University Press Roundup
Time for our weekly look at the best articles from the academic press blogosphere:
We’ll open up this week with a thoughtful take from Kyla Tompkins at From the Square, the NYU Press blog, on an extremely bizarre story from Sweden concerning the Minister of Culture, blackface, and a cake shaped like a human. I dislike the “defies description” cliche, but this situation really does defy description.
On Tuesday, May 1, the Occupy movement held a worldwide General Strike. The University of Minnesota Press has an excellent guest post from Eugene W. Holland discussing the strike and the Occupy movement more generally.
Do you feel strongly about any of the following: Dan Brown, Twilight, Neil Gaiman, or the films of Guillermo del Toro? If you are part of the 99% of the world that loves or hates “the new supernatural,” this post on the Harvard University Press blog is for you! Complete with recommendations, interviews, and discussion of how “the new supernatural” is the forefront of a reinvention of American Christianity, Harvard’s discussion of the work of Victoria Nelson is truly fascinating.
The OUPblog has run a couple of excellent articles over the past week on different aspects of bullying. In the first post, Maureen Duffy details seven ways that schools and parents can mishandle reports of bullying. And today, Faye Mishna discusses how to tell the difference between regular conflict and bullying within friendship.
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the Cambridge University Press blog offers an interview with Robert Crosnoe and Peter K. Smith, in which the most pressing questions about the sociology and psychology of bullies and the bullied are answered.
Elsewhere on the Cambridge blog, Tim Burns continues Cambridge’s Dickens 2012 series, a celebration of the great author’s 200th birthday. In his post, Burns looks at Dickens’ place in the 21st-century school classroom.
The UNC Press Blog is a reliable source of fascinating posts about the Civil War, and this week they featured a guest post from Christian McWhirter on Civil War music in popular film. Happily, some of the best-known Civil War films and television shows gain high grades on the historical accuracy of their soundtracks.
At Beacon Broadside, Chris Steadman invites Sam Harris on a joint trip to a mosque. In the rest of his post, Steadman, a self-avowed “queer atheist” looks at atheist Islamophobia and offers a passionate attack on the Islamophobic misinformation machine.
Jennifer Lena (of former University Press Roundup fame) is back with Princeton University Press’s Election 101 series! This week, she delves deeper into the (surprisingly) frequent unauthorized use of popular songs by political campaigns.
Finally, this week Yale University Press ran an excellent article by Cathy L. Jrade on Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. Jrade claims that Agustini is known for “her daring eroticism, her inventive appropriation of vampirism, her morbid embrace of death and pain, and her startling use of dualities and opposites,” but is overlooked in her obsession with writing itself.
