Books published by The University of Chicago Press

"How do people live in a time after promises of progress have revealed themselves to be empty? In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann examines the grave, lethal threat posed by long-term air pollution in Baltimore, MD. Focusing on the industrialized community of Curtis Bay-ranked first in the country for air pollutants released from stationary sources-she examines competing visions of the future and the severe human toll they can take. Examining the rifts between white and Black communities, advocates of big industry and environmental activists, and older and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground in which lives lost to pollution are seen by some as a regrettable side effect on the road to economic renewal. A rigorous, moving study of environmental risk and disaster, this book offers deep insights for our current condition and the possibility of a postindustrial world"--

How inflation and deflation fears shape American democracy. Many foundational moments in American economic history--the establishment of paper money, wartime price controls, the rise of the modern Federal Reserve--occurred during financial panics as prices either inflated or deflated sharply. The government's decisions in these moments, intended to control price fluctuations, have produced both lasting effects and some of the most contentious debates in the nation's history. A sweeping history of the United States' economy and politics, Shock Values reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented--not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures. Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.

A surprising study reveals a plethora of attempts to communicate with non-humans in the modern era. In Interspecies Communication, music scholar Gavin Steingo examines significant cases of attempted communication beyond the human--cases in which the dualistic relationship of human to non-human is dramatically challenged. From singing whales to Sun Ra to searching for alien life, Steingo charts the many ways we have attempted to think about, and indeed to reach, beings that are very unlike ourselves. Steingo focuses on the second half of the twentieth century, when scientists developed new ways of listening to oceans and cosmic space--two realms previously inaccessible to the senses and to empirical investigation. As quintessential frontiers of the postwar period, the outer space of the cosmos and the inner space of oceans were conceptualized as parallel realities, laid bare by newly technologized "ears." Deeply engaging, Interspecies Communication explores our attempts to cross the border between the human and non-human, to connect with non-humans in the depths of the oceans, the far reaches of the universe, or right under our own noses.

An ambitious study of the ways opera has sought to ensure its popularity by keeping pace with changes in media technology. From the early days of television broadcasts to today's live streams, opera houses have embraced technology as a way to reach new audiences. But how do these new forms of remediated opera extend, amplify, or undermine production values, and what does the audience gain or lose in the process? In Screening the Operatic Stage, Christopher Morris critically examines the cultural implications of opera's engagement with screen media. Foregrounding the potential for a playful exchange and self-awareness between stage and screen, Morris uses the conceptual tools of media theory to understand the historical and contemporary screen cultures that have transmitted the opera house into living rooms, onto desktops and portable devices, and across networks of movie theaters. If these screen cultures reveal how inherently "technological" opera is as a medium, they also highlight a deep suspicion among opera producers and audiences toward the intervention of media technology. Ultimately, Screening the Operatic Stage shows how the conventions of televisual representation employed in opera have masked the mediating effects of technology in the name of fidelity to live performance.

"In the Western popular imagination, there is a singular association between Tantra and sex. But behind sensationalist stories of Tantric lovemaking lies a rich spiritual and textual tradition of which sexual union is only a small, and fiercely debated, part. In The Path of Desire, Hugh B. Urban takes us on an ethnographic journey to Assam, the heartland of Tantric practice in contemporary India, revealing the vibrant, dynamic lived tradition of Hindu Tantra. The Path of Desire expands our definition of kåama, a central concept of Tantra generally translated as "desire," to focus on mundane and worldly desires such as healing and childbearing. This more holistic notion of desire manifests itself in popular folk practice, which Urban categorizes in four forms: institutional Tantra, comprised of gurus, disciples, and esoteric rituals; public Tantra, involving offerings and temple celebrations; folk Tantra, focusing on practices of healing, protection, material wellbeing, and desire fulfillment; and pop Tantra, or how Tantra is portrayed in popular media such as paperbacks, comic books, and movies. The result is a nuanced understanding of Tantra as a diverse lived tradition"--

Acclaimed poet and critic Maureen N. McLane offers an experimental work of criticism ranging across Romantic and contemporary poetry. In My Poetics, Maureen N. McLane writes as a poet, critic, theorist, and scholar--but above all as an impassioned reader. Written in an innovative, conversable style, McLane's essays illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. Ranging widely from romantic-era odes and hymns to anonymous ballads to haikus and haibuns to modernist and contemporary poetries in English, My Poetics explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive. McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surroundings, and how do specific poems activate that relation? If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, "poetry is the scholar's art," My Poetics flies under a slightly different banner: study and criticism are also the poet's art. Punctuated with McLane's poems and drawing variously on Hannah Arendt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, and other writers and poets, My Poetics is a formally as well as intellectually adventurous work. Its artful arrangement of readings and divagations shows us a way to be with poems and poetics.

"To be a Black writer in the early years of the Cold War was to face a stark predicament. On the one hand, revolutionary Communism promised egalitarianism and lit the sparks of anticolonial struggle, but was hostile to conceptions of personal freedom. On the other hand, the great force opposing the Soviets at midcentury was itself the very fountainhead of racial prejudice, represented in the United States by Jim Crow. Jesse McCarthy argues that Black writers of this time were equally alienated from the left and the right and channeled that alienation into remarkable experiments in literary form. Embracing racial affect and interiority, they forged an aesthetic resistance premised on fierce dissent from both US racial liberalism and Soviet Communism. Ranging from the end of World War II to the rise of Black Power in the 1960s, from Richard Wright and James Baldwin to Gwendolyn Brooks and Paule Marshall and others, Jesse McCarthy shows how Black writers defined a distinctive moment in American literary culture that McCarthy calls "the Blue Period.""--

"In this book, âEtienne Helmer offers a comprehensive analysis of oikonomia in ancient Greek philosophy. Despite its similarity to the word "economy," for the ancients, oikonomia named a branch of knowledge (the science of management) aimed at studying the practices we engage in to satisfy our needs. This began with the domestic sphere, but it radiated outward from the oikos (house) to encompass broader issues in the city (polis) as well. Helmer explores topics such as gender roles and marriage; property and the household; the acquisition and preservation of material goods; and how Greek philosophers addressed the issue of slavery in the ancient world. Even if we are not likely to share many of ancient thinkers' beliefs today, Helmer shows that there was once a way of thinking of "economic life" that went beyond the accumulation of wealth, and represented a key point of departure for understanding how to inhabit the world with others"--

"There is no question that art has played a key role in constructing the public understanding of "America." Probing the intersection of art, nature, race, and place, Temporary Monuments examines how art and artists have responded to this legacy by imagining new ways of constructing notions of land, culture, and public space. Zorach demonstrates how art historical tropes play out through and against the construction of race in a series of real and conceptual spaces that are key to how we imagine this country. Ranging from the museum, the wild, and the monument to the garden, the home, and the border, Temporary Monuments incorporates memoir, historical narrative, literary analysis, and close looking at objects that date from significant moments in American history. Works by artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Dawoud Bey, George Catlin, Theaster Gates, Kerry James Marshall, Dylan Miner, Barnett Newman, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams help to pry open knotty questions about the relationship between the environment, social justice, history, and identity"--

The surprising history behind a ubiquitous facet of the United States: the gridded landscape. Fly across the United States and you'll see cities and fields organized around the grid: perpendicular streets and a patchwork of rectangular farmland. All over the country, but especially in the West, the grid has become a hallmark of American life, a framework we use to navigate the terrain. This might seem a practical utility--an easy way to divide the land. It was not. This pattern at this scale, historian and writer Amir Alexander argues, was a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a titanic rectilinear grid, aligned with the points of the compass. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible, and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it. From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty's Grid tells the story of the battle between grid-makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson's plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility, but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country's founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite's cliffs and suburbia's cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty's Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.

An engaging exploration of the wondrous social webs that permeate life in animal societies around the world. It's all about who you know. Whether vampire bats sharing blood meals for survival, field crickets remembering champion fighters, macaque monkeys forming grooming pacts after a deadly hurricane, or great tit birds learning the best way to steal milk--it pays to be well connected. In this tour of the animal kingdom, evolutionary biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin reveals a new field of study, uncovering social networks that existed long before the dawn of human social media. He accessibly describes the latest findings from animal behavior, evolution, computer science, psychology, anthropology, genetics, and neurobiology, and incorporates interviews and insights from researchers that he finds swimming with manta rays, avoiding pigeon poop, and stopping monkeys from stealing iPads. With Dugatkin as our guide, we investigate social networks in giraffes, elephants, kangaroos, Tasmanian devils, whales, bats, and more. From animal networks in Australia and Asia to Africa, Europe, and the Americas, The Well-Connected Animal is an eye-opening expose of wild friends, enemies, and everything in between.

The definitive guide to starting and running a freelance editing business. You've been thinking about shifting into the world of freelance editing, but you don't know where to start. In a time when editors are seeking greater flexibility in their work arrangements and schedules, freelancing is an increasingly common career option. But deciding to go it alone means balancing the risks with the rewards. From the publisher of The Chicago Manual of Style comes The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors, the definitive guide to running your business and finding greater control and freedom in your work life. In this book, Erin Brenner--an industry leader and expert on the business of editorial freelancing--gathers everything you need to know into a single resource. Brenner has run her own successful editing business for over two decades and has helped hundreds of editors launch or improve their businesses through her teaching, blog writing, and coaching. The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors will walk you through the entire process of conceiving, launching, and working in a freelance editing business, from deciding on services and rates to choosing the best business structure to thinking through branding and marketing strategies and beyond. This book is ideal for beginning freelancers looking to get set up and land their first clients, but it's equally valuable to those who have already been freelancing, with detailed coverage of such issues as handling difficult clients and continuing professional development. You'll find a collection of advice from other successful freelance editors in this guide, as well as an extensive list of resources and tools. In the final and perhaps most important chapter, Brenner teaches you how to care for the key component of the business: yourself.

"Ecce Homo and The Antichrist address the interrelated questions of what a philosopher is and what constitutes a philosophic life. Nietzsche's Legacy conceives of these twin books as the late major work that is meant to take the place of the Will to Power, a project Nietzsche had come to reject. The pair concludes his ¶uvre by both enacting the highest affirmation, the "revaluation of all values," and the most resolute negation, the sharpest criticism to which a philosopher has subjected Christianity. Yet in both books, Nietzsche is interested above all in the nature of the philosopher. How the Yes and the No go together, how to determine the relation between nature and politics, how Nietzsche's intention governs the political-philosophical double-face: this is the subject of Nietzsche's Legacy, which advances a new view of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole"--

"A distinguished geologist and a popular science writer Charles Frankel turns his attention in his latest book to the mass extinctions on our planet, considering what the past can tell us about the future. Explaining Earth's past mass extinctions, Frankel suggests that, each time, a decrease in biodiversity created fragile conditions that eventuated into widespread and cataclysmic disappearances. The rise of mammals led to the rise of humans, who, over the past 200,000 years, have become their own geological force, forever affecting the bio-environment, from the massacre of megafauna in the Ice Age to the impoverishment of soils and pollution of waterways and air, to the unwitting transfer of invasive species from one part of the globe to another. After a compelling account of the latest research, Frankel ends with speculations on planetary peril and whether the widespread extinctions, climate change, and loss of biodiversity that we are currently experiencing can be slowed or even reversed. His answer inspires hope and urgency. If humans can redirect and curb some of our basic behaviors (like the obsession to kill and consume other species), we might stand a chance. Still, he eloquently explains that, even if we succeed in this, our way of life and even some of our ways of being human will be transformed forever. As extinction repeatedly shows those who survive, life is not eternal"--