In books this year, Clark University faculty examined the U.S. struggle against radical Islam, issues involving the health care of black women and the challenges for families of gay and lesbian children who marry.
MEDICINE AND ETHICS IN BLACK WOMEN’S SPECULATIVE FICTION
By Esther Jones, Assistant Professor of English
The book engages the complex nexus of black women’s health, the fraught history of medicine as it relates to black women, and the problems with the inconsistent application of medical ethics that should concern us all through the lens of black women’s literary speculation. Through prominent writers like Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor and Nalo Hopkinson, Jones highlights how personal experiences of illness and disease frequently reflect larger societal sicknesses in connection to race and gender.
US VERSUS THEM: THE UNITED STATES, RADICAL ISLAM, AND THE RISE OF THE GREEN THREAT
By Douglas Little, Robert and Virginia Scotland Professor of History and International Relations
This book explores the political and cultural turmoil that led U.S. policymakers to shift their attention from containing the “Red Threat” of international communism to combating the “Green Threat” of radical Islam after 1989. Little analyzes America’s confrontation with Islamic extremism through the traditional ideological framework of “us versus them” that has historically pitted the United States against Native Americans, Mexicans, Asian immigrants, Nazis and the Soviets.
WHEN YOUR GAY OR LESBIAN CHILD MARRIES
By Deborah M. Merrill, Professor of Sociology
Through research based on interviews with married (or previously married) homosexual men and women, as well as with parents who have both a married gay/lesbian child and a married heterosexual child, Merrill examines how same-sex marriage changes the relationships between parents and their gay or lesbian adult children. The book serves to help parents understand the contours of same-sex marriage and their child’s struggles as he or she navigates marriage, parenthood and family relationships.
THE DEREGULATORY MOMENT? A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON CHANGING CAMPAIGN FINANCE LAWS
Edited by Robert Boatright, Associate Professor of Political Science
Is deregulation, exemplified by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, a harbinger of things to come elsewhere or further evidence that the United States remains an anomaly? In this volume, experts on the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and other European nations explore what deregulation means in the context of political campaigns, and demonstrate how such comparisons can inform the study of campaign finance in the U.S.
PERIPHERAL DESIRES: THE GERMAN DISCOVERY OF SEX
By Robert Deam Tobin, Professor of Foreign Languages and Henry J. Leir Chair in Language, Literature and Culture
Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary authors, politicians and members of the medical establishment in German-speaking central Europe — and observes how consistently these writers, thinkers and scientists associated the new non-normative sexualities with places away from the German metropoles of Berlin and Vienna.
