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Cover of 'Sonic Relations' by Stefan Williamson Fa

Sonic Relations

Sonic Relations explores how sound shapes religious life and community among Twelver Shi’i Muslims in eastern Turkey and beyond, examining the powerful role of devotional recitation in cultivating relationships not only among people, but also with the unseen. These sonic practices are central to Muslim devotional life, and through media and public ritual performance, they also shape how identity is expressed in broader social and political spheres.
Cover of 'Music from Another Species' by Hollis Taylor

Music from Another Species

Music from Another Species is an inspired zoömusicological analysis of these avian vocalizations with strong overlaps to diverse music produced by humans. In this culmination of over twenty years of recording, author Hollis Taylor notates 100+ individual vocalizations. The collected transcriptions feature comparisons of bird solos across geography and across time (at the same site on different years), elegant and virtuosic variations between subspecies, and even duets and larger ensembles, allowing readers to immerse themselves in avian song culture replete with musicality and invention.
Cover of 'Dancing at the Thresholds' by Tamara Dee Turner

Dancing at the Thresholds

Dancing at the Thresholds tells the story of a racialized community in Algeria that literally trance dances at the thresholds of consciousness. It also tells the story about how these communities negotiate and “dance” at thresholds of the sacred and profane, at the perceived clashes of Islam and animism or of sub-Saharan versus North African lifeworlds.
Cover of 'The Israeli Career of Hummus' by Dafna Hirsch

The Israeli Career of Hummus

The Israeli Career of Hummus tracks how hummus has turned from an “Arab” or “Oriental” food into a national symbol and culinary cult in Israel. The Israeli Career of Hummus traces how hummus has turned from an “Arab” or “Oriental” food into a national symbol and culinary cult in Israel. Rather than regard culinary appropriation as a necessary outcome of land colonization, author Dafna Hirsch instead examines how changing gastronomic, economic, and political factors intersected with material and cultural production in a multilayered and socially stratified colonial context. Departing from the thesis of cultural erasure of hummus’s Arab or Palestinian provenance, Hirsch shows how the Arab identity of hummus functions as a semiotic resource, which is sometimes suppressed and at other times leveraged to lend authenticity to hummus—and thus to its consumers.

On the Blog

A Closer Look at JML 49.2: What Happens When Regionalism Takes Animals Seriously?

By Nir Evron, author of “Intimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Animal Fiction,” Journal of Modern Literature,…

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Victorian Studies 67.4: How Did “Gatekeeping” Shape Literary History?

By Alex Murray (Queen’s University Belfast)

Read Alex Murray’s full article, “Gatekeeping: Publishers’ Readers, Gender, and the Literature of the 1890s” in Victorian Studies 67.4,…

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An Excerpt from Lisa Gabbert, author of The Medical Carnivalesque

I’ve been watching “The Pitt,” which is now in its second season on HBO Max and produced by some of the same folks that produced the super-popular medical drama ER….

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