jadams23@syr.edu

Celebrating writer Walter D. Edmonds

There are few authors who define turn of the century life along the Erie Canal like Walter D. Edmonds.

Excerpt: ‘Questionable People’

In Questionable People: Inventing Modern Jewish Selves in the Russian Empire, 1860-1890, author Svetlana Natkovich focuses on Jewish intellectuals during the period of Russian Reform less as individuals in a transitionary period, instead focusing on the style and aesthetic choices that characterized and informed a movement. In the below excerpt from the book’s introduction, Natkovich explains her thesis. In the early 1860s, life looked bright and promising for Lev (Yehudah Leib) Levanda (1835–88). As a recent graduate of the Vilnius (Vilna) Rabbinical Seminary, he had secured a stable position as the expert Jew in the governor-general’s office of the Vilna…

Excerpt: Banshees, Hags, and Changelings

Molly Ferguson is an associate professor of English and affiliate faculty member in women’s and gender studies at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her new book, Banshees, Hags, and Changelings: Feminist Folklore Transformations in Irish Writing is the newest title in our Irish Studies series and is available this February. In Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel Room, narrated by five-year-old Jack, his mother “Ma” attempts to explain her kidnapping and entrapment in an eleven-by-eleven-foot shed through a story that conveys her experience through a magical, folkloric framework. Ma tells Jack a tale of a selkie ( a woman who is…

Excerpt: Castigation

The winner of Kazakhstan’s 2014 Novel of the Year, Castigation is a stunning meditation on humanity’s capacity for both destruction and transcendence

Excerpt: Crafting Marriages

In honor of Arab American Heritage Month, an excerpt from the upcoming book.

Excerpt: Mad Scholars

The following is an excerpt from Mad Scholars: Reclaiming and Reimagining the Neurodiverse Academy, edited by Melanie Jones and Shayda Kafai and published by Syracuse University Press, Copyright 2024 by Syracuse University Press. The excerpt is drawn from the introduction, written by the editors. This collection explores how our Mad selfhood is understood, articulated, and engaged through our capacity as scholars. It wonders where we might go if we embraced that overlap instead of shunning it: if we probed its depths and exploded its boundaries.” From the start, Mad Scholars has emerged from a place of hopeful, desperate imagining. What…

Excerpt: Steel and Grit

Steel and Grit: A History of the Lower Hudson Valley and the Bear Mountain Bridge explores the story behind the bridge’s construction as well as the fundraising and community-led efforts that radically reshaped the region. In this excerpt, Barbara Cali takes readers behind the scenes of the opening day celebration. The parade of cars carrying the many guests invited to the opening-day festivities for the Bear Mountain Bridge reached the eastern-approach roadway of the newly completed span just as the fifty-piece West Point Band broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The automobiles pulled to a stop, and the occupants began to…