Please join us at FITZ BOOKS as we celebrate the publication of two new volumes in the Humanities to the Rescue Series, along with recent publications by Humanities Institute Faculty Fellows and HI/OVPRED Research Funding in the Arts and Humanities Awardees. Complimentary brunch fare will be served along with celebratory beverages (first drink free per guest). Free and open to the public.
New HI Humanities to the Rescue Series Releases
Modernist and Avant-Garde Sounds from Kurt Weill to Black Lives Matter
Edited by Laura Chiesa (SUNY Press, January 2024)
Resonances against Fascism explores some of the myriad ways music and, more broadly, sound have emerged from, and been mobilized to address, the urgencies of the present, from modernism to today. Taking the works and life of the German-born composer Kurt Weill as a pivotal point of departure, the collection brings together a range of critical voices, each with a singular tone, to demonstrate the pervasive force of sound in the face of fascism. Across eight essays, contributors sound out the anti-authoritarian resonances of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics from Weill to Nina Simone and Chico Buarque, to Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard, to Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and to the choral chants of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The second volume in the Humanities to the Rescue book series, a public humanities project dedicated to discussing the role of the arts and humanities today, Resonances against Fascism takes its cue from the disruptive force of music in traversing the boundaries between—and engaging readers from—modernist and avant-garde studies, critical and cultural theory, musicology and sound studies, critical race and gender studies, performance studies, and philosophy.
Laura Chiesa is Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author of Space as Storyteller: Spatial Jumps in Architecture, Critical Theory, and Literature.
Saving the Future in the Present
Edited by Victoria W. Wolcott (SUNY Press, April 2024)
“Sometimes that’s all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time.” These words were spoken by a fictional character in N. K. Jemisin’s 2019 utopian novella Emergency Skin. But the idea of saving the world through utopian imaginings has a deep and profound history. At this moment of rupture—with the related crises of the pandemic, racial uprisings, and climate change converging—Utopian Imaginings revisits this history to show how utopian thought and practice offer alternative paths to the future. The third book in the Humanities to the Rescue series, the volume examines both lived and imagined utopian communities from an interdisciplinary perspective. While attentive to the troubled and troubling elements of different spaces and collectives, Utopian Imaginings remains premised in hope, culminating in a series of inspiring exemplars of the utopian potential of the college classroom today.
Victoria W. Wolcott is Professor of History and Director of the Gender Institute at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement; Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America; and Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit.
Recent Publications by HI Faculty Fellows
Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism, by Katja Praznik (6/1/2021, University of Toronto Press)
The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision by Joseph Valente (9/15/2023, Syracuse University Press)
Difference, Sameness and DNA by Paul Vanouse (3/20/2024,Palgrave Macmillan)
Special Recognition
The Letters of Emily Dickinson, by Cristanne Miller (4/2/2024, Harvard University Press)
In recognition of SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English Cristanne Miller’s good citizenship and support of the Humanities Institute during her tenure at UB, we are pleased to include her recent publication The Letters of Emily Dickinson in this year’s New Books Celebration.
Resonances against Fascism
Utopian Imaginings
In recognition of SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English Cristanne Miller’s good citizenship and support of the Humanities Institute during her tenure at UB, we are pleased to include her recent publication The Letters of Emily Dickinson in this year’s New Books Celebration.
