April 23, 2024

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera on Translating The Book of Conjurations

Poetry, like alchemy, can promise a material wealth it never quite delivers, transmutation through words, and the power to turn paupers into patrons, but most often promises an alchemy of the soul that strives toward a higher form. Irizelma Robles...

April 22, 2024

A Systems Thinking Approach to Teaching About Climate Change

Cassie Xu and Radhika Iyengar

Climate change is one of the largest threats for humanity and has already had a significant impact globally and locally. It is perhaps the most defining issue of our time. It will ultimately test how communities, cities, and countries around...

April 17, 2024

Jean Yen-chun Lin on A Spark in the Smokestacks

When author Jean Lin initially approached first-time homeowners of newly built gated communities in Beijing regarding their protests against overflowing landfills and waste incinerator construction plans, she believed that her research should focus on mobilization strategies in an authoritarian context....

April 15, 2024

Changing the Media Environment to Protect Climate Activists

Adrienne Russell

Activism serves as an essential channel of communication from the public to policy makers, corporations, and other powerful actors. It is precisely because of its essential ro­­le in governance (and even capitalist arrangements, such as so-called voting with your pocketbook)...

April 11, 2024

Matthew Fraleigh on The Same Moon Shines on All

The last few decades have been a time of great change for the field of Japanese literary studies. The scope of the category “Japanese literature” is very differently conceptualized than it was just a generation ago; it now embraces a...

April 10, 2024

What’s the Difference Between a Tree and a Building? Sometimes Nothing.

Dickson Despommier

The New City: How to Build Our Urban Sustainable Future is about the urban environment and how to make it a safer place for us to live in and, at the same time, dramatically reduce its effects on rapid climate...

April 9, 2024

Jonathan Chaves on Yanagawa Seigan

Perhaps the largest body of great poetry in the world as yet undiscovered is the verse composed by Japanese authors not in Japanese, but in literary Chinese (C., wenyan; J., bungen). The phenomenon of great literature written in a language...

April 8, 2024

The Power of the Shuar:

How a Small Group of Indigenous People Protected Large Forests

Thomas K. Rudel

Affluent farmers and wealthy groups of investors have continued to destroy extensive tracts of tropical forests in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America over these past forty years. The ongoing loss of these old growth forests has intensified the biodiversity...

April 3, 2024

Pete Hill on River Profiles

Centuries of mismanagement and destructive development have gravely harmed American waterways, with significant consequences for the ecosystems and communities built around them. In River Profiles: The People Restoring Our Waterways, Pete Hill  delves into the deep-rooted challenges facing American waterways,...

April 2, 2024

André Colomer, the Action of the Arts, and the Importance of Poetry

Oskar De Wolf

– An individualist anarchist? To the uninitiated, it may appear somewhat peculiar that an individualist anarchist is a part of poetry month at the Columbia University Press blog. Anarchism has a well-earned reputation for being a little cold, a little...

April 1, 2024

Five Fascinating Facts About Earth’s Ancient Climate

Donald R. Prothero

Earth’s ancient climate reveals a history of extreme transformations—from a greenhouse world of sweltering temperatures and high sea levels to a “snowball earth” in which glaciers reached the equator. In The Story of Earth’s Climate in 25 Discoveries, Donald R....

March 27, 2024

Laura E. Helton on Scattered and Fugitive Things

In Scattered and Fugitive Things, Laura E. Helton tells the stories of six Black collectors who played a pivotal role in shaping the early twentieth-century Black archive. From the parlors of the urban North to HBCU reading rooms and branch...