Indiana University Press blog

Win A Copy of Award-Winning 'UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens'

We're delighted to announce that UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens has won the 2017 Robert P. Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking from the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the 2018 IPPY Gold Medal for Science. To celebrate, we're giving away a free copy of the book!

Lights in the sky over Area 51. Unnatural cloud formations. A crash and a cover-up in Roswell.

These are the phenomena that spark conspiracy rants on message boards across the internet, ongoing fascination with unexplained sightings the world over, and even a campaign promise from presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to release what the U.S. government knows about alien visitors.

But Donald R. Prothero and Timothy D. Callahan are here to fight conspiracy fire with scientific fact, offering explanations for the events that lead to theories about aliens, the paranormal, and beyond. Using the basic tenets of the scientific method to take on everything from eyewitness testimony to reported sightings of UFOs, Prothero and Callahan give an impressive challenge to even the most ardent believers in the unexplained.

If the truth is out there, UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens is your first step towards finding it.

Enter your name and email address below by 11:59 pm on Thursday, May 10 for your chance to win a copy of this compelling book. 

IU Press Author Pravina Shukla Wins Teaching Award

Indiana University Press author Pravina Shukla has been recognized by Indiana University for her excellent work in the classroom. Shukla will be recognized with the 2018 President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

An accomplished scholar, Shukla has previously been honored with the Indiana University Trustee Teaching Awards in 2002, 2007, 2010, and 2016.

Shukla has been involved in the production of several books published by IU Press, working as both an author and editor on four total volumes.

Please join us in celebrating this exciting news! More information on Dr. Shukla's books is available below.

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Sacred Art

Catholic Saints and Candomble Gods in Modern Brazil

Sacred art flourishes today in northeastern Brazil, where European and African religious traditions have intersected for centuries. Professional artists create images of both the Catholic saints and the African gods of Candomblé to meet the needs of a vast market of believers and art collectors.

Over the past decade, Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla conducted intense research in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, interviewing the artists at length, photographing their processes and products, attending Catholic and Candomblé services, and finally creating a comprehensive book, governed by a deep understanding of the artists themselves.

Beginning with Edival Rosas, who carves monumental baroque statues for churches, and ending with Francisco Santos, who paints images of the gods for Candomblé terreiros, the book displays the diversity of Brazilian artistic techniques and religious interpretations. Glassie and Shukla enhance their findings with comparisons from art and religion in the United States, Nigeria, Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, and Japan and gesture toward an encompassing theology of power and beauty that brings unity into the spiritual art of the world.

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The Grace of Four Moons

Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India

Because clothing, food, and shelter are basic human needs, they provide excellent entries to cultural values and individual aesthetics. Everyone gets dressed every day, but body art has not received the attention it deserves as the most common and universal of material expressions of culture. The Grace of Four Moons aims to document the clothing decisions made by ordinary people in their everyday lives. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily in the city of Banaras, India, Pravina Shukla conceptualizes and realizes a total model for the study of body art—understood as all aesthetic modifications and supplementations to the body. Shukla urges the study of the entire process of body art, from the assembly of raw materials and the manufacture of objects, through their sale and the interactions between merchants and consumers, to the consumer's use of objects in creating personal decoration. 

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Costume

Performing Identities through Dress

What does it mean to people around the world to put on costumes to celebrate their heritage, reenact historic events, assume a role on stage, or participate in Halloween or Carnival? Self-consciously set apart from everyday dress, costume marks the divide between ordinary and extraordinary settings and enables the wearer to project a different self or special identity. Pravina Shukla offers richly detailed case studies from the United States, Brazil, and Sweden to show how individuals use costumes for social communication and to express facets of their personalities.

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The Individual and Tradition

Folkloristic Perspectives

Profiles of artists and performers from around the world form the basis of this innovative volume that explores the many ways individuals engage with, carry on, revive, and create tradition. Leading scholars in folklore studies consider how the field has addressed the connections between performer and tradition and examine theoretical issues involved in fieldwork and the analysis and dissemination of scholarship in the context of relationships with the performers. Honoring Henry Glassie and his remarkable contributions to the field of folklore, these vivid case studies exemplify the best of performer-centered ethnography.

 

 

Five IU Press Books Named 'Outstanding Academic Titles'

Choice magazine has named five books published by Indiana University Press to its list of 2017 Outstanding Academic titles.

IU Press's Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary, Encyclopedia of the Yoruba, Feeling Normal, Levinas's Ethical Politics, and Turtles as Hopeful Monsters each made the list of more than 500 titles recognized by Choice in 2017.

According to Choice editor and publisher Mark Cummings, each of these titles was selected "for their excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to the field, and their value as an important - often the first - treatment of their subject."

Scholarly titles represent only about 2% of the more than 25,000 title submitted for consideration by Choice each year, a fact that Cummings says makes each of the books selected as outstanding "truly the best of the best."

Please join us in congratulating the authors and editors behind each of these truly outstanding books!

Two IU Press Books Win MLA Prizes

Two Indiana University Press titles have been recognized with awards from the Modern Language Association.

The Varorium Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 3 was named as a co-winner of the MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition. The analysis in this work, which is based in an exhaustive study of original manuscripts and subsequent print editions of Donne's work, examines Donne's revision process and explains how early versions of his poems intermingled with later publications.

Army Film and the Avant Garde, meanwhile, has been named a co-winner of the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures. In this work, Alice Osborne Lovejoy dives deep into postwar Czechoslovak cinema, linking the Army Film studio to Czechoslovakia's art cinema and exploring the ways in which the military's own style of avant-garge filmmaking influenced and engaged with global film practices and cultures.

Please join us in recognizing and celebrating these award winning works!

'Czech Feminisms' Awarded 2017 Heldt Prize

Indiana University Press book Czech Feminisms has been awarded a 2017 Heldt Prize recognizing the work as the Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's and Gender Studies.

Edited by Iveta Jusová and Jiřina Šiklová, Czech Feminisms is a collection of essays by leading scholars, artists, and activists, explores such topics as reproductive rights, state socialist welfare provisions, Czech women’s NGOs, anarchofeminism, human trafficking, LGBT politics, masculinity, feminist art, among others.

The Association for Women in Slavic Studies, which awards the Heldt Prize, said of the book "Jusová and Šiklová have done a tremendous service to the field of women’s and gender studies through the publication of this edited volume. It allows leading Czech feminist scholars to speak in their own voice to an English-language audience. Covering history, sociology, ethnography, and politics, this collection gives readers a sense of the broad range of concerns that animate Czech women’s and gender studies."

Please join us in congratulating and celebrating the editors and contributors for their accomplishment!

'Earth As It Is' Wins Grand Prize at Great Midwest Book Festival

Earth As It Is by Jan Maher has been honored with the Grand Prize at the 2017 Great Midwest Book Festival in Chicago. 

Published in January 2017, Earth As It Is tells the story of Charlie Bader, who comes of age in 1930s Texas struggling with urges to dress in women's clothing. When his young bridge leaves him, he journeys to Chicago, then joins the military after Pearl Harbor. At the end of the conflict, he winds up in Heaven, Indiana, where poor military records have listed him as Charlene, an identity he adopts. 

Charlene opens a beauty shop where Heaven’s women safely share their stories and secrets as she shampoos, clips, curls, and combs their hair. Charlene deftly manages to keep her own story hidden and her sexual desires quiet until she falls in love with a female customer and her life begins to change.

Earth As It Is is Maher's second novel and first with Indiana University Press. It was also recognized as the winner in the General Fiction category at the 2017 Great Midwest Book Festival. Please join us in celebrating Maher's success!

IU Press Books Collect Three INDIES Awards

Three Indiana University Press were recently recognized in the annual Forward INDIES book awards.

Thousands of INDIES nominees are judged each year by a panel of 120 librarians and booksellers, and for the 2016 season nine IU Press books were named finalists, with the following three taking home hardware in their categories.

• Girl by Alona Frankel won gold in the Autobiography and Memoir category
• Congress, Presidents, and American Politics by Lee Hamilton won gold in the Political Science category
• Hopeless But Optimistic by Doug Wissing won silver in the War and Military category

You can see the full list of IU Press books up for consideration here. Congratulations to our award winners and nominees!

'Transition' Essay Featured in Best American Essays 2017

Bernard Matambo's “Working the City,” (Transition 121) was selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays 2017! This year's guest editor is best-selling essayist Leslie Jamison.

Matambo is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Oberlin College. He teaches courses in fiction, nonfiction, transitional prose forms as well as poetry and internationally-focused electives in Creative Writing.

Read Bernard Matambo’s article, “Working the City,” in issue 121 of Transition, available now on JSTOR for free.

Congratulations Bernard and the Transition team! 

 

Six IU Press books win IPPY Awards

Six books published by Indiana University Press have received national or regional medals in the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

The five national winners were as follows:

• Horned Armadillos and Rafting Monkeys by Darin A. Croft received a gold medal in the Science category.
• Hopeless But Optimistic: Journeying Through America’s Endless War in Afghanistan by Douglas A. Wissing received a silver medal in the Current Events category.
• But What If There’s No Chimney? by Emily Weisner Thompson and Mandy Hussey received a silver medal in the Holiday category.
• Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture by Catherine M. Roach received a silver medal in the Popular Culture category.
• The Milan Miracle: The Town that Hoosiers Left Behind by Bill Riley received a bronze medal in the Sports/Fitness/Recreation category.

Additionally, The Great Smoky Mountains: A Visual Journey by Lee Mandrell and DeeDee Niederhouse-Mandrell received a gold medal in the Southeast Region of the Best Regional Non-Fiction category.

Congratulations to all the award winners!

'Cuba's Racial Crucible' wins Best Book award

Cuba's Racial Crucible by Karen Y. Morrison has been selected as the winner of this year's Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize.

The Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize is awarded annually by the New England Council of Latin American Studies. The award committee offered this assessment of Morrison's work:    

Karen Morrison’s Cuba’s Racial Crucible is a transformative volume in Latin American Studies that puts forward a profoundly interdisciplinary approach to understanding the nexus between race, individual and nation by focusing on the study of familial reproduction. Cuba’s Racial Crucible is a long durée account of the ways that families are made and remembered over three centuries. Structured as a study of the sexual economy of race, the volume showcases the value of conceptual cross-pollination between cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, history, African American and Latin American studies. As Morrison traces the particular political and social contexts within which individuals act to construct and reproduce of racial categories in Cuba from the 18^th to the 20^th century she employs nuanced and dynamic conceptualizations of culture, racial categorization and institutional dynamics. The meticulously documented national and familial narratives crafted by Morrison juxtapose a surprisingly wide breadth of historical sources― such as marriage, baptismal, and paternity petition records with prose or poetry by public intellectuals― in order to highlight the ways that state-making practices coalesce with religious and secular ideologies of family formation. Asking us to rethink the ways that individuals enact selves and families whilst making both race and nation, Karen Morrison moves us miles beyond facile accounts of mestizaje that too often characterize post-colonial histories.