The Center continued to support humanities book publications with its publication subvention award, in collaboration with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of the Arts.
BOOK SPOTLIGHT
Benjamin Hebblethwaite, Professor, Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Professor Benjamin Hebblethwaite and Professor Silke Jansen’s edited volume, Indigenous and African Diaspora Religions in the Americas (University of Nebraska Press), collects ten chapters that explore Indigenous and African Diasporic spirit-based religious traditions in Canada, the United States, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Nigeria. The book profiles the investigated religions using interdisciplinary research methods and includes several maps by UF’s geospatial consultant, Joe Aufmuth.
Stephen Perz, Professor, Sociology and Criminology & Law
With the support of the publication subvention, Professor Stephen G. Perz co-authored The Road to the Land of the Mother of God: A History of the Interoceanic Highway in Peru (University of Nebraska Press) with Jorge Luis Castillo Hurdado. This work discusses the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios, the land of the Mother of God, which for centuries was among the most remote parts of South America. Access to Madre de Dios was a priority for the Incan empire, Spanish conquerors, missionaries, scientists, rubber barons, and colonists, all of whom encountered unexpected perils in finding the way, many paying with their lives. At the dawn of the 21st century, unprecedented circumstances aligned to finally impel construction of an Interoceanic Highway across Madre de Dios. Despite political demand, the highway was not justifiable economically or ecologically, resulting in extraordinary exemptions from oversight. The road thus yielded problematic outcomes and stimulated debate over infrastructure governance. Revelations that systemic corruption was behind its approval made the Interoceanic Highway an emblematic case of the contradictions of infrastructure.
Seth Bernstein, Professor, History
The publication subvention also supported the publication of Professor Seth Bernstein’s monograph, Return to the Motherland: Soviet Displaced Persons in World War II and the Cold War (Cornell University Press). The book covers the situation of the end of World War II, when more than five million people returned to the Soviet Union from wartime displacement. Most had been forced laborers and prisoners of war, deported to the Third Reich to work in a crushing environment, and they returned to accusations of treason in the USSR. Using declassified Soviet police archives, the book explores their brutal but transnational experience from 1941 into the 1950s. Their story is a window onto the paradoxes of freedom and violence during war, Soviet conceptions of belonging, and debates over migration as a human right in the Cold War.
The subvention program is instrumental in supporting quality book publications at affordable prices for humanities scholars at UF.
Read more articles from the CHPS 2022-23 Annual Newsletter >