Jeremiah W. Cataldo, Ph.D.

Professor in Frederik Meijer Honors College

Disembodying Narrative: A Postcolonial Subversion of Genesis 

Publisher: Lexington Books / Fortress Academic, November 2023

Long believed to bear witness to the beginning of all life, the Bible's first book, Genesis, has been plumbed by a cornucopia of theologies and philosophies for ideas about social organization, human relationships, class, gender and gender roles, marriage, land rights, private property, and so much more. For many readers, assumptions about a divine creator, whose eye is cast upon a favored community, are at the heart of Western societies and politics and reside at the core of many national foundation myths. Yet despite all this, Genesis is not a frequent subject of postcolonial analyses seeking to expose the rootedness of inequalities within dominant social, political, and economic institutions. At times provocative, at others conciliatory, Jeremiah Cataldo explores how postcolonialism's rudeness, anger, and subversiveness are challenges to dominant traditions of interpreting Genesis and how those traditions influence who we are, how we relate to each other, how we read the Bible, and why, despite an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, we passionately cling to what divides us.

Jeremiah Cataldo has previously published additional books. Books by Jeremiah Cataldo

Eric Covey, Ph.D.

Affiliate Faculty, Brooks College School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS)

Americans at War in the Ottoman Empire: US Mercenary Force in the Middle East

Publisher: I.B. Tauris, 2018

Americans at War in the Ottoman Empire examines the role of mercenary figures in negotiating relations between the United States and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Mercenaries are often treated as historical footnotes, yet their encounters with the Ottoman world contributed to US culture and the impressions they left behind continue to influence US approaches to Africa and the Middle East. The book's analysis of these mercenary encounters and their legacies begins with the Battle of Derna in 1805-in which the US flag was raised above a battlefield for the first time outside of North America with the help of a mercenary army-and concludes with the British occupation of Egypt in 1882-which was witnessed and criticized by many of the US Civil War veterans who worked for the Egyptian government in the 1870s and 1880s. By focusing these mercenary encounters through the lenses of memory, sovereignty, literature, geography, and diplomacy, Americans at War in the Ottoman Empire reveals the ways in which mercenary force, while marginal in terms of its frequency and scope, produced important knowledge about the Ottoman world and helped to establish the complicated relationship of intimacy and mastery that exists between Americans in the United States and people in Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, South Sudan, and Turkey.

Aaron Eddens, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor in Brooks College School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS)

Seeding Empire: American Philanthrocapital and the Roots of the Green Revolution in Africa

Publisher: University of California Press, 2024

In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution.

Books by Aaron Eddens

Kurt Ellenberger, DMA

Professor in Frederik Meijer Honors College

Materials and Concepts in Jazz Improvisation

Publisher: Assayer Publishing, 2005

This concise jazz theory book presents and explains all of the main theoretical concepts found in jazz improvisation.

Denise Goerisch, Ph.D.

Director of Integrative Studies, School of Interdisciplinary Studies

The True Costs of College

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

This book examines the true costs of attendance faced by low- and moderate-income students on four public college campuses, and the consequences of these costs on students academic pathways and their social, financial, health, and emotional well-being. The authors exploration of the true costs of academics, living expenses, and student services leads them to conclude that current college policies and practices do not support low-income and otherwise marginalized students' well-being or success. To counter this, they suggest that reform efforts should begin by asking value-based questions about the goals of public higher education, and end by crafting class-responsive policies. They propose three tools that policymakers can use to do this work, and steps that every person can take to revitalize public support for public education, equity-producing policies, and democratic participation in the public arena.

Azfar Hussain, Ph.D.

Director of the Graduate Program in Social Innovation

Associate Professor in Brooks College School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS)

Chinho Bhasey Oboseshe (Signs Drift At last)

Publisher: Poondra Publications, Dhaka, December, 2023.

Chinho Bhashe Oboseshe is Azfar Hussain’s third book written in the Bengali language. It is an experimental, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and mixed-genre work in which the elements of travelogue, docufiction, and critifiction are interspliced to make theoretical and critical points about time and space, music and dance, and, of course, about politics and philosophy and poetry.

Brian R. Johnson, Ph.D.

Human Rights Program Coordinator

Through Blood and Brotherhood: Comrades and Enemies in WWII Yugoslavia

Publisher: Casemate, 2024

On April 6, 1941, German troops along with Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian military units invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In less than two weeks the Kingdom would be defeated, setting the stage for a bloody civil war that the occupying Axis forces desperately triedýand neededýto control. Based on years of research, this book provides a distinctive account of what happened in the relatively unknown and under-researched Yugoslavian theater of conflict in World War II.

Brian Johnson previously published additional books. Books by Brian Johnson

Jack Mangala, Ph.D.

Director of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS)

The Politics of Challenging Presidential Term Limits in Africa

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020

This book takes stock of the debate surrounding the institution of presidential term limits in Africa, against the backdrop of global trends toward authoritarianism and the rise of strong men. Widely adopted three decades ago, term limits for the office of the president are now being challenged by many African leaders. The power alternation debate in Africa raises important questions concerning the future of democracy and development on the continent. Using a case study approach, this book explores in detail six situations in which leaders have either succeeded or failed in altering term limits. It thoroughly dissects the arguments, tactics and strategies on both sides of the issue, and draws key lessons for strengthening constitutionalism in Africa.

Jack Mangala previously published additional books. Books by Jack Mangala

Kimberly D. McKee, Ph.D.

Associate professor in Brooks College School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS)

Adoption Fantasies: Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood

Publisher: The Ohio State University Press, November 2023

In Adoption Fantasies, Kimberly D. McKee explores the ways adopted Asian women and girls are situated at a nexus of objectifications—as adoptees and as Asian American women—and how they negotiate competing expectations based on sensationalist and fictional portrayals of adoption found in US popular culture. McKee traces the life cycle of the adopted Asian woman, from the rendering of infant adoptee bodies in the white US imaginary, to Asian American fantasies of adoption, to encounters with the hypersexualization of Asian and Asian American women and girls in US popular culture. 

Dr. Kimberly D. McKee previously published additional books. Books by Dr. Kimberly D. McKee

Anthony R. Meyer, Ph.D.

Affiliate professor in Brooks College School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS)

Naming God in Early Judaism: Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek 

Publisher: Brill, November 2022  

During the Second Temple period (516 BCE-70 CE), Jews became reticent to speak and write the divine name, YHWH, also known by its four letters in Greek as the tetragrammaton. Priestly, pious, and scribal circles limitted the use of God's name, and then it disappeared. The variables are poorly understood and the evidence is scattered. This study brings together all ancient Jewish literary and epigraphic evidence in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek to describe how, when, and in what sources Jews either used or avoided the divine name. Instead of a diachronic contrast from use to avoidance, as is often the scholarly assumption, the evidence suggests diverse and overlapping naming practices that draw specific meaning from linguistic, geographic, and social contexts.

Joel P. Stillerman, Ph.D.

Faculty-in-Residence for Frederik Meijer Honors College, Professor of Sociology (CLAS)

Identity Investments: Middle-class Responses to Precarious Privilege in Neoliberal Chile

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2023

After Pinochet's dictatorship ended in Chile in 1990, the country experienced a rapid decline in poverty along with a quickly growing economy. As a result, Chile's middle class expanded dramatically, echoing trends seen across the Global South as neoliberalism took firm hold in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Identity Investments examines the politics and consumption practices of this vast and varied fraction of the Chilean population, seeking to better understand their value systems and the histories that informed them.

Using participant observation, interviews, and photographs, Joel Stillerman develops a unique typology of the middle class, made up of activists, moderate Catholics, pragmatists, and youngsters. This typology allows him to unearth the cultural, political, and religious roots of middle-class market practices in contrast with other studies focused on social mobility and exclusionary practices. The resultant contrast in backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives of these four groups animates this book and extends an emerging body of scholarship focused on the connections between middle-class market choices and politics in the Global South, with important implications for Chile's recent explosive political changes.

Joel Wendland-Liu

Associate Professor in Brooks College School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS)

Mythologies: A Political Economy of U.S. Literature in the Long Nineteenth-Century

Publisher: International Publishers, 2022

Four myths dominated U.S. ideology in the 19th century. Myths of white victimization, capitalist progress, the frontier, and the 3self-made man3 shaped how many Americans thought about themselves. These ideas lay at the heart of ruling class justification for settler colonialism, the expansion of racial slavery, and the development of the capitalist market system. They became the basis for the transition to U.S. global imperialism.

Joel Wendland-Liu previously published an additional book. Books by Joel-Wendland-Liu