This holiday, take a deep dive into medieval Germany and its power politics, or the little-known but persistent Jewish tribes of Ethiopia. Or, for something lighter, you can queue up some jazz trumpet in an homage to Clark Terry. Perhaps you’re in the mood for some poetry? Three new collections are available. While faculty scholarship takes many forms, here is a diverse selection of liberal arts books and recordings that is sure to fascinate.
The Foundations of Royal Power in Early Medieval Germany: Material Resources and Governmental Administration in a Carolingian Successor State
by David Bachrach
Boydell and Brewer (August 2022)
The Ottonians were the most powerful monarchs in Europe during the tenth and early eleventh century. However, the foundations of Ottonian royal power remain highly contested and largely misunderstood. This study challenges the dominant historiographical paradigm, arguing that the foundations of royal power under the Ottonians comprised not only their own enormous wealth, but also their unique authority and ability, inherent in the office of the king, to make use of the economic resources and labor of the broad free population and the Church.
Bruno of Merseburg’s The Saxon War
translated with introduction and notes by Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach
The Catholic University of America Press (October 2022)
Bruno, a cleric who served the archbishop of Magdeburg and subsequently the bishop of Merseburg from the 1060s to the 1080s, composed one of the most important historical works treating the tumultuous period in the history of the German kingdom in the second half of the eleventh century. Bruno's main focus is the civil wars that engulfed the kingdom during his service. However, as a historian of contemporary affairs, Bruno offers insights into politics, economics and more. This is the first English translation of this work.
For the Sake of the Song: Essays on Townes Van Zandt
edited by Anne Norton Holbrook and Dan Beller-McKenna
University of North Texas Press (July 2022)
After he died, Townes Van Zandt found the success that he sabotaged throughout his short life despite the release of 16 brilliant albums. This book collects 10 essays on Van Zandt that examine his legacy, his use of the minor key, his reception in the Austin music scene and an exploration of his relationship with Richard Dobson of the Hemmer Ridge Mountain Boys. The introduction provides an overview of Van Zandt’s literary excellence and philosophical wisdom, rare among even the best songwriters.
True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems 1998–2021
by David Blair
MadHat Press (October 2022)
One poem per page, sometimes one stanza per page, here is a poet with the range to match the twenty-first century of noise with lyric brevity, humor, horror, shifting language and consciousness. In this book, Blair collects poems from his first four books of poetry alongside unpublished lyrics and new poems that frame this as a collection with its own themes and logic.
The Music of Erika Svanoe, University of New Hampshire Wind Symphony
Andrew Boysen, conductor; with Amanda Munton, soprano, and Rob Haskins, narrator
Mark Custom Recording Company (2022)
This is the first full album of music by one of the band world’s most impressive new composers. The recording features some of Svanoe’s best known works, such as “Steampunk Suite” and “The Haunted Carousel,” alongside brand new and equally delightful pieces, like “Tutued Toucan Can-Can,” “First Suite Fanfare” and “Mary Shelley Meets Frankenstein.” Svanoe’s inventive approach is apparent throughout the album.
The Hidden Jews of Ethiopia: The Beta Israel of Kechene and North Shewa
edited by Marla Brettschneider, Malka Shabtay and Nina Judith Katz
Edwin Mellen Press (April 2022)
This book presents scholarly material introducing the world to the little-known, extraordinary and persistent Jewish communities remaining in Ethiopia as the First Temple Beta Israel Jewish Communities of Kechene and Semien Shewa. Some segments of the historic Jewish communities in Ethiopia were introduced on the world stage in the 1980s with dramatic airlifts to Israel. However, there remains a network of still largely hidden Jewish communities practicing their traditions, surviving amidst intense local forms of anti-Jewishness and struggling for recognition as legitimate Jewish communities.
Jewish Lesbian Scholarship in a Time of Change
edited by Marla Brettschneider
Routledge (July 2022)
Once a vibrant field, few works in Jewish queer studies in recent years have looked at the experiences of and scholarship on Jewish women, feminists and those identified as lesbians. Correcting a twenty-first century shift away from explicitly feminist investigations in Jewish queer and LBGTQ studies, this work signals a new trend of scholarly works in the field. The chapters span an array of genres, presenting the rich diversity of Jewish lesbians as they are, as well as of Jewish lesbian scholarship today.
Raising a Cautionary Flag: Educational Malpractice and the Professional Teacher
edited by Todd A. DeMitchell, Richard Fossey and Terri A. DeMitchell
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (October 2022)
This book explores the judicial reticence to recognize educational malpractice as a viable tort of negligence. The authors review the concept of what constitutes a professional, what is malpractice and how is it related to the professional malpractice of physicians and attorneys, and the potential responses to education malpractice. They conclude by raising a cautionary flag about breaching the judicial wall that courts have constructed against the recognition of educational malpractice lawsuits, which may now be cracking.
Art and its Observers
by Patricia Emison
Vernon Press (January 2022)
What ties western art together? This extended essay attempts to distill some of the basic ideas with which artists and observers of their art have grappled, ideas worthy of ongoing consideration and debate. The fostering of visual creativity as it has morphed from ancient Greece to the present day, the political and economic forces underpinning the commissioning and displacement of art, and the ways in which contemporary art relates to past periods of art history (and in particular, the Renaissance), are among the topics broached.
Creole Soul: Zydeco Lives
by Burt Feintuch, edited by Jeannie Banks Thomas, photographs by Gary Samson
University Press of Mississippi (November 2022)
This is an exquisitely photographed volume of interviews with contemporary zydeco musicians. Featuring the voices of zydeco’s venerable senior generation and its current agents of change, this book celebrates a musical world full of passion, energy, cowboy hats and boots, banging bass, horse trailers, joy and dazzling dance moves. Feintuch captures an important American music in the process of significant — and sometimes controversial — change.
The Geopolitics of Sectarianism in Bosnia-Herzegovina: A Social Justice Perspective
by Laurence Armand French
Edwin Mellen Press (2022)
This book provides an analysis of geopolitics, racial prejudices, and judicial bias in the case of the Sarajevo Siege and scourge of Serb atrocities. It includes reports of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo between 1991 and 1995 and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Sufferings of all People in the Srebrenica Region between 1991 and 1995.
The Voices of Clark Terry
by Chris Humphrey ’87, ‘97G and Les Harris Jr.
Chris Humphrey Music (April 2022)
This recording is a labor of love in tribute to the great late jazz trumpeter Clark Terry. Terry was one of the only musicians to play with both Duke Ellington and Count Basie’s orchestras. His sound on the trumpet and flugelhorn is immediately recognizable and his roots in the blues and soulfully felt music are deep and rich. The recording includes UNH trumpet instructor Chris Klaxton ‘07 along with piano instructor Mark Shilansky ‘92 among other UNH alumni and regional artists.
Rethinking Teacher Education: Improvement, Innovation and Change
edited by Joe L. P. Lugalla, Frederick J. Mtenzi and Samuel Andema
African Books Collective Limited (August 2022)
This collection is the result of a conference on education organized by The Aga Khan University's Institute for Educational Development, East Africa, in Uganda in 2017. The conference gathered participants from nine countries to deliberate on a cross section of factors regarding teacher education in the region and landscaping the same on global perspectives. The conference was inspired by a need to consider new systems, policies, structures and reforms to help drive sustainable education for the development of nations in the East African region.
The United Nations in the 21st Century, 6th edition
by Karen A. Mingst, Margaret P. Karns and Alynna J. Lyon
Routledge (March 2022)
This thoroughly revised and expanded sixth edition provides a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to the UN. It explores the historical, institutional, and theoretical foundations of the UN as well as major global trends and challenges facing the organization today, including changing major power dynamics, new threats to peace and security, the migration and refugee crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the existential challenges of climate change and sustainability.
Agency, Normative Systems, Artifacts, and Beliefs: Essays in Honor of Risto Hilpinen
edited by Paul McNamara, Andrew Jones and Mark Brown
Springer Nature Switzerland (2022)
The book contains a collection of chapters written by experts from the fields of philosophy, law, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence who pay tribute to Professor Risto Hilpinen's impressive work on the logic of induction, on deontic logic and epistemology, and on philosophy of science. The editors have compiled a multidisciplinary global cross-section of academic contemporaries that provides insights and perspectives on Hilpinen's influence and legacy.
De El Burlador a James Bond: Los Juegos de Don Juan (From El Burlador to James Bond: The Games of Don Juan)
edited by Carmen Garcia de la Rasilla
La Nueva Literatura Hispánica. Número 26. Valladolid: Universitas Castellae (2022)
This monograph offers a new and unique view of the Spanish myth of Don Juan in Western culture and literature, from its origins to our day. Its essays exhibit a wide range of approaches (historicist, feminist, interdisciplinary, literary, psychoanalytical, etc.) and analyze the myth through a variety of means (theatre, novel, painting, film and television). Thus the collection reveals the literary, artistic and cultural fertility of Don Juan throughout centuries and reflects on the mechanics, reasons and motivations for such a constant and universal appeal.
Some of You Will Know: Poems
by David Rivard
Arrowsmith Press (October 2022)
The wry, wise, funny and reflective poems in Rivard’s seventh book take a hard yet affectionate look at the games we play with ourselves. A delicate sense of being “within earshot” governs this book, allowing the poems to be both perishable and fundamentally timeless. Elemental claims emerge from moments that, however splendid, are merely human, as ordinary and repetitive and passing as the tides.
The Cyclops Myth and the Making of Selfhood
by Paul Robertson
Gorgias Press (February 2022)
This book explores the myth of the Cyclops across western history, and how its changing form from ancient Greece until the modern day reveals fundamental changes in each era’s elite understandings and depictions of cultural values. This myth’s distinct forms in each historical era reflect and distill wider changes occurring in the spheres of politics, philosophy, aesthetics, and social values, and as a story that persists continually across three millennia it provides a unique lens for cross-historical comparison across western thought.
No Land in Sight: Poems
by Charles Simic
Knopf (August 2022)
Leading us into a city stirring with gravediggers and beggars, lovers and dogs, Charles Simic returns with a brilliant collection full of his singular wit, dark humor and tenderheartedness. In poems that are often as spare as they are monumental, he captures the fleeting moments of modern life — peering inside pawnshop windows, brushing shoulders with strangers on the street and walking familiar cemetery rows — to uncover all the beauty and worry hiding in plain sight.
The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography
edited by Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma
Oxford University Press (November 2022)
Smith and Trzaskoma provide the first comprehensive survey of mythography from the earliest attempts to organize and comment on myths in the archaic period to late antiquity. The book provides an overview of mythographers and other major sources of mythographic material, followed by essays that explore the ways in which mythographical impulses were interconnected with other intellectual activities. Another section presents the first sustained analysis between mythography and the visual arts, while a final section takes mythography from late antiquity up into the Renaissance.
Orchestra Music of Vaclav Nelhybel, Vol. 1, University of New Hampshire Symphony and Chamber Orchestra
David Upham, conductor; featuring Elizabeth Gunlogson, clarinet, and Deborah Rentz-Moore, mezzo-soprano
Mark Custom Recording Company (2022)
Widely well known for his significant contribution to the repertoires for wind band and wind chamber music, Vaclav Nelhybel also wrote numerous and varied compositions for orchestras, including collaborative pieces such as concertos, operas and choral-orchestral works. This recording project seeks to celebrate and promote these lesser-known orchestral compositions of Nelhybel, focusing on works appropriate for more advanced educational and professional orchestras.
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Compiled By:
Susan Dumais '88 '02G | College of Liberal Arts
