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After the Gulag

Using these previously unavailable personal records, alongside newspapers, photographs, interviews, and other non-state archival sources, After the Gulag sheds new light not only on how former prisoners experienced life after release but also how they laid the foundations for the future commemoration of Komi’s dark past. Bound by a “camp brotherhood,” they used informal social networks to provide mutual support amid state and societal oppression. Decades later, they sought rehabilitation with the help of the newly formed Memorial Society—the civic organization largely responsible for the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union. In sharing their life stories and family archives with Memorial, they sustained an alternate history of the Soviet Union.

Indecent Detroit

While Detroit has been a major focus in urban history, little has been written on censorship in the very city that—due to shifting legalities, the urban crisis, and racial tensions—profoundly shaped media suppression in the United States.

By examining censorship in film and literature, Indecent Detroit recounts the evolution of media control from the end of WWII through the 1970s, when the US saw a major change in the legal mechanisms used to censor media due to court rulings that curtailed censorship laws. Ben Strassfeld reveals how Detroit altered its censorial tactics and rhetoric from an obscenity-based system of censorship centered in the Detroit Police Department to a regulatory model based in zoning law that was then expanded nationwide. This shift was connected to broader social and political trends, including the sexual revolution, that led the public to increasingly turn against censorship.

This Year's Work in Showgirls Studies

The Year’s Work in Showgirls Studies is a fan culture volume that deconstructs how and why Showgirls, a 1995 drama with a female lead bent on becoming a famous performer in Las Vegas, became a much-contested cult film despite being a critical failure when it released.

The collection orchestrates a conversation between scholarly essay work and archival documentation offering a magnificent representation of the array of responses generated by the film, its makers, its promoters, and its audience. A multifaceted approach to the film, its popularity, and its social relevance results in a new text for understanding normative social hierarchies of sexuality, race, and gender.

Explore how our more than three dozen scholarly journals play an important part in today’s increasingly global dialogue and feature essays, fiction, poetry, and art in a wide range of subject areas, including African studies, Jewish and Middle East studies, globalism, philosophy, religion, bioethics, folklore, electronic services, film, transnationalism, cultural studies, education, and environmental ethics.
Indecent Detroit

Indecent Detroit

Ben Strassfeld

After the Gulag

After the Gulag

Tyler C. Kirk

Ornaments and Other Ambiguous Artifacts from Franchthi

Ornaments and Other Ambiguous Artifacts from Franchthi

Catherine Perlès, Sandrine Bonnardin, Benoît Mille, Patrick Pion

The Year’s Work in Showgirls Studies

The Year's Work in Showgirls Studies

Melissa Hardie, Meaghan Morris, Kane Race, Anna Breckon, Kara Keeling, Adrian Martin, Kieryn McKay, Jane Chi Hyun Park, Zahra Stardust, Billy Stevenson, Shawna Tang

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