Chinese Studies: Jianjun He's book Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue: An Annotated Translation of Wu Yue Chunqiuwas published by Cornell University Press in Spring 2021.
Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue is the first complete English translation of Wu Yue Chunqiu, a chronicle of two neighboring states during China's Spring and Autumn period. This collection of political history, philosophy, and fictional accounts depicts the rise and fall of Wu and Yue and the rivalry between them, the inspiration for centuries of poetry, vernacular fiction, and drama.
Wu Yue Chunqiu makes use of rich sources from the past, carefully adapting and developing them into complex stories. Historical figures are transformed into distinctive characters; simple records of events are fleshed out and made tangible. The result is a nuanced record that is both a compelling narrative and a valuable historical text. As one of the earliest examples of a regional history, Wu Yue Chunqiu is also an important source for the history of what is now Zhejiang and Jiangsu.
In Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue, Jianjun He's engaging translation and extensive annotations make this significant historical and literary work accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.
Chinese Studies: Liang Luo publishedThe Global White Snakewith the University of Michigan Press in 2021.
The Global White Snake examines the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels within Asia and across the globe. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. Moreover, the inter-Asian voyages and global circulations of the White Snake legends have enabled them to become repositories of diverse and complex meanings for a great number of people, serving as reservoirs for polyphonic expressions ranging from the attempts to consolidate authoritarian power to the celebrations of minority rights and activism.
The Global White Snake uncovers how the White Snake legend often acts as an unsettling narrative of radical tolerance for hybrid sexualities, loving across traditional boundaries, subverting authority, and valuing the strange and the uncanny. A timely mediation and reflection on our contemporary moment of continued struggle for minority rights and social justice, The Global White Snake revives the radical anti-authoritarian spirit slithering under the tales of monsters and demons, love and lust, and reminds us of the power of the fantastic and the fabulous in inspiring and empowering personal and social transformations.
French and Francophone Studies: Jeffrey Peters has published, with Katharina Piechocki (Comparative Literature, Harvard), a two-issue special volume of the journal Romance Quarterly titled Early Modern Clouds I & II.
The two issues, Volume 68, No. 2 and Volume 68, No. 3, explore how clouds have been closely associated with poetry and the poetic since antiquity. Early Modern Clouds I & II include essays on clouds in Descartes's meteorology, early modern European opera, historical engraving, Portuguese lyric and epic poetry, machine plays, art history, and early scientific ballooning.
Japan Studies: Doug Slaymaker edited and published Wild Lines and Poetic Travels. A Keijiro Suga Reader with Rowman & Littlefield in 2021.
This volume of essays and translations analyzes the prodigious and wide-ranging output of Keijiro Suga. Based in Japan, Keijiro Suga's works are wide-ranging and multilingual. His volumes of poetry have been shortlisted for a range of poetry prizes, and he was awarded the 2011 Yomiuri Shinbun Prize for Travel writing. He has translated dozens of books and has authored or co-authored more than fifteen other books across various genres. He is, by his own introduction, a poet first, but is also a prolific book reviewer, an astute theorist, and an insightful critic. His presence and contributions have been profound in many countries around the globe.
Hebrew and Jewish Studies: Daniel A. Frese published The City Gate in Ancient Israel and Her Neighbors: The Form, Function, and Symbolism of the Civic Forum in the Southern Levantwith Brill's Culture and History of the Ancient Near East series in 2020.
In The City Gate in Ancient Israel and Her Neighbors, Daniel A. Frese provides a wide-ranging portrayal of one of the most prominent social institutions in the kingdoms of the southern Levant during the Iron II period: the use of the city gate as a hub for numerous and diverse civic functions. The book provides an up-to-date description of the architecture of gate complexes based on archaeological evidence, and a systematic description of the many functions of the gate seen in hundreds of texts from the Hebrew Bible and the broader ancient Near East. The final chapters of the book discuss the conceptual significance of gates in Israelite culture, based on idiomatic and symbolic gate terminology in the Hebrew Bible.
Hebrew and Jewish Studies: Christian Brady's book Beautiful and Terrible Things was published by Westminster John Knox Press in Fall 2020.
Russian Studies: Molly T. Blasing's first book,Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture, was published in July 2021 by Cornell University Press.
Snapshots of the Soul considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei Sen-Sen'kov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, and Kirill Medvedev, to understand their fascination with the visual language, representational power, and metaphorical possibilities offered by the camera and the photographic image.
Within the context of long-standing anxieties about the threat that visual media pose to literary culture, Blasing finds that these poets were attracted to the affinities and tensions that exist between the lyric or elegy and the snapshot. Snapshots of the Soul reveals that at the core of each poet's approach to "writing the photograph" is the urge to demonstrate the superior ability of poetic language to capture and convey human experience.
Harvard University Professor Stephanie Sandler has written the following about Blasing's book:
"A deeply researched and utterly compelling work of scholarship. Case studies provide close-ups of major poets, with dozens more to fill in a varied and persuasive context. The poets conjure up photographs real and imagined, and photography is shown as a metaphor for writing practice. We come away from this splendid book with a richer sense of modern Russian poetry, and we get to reread and rethink poems that associate photography with mourning and memory, with fluidity and freedom, with a flickering sense of being and of knowing."
