View some of the published books by our faculty or scroll farther for a complete list of all our faculty publications!
Vox ex Machina: A Cultural History of Talking Machines
Sarah A. Bell
From early robots to toys like the iconic Speak & Spell to Apple's Siri, Vox ex Machina tells the fascinating story of how scientists and engineers developed voices for machines during the twentieth century. Sarah Bell chronicles the development of voice synthesis from buzzy electrical current and circuitry in analog components to the robotic sounds of early digital signal processing to today's human sounding applications. Along the way, Bell also shows how the public responded to these technologies and asks whether talking machines are even good for us.
Using a wide range of intriguing examples, Vox ex Machina is embedded in a wider story about people—describing responses to voice synthesis technologies that often challenged prevailing ideas about computation and automation promoted by boosters of the Information Age. Bell helps explain why voice technologies came to sound and to operate in the way they do—influenced as they were by a combination of technical assumptions and limitations, the choices of the corporations that deploy them, and the habits that consumers developed over time.
A beautifully written book that will appeal to anyone with a healthy skepticism toward Silicon Valley, Vox ex Machina is an important and timely contribution to our cultural histories of information, computing, and media.
Matt Bartley Seigel
"Artfully wrought poems tracing the intimate contours of self, nature, and history. Immersed in the rugged beauty and complex history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, M. Bartley Seigel steers his second poetry collection through the terrain of the tangible and the mythical to capture the essence of the region's mining towns and dense forests and the vastness of Lake Superior. Through a cumulation of sonnets, prose poems, and open forms, In the Bone-Cracking Cold unfolds across a year, beginning and ending in winter. Seigel carefully weaves and unravels the complexities of love and loss, the legacy of colonialism, and the deep bond between nature, people, and place. Poems like 'Beach Glass' highlight Seigel's lyricism, while his series of sonnets and a variety of open forms reveal joyfully flexible innovation. With a voice that is both striking and unpretentious, Seigel's poems remain hopeful regardless of uncertainty and curious despite the threat of apathy, inviting readers to connect with a landscape as iconic as it is misunderstood.”
Professor Seigel will also be featured in Words, a statewide billboard campaign celebrating Michigan poetry by contemporary Michigan poets. Funded by the Academy of American Poets (Mellon Foundation), Michigan Words was developed by Michigan Poetry Laureate Nandi Comer as part of her 2023-2024 tenure. Posters will also be going up in public libraries across Michigan.
The Idler's Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P. G. Wodehouse
Laura Kasson Fiss
Laura Kasson Fiss (HU) has won the inaugural 2023 First Book Prize from the Victorian Popular Fiction Association for The Idler's Club: Humour and Mass Readership from Jerome K. Jerome to P. G. Wodehouse (Edinburgh UP, 2023).
Dr Fiss will receive a £200 cash prize and be honored at the Annual General Meeting of the upcoming VPFA Annual Conference at Canterbury Christ Church University (15-17 July 2024). The judging panel, Professors Anne-Marie Beller, Kate Newey and Jennifer Phegley, wrote in their decision: "[Fiss’s] exploration of this particular cohort of writers as a literal and metaphorical ‘club’ makes an original contribution to the study of these famous but largely neglected figures who have had a lasting impact on contemporary popular cultural forms.
Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Are Transforming Everyday Life
Stefka Hristova, Soonkwan Hong, and Jennifer Daryl Slack
Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Everyday Life explores the complex ways in which algorithms and big data, or algorithmic culture, are simultaneously reshaping everyday culture while perpetuating inequality and intersectional discrimination. Contributors situate issues of humanity, identity, and culture in relation to free will, surveillance, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumerism, solipsism, and creativity, offering a critique of the myriad constraints enacted by algorithms. This book argues that consumers are undergoing an ontological overhaul due to the enhanced manipulability and increasingly mandatory nature of algorithms in the market, while also positing that algorithms may help navigate through chaos that is intrinsically present in the market democracy. Ultimately, Algorithmic Culture calls attention to the present-day cultural landscape as a whole as it has been reconfigured and re-presented by algorithms.
Home Front in the American Heartland: Local Experiences and Legacies of WWI
Patty Sotirin, Steven A. Walton, and Sue Collins
This collection offers a multifaceted exploration of World War One and its aftermath in the northern American Heartland, a region often overlooked in wartime histories. The chapters feature archival and newspaper documentation and visual imagery from this era. The first section, “Heartland Histories,” explores experiences of conscription and home front mobilization in the small communities of the heartland, highlighting tensions associated with patriotism, class, ethnicities, and locale. In one chapter, the previously unpublished cartoon art of a USAF POW displays his Midwestern sensibilities. Section Two, “Homefront Propaganda,” examines the cultural networks disseminating national war messages, notably the critical work of local theaters, Four Minute Men, the Allied War Exhibitions, and the local commemorative displays of military relics. Section Three, “Gender in/and War,” highlights aspects often over-shadowed by male experiences of the war itself, including the patriotic mother, androgynous representations in wartime propaganda, and masculine violence following the war. Together, this volume provides rich portraits of the complexities of heartland home front experiences and legacies.
Performing Math: A History of Communication and Anxiety in the American Mathematics Classroom
Andrew Fiss
Performing Math tells the history of expectations for math communication—and the conversations about math hatred and math anxiety that occurred in response. Focusing on nineteenth-century American colleges, this book analyzes foundational tools and techniques of math communication: the textbooks that supported reading aloud, the burnings that mimicked pedagogical speech, the blackboards that accompanied oral presentations, the plays that proclaimed performers’ identities as math students, and the written tests that redefined “student performance.” Math communication and math anxiety went hand in hand as new rules for oral communication at the blackboard inspired student revolt and as frameworks for testing student performance inspired performance anxiety. With unusual primary sources from over a dozen educational archives, Performing Math argues for a new, performance-oriented history of American math education, one that can explain contemporary math attitudes and provide a way forward to reframing the problem of math anxiety.
Domestic Violence in Hollywood Film: Gaslighting
Diane L. Shoos
This is the first book to critically examine Hollywood films that focus on male partner violence against women. These films include Gaslight, Sleeping with the Enemy, What’s Love Got to Do with It, Dolores Claiborne, Enough, and Safe Haven. Shaped by the contexts of postfeminism, domestic abuse post-awareness, and familiar genre conventions, these films engage in ideological “gaslighting” that reaffirms our preconceived ideas about men as abusers, women as victims, and the racial and class politics of domestic violence. While the films purport to condemn abuse and empower abused women, this study proposes that they tacitly reinforce the very attitudes that we believe we no longer tolerate. Shoos argues that films like these limit not only popular understanding but also social and institutional interventions.
Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History (Stuart Hall: Selected Writings)
Stuart Hall
The publication of Cultural Studies 1983 is a touchstone event in the history of Cultural Studies and a testament to Stuart Hall's unparalleled contributions. The eight foundational lectures Hall delivered at the University of Illinois in 1983 introduced North American audiences to a thinker and discipline that would shift the course of critical scholarship. Hall discusses the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson; the influence of structuralism; the limitations and possibilities of Marxist theory; and the importance of Althusser and Gramsci.
Culture and Technology: A Primer
Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. MacGregor Wise
From mobile phones to surveillance cameras, from fracking to genetically modified food, we live in an age of intense debate about technology’s place in our culture. Culture and Technology is an essential guide to that debate and its fascinating history. Slack and Wise untangle and expose cultural assumptions that underlie our thinking about technology, stories so deeply held we often don’t recognize their influence. The book considers the perceived inevitability of technological progress, the role of control and convenience, and the very sense of what technology is. Most important, it builds an alternative, cultural studies approach for engaging technological culture, one that considers politics, economics, space, time, identity, and change. After all, what we think and what we do make a difference.
Shelley's Radical Stages: Performance and Cultural Memory in the Post-Napoleonic Era
Dana Van Kooy
Dana Van Kooy draws critical attention to Percy Bysshe Shelley as a dramatist and argues that his dramas represent a critical paradigm of romanticism in which history is 'staged'. Reading Shelley's dramas as a series of radical stages - historical reenactments and theatrical reproductions - Van Kooy highlights the cultural significance of the drama and the theatre in shaping and contesting constructions of both the sovereign nation and the global empire in the post-Napoleonic era. It examines each of Shelley's dramas as a specific radical stage that reformulates the familiar cultural performances of war, revolution, slavery and domestic tyranny. Although Shelley's dramas are few in number they engage a larger cultural project of aesthetic and political reform that constituted a groundswell of activism that took place during the Romantic period.
Edited by Michael Bowler and Ingo Farin
Examines and confronts Heidegger's hermeneutical approach to philosophy and the history of philosophy. Heidegger's work, both early and late, has had a profound impact on hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy. The essays in this volume are striking in the way they exhibit the variety of perspectives on the development and role of hermeneutics in Heidegger's work, allowing a multiplicity of views on the nature of hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy to emerge. As Heidegger argues, the rigor and strength of philosophy do not consist in the development of a univocal and universal method, but in philosophy's ability to embrace—not just tolerate—the questioning of its basic concepts. The essays in Hermeneutical Heidegger are exemplars of this kind of rigor and strength.
Carlos M. Amador
This book argues for a new reading of the political and ethical through the literatures of Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay from 1970-2000. Carlos Amador reads a series of examples from the last dictatorship and the current post-dictatorship period in the Southern Cone, including works by Augusto Roa Bastos, Roberto Bolaño, Ceferino Reato, Horacio Verbitsky, Nelly Richard, Diamela Eltit, and Willy Thayer, with the goal of uncovering the logic behind their conceptions of belonging and rejection. Focusing on theoretical concepts that make possible the formation of any and all communities, this study works towards a vision of literature as essential to the structure of ethics.