FACULTY PUBLICATIONS & Creative Projects

Ross Melnick, Professor, Film and Media Studies

Hollywood's Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World, Columbia University Press, 2022

Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way.

In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras.

Sabine Frühstück, Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan, Columbia University Press, 2022

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan describes the ever-changing manifestations of sexes, genders, and sexualities in Japanese society from the 1860s to the present day. Analyzing a wide range of texts, images, and data, Sabine Frühstück considers the experiences of females, males, and the evolving spectrum of boundary-crossing individuals and identities in Japan. These include the intersexed conscript in the 1880s, the first “out” lesbian war reporter in the 1930s, and pregnancy-vest-wearing male governors in the present day. She interweaves macro views of history with stories about individual actors, highlighting how sexual and gender expression has been negotiated in both the private and the public spheres and continues to wield the power to critique and change society. This lively and accessible survey introduces Japanese ideas about modern manhood, modern womenhood, reproduction, violence and sex during war, the sex trade, LGBTQ identities and activism, women’s liberation, feminisms, and visual culture.

Elena Aronova, Associate Professor, History

Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War, University of Chicago Press, 2021

Increasingly, scholars in the humanities are calling for a reengagement with the natural sciences. Taking their cues from recent breakthroughs in genetics and the neurosciences, advocates of “big history” are reassessing long-held assumptions about the very definition of history, its methods, and its evidentiary base. In Scientific History, Elena Aronova maps out historians’ continuous engagement with the methods, tools, values, and scale of the natural sciences by examining several waves of their experimentation that surged highest at perceived times of trouble, from the crisis-ridden decades of the early twentieth century to the ruptures of the Cold War.

Isabel Bayrakdarian, Professor, Music

Armenian Songs for Children, 2021

The celebrated Lebanese-born, Canadian-Armenian-American soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian presents a poignant project of songs and lullabies that traces an arc of the memories and experiences of the Armenian people from the Ottoman Empire through the Genocide and beyond, and pays homage to her personal heritage.

Daina Ramey Berry (Co-Author), Professor, History

A Black Women's History of the United States, Beacon Press, 2020

A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country.

In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today.

2021 Susan Koppelman Award Winner for the Best Book in Feminist Studies
2021 NAACP Image Award Finalist: Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction
2021 Organization of American Historians Darlene Clark Hine Award – Honorable Mention

Suma Ikeuchi, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

Jesus Loves Japan: Return Migration and Global Pentecostalism in a Brazilian Diaspora, Stanford University Press, 2019

After the introduction of the "long-term resident" visa, the mass-migration of Nikkeis (Japanese Brazilians) has led to roughly 190,000 Brazilian nationals living in Japan. While the ancestry-based visa confers Nikkeis' right to settlement virtually as a right of blood, their ethnic ambiguity and working-class profile often prevent them from feeling at home in their supposed ethnic homeland. In response, many have converted to Pentecostalism, reflecting the explosive trend across Latin America since the 1970s. Jesus Loves Japan offers a rare window into lives at the crossroads of return migration and global Pentecostalism. Suma Ikeuchi argues that charismatic Christianity appeals to Nikkei migrants as a "third culture"—one that transcends ethno-national boundaries and offers a way out of a reality marked by stagnant national indifference. Jesus Loves Japan insightfully describes the political process of homecoming through the lens of religion, and the ubiquitous figure of the migrant as the pilgrim of a transnational future.

Winner of the 2020 Clifford Geertz Prize in Anthropology of Religion and the 2020 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize.

Stephanie Malia Hom, Assistant Professor, French and Italian

Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention, Cornell University Press, 2019

Italy's current crisis of Mediterranean migration and detention has its roots in early twentieth century imperial ambitions. Empire's Mobius Strip investigates how mobile populations were perceived to be major threats to Italian colonization, and how the state's historical mechanisms of control have resurfaced, with greater force, in today's refugee crisis.

Winner of the 2019 American Association of Italian Studies Book Prize (20th and 21st Centuries) and 2019 Books of the Year, Times Literary Supplement.

Robert Krut, Lecturer, Writing

The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All On Fire, SUNY Press, 2019

“Let these poems be lanterns to the door you are about to open,” says Portland poet Sam Roxas-Chua of The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire, a new book by UCSB Writing Lecturer Robert Krut, which won the Codhill Poetry Award. Through this collection, readers embark on a journey from poem to poem as if moving between alternate universes, each poem commenting on our own reality. Krut employs graceful metaphors of rainstorms, dragons, and giant arachnids to weave beauty into the tragedy of our world while still assuring readers that reality cannot be escaped.

Winner of the Codhill Poetry Award for 2018.

Sara Pankenier Weld, Professor, Russian

An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook, Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins, 2018

An Ecology of the Russian Avant-Garde Picturebook takes a new approach to interpreting 1920s and 1930s picturebooks by prominent Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals by examining them within the ecological environment that, first, made them possible and, then, led to their demise. It argues that naturalistic models of the complex interactions of dynamic systems offer effective tools for understanding the fraught interrelations of art and censorship in the early Soviet period.

Jane Sherron De Hart, Professor Emerita, History

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018

In her comprehensive biography of the 107th Supreme Court Justice, Jane Sherron De Hart explores the crucial moments in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life that shaped her dedication to gender equality, national unity, and justice as a whole. The book—fifteen years in the making—uses interviews with Ginsburg’s associates, husband, children, friends, and the justice herself to illuminate the profound mark her life has left on American jurisprudence and society.

William Elison, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies

The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai, The University of Chicago Press, 2018

The Neighborhood of Gods explores the connection between territory and divinity in Mumbai, India, where limited space causes the city’s residents to scramble to stake a claim for their gods. The book examines the ways that different cultures and religions in India use their available space to make themselves heard, and how those methods affect what already exists around them.

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Xiaowei Zheng, Assistant Professor, History and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China, Stanford University Press, 2018

The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China features research from previously untouched sources as it chronicles China’s 1911 Revolution as it spread through the country. In this book, Zheng focuses not on the successes and failures of the revolution, but rather on its effect on Chinese society and its people, and the ideas they took away from it: national sovereignty, constitutionalism, and people’s rights.

Yunte Huang, Professor, English

Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History, Liveright Publishing, 2018

Huang’s Inseparable tells the story of the famous, original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), through the perspective of an American immigrant author. Huang uses a mix of dry humor and profound insight to depict the twins in their journey from museum exhibit freak-shows to wealthy southern gentlemen, marrying white sisters and owning their own slaves. The book comments on the American fixation on the “other” and offers its readers a humorous take on the darker parts of US history.

Erika Rappaport, Professor, History

A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, Princeton University Press, 2017

In A Thirst for Empire, Erika Rappaport explores the ways in which the global tea industry has influenced trade, social hierarchies, mass consumerism, and other aspects of contemporary society. Through the lens of tea, one of the most popular commodities in the world, Rappaport highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that gave powerful empires their control over international trade and paved the way for globalization.

Laura Kalman, Professor, History

The Long Reach of the Sixties: LBJ, Nixon, and the Making of the Contemporary Supreme Court, Oxford University Press, 2017

In this book, Laura Kalman focuses on the effects that the era of Chief Justice Earl Warren, which took place during the 1950s and 60s, had on the direction of American politics. Kalman uses the ideological battles that erupted between Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to show how the Warren Court became a symbol of liberal activism that was feared enough to change the entire appointment process. Using sources such as telephone conversations, research from the presidential library, and the justices’ papers, Kalman shows how influential the Supreme Court was during its time and how its power can still be felt to this day.

Michael Curtin (co-editor), Professor, Film and Media Studies

Voices of Labor: Creativity, Craft, and Conflict in Global Hollywood, University of California Press, 2017

Published with Curtin’s fellow editor Kevin Sanson, this book features a series of interviews that highlight aspects of the entertainment industry that both attract people to work in it and wear them down once they are in too deep. The interviews illuminate the details of the industry’s unsafe work environments, long work days without legally-mandated turn-around time, gender inequality in the industry, and personal experiences of women in entertainment.

Kate McDonald, Assistant Professor, Modern Japanese History

Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan, University of California Press, 2017

Placing Empire follows Japanese travelers in the early 20th century as they visited Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan. Through the lens of Japanese imperialism, the book shines a light on the intersection of geography and more contemporary forms of colonial hierarchies. McDonald examines how differing perspectives on Japan’s imperialistic history and how that history has shaped the modern country.

Elizabeth Pérez, Associate Professor, Religious Studies

Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions, New York: NYU Press, 2016

In Religion in the Kitchen, Elizabeth Pérez explores Afro-Caribbean cooking and its intersection with religion through rituals, spirituality, songs, and sacred foods. Pérez focuses on seemingly trivial or small-scale practices, such as cooking African deities’ favorite dishes in order be ordained into their following. In this rich approach to the anthropological side of religion, this book re-conceptualizes ideas of race, gender, and sexuality through the lens of cultural cooking.

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ENDOWED CHAIRS

ENDOWED CHAIRS

Dorothy and Sherrill C. Corwin Chair in Music Composition

Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies

Koichi Takashima Chair in Japanese Cultural Studies

The XIVth Dalai Lama Chair in Tibetan Buddhism and Cultural Studies

Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center and Presidential Chair in Media Studies

Virgil Cordano OFM Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies

Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies

Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion

King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud Chair in Islamic Studies

Sorensen Choral Director Chair

Robert & Liisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English

International Shinto Foundation Chair in Shinto Studies

Jody and John Arnhold Director of Performance in Theater and Dance

FACULTY PUBLICATIONS & Creative Projects

FACULTY PUBLICATIONS & Creative Projects

Ross Melnick, Professor, Film and Media Studies

Sabine Frühstück, Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

Elena Aronova, Associate Professor, History

Isabel Bayrakdarian, Professor, Music

Daina Ramey Berry (Co-Author), Professor, History

Suma Ikeuchi, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

Stephanie Malia Hom, Assistant Professor, French and Italian

Robert Krut, Lecturer, Writing

Sara Pankenier Weld, Professor, Russian

Jane Sherron De Hart, Professor Emerita, History

William Elison, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies

Xiaowei Zheng, Assistant Professor, History and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies

Yunte Huang, Professor, English

Erika Rappaport, Professor, History

Laura Kalman, Professor, History

Michael Curtin (co-editor), Professor, Film and Media Studies

Kate McDonald, Assistant Professor, Modern Japanese History

Elizabeth Pérez, Associate Professor, Religious Studies

GUGGENHEIM FELLOWS

GUGGENHEIM FELLOWS

61 Recipients since 1954