2024 Faculty Book Summaries and Covers
Trigonometric and Hyperbolic Generated Approximation Theory
George Anastassiou, Professor, Department of Mathematical Science
This monograph is a testimony of the impact over Computational Analysis of some new trigonometric and hyperbolic types of Taylor's formulae with integral remainders producing a rich collection of approximations of a very wide spectrum.
This volume covers perturbed neural network approximations by themselves and with their connections to Brownian motion and stochastic processes, univariate and multivariate analytical inequalities (both ordinary and fractional), Korovkin theory, and approximations by singular integrals (both univariate and multivariate cases). These results are expected to find applications in the many areas of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Analytical Inequalities, Approximation Theory, Statistics, Economics, amongst others. Thus, this treatise is suitable for researchers, graduate students, practitioners and seminars of related disciplines, and serves well as an invaluable resource for all Science and Engineering libraries.
Geology, Archeology, and Earthquakes of the Central Mississippi River Valley
Roy Van Arsdale, Emeritus Professor, Department of Earth Sciences
David Dye, Professor, Department of Earth Sciences
Roy Van Arsdale and I just published (last month) a book on the geology and archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley through the Arkansas Archeology Survey’s Popular Series (No. 9). In the book we present the geologic history of the region, including the formation of the Ouachita Mountains and the Mississippi River Valley, as well as discussing the first humans who entered the valley some 13,000 years ago and their history in the valley. We also cover the earthquakes of the New Madrid seismic zone. The book is richly illustrated, including many of our own photographs, figures, and tables. The research distills some 60 years of our combined research in the region.
Islam, Motherhood, and Discourses of Faith
Joanna Boudreaux, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Department of Sociology
How do U.S. American Muslim mothers describe and discuss their identities as mothers, wives, and Muslims? How do they conceptualize their relationships with their children, husbands, and other family members? Often, discussions of motherhood within the mainstream Muslim community do not center on actual mothers’ perspectives. This study, undertaken by a Muslim woman researcher, foregrounds the lived experiences of Muslim mothers to explore their communicative experiences of identity.
The findings of this study are based on interviews with nine U.S.-based Muslim women who shared detailed thoughts about what Islamic scripture says about motherhood, the role of culture, the rights and obligations of different family members, and details about their day-to-day lives. Hecht’s Communication Theory of Identity (CTI) framework – a flexible and useful method for understanding the relationship between ideology, identity, and personal agency – is used to identify core themes. Further, this study explores contradictions, incongruences, an disruptions between how respondents may enact (or perform) "motherhood" and their own personal feelings.
The Self and its Disorders
Shaun Gallagher, Professor, Department of Philosophy
(1) Professor Shaun Gallagher (Philosophy) authored a book entitled The Self and its Disorders (2024, Oxford University Press. The book offers an account of psychopathologies as disorders of the self. It develops an interdisciplinary approach to an 'integrative' perspective in psychiatry. In contrast to some integrative approaches that focus on narrow brain-based conceptions, or on symptomology, this book takes its bearings from embodied and enactive conceptions of human experience. Gallagher offers an understanding of the self as a pattern of processes that include bodily, experiential, affective, cognitive, intersubjective, narrative, ecological and normative factors. He provides a philosophical analysis of the notion of self-pattern; then, drawing on phenomenological, developmental, clinical and experimental evidence, he proposes a method to study the effects of psychopathologies on the self-pattern. The book includes specific discussions of schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, borderline personality disorder, and autism, among other disorders, as well as the effects of torture and solitary confinement. It also explores a variety of issues that relate to therapeutic approaches, including deep brain stimulation, meditation-based interventions, and the use of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
Out of Place (The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants)
SunAh M Laybourn, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United
States, primarily by white families. Korean adoptees figure in twenty-five percent
of US transnational adoptions and are the largest group of transracial adoptees currently
in adulthood. Despite being legally adopted, Korean adoptees' position as family members
did not automatically ensure legal, cultural, or social citizenship. Korean adoptees
routinely experience refusals of belonging, whether by state agents, laws, and regulations,
in everyday interactions, or even through media portrayals that render them invisible.
In Out of Place, SunAh M Laybourn, herself a Korean American adoptee, examines this long-term journey,
with a particular focus on the race-making process and the contradictions inherent
to the model minority myth.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with Korean adoptee adults, online surveys, and participant
observation at Korean adoptee events across the US and in Korea, Out of Place illustrates how Korean adoptees come to understand their racial positions, reconcile
competing expectations of citizenship and racial and ethnic group membership, and
actively work to redefine belonging both individually and collectively. In considering
when and how Korean adoptees have been remade, rejected, and celebrated as exceptional
citizens, Out of Place brings to the fore the features of the race-making process.
Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same
Harvey Lomax, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
This long overdue English translation of Karl Löwith's magisterial study is a major
event in Nietzsche scholarship in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Its initial
publication was extraordinary in itself―a dissident interpretation, written by a Jew,
appearing in National Socialist Germany in 1935. Since then, Löwith's book has continued
to gain recognition as one of the key texts in the German Nietzsche reception, as
well as a remarkable effort to reclaim the philosopher's work from political misappropriation.
For Löwith, the centerpiece of Nietzsche's thought is the doctrine of eternal recurrence,
a notion which Löwith, unlike Heidegger, deems incompatible with the will to power.
His careful examination of Nietzsche's cosmological theory of the infinite repetition
of a finite number of states of the world suggests the paradoxical consequences this
theory implies for human freedom. How is it possible to will the eternal recurrence
of each moment of one's life, if both this decision and the states of affairs governed
by it appear to be predestined? Löwith's book, one of the most important, if seldom
acknowledged, sources for recent Anglophone Nietzsche studies, remains a central text
for all concerned with understanding the philosopher's work.
Images
Verner D. Mitchell, Professor, Department of English
The poet William Waring Cuney (1906–1976) hails from an illustrious Afro-Texan family whose members include the charismatic politician Norris Wright Cuney (1846–1898) and his daughter, Maud Cuney Hare (1874–1936), the concert pianist and writer. Waring Cuney’s maternal line, after whom he was named, was equally eminent.
Cuney was born and raised in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from Howard University where three generations of his family studied. Despite his privileged upbringing among the city’s Black elite, Cuney embraced his family’s passionate commitment to racial uplift and civil rights; in exploring the relationship between African Americans and their environment, he was thus able to transmute into two books of poetry a broad cross section of African American life; his poems and songs explore the lives of jazz musicians, athletes, domestic and railway workers, women and children, blues singers, prisoners, sharecroppers, and soldiers. In addition, Cuney published in all the major Harlem Renaissance journals and anthologies alongside the luminaries of the period, many of whom were good friends.
Through 100 of his best poems, many never before collected or published, and a detailed biographical monograph, Images in the River: The Life and Work of Waring Cuney introduces readers to a newly recovered Harlem Renaissance poet, and to the history of a remarkable American family.
Best American Essays 2024 Anthology (Available October 2024)
Courtney Miller Santo, Assistant Professor, Department of English
Description: A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Wesley Morris and series editor Kim Dana Kupperman. “Imparting some piece of yourself—any part—is arduous and warrants some kind of commendation,” writes guest editor Wesley Morris in his introduction. Both personal and personable, the essayists in this volume use their own vulnerability to guide readers on excursions that unfold on uncomfortable edges. From contemplating the nuances of memory to exploring the complexities of family, romance, gender identity, illness, and death, Morris’s selection of essays presents a roundup of the thinkers who masterfully grapple with the issues of our time. Santo's essay "If/Then" explores the reverberations of spending a childhood preparing for the apocalypse.
Introduction to Claudia Rankine
Kathy Lou Schultz, Professor, Department of English
In this scholarly overview of the poetry and art of Claudia Rankine, Kathy Lou Schultz analyzes the various aesthetic, cultural and social influences that shape Rankine’s five books of poetry. Drawing from published interviews with Rankine and the critical reception of her work, Schultz marches methodically through each book, including the acclaimed Citizen, showing the generative importance of thinkers and writers like Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Aimé Césaire, Paul Celan, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to the poet. At the same time Schultz demonstrates the ways that Rankine’s innovations in lyric, narrative and documentary poetry and prose, photography and video, dovetail with her frank and candid delineations of the challenges presented by feminism, motherhood, mental illness, institutional racism, and social microaggressions. Historically “thick,” culturally attuned, and aesthetically broad, Introduction to Claudia Rankine is that rare monograph that will be as useful to college students as it will be to academic scholars.
Tyrone Williams, David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters, Univ. at Buffalo