Add these faculty titles to your summer reading list

With the spring semester and commencements completed, summer beckons with vacations and relaxing times for reading. If you are building your summer book list, here is a small sample of recent faculty publications to consider reading:

“Lake Michigan” by Daniel Borzutzky, UIC assistant professor of English and Latin American and Latino studies

The latest collection from award-winning poet Daniel Borzutzky has been named to the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize’s international shortlist. It features a series of 19 lyric poems that explore themes of economic policy, racism and militarized policing. He “imagines a prison camp located on the beaches of a Chicago that is privatized, racially segregated and overrun by a brutal police force.”

“Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future” by Roy Christopher, visiting assistant professor of communication

Roy Christopher, who was a featured panelist at this year’s edition of the South By Southwest conference, explores the parallel rise of hip-hop with cyberpunk in the 1980s and how hip-hop’s emergence led to defining 21st century culture. He argues that hip-hop DJs were the modern era’s first hackers and ultimately led the genre’s influence beyond music and new technologies, but also into areas such as language, fashion, literature and entrepreneurship.

“The Browning of the New South” by Jennifer Jones, assistant professor of sociology

Jennifer Jones’ first book manuscript examines racial change, race relations and the experiences of Mexican immigrants in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. As Latinos move to cities throughout the Southeast, she argues that shifting social relations and shared exclusion as minorities are creating black-Latino alliances rather than rivalries. Through narratives of inclusion, exclusion and interracial solidarity shared by the community’s new residents, Jones suggests the area’s demographic changes have political implications at the local, state and national levels.

“Living and Dying on the Factory Floor: From Outside In and the Inside Out” by David Ranney, professor emeritus of urban planning and policy

David Ranney’s memoir recalls his employment in a variety of factories on Chicago’s Southeast Side and in Northwest Indiana from 1976 to 1982. Among the experiences, readers learn about his time as a labor organizer and the challenges workers faced, both then and now. Ranney shares observations on several societal issues, such as race and class, when reflecting on how the region has changed over the past four decades.

“Dramatic Justice: Trial by Theater in the Age of the French Revolution” by Yann Robert, assistant professor of French and Francophone studies

Yann Robert explored the Newberry Library’s digitized collection of nearly 40,000 French Revolution pamphlets that chronicle the era’s tumultuous events through opinions expressed by the monarchy’s detractors and defenders. The materials transformed his analysis and led to the book that is considered a pioneering effort that uses a “theatrical lens” to present new histories and interpretations of the era’s key events such as the trial of Louis XVI and the Terror.