A chill is in the air as Thanksgiving fades to a memory and the end of the year draws ever closer. As we close out the last month of 2017 with some more new releases from Indiana University Press, don't forget to check out our holiday sale for your chance to get 40% off these books and many others. Enjoy!
Folk Masters
A Portrait of America
Photographs by Tom Pich
Text by Barry Bergey
Discover one hundred of the greatest folk artists practicing in the United States in Folk Masters: A Portrait of America. Over the past 25 years, photographer Tom Pich has traveled the country to the homes and studios of recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship, the highest honor given to folk and traditional artists in the US. His portraits give us a glimpse into their art, their process, and their culture. While each image tells a story on its own, Barry Bergey, former Director of Folk and Traditional Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts, provides further insight into the lives of each featured artist as well as the remarkable stories behind each photograph. Folk Masters honors again the extraordinary women and men who simultaneously take the traditional arts to new heights while ensuring their continuation from generation to generation.
Transfinite Life
Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination
Bruce Rosenstock
Oskar Goldberg was an important and controversial figure in Weimar Germany. He challenged the rising racial conception of the state and claimed that the Jewish people were on a metaphysical mission to defeat race-based statism. He attracted the attention of his contemporaries—Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Thomas Mann, and Carl Schmitt, among others—with the argument that ancient Israel's sacrificial rituals held the key to overcoming the tyranny of technology in the modern world. Bruce Rosenstock offers a sympathetic but critical philosophical portrait of Goldberg and puts him into conversation with Jewish and political figures that circulated in his cultural environment. Rosenstock reveals Goldberg as a deeply imaginative and broad-minded thinker who drew on biology, mathematics, Kabbalah, and his interests in ghost photography to account for the origin of the earth. Caricatured as a Jewish proto-fascist in his day, Goldberg's views of the tyranny of technology, biopolitics, and the "new vitalism" remain relevant to this day.
Trauma in First Person
Diary Writing during the Holocaust
Amos Goldberg
What are the effects of radical oppression on the human psyche? What happens to the inner self of the powerless and traumatized victim, especially during times of widespread horror? In this bold and deeply penetrating book, Amos Goldberg addresses diary writing by Jews under Nazi persecution. Throughout Europe, in towns, villages, ghettos, forests, hideouts, concentration and labor camps, and even in extermination camps, Jews of all ages and of all cultural backgrounds described in writing what befell them. Goldberg claims that diary and memoir writing was perhaps the most important literary genre for Jews during World War II. Goldberg considers the act of writing in radical situations as he looks at diaries from little-known victims as well as from brilliant diarists such as Chaim Kaplan and Victor Kemperer. Goldberg contends that only against the background of powerlessness and inner destruction can Jewish responses and resistance during the Holocaust gain their proper meaning.
The Contemplative Mind in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Patricia Owen-Smith
In The Contemplative Mind in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Patricia Owen-Smith considers how contemplative practices may find a place in higher education. By creating a bridge between contemplative practices and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), Owen-Smith brings awareness of contemplative pedagogy to a larger audience of college instructors, while also offering classroom models and outlining the ongoing challenges of both defining these practices and assessing their impact in education. Ultimately, Owen-Smith asserts that such practices have the potential to deepen a student’s development and understanding of the self as a learner, knower, and citizen of the world.