The fall issue of Elements, the undergraduate research journal of Boston College, features articles on topics such as the democratic transitions in Tunisia and Egypt, the statistical exploration of NFL kicking, and the life of Henry Hills, official printer to the British crown, among other original student research. Published twice a year, Elements receives financial support from the Institute for the Liberal Arts and the Office of the Dean for the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences.
Elements
Skipping Midnight
Rapunzel, Belle, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella return in Skipping Midnight, the third and final installment of Boston College alumna Laura Kenyon’s Desperately Ever After book series. In the series, Kenyon takes a whimsical look at the most beloved fairy tale princesses several years after true love’s kiss and asks readers to rethink everything they believe about happy endings. A former journalist, Kenyon has written for magazines such as Kiwi, Serendipity, Just Labs, and Westchester. The first novel in her series was a 2014 National Indie Excellence Awards Chick-Lit finalist and an Amazon #1 bestseller in the categories of Women’s Fiction Fantasy and Women’s Fiction Humor.
The farming life
They started out as professor and student. Six years later, Associate Professor of Sociology and International Studies Brian Gareau and alumnus Connor Fitzmaurice are friends and co-authors of the new book Organic Futures: Struggling for Sustainability on the Small Farm (Yale University Press, 2016). Their book trace the trajectory of the organic, “locally grown” food movement from its beginnings nearly a century ago among farmers resisting the advent of industrial agriculture, through the 1960s and ’70s counterculture, and its gradual emergence in mainstream consumer markets. The book began as Fitzmaurice’s award-winning senior thesis, with research supported by an Advanced Study Grant. According to Gareau, “The book has relevance for the social sciences, but it’s also a celebration of the small farm, a quintessential part of New England’s social fabric.” More from BC News
Immunity and fear
Eula Biss will present “On Immunity: A Reading and Conversation” on Nov. 30 at 7 p.m. in Gasson Hall, room 100. Biss is the author of best seller On Immunity: An Inoculation, which addresses a chronic condition of fear: of the government, the medical establishment, what is in your child’s air, food, mattress, medicine and vaccines – to investigate the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. She also is the author of Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. New York Times Sunday Book Review | Sponsor: Lowell Humanities Series.
A new kind of propaganda war
The U.S. is fighting a new kind of propaganda war – one for the airwaves of the Middle East, according to The Other Air Force: U.S. Efforts to Reshape Middle Eastern Media Since 9/11 by Assistant Professor of Communication and International Studies Matt Sienkiewicz. According to the author, “The U.S. is not trying to trick people as much as it is trying to change the Middle East media system to operate more like a Western one, particularly in terms of competition and profit motives. America looks for entrepreneurs with friendly ideological commitments and supports them in producing creative, competitive media…It’s the overall media system that’s supposed to reflect American values…They hope that locals watch the TV show, associate it with the freedom to choose what you want to watch, and reflect on it as being part of a broader democratic, capitalistic shift in local society.” Read more in a Q&A with Sienkiewicz from BC News.
Posted in Boston College Authors
Tagged Communication Department, International Studies, media, Middle East
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Picking mushrooms in America
Writing in Tablet magazine, Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer reflects on mushroom-picking as a Jewish immigrant tradition. He cites his own experiences of foraging for mushrooms with his daughters on Cape Cod. An author, editor, and translator, Shrayer’s publications include Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story; Yom Kippur in Amsterdam; and Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, among others.The Jews of Lebanon
Associate Professor of Near Eastern Studies Franck Salameh has published an article in the Journal of the Middle East and Africa that mines an early history of modern Lebanon by placing a special focus on the country’s Jewish community and examining inter-Lebanese relations where Lebanese Jews had once taken center stage. He gives special consideration to the “rise” and “fall” of Lebanese Jewry during the first half of the 20th century as a group that was uniquely Lebanese and, in that sense, uniquely distinct from other Lebanese and other Jews elsewhere in the Middle East. Salameh is the author of the books, Language Memory and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon, Charles Corm: An Intellectual Biography of a Twentieth-Century Lebanese “Young Phoenician,” and the forthcoming The Other Middle East: An Anthology of Modern Levantine Literature.
Book award for Wortham
Lynch School of Education’s Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean Stanton Wortham has been awarded the 2016 Edward Sapir Book Prize for Discourse Analysis beyond the Speech Event (Routledge, 2014) (co-authored with Angela Reyes of Hunter College). The book draws from theories and methods of linguistic anthropology to explore a new approach in discourse analysis. Established in 2001 by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, the book prize honors books that have made significant contributions to the understanding of how language impacts society and mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes. More from the Lynch School.
Watch
“Watch,” a poignant poem by Professor of English Suzanne Matson, appears in the latest issue of The Cortland Review. A novelist and poet, Matson’s poetry has been published in several journals, including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Poetry, and Salamander. Her publications include the poetry collections Sea Level and Durable Goods, and the novels, The Tree-Sitter, A Trick of Nature, and The Hunger Moon. Read and listen to “Watch.”
The manuscript in the digital age
Medieval literature scholar Elaine Treharne, a keen advocate and critic of the use of digital technologies in the classroom and in research, will present “Momentary Presence and Manuscript Permanence in Digital Space” on Nov. 17 at 5:30 p.m.in Higgins Hall, room 300. She will discuss the manuscript as a vessel that carries the memorialized presences of people from the past into the present and how the digital realm can best be deployed to represent the permanent record of those who made even the most fleeting of efforts to be remembered. Treharne is the author of Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020 to 1220 and A Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English. She is the Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities at Stanford University where she serves as principal investigator of the NEH-funded portion of the inter-institutional grant ‘Global Currents: Cultures of Literary Networks, 1050-1900‘ and the director of Stanford Text Technologies. Sponsor: Heinz Bluhm Memorial Lecture Series.
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