups in Los Angeles, to a collective she founded in Durban, South Africa. Over the past fifteen years, Lou has focused on a poetic approach to abstraction as a way to highlight the process underlying her work.

In this comprehensive volume that considers the entirety of Lou’s singular vision, curators, art historians, and artists offer important perspectives on the breadth of the work.

New Publication by Faculty Lisa Pieraccini

Posted on by Nina Bayley

Etruria and Anatolia : material connections and artistic exchange

Lisa Pieraccini, Lecturer of First Millennium BCE Italy, Reception, Collecting, has published a new book, available from the UC Berkeley Library. It is also available as an e-book. 

From the publisher’s website:

Striking similarities in Etruscan and Anatolian material culture reveal various forms of contact and exchange between these regions on opposite sides of the Mediterranean. This is the first comprehensive investigation of these connections, approaching both cultures as agents of artistic exchange rather than as side characters in a Greek-focused narrative. It synthesizes a wide range of material evidence from c. 800 – 300 BCE, from tomb architecture and furniture to painted vases, terracotta reliefs, and magic amulets. By identifying shared practices, common visual language, and movements of objects and artisans (from both east to west and west to east), it illuminates many varied threads of the interconnected ancient Mediterranean fabric. Rather than trying to account for the similarities with any one, overarching theory, this volume presents multiple, simultaneous modes and implications of connectivity while also recognizing the distinct local identities expressed through shared artistic and cultural traditions.

New Publication by Faculty Margaretta Lovell

Posted on by Nina Bayley
Painting the Inhabited Landscape by Margaretta Lovell
Margaretta Lovell, Professor of American Art and Architecture, has a new book published, available in the UC Berkeley Library.  There will be a Berkeley Book Chat with Margaretta Lovell, joined by David Henkin, Wednesday, October 4th from 12:00 to 1:00pm in 220 Stephens Hall.  Registration is requested for attendance.
“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is an American art history that in its depth of research and its absolute assurance in method and goals matches or surpasses anything done by any global modernist art historian today. It is a significant contribution to the study of nineteenth-century world history in visual and material studies, and will be of interest to anyone looking at the formation of global modernism, technologies, and capital markets.”—Bruce Robertson, coauthor of Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is by far the most insightful study of Lane and his art to date. Margaretta Lovell’s close examination of Lane’s life, art, and the historical contexts within which he worked represents not only a quantum leap for our understanding of Lane and his world but also a new standard of scholarship for the field of American art.”—Alan Wallach, author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States

New Book by Anthony Cascardi

Posted on by Claude Potts

Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique [cover]

Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique probes the relationship between the enormous, extraordinary, and sometimes baffling body of Goya’s work and the interconnected issues of modernity, Enlightenment, and critique. Taking exception to conventional views that rely mainly on Goya’s darkest images to establish his relevance for modernity, Cascardi argues that the entirety of Goya’s work is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds, of which it nonetheless remains an integral part. The book reckons with the apparent gulf assumed to divide the Disasters of War and the so-called Black Paintings from Goya’s scenes of bourgeois life or from the well-mannered portraits of aristocrats, military men, and intellectuals. It shows how these apparent contradictions offer us a gateway into Goya’s critical practice vis-à-vis a European modernity typically associated with the Enlightenment values dominant in France, England, and Germany. In demonstrating Goya’s commitment to the project of critique, Cascardi provides an alternative to established readings of Goya’s work, which generally acknowledge the explicit social criticism evident in works such as the Caprichos but which have little to say about those works that do not openly take up social or political themes. In Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique, Cascardi shows how Goya was consistently engaged in a critical response to—and not just a representation of—the many different factors that are often invoked to explain his work, including history, politics, popular culture, religion, and the history of art itself.

[from publisher’s site]

Anthony J. Cascardi is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including The Consequences of Enlightenment; Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics; The Subject of Modernity; and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy.

Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2023.

New Publication By Art History Faculty Aglaya Glebova

Posted on by Nina Bayley
Aleksander Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin

Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin

by Associate Professor Aglaya Glebova for European Modern Art.

From Yale University Press:

“Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography, a new and provocative understanding emerges of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin’s Soviet Union

Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova reconsiders the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956), a versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism’s founders, embraced photography as a medium of revolutionary modernity. Yet his photographic work between the late 1920s and the end of the 1930s exhibits an expansive search for a different pictorial language.

In the context of the extreme transformations carried out under the first Five-Year Plans, Rodchenko’s photography questioned his own modernist commitments. At the heart of this book is Rodchenko’s infamous 1933 photo-essay on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, site of one of the first gulags. Glebova’s careful reading of Rodchenko’s photography reveals a surprisingly heterodox practice and brings to light experiments in adjacent media, including the collaborative design work he undertook with Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenko’s partner in art and life.”