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Ferguson, Missouri, became the epicenter of America’s racial tensions after the 2014 murder of Michael Brown and the protests that followed in its wake. Though this suburb just outside St. Louis might have seemed like an average midwestern town, the activism that exploded there after Brown’s killing laid bare how longstanding municipal planning policies had […]

When the Nigerian Civil War crept to his quiet college town, Matthew Mamah’s global journey began. His father, an Anglican priest who survived smallpox, had always urged him to “aim high and shoot high.” Matthew knew that his quest for excellence could take him to the horizon’s edge, but he never imagined himself in Budapest, […]

Body Language is the first in-depth study of the extraordinary interplay between George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French). Nick Mauss and Angela Miller offer timely readings of how their practices of staging, collaboration, and psychological enactment through the body arced across the boundaries of art and life, private […]

A Planetary Avant-Garde explores how experimental poetics and literature networks have aesthetically and politically responded to the legacy of Iberian colonialism across the world. The book examines avant-garde responses to Spanish and Portuguese imperialism across Europe, Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia between 1909 and 1929. Ignacio Infante critically traces the hegemony and resistance […]

This book analyzes how contemporary visual art can visualize environmental crisis. It draws on Karen Barad’s method of “agential realism,” which understands disparate factors as working together and “entangled.” Through an analysis of digital eco art, the book shows how the entwining of new materialist and decolonized approaches accounts for the nonhuman factors shaping ecological […]

Next Big Idea Club Must Read BooksLibrary Journal Editor’s Pick “This vital and accessible study is a must-read for anyone concerned with workplace equality.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) A leading sociologist reveals why racial inequality persists in the workplace despite today’s multi-billion-dollar diversity industry—and provides actionable solutions for creating a truly equitable, multiracial future. Labor and […]

At the onset of the first World War, E.G. Lewis wielded his outsized charm and entrepreneurial spirit to attract legions of women to move across the country to build a new American dream in Atascadero, California His new city, envisioned to rival Los Angeles and San Francisco, targeted the millions of subscribers to his national women’s magazines who longed for a utopia designed for progressive women and their families. However, Atascadero’s unrivaled success soon attracts conspirators from his past, threatening to destroy all he’s built.

In the early 1990s, the phrase “screen time” emerged to scare parents about the dangers of too much TV for kids. Screen time was something to fret over, police, and judge in a low-grade moral panic. Now, “screen time” has become a metric not only for good parenting, but for our adult lives as well.

“Missouri Weird and Wonderful” is a fast-paced, fact-filled collection of the most fascinating parts of life in our state, with a kid’s-eye point of view. Learn the many wild nicknames of our famous native amphibian, get an appreciation for how radical Scott Joplin’s ragtime music was in the early 1900s, and discover the entire branch of medicine that was born here.

The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. “Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture” examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture.