Archives

“Sovereign Joy” explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as […]

“Color is very intimate” The immediate physical presence of color is central to Katharina Grosse’s creative endeavor. Through an open-ended creative process in which painting takes on the form of a performance, color embodies movement, making its emotional potential tangible.These issues are not only driving her dramatically large in situ works painted across various surfaces […]

Unique essays that look for stillness at the center of a life while confronting chaos in our era at home and abroad At age fifty, when many hope to slow down, and what’s left, as the poet Kobayashi Issa once wrote, is “clear profit,” John Griswold was starting over–again–in a position he had worked decades […]

A groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago’s AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music. Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In “Sound Experiments,” Paul Steinbeck offers […]

A panoramic and accessible guide to one of the most celebrated—and controversial—authors of the 20th centuryPhilip Roth was one of the most prominent, controversial, and prolific American writers of his generation. By the time of his death in 2018, he had won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and three PEN/Faulkner Awards. In “Understanding Philip […]

A rebellious Indian proclaiming noble ancestry and entitlement, a military lieutenant foreshadowing the coming of revolution, a blasphemous Creole embroiderer in possession of a bundle of sketches brimming with pornography. All shared one thing in common. During the late 18th century, they were deemed to be mad and forcefully admitted to the Hospital de San […]

“Monika Weiss. Nirbhaya” is an extensive monograph of an outstanding Polish-American artist, Monika Weiss. In her work, she focuses on politics and poetics of memory, alluding to the history of the neglected or erased from the collective awareness. In her projects the artist presents the woman’s body, including her own, as a carrier of memory and […]

Why are political conversations uncomfortable for so many people? The current literature focuses on the structure of people’s discussion networks and the frequency with which they talk about politics, but not the dynamics of the conversations themselves. In “What Goes Without Saying,” Taylor N. Carlson and Jaime E. Settle investigate how Americans navigate these discussions […]

“Cellular Transformations” presents a course developed for students who are interested in emerging technologies and cross-disciplinary approaches in design strategies. Relying on how advances in engineering and biology are influencing design production and implementation, professors Ram Dixit and Sung Ho Kim at Washington University in St. Louis explore the premise that structure (or form) and […]

How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, “Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage” demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of […]