Four York University faculty members will celebrate the launch of their new books on Oct. 10 during an event hosted by the York Lanes Bookstore from 4 to 6 p.m.
The four faculty authors launching their books at the event are:
• Jody Berland, a professor in the Department of Humanities, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS), with her book Virtual Menageries
From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens and spaces are crowded with animal bodies. In Virtual Menageries, Berland examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Her richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in the formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion. By tracing previously unseen parallels across the history of exotic and digital menageries, Berland shows how and why animals came to bridge peoples, territories, and technologies in the expansion of colonial and capitalist cultures.
• Elicia Clements, an associate professor in the Departments of Humanities and English, LA&PS, with her book Virginia Woolf: Music, Sound, Language
Arguing that sound is integral to Virginia Woolf’s understanding of literature, Clements highlights how the sonorous enables Woolf to examine issues of meaning in language and art, elaborate a politics of listening, illuminate rhythmic and performative elements in her fiction, and explore how music itself provides a potential structural model that facilitates the innovation of her method in The Waves. Woolf’s investigation of the exchange between literature and music is thoroughly intermedial: her novels disclose the crevices, convergences, and conflicts that arise when one traverses the intersectionality of these two art forms, revealing, in the process, Woolf’s robust materialist feminism. This book focuses, therefore, on the conceptual, aesthetic, and political implications of the musico-literary pairing.
• Andrea Katherine Medovarski, an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities, LA&PS, with her book Settling Down and Settling Up
Comparing second generation children of immigrants in black Canadian and black British women’s writing, Settling Down and Settling Up extends discourses of diaspora and post-colonialism by expanding recent theory on movement and border crossing. While these concepts have recently gained theoretical currency, this book argues that they are not always adequate frameworks through which to understand second generation children who wish to reside “in place” in the nations of their birth. Considering migration and settlement as complex, interrelated processes that inform each other across multiple generations and geographies, Medovarski challenges the gendered constructions of nationhood and diaspora with a particular focus on Canadian and British black women writers, including Dionne Brand, Esi Edugyan, and Zadie Smith.
• Scott McLaren, associate librarian in the Department of Humanities, LA&PS, with his new book Pulpit, Press, and Politics
When American Methodist preachers first arrived in Upper Canada in the 1790s, they brought with them more than a contagious religious faith. They also brought saddlebags stuffed with books published by the New York Methodist Book Concern – North America’s first denominational publisher – to sell along their preaching circuits. Pulpit, Press, and Politics traces the expansion of this remarkable transnational market from its earliest days to the mid-nineteenth century, a period of intense religious struggle in Upper Canada marked by fiery revivals, political betrayals, and bitter church schisms.
The event is open to all, and light refreshments will be served.
Originally published on yFile