Award-Winning Books

In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting, performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money, culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that received these waves of people. He interrogates central issues in the study of similar case studies from South Africa and England to demonstrate how Chinese Atlantic seascapes frame globalization as we experience it today. Frequently focusing on art that interacts directly with the sites in which it is located, Metzger explores how Chinese migrant laborers and entrepreneurs did the same to shape—both physically and culturally—the new spaces in which they found themselves. In this manner, Metzger encourages us to see how artistic imagination and practice interact with migration to produce a new way of framing the global.

In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.

What compels Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and abroad to promote a positive image of Ottomans and Turks while they deny the Armenian genocide and the existence of antisemitism in Turkey? Based on historical narrative, the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 were embraced by the Ottoman Empire and then, later, protected from the Nazis during WWII. If we believe that Turks and Jews have lived in harmony for so long, then how can we believe that the Turks could have committed genocide against the Armenians? Marc David Baer confronts these convictions and circumstances to reflect on what moral responsibility the descendants of the victims of one genocide have to the descendants of victims of another. Baer delves into the history of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey to find the origin of these many tangled truths. He aims to bring about reconciliation between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, not only to face inconvenient historical facts but to confront it and come to terms. By looking at the complexities of interreligious relations, Holocaust denial, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and confronting some long-standing historical stereotypes, Baer sets out to tell a new history that goes against Turkish antisemitism and admits to the Armenian genocide.

C. Curry Bohm was a talented and highly regarded landscape artist who is most commonly associated with Brown County, Indiana. Most consider him a leader of the second generation of Brown County painters. However, Curry's career and success expanded well beyond the borders of Brown County. The artist was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1894. Much of his artistic training was received in Chicago. The Illinois metropolis served as an important focus for his career development and an outlet for exhibitions until the 1950s. Curry permanently moved to Brown County in 1930. Many of his works during the first half of his career portrayed landscapes painted in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. Later, harbor and marine landscapes painted along coastal sites in Massachusetts and Maine provided new challenges and satisfaction for him over the second half of his career. Curry garnered success in all these artistic arenas. He won major awards at the Chicago Palette & Club in the early 1930s. He was awarded multiple exhibition prizes in East Coast shows during the 1950s. His Smoky Mountain and East Coast landscapes were major painting subjects for his showing in the Indiana Hoosier Salon exhibitions, from 1929-1967, where he won over 25 awards, including two Best in Show Awards. Curry Bohm thus became one of the leading painters in the Indiana arts community during the 20th century.

Uri Bialer lays a foundation for understanding the principal aspects of Israeli foreign policy from the early days of the state's existence to the Oslo Accords. He presents a synthetic reading of sources, many of which are recently declassified official documents, to cover Israeli foreign policy over a broad chronological expanse. Bialer focuses on the objectives of Israel's foreign policy and its actualization, especially as it concerned immigration policy, oil resources, and the procurement of armaments. In addition to identifying important state actors, Bialer highlights the many figures who had no defined diplomatic roles but were influential in establishing foreign policy goals. He shows how foreign policy was essential to the political, economic, and social well-being of the state and how it helped to deal with Israel's most intractable problem, the resolution of the conflict with Arab states and the Palestinians.