Duke University Press Log

Brenda R. Weber tackles Makeover TV

Check out our new YouTube video! Brenda R. Weber, author of Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (2009), answers questions about her new book, the makeover tv genre, and the influence the concept of makeovers has on popular culture and thinking.

Books on Traffic

In honor of the year's busiest travel week, NPR is doing a series on traffic safety, which inspired us to think about several recent Duke Press books nominally about the subject. Enda Duffy's The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism returns to the early days of the automobile to examine how the experience of speed has always been political and how it has affected nearly all aspects of modern culture. Speed became the quintessential way for individuals to experience modernity, to feel modernity in their bones, particularly when that speed resulted in actual broken bones! Jeremy Packer looks at automobile safety in American culture in his book Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship.  Packer analyzes how driving has been understood by experts, imagined by citizens, regulated by traffic laws, governed through education and propaganda, and represented in films, television, magazines, and newspapers. Packer, a motorcyclist himself, has an especially interesting chapter on how the motorcycle went from being seen as a cheap, easy mode of transport to a risky machine driven by outlaws. And finally, we have a new book out about the development of the anti-lock braking system (ABS). Ann Johnson's Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge uses the development of ABS as a case study for examining the process of engineering design in which knowledge communities come together to produce new products and knowledge. Think about the rather tortured path from design to implementation as you stomp your own anti-lock brakes in traffic this week.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Reviews Slaves to Fashion, Glave in Out 100

Two nice bits of news today. First, Monica Miller's Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity is reviewed in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Reviewer D. Scott Miller says he will now "direct all queries" regarding black dandies to Miller's book, which demonstrates "uncanny feats of scholarship that illustrate ways in which the figure of the black dandy has been an elephant-in-the-room — albeit a particualrly well-dressed one."

We were also pleased to learn that Thomas Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, and quite a sharp-dressed man himself, was named one of Out Magazine's Out 100. Glave is praised for his short story collection, The Torturer's Wife, but it should be noted that he won his Lambda Literary Award for Our Caribbean!

Jayna Brown Wins ASTR Award

Jayna Brown, author of Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, has just been announced as the winner of the American Society for Theatre Research's Errol Hill Award for 2009. Congratulations, Jayna!

Duke Authors at American Studies Association Annual Meeting

We had a great time at the American Studies Association annual meeting in DC last week. Our staffers enjoyed getting to know authors new and old. Stay tuned for some YouTube interviews we did while at the conference.  

Scholars browsing at our booth.

Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (February 2010)

Colin Milburn, Nanovision: Engineering the Future (2008) 

Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (March 2010) 

Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity

Rebecca Hill, Men, Mobs and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (2008) and Sophia A. McClennen, Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope

Thanks to our Publicity & Marketing Assistant, Amanda E. Sharp, for taking these photos!

Daylight Podcast with Jennette Williams

 The folks over at Daylight Magazine have made a terrific podcast with photographer Jennette Williams, whose stunning platinum prints of women bathers in Budapest and Istanbul won the fourth Center for Documentary Studies / Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. Williams says her goal was to capture women "living inside rather than fighting against their bodies." Her book The Bathers will be launched here at Duke tomorrow, with an artist's talk at Perkins Library. 

Sunday Times Returns to Java to Profile S. Ann Dunham

 The Sunday Times (London) sent reporter Christine Finn to Kajar, Java in Indonesia to revisit the site of S. Ann Dunham's research there. As you have read before on this blog, Dunham, who died in 1995, was President Barack Obama's mother. An anthropologist, she did her fieldwork on Javanese metal workers in the village of Kajar. Finn writes, "Dunham is still remembered in the central Javan hamlet of Kajar as a generous benefactor whose gifts of money, food and schoolbooks helped numerous villagers. Yet none of them had realised that the woman who paid several visits to research rural crafts in the 1980s had a son who was to become America’s 44th president." Duke will publish Dunham's dissertation, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia next month.

Thomas Glave Interviewed by Examiner.com

Thomas Chin, the San Francisco GLBT Literary editor for the Examiner.com, interviews Thomas Glave this week. Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, talks about writing, activism, and one of his other loves, watching ballet. Glave offers this advice to new writers: "I would say read as much as possible, as widely as possible -- and read books, not only periodicals. It is in fact ridiculous, and even arrogant, to expect to become a writer of any real merit if you don’t read. And if you don’t read, why would you expect people to read your work?"

Pittburgh Reporter Searches for Paris's Best Baguette

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Bob Hoover recently traveled to Paris in search of the perfect baguette. He took along Steven A. Kaplan's 2006 classic Good Bread is Back as his inspiration and guidebook. Kaplan, he writes, is known as "the world's authority on the social history of bread in Paris," but his critics sometimes refer to him as an "ayatollah." Hoover visits some of the bakeries Kaplan recommends and encounters "bread factionalism."