What to Give/Get this Holiday Season

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press offer the Temple University Press books they will likely give along with some non-Temple University Press titles they hope to get this holiday season. 

Mary Rose Muccie, Director

Give: As we’re immersed in the run-up to the presidential election with a field that includes a strong female Democratic candidate,  I’d give Navigating Gendered Terrain, by Kelly Dittmar. If you’re interested in understanding the role of gender in campaigning, DIttmar’s book will give you insight into how candidates of different genders approach communicating their message and why those differences matter.

Get: I’d like to read and yet fear reading A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara.  In addition to the many accolades it’s received (National Book Aware finalist, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, numerous great reviews), it comes highly recommended by my best friend of over 35 years. When I asked if, given what I know about it, I’d be left an emotional wreck, she replied, “Probably, but it would be worth it.”

Karen Baker, Financial Manager
 Give: Even though the Eagles may not be having the best season this year (what an understatement!) the guys in my family (dad and 5 brothers) are all still die-hard Eagles fans and will enjoy receiving Ray Didinger’s The New Eagles Encyclopedia as a gift and reminiscing about the good old days of the Eagles.

Micah Kleit, Editor-in-Chief

   Give: This year was an embarrassment of riches for the Press; not only have we had another remarkable year of great books, but our two recently-hired or promoted editors have seen their first titles come out, which makes me as proud of their work as I am of the books they’ve published.  For that reason I’d gift Chilean New Song by J. Patrice McSherry and Walking in Cities, edited by Evrick Brown and Timothy Shortell, just to show off what my colleagues have been doing. Another book I’m specifically proud of is Suffering and Sunset by Celeste Marie-Bernier, because it restores Horace Pippin’s place as a critically-important artist, and reminds us of the rich cultural history of our region.

Get: I plan on reading The Nature of Things by Lucretius over the holiday break.  As we think about what we’re grateful for this time of year, it’s also helpful to remember the world as it is, in all its beauty and woe; Lucretius is always a helpful reminder of this.

Sara Cohen, Editor

  Give: Eric Tang’s Unsettled to my family and friends and Alexander Wolff’s The Audacity of Hoop to the popular readers in my life.

Get: I hope nobody gets me any books because I already have a very long queue…

Aaron Javsicas, Senior Editor

Give: Harold Platt’s Building the Urban Environment offers lessons from recent history for anyone interested in the future of cities. Post-World War II contests between modernist planners and the grassroots over what cities should be suggest that cities must function as flexible, multi-purpose “hybrid spaces,” emerging from more open, less top-down planning processes. We can see manifestations of these dynamics all around us in our revitalizing cities.

Get: Revolutionary Russia: 1891-1991 by Orlando Figes, promises a tight, sharp, engaging history of the Russian Revolution. I’m looking forward to brushing up on my history of this period and learning something new — Figes argues the revolution really did last, at least in some form, right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union — and frankly, at just over 300 pages it’s particularly appealing to those of us with small children who also want us to watch SpongeBob with them.

Nikki Miller, Right and Contracts Manager

Give:  Love, by Beth Kephart. It’s a nice combination of history and personal narrative that takes you on a journey through Philadelphia; maybe even introducing you to somewhere new.

Get: The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah. Family, hope, and the unexpectancy of fighting and living in WWII promises both a sentimental and thrilling read all in one.

Joan Vidal, Senior Production Editor
 Give:  A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past, by Ashraf H. Rushdy, which examines two types of apologies: apologies for events of the recent past and apologies for events of the distant past. Rushdy explores the question of whether apology and forgiveness undo the effects of past events or the events themselves, and he makes an intriguing argument about the ambiguity between guilt and grief.

Get: I would like to receive Philly Fiction 2, edited by Josh McIlvain, Christopher Munden, Greg November, and Tracy Parker: Philly stories by local authors.

David Wilson, Senior Production Editor
 Give:  City in a Park by James McClelland and Lynn Miller. This book provides an education both to those who use the park and to those who have never visited the park. This informative book traces the historical and present-day uses of the park. It is a must for anyone who wants to visit or expand their visit to The Fairmount Park System throughout Philadelphia.

Kate Nichols, Art Manager

 Give: City in a Park by James McClelland and Lynn Miller shows how and why Fairmount Park, within Philadelphia’s city limits, with all its history, architecture, sculpture and wild beauty, is such an amazing gift to those of us who live here.

Levi Dillon, Production Assistant

Give: I can think of no better gift for my MFA-seeking and Horace Pippin fan mother than Suffering and Sunset by Celeste Marie-Bernier.

Get: I’d most like to receive Lisa Randall’s Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe, in which Randall, Harvard cosmologist, suggests a link between dark matter, the extinction of the dinosaurs and our emergence as a species.

Ann-Marie Anderson, Marketing Director

 Give: For my art loving friends, I would give Suffering and Sunset by Celeste Marie-Bernier, a beautiful first biography of Horace Pippin, an African American artist of growing renown.

Get: I have already read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, but I will re-read it again during the holidays.  The book is a chance to step inside Coates’ shoes and experience what it means to be black and male in America, and understand…  Peace and love to all this holiday season!

Irene Imperio, Advertising and Promotion Manager

Give:  A Guide to the Great Gardens of the Philadelphia Region, text by Adam Levine, photographs by Rob Cardillo. I love to give this book to our out-of-town guests with hopes of new memories around Philadelphia and more visits in the near future.

Get: Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas by Stephanie Barron. Jane Austen, a mystery, and Christmas all in one book?? I can’t wait to read this!!

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

 Give:  As a cinephile, I would gift Samir Dayal’s Dream Machine, as it looks at realism and fantasy in Hindi Cinema. I’ve been impressed with Dayal’s analysis of film as “a mirror and a lamp” because I strongly believe “you are what you watch.” I am encouraged to share Dayal’s insights with others.

Get: What I’d like to receive this year is Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life which a friend raved about during the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend. It is my goal to read this  book  over the holiday break if I get a copy (hint, hint), but I fear it will become my New Year’s Resolution to get it and read it by the end of 2016.

Michael Baratta, Marketing Assistant

Give:  James W. Hilty’s book Temple University: 125 Years of Service to Philadelphia, the Nation, and the World to a fellow Temple student or to an alumnus in my family during this holiday season because the book reflects the pride that I have for my university and my excitement to be a student here during a period of such growth and upward movement.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM EVERYONE AT TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS!

Found in Translation: How Sexual Debates Developed Across the Modern World

This week in North Philly Notes, we re-post a recent blog by Heike Bauer, editor of Sexology and Translation, that originally appeared on Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality, a blog devoted to promoting critical conversations about the history of sex and sexuality across theme, period and region. Learn more about the history of sexuality at Notchesblog.com.

By Heike Bauer

A new collection of essays I edited, Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World (Temple UP, 2015) shows that the emergence of modern sexuality was a global phenomenon.

The book examines the contemporaneous emergence of sexual science in Europe, Asia, Peru, and the Middle East between the later nineteenth century and the period leading up to World War II. It brings together literary and cultural scholars, historians, sociologists, and political scientists whose contributions cover topics ranging from the history of frigidity to ‘third sex’ culture in 1920s Berlin and the development of the sexual sciences in Russia.

Many of the contributors first met at an international, Wellcome Trust funded symposium I organized in 2012. The event was prompted by the realization that while we know that many of the founding texts of the sexual science in nineteenth-century Europe were multilingual as well highly intertextual, we still know relatively little about the global travels of ideas and people that shaped modern sexual debates.

For example, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, a founding text of modern sexology first published in German in 1886, is famous today because it popularized words such as homosexuality, sadism, and masochism. Krafft-Ebing and his contemporaries drew inspiration from literary and scientific works to coin this new vocabulary. Sadism, for instance, was indebted to the books of the Marquis de Sade. A new project led by Kate Fisher and Jana Funke at Exeter University examines the cross-disciplinary ‘invention’ of sexuality.

Sexology and Translation in turn explores the textual and interpersonal avenues of exchange by which sexual ideas migrated across linguistic and cultural, as well as disciplinary, boundaries. Psychopathia Sexualis, for instance, was translated into a host of other languages including English, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian, and Japanese. Within the German text itself, Krafft-Ebing rendered sexually explicit passages in Latin, ostensibly to make them inaccessible to lay readers. That this strategy was unsuccessful is indicated by the proliferation of literary and cultural references to Psychopathia Sexualis – Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), the trial of which prompted the first public debates about lesbianism in England, mentioned both Krafft-Ebing and his legal predecessor Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. The Well of Loneliness was itself prefaced by a foreword written by English sexologist Havelock Ellis, indicating the close, albeit complex, links between literary and sexological cultures at the time.

Images such as the photograph of the man in a pink tutu, which was found in Krafft-Ebing’s estate, further reinforce that the development of sexology was not constrained solely to the scientific realm.

The collection examines the processes by which ideas were formed and transmitted across the modern world. It deliberately uses the formulationacross the modern world – in place of, say, transnational or global history – to define its scope. This is not to deny the usefulness of either of these critical perspectives – a summer institute on the global history of sexualityat Dartmouth College has shown that much is gained from framing the research in these terms. However, the collection’s subtitle seeks to emphasize the queer allegiances of the work presented here. The word ‘across’ – which can be defined in terms such as ‘not straight’, ‘askance’, and ‘at odds’ – resonates with the ‘traversing’ and ‘twisting’ which, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famous observations, is a conceptual characteristic of ‘queer’.

This association fittingly describes the aims and scope of the book. For while only some of the chapters directly engage with queer theory, all of the contributors look across boundaries, glancing sideways, backwards, and ahead as they expose the similarities in the way sex came to be discussed across different parts of the world between the 1880s and the 1930s.

Translations of Sex

Some of the chapters analyze the translations of certain sexological texts, revealing, for instance, that Psychopathia Sexualis was selectively adapted by the American anarchist John Henry Mackay to support a pro-homosexual stance; that the modern German concept of love is indebted to literary translations of Darwin’s evolutionary theory; and that the Japanese feminist movement found inspiration in the ideas of the English poet and reformer Edward Carpenter.

But the book also shows that translation is not merely a name for the one-way traffic of ideas. Where many previous studies have focused on the emergence of sexology in central Europe, several contributors here chart the coeval emergence of sexual science on the borders of Europe and beyond, discussing sexual debates in Russia, China, Egypt, Palestine and Peru.

This scholarship complicates assumptions that sexological ideas were transmitted from Europe to other parts of the world. For instance, the chapter on feminist debates in Peru shows that inward-looking debates about society were at the heart of gender debates on the nation. The essays on Chinese sexology in turn suggest that it was competing indigenous and international influences that shaped modern ideas about sexuality in that country. One of these essays further considers how ideas about China informed European views on sexual history. It reveals that Foucault’s arguments about the Eastern ars erotica were derived from a scholarly misreading of Chinese sexual culture, which, via, Foucault, was transmitted back into Western culture and thus became influential in the way Western scholars historicized sex.

A Suicidal Encounter

My own contribution on the writings of Jewish sex reformer Magnus Hirschfeld indicates that attention to translation between languages can also offer glimpses at the elusive evidence of past emotions and the circumstance in which they are formed. Hirschfeld is best known today for his homosexual rights activism, sexual intermediaries theory, (which is considered an early conceptualization of trans) and his founding of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin. I found that he was also a chronicler of the suffering of women and men who were attacked and ostracized because their bodies and desires did not conform to social norms and expectation. He mentions, for instance, the experience of a man from Philadelphia whose doctor had told him that homosexuals should ‘better commit suicide’. Hirschfeld includes these devastating words in English in the German text, bracketing them to distance himself from the incitement to suicide – even as he alerts readers to the complicity of certain medical discourses and certain doctors in perpetuating violence against homosexuals

It was this passage that first alerted me to Hirschfeld’s little discussed writings on homosexual suicide, writings which reveal that death and suffering as much as affirmative politics and cultural production shaped the emergence of modern queer culture.

Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World is full of new research that shows that new critical and scholarly insights can be found in translation. In the short time since its publication, I have already been contacted by several people who work on the emergence of modern sexual sciences in parts of the world not covered by this project. The book is thus also a beginning, the start of an ongoing dialogue about the history of sexuality.

Temple University Press’ Year of Glory

This year Temple University Press received a dozen honors and accolades for its books, authors, and publishing program. We are pleased (and humbled) to be recognized by so many scholarly associations. Below is a compilation of the awards we received during the 2015 calendar year.

Press Award:

Temple University Press was especially pleased to be selected by the Association of American Geographers to receive the AAG Publication Award for 2016. This prize is conferred in recognition of exceptional and outstanding contributions to the discipline by publishers. It read:

At a time when many smaller university presses are shrinking, Temple University Press has distinguished itself by its continued commitment to and excellence in publishing insightful, thorough, and well written scholarship and research in Geography and Urban Studies.

The relationship between the Temple University Press and the discipline of geography goes back to the founding of the Press in 1969. Since that time, the Press has continued to publish important and innovative work on current social issues. Their publications in geography are focused on urban, political, and human geography.

Today, the geographic works published by the Temple University Press are recognized with major awards from a wide variety of organizations. Two recent publications in geography were awarded the “Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice Magazine.  Urban Studies titles have received awards from major academic and professional organizations in Anthropology, History, Sociology, Urban Studies and Planning, among others.

For their long-term commitment to publishing excellent research in geography, we honor Temple University Press with the AAG Publication Award.

Book Awards

Liberty Walther Barnes received the British Sociological Association’s Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize for her book Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity 

Edward Berger was honored with the Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ Award for Excellence in the category of Best Historical Research in Recorded Jazz, 2015 for his book Softly, with Feeling: Joe Wilder and the Breaking of Barriers in American Music.

 Lynette Chua’s Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State received the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association, 2015.

 Reverse Engineering Social Media, by Robert Gehl won the Nancy Baym Book Award 2015, given by the Association of Internet Researchers for the best work in the field of Internet Studies.

 The North American Society for the Sociology of Sport presented its 2015 Outstanding Book Award to Dominican Baseball: New Pride, Old Prejudice by Alan Klein.

 J. Patrice McSherry received the 2015 Cecil B. Currey Book Award from the Association of Third World Studies for her book, Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s-1973.

 The Modern Language Association’s 2015 Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary Cultural Studies was awarded to Julie Avril Minich for her book, Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico.

 Patricia Morris’s Blue Juice: Euthanasia in Veterinary Medicine, received the Midwest Sociological Society’s 2015 Distinguished Book Award.

 Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, by Tarry Hum, received an Honorable Mention from the Association of Collegiate School’s of Planning‘s Paul Davidoff Award, 2015.

 Dea H. Bolster, a contributor to Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity, edited by Jeffrey A. Brune and Daniel J. Wilson, received the Disability History Association Award for Best Book Chapter 2015.

Lifetime Achievement Award

   The American Sociological Association convened its Marxist Sociology Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015 to the late Randy Martin, author of three Temple University Press titles, Financialization of Daily Life, Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn, and Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative.