All USF Faculty Authored Books

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Entre bestias y bellezas: raza, género e identidad en Colombia

Michael Edward Stanfield and Mateo Cardona

A lo largo de la historia, la belleza ha sido muy valorada, pues ha sido de suma importancia en los ámbitos sociales, económicos, culturales y políticos en distintas sociedades. En Colombia, la belleza de sus mujeres, conocida mundialmente, se ha convertido en una fachada para problemas profundamente arraigados en su realidad nacional. Aunque ha tenido pocas dictaduras y se ha destacado por sus gobiernos democráticos, sus abundantes recursos y su economía dinámica, en toda su historia este país nunca ha tenido un Gobierno incluyente y soberano. Además, muchos de sus ciudadanos han sido pobres y excluidos, debido a políticas elitistas que favorecen a ricos y poderosos. En este libro, Michael Edward Stanfield explora cómo ha evolucionado el concepto de belleza en la historia cultural del país, revelando las nuevas facetas de las construcciones tradicionales de género, las jerarquías raciales y sus señas de identidad. Para esto, estudia el desarrollo y la transformación del Concurso Nacional de Belleza y los más de tres mil concursos regionales que se hacen cada año en el país. Justamente porque en Colombia, una nación que se caracteriza tanto por sus altos niveles de violencia e inseguridad como por su cautivadora hermosura geográfica, cultural y femenina, la belleza no solo reina, sino que cura, distrae y, a menudo, mata.
The Epic Journey in Greek and Roman Literature

Thomas Biggs and Jessica Blum

This volume explores journeys across time and space in Greek and Latin literature, taking as its starting point the paradigm of travel offered by the epic genre. The epic journey is central to the dynamics of classical literature, offering a powerful lens through which characters, authors, and readers experience their real and imaginary worlds. The journey informs questions of identity formation, narrative development, historical emplotment, and constructions of heroism - topics that move through and beyond the story itself. The act of moving to and from 'home' - both a fixed point of spatial orientation and a transportable set of cultural values - thus represents a physical journey and an intellectual process. In exploring its many manifestations, the chapters in this collection reconceive the centrality of the epic journey across a wide variety of genres and historical contexts, from Homer to the moon.
Beyond Borders: Reflections on the Resistance & Resilience Among Immigrant Youth and Families

Flavio Bravo and Erin Brigham

An Ignatian Educator’s Response to Supporting Immigrants and Refugees

Our broken immigration system is much more than just a daily headline in the news. It has contributed to injustices that intimately affect people worldwide. From family separation at the U.S. southern border, to the detention and deportation of loved ones, to the widespread challenges that undocumented communities face, immigrants and refugees have repeatedly responded with resilience and resistance.

In this volume, the Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition at the University of San Francisco has compiled essays from educators across the Jesuit network offering testimonies, best practices, and methods on how we ought to respond to the realities of global migration with courage, compassion, and coaction.
Seeking rights from the left : gender, sexuality, and the Latin American pink tide

Elisabeth Jay Friedman

Seeking Rights from the Left offers a unique comparative assessment of left-leaning Latin American governments by examining their engagement with feminist, women's, and LGBT movements and issues. Focusing on the “Pink Tide” in eight national cases—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela—the contributors evaluate how the Left addressed gender- and sexuality-based rights through the state. Most of these governments improved the basic conditions of poor women and their families. Many significantly advanced women's representation in national legislatures. Some legalized same-sex relationships and enabled their citizens to claim their own gender identity. They also opened opportunities for feminist and LGBT movements to press forward their demands. But at the same time, these governments have largely relied on heteropatriarchal relations of power, ignoring or rejecting the more challenging elements of a social agenda and engaging in strategic trade-offs among gender and sexual rights. Moreover, the comparative examination of such rights arenas reveals that the Left's more general political and economic projects have been profoundly, if at times unintentionally, informed by traditional understandings of gender and sexuality. Contributors: Sonia E. Alvarez, María Constanza Diaz, Rachel Elfenbein, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Niki Johnson, Victoria Keller, Edurne Larracoechea Bohigas, Amy Lind, Marlise Matos, Shawnna Mullenax, Ana Laura Rodríguez Gustá, Diego Sempol, Constanza Tabbush, Gwynn Thomas, Catalina Trebisacce, Annie Wilkinson
Calling the soul back: embodied spirituality in Chicanx narrative

Christina Garcia Lopez

"This book shows how the Chicanx literary canon maps vital connections between mind, body, spirit, and soul"--Provided by publisher.

"Spirituality has consistently been present in the political and cultural counternarratives of Chicanx literature. Calling the Soul Back focuses on the embodied aspects of a spirituality integrating body, mind, and soul. Centering the relationship between embodiment and literary narrative, Christina Garcia Lopez shows narrative as healing work through which writers and readers ritually call back the soul--one's unique immaterial essence--into union with the body, counteracting the wounding fragmentation that emerged out of colonization and imperialism. These readings feature both underanalyzed and more popular works by pivotal writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Rudolfo Anaya, in addition to works by less commonly acknowledged authors. Calling the Soul Back explores the spiritual and ancestral knowledge offered in narratives of bodies in trauma, bodies engaged in ritual, grieving bodies, bodies immersed in and becoming part of nature, and dreaming bodies. Reading across narrative nonfiction, performative monologue, short fiction, fables, illustrated children's books, and a novel, Garcia Lopez asks how these narratives draw on the embodied intersections of ways of knowing and being to shift readers' consciousness regarding relationships to space, time, and natural environments. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Calling the Soul Back draws on literary and Chicanx studies scholars as well as those in religious studies, feminist studies, sociology, environmental studies, philosophy, and Indigenous studies, to reveal narrative's healing potential to bring the soul into balance with the body and mind"--Publisher's website.
Legal marijuana : perspectives on public benefits, risks and policy approaches

Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III and Mickey P. Mcgee

"The legalization of marijuana has spread rapidly throughout the U.S., from just a handful of states ten years ago to now more than half, as well as the nation's capital. This collection of essays explains the benefits and concerns, the policies and actions, and the future of this controversial issue"-- Provided by publisher
Social Justice and Israel/Palestine: foundational and contemporary debates

Aaron Hahn Tapper and Mira Sucharov

This book critically assesses a series of complex and topical debates helping readers to make sense of the politics surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Each chapter considers one topic, represented by two or three essays offered in conversation with one another. Together, these essays advance different perspectives; in some cases they are complementary and in others they are oppositional.

Topics include scholarly and activist interpretations of narratives in the context of Israel/Palestine; the concept of self-determination for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians; the debate over settler-colonialism as an appropriate framework for interpreting the history of Israel/Palestine; and questions surrounding Jewish and Palestinian refugees and the impact of displacement, among others. Through these foundational and contemporary topics, readers will be challenged to critically examine the strengths and weaknesses of each position in light of scholarly debates rooted in social justice and helped to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians in order to see a path forward toward justice for all. - from publisher
Migration for Mission: international Catholic Sisters in the United States

Mary Johnson S.N.D. de N., Mary Gautier, Patricia Wittberg S.C., and Thu T. Do L.H.C.

Patterns of migration for the purpose of religious mission are an unexamined dimension of the immigration narrative. Catholic sisters from many countries around the world come to the United States to minister and to study. Sociologists from Trinity Washington University and CARA at Georgetown University combined forces to document and understand this contemporary and historical phenomenon. Together, they located more than 4,000 "international sisters" who are currently in the United States for formation, studies, or ministry, from 83 countries spread over six continents. Through surveys, focus groups, and interviews, they heard the stories of these sisters and learned of their joys and satisfactions as well as their struggles and challenges.
This book examines the experience of these sisters in depth and offers valuable suggestions for religious institutes, Catholic dioceses and parishes, and others who benefit from their contributions. More broadly, this book also raises awareness of immigration issues at a time of great contention in the public policy debate in the United States. Illustrated with instructive graphics and tables, it is an accessible and inviting resource for academics and the media, as well as bishops, and leaders of Catholic health care, social service, education, pastoral, and philanthropic institutions.
Death under.....construction.....

Ava Koohbor

Death Under Construction is the first full-length book by Iranian-born, San Francisco-based poet/sculptor/musician Ava Koohbor. Singing loud from the intersection of Farsi and English, of emigrant memoir and concrete ode, Koohbor approaches the bewitching problem of living with astringent eye, killer ear, and paint on her hands.
Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing

Catherine H. Lusheck

Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing re-examines the early graphic practice of the preeminent northern Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640) in light of early modern traditions of eloquence, particularly as promoted in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Flemish, Neostoic circles of philologist, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Focusing on the roles that rhetorical and pedagogical considerations played in the artist’s approach to disegno during and following his formative Roman period (1600–08), this volume highlights Rubens’s high ambitions for the intimate medium of drawing as a primary site for generating meaningful and original ideas for his larger artistic enterprise. As in the Lipsian realm of writing personal letters – the humanist activity then described as a cognate activity to the practice of drawing – a Senecan approach to eclecticism, a commitment to emulation, and an Aristotelian concern for joining form to content all played important roles.

Two chapter-long studies of individual drawings serve to demonstrate the relevance of these interdisciplinary rhetorical concerns to Rubens’s early practice of drawing. Focusing on Rubens’s Medea Fleeing with Her Dead Children (Los Angeles, Getty Museum), and Kneeling Man (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), these close-looking case studies demonstrate Rubens’s commitments to creating new models of eloquent drawing and to highlighting his own status as an inimitable maker. Demonstrating the force and quality of Rubens’s intellect in the medium then most associated with the closest ideas of the artist, such designs were arguably created as more robust pedagogical and preparatory models that could help strengthen art itself for a new and often troubled age.
Leonardo's Brambles and their Afterlife in Rubens's Studies of Nature from Leonardo da Vinci: nature and architecture

Catherine H. Lusheck, Constance Moffatt, and Sara Taglialagamba

The second volume of Leonardo Studies explores a dual theme of nature and architecture, offering a wide-ranging overview of current Leonardo scholarship on these two abundant subjects. While Leonardo worked on his Treatise on Painting, he noted that understanding the physical properties of nature must precede individual projects of painting or designing buildings. The volume begins with the Trattato, and follows with physics, geology, painting that imitates architectural structure and vice-versa, and proceeds to architectural projects, questions of attribution, urban planning, and and the dissemination of Leonardo’s writings in the Trattato and its historiography. This impressive group of articles constitutes not only new research, but also a departure point for future studies on these topics.

Contributors are: Janis Bell, Andrea Bernardoni, Marco Carpiceci, Paolo Cavagnero, Fabio Colonnese, Kay Etheridge, Diane Ghirardo, Claudio Giorgione, Domenico Laurenza, Catherine Lusheck, Silvio Mara, Jill Pederson, Richard Schofield, Sara Taglialagamba, Cristiano Tessari, Marco Versiero, and Raffaella Zama
The inner work of racial justice: healing ourselves and transforming our communities through mindfulness

Rhonda V. Magee

An essential mindfulness-based approach to increase our mental and emotional capacity to heal from injustices done against us Law professor and mindfulness practitioner Rhonda Magee shows that the work of racial justice begins with ourselves. When conflict and division are everyday realities, our instincts tell us to close ranks, to find the safety of our own tribe, and to blame others. The practice of mindfulness-paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations in an open, nonjudgmental way-increases our emotional resilience, giving us the space to become less reactive and to choose how we respond to injustice. For victims of injustice, mindfulness calms our fears and helps us to exercise self-compassion. Magee shows us how to slow down and reflect on microaggressions-to hold them with some objectivity and distance-rather than bury unpleasant experiences so they have a cumulative effect over time. She helps us develop the capacity to address the fears and anxieties that would otherwise lead us to re-create patterns of separation and division. It is only by healing from the injustices done against us and dissolving our personal barriers to connection that we develop the ability to view others with compassion and to live in community with people of vastly different backgrounds and viewpoints. Incorporating mindfulness exercises, research, and Magee's hard-won insights, The Inner Work of Racial Justice offers a road map to a more peaceful world.
Democracy in Ghana: Everyday Politics in Urban Africa

Jeffrey W. Paller

Rapid urbanization and political liberalization is changing the nature of African politics and societies. This book develops a framework for the study of democracy and development that emphasizes informal institutions and the politics of belonging in the context of daily life, in contrast to the formal and electoral paradigms that dominate the social sciences. Based on fifteen months of field research including ethnographic observation, focus group interviews, and original quantitative survey analysis in Ghana, this book intervenes in major debates about public goods provision, civic participation, ethnic politics and democratization, and the future of urban sustainability in a rapidly changing world. By developing new understandings of democracy, as well as providing novel explanations for good governance and development in poor urban neighborhoods, the book transcends the narrative of a failing and corrupt Africa and charts a new way forward for the study of democracy and development.
Changemakers : African Americans in San Francisco who made a difference

Stephanie Sears and David Holler

Changemakers, written and researched by students at the University of San Francisco, documents and celebrates the lives and legacies of 96 inspiring African Americans featured on the Inspiration Murals at the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood.
Growing up with God and empire : a postcolonial analysis of "missionary kid" memoirs

Stephanie Vandrick

"This book analyzes the memoirs of 42 'missionary kids' - the children of North American Protestant missionaries in countries all over the world during the 20th century. It explores ways in which the missionary enterprise was part of the Western colonial enterprise, and ways in which a colonial mindset is unconsciously manifested in these memoirs"-- Provided by publisher
Mother Tongue Apologize

Preeti Vangani

"Preeti Vangani is, as she freely admits, riffing on the African-American poet Amiri Baraka, who once claimed that poems were useless unless they could shoot, or provide us with daggers, or serve as our fists. Pepper spray and cries for change are more humane than fists and daggers, but Vangani's urgency is no less intense than Baraka's. Her poem constantly circle back to the condition of women, both in India and the world, and call for change. She honors her mother, whose struggle with cancer she documents in a number of her poems, but she yearns for a world larger than that which her mother was not permitted to inhabit. Her yearning takes the form of meditations on love and sex, on violence, fear, joy, and death. They are poems of feminist struggle--emphatically so. But it is because, not in spite, of this that they speak so directly and so powerfully to not only to women, and not only to Indians, but to that which is most human in all of us." -- Page 7
See, Judge, Act: Catholic Social Teaching and Service Learning

Erin Brigham

Although more and more classrooms are integrating service-learning components into their curriculum, teachers and students often lack the unique pedagogical resources or frameworks for community-based learning that these courses demand.

Erin Brigham’s See, Judge, Act: Catholic Social Teaching and Service Learning, Revised Edition updates a proven text that delivers the tools needed for reflective community engagement. Designed for readers with little to no theology background, See, Judge, Act introduces the seven principles of Catholic social teaching and guides students and teachers alike to apply them to contemporary social issues. Using the see-judge-act method of analysis—seeing social situations, judging them in light of CST principles, and acting to promote justice and improve the situations of those served—this resource deftly balances thoughtful reflection with concrete application. With service-learning vignettes, reflection questions that bookend each chapter, rich recommended resources, and sidebars that introduce relevant people, events, and concepts, See, Judge, Act invites and empowers students to participate in works of justice and social change.
The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare's Queens

Carolyn E. Brown, Kavita Mudan Finn, and Valerie Schutte

Of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, fifteen include queens. This collection gives these characters their due as powerful early modern women and agents of change, bringing together new perspectives from scholars of literature, history, theater, and the fine arts. Essays span Shakespeare's career and cover a range of famous and lesser-known queens, from the furious Margaret of Anjou in the 'Henry VI' plays to the quietly powerful Hermione in 'The Winter's Tale'; from vengeful Tamora in 'Titus Andronicus' to Lady Macbeth. Early chapters situate readers in the critical concerns underpinning any discussion of Shakespeare and queenship: the ambiguous figure of Elizabeth I, and the knotty issue of gender presentation. The focus then moves to analysis of issues such as motherhood, intertextuality, and contemporary political contexts; close readings of individual plays; and investigations of rhetoric and theatricality. Featuring twenty-five chapters with a rich variety of themes and methodologies, this handbook is an invaluable reference for students and scholars, and a unique addition to the fields of Shakespeare and queenship studies.
Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS

Rose L. Chou, Annie Pho, and Charlotte Roh

Rose L. Chou and Annie Pho, series editors

Using intersectionality as a framework, this edited collection explores the experiences of women of color in library and information science (LIS). With roots in black feminism and critical race theory, intersectionality studies the ways in which multiple social and cultural identities impact individual experience. Libraries and archives idealistically portray themselves as egalitarian and neutral entities that provide information equally to everyone, yet these institutions often reflect and perpetuate societal racism, sexism, and additional forms of oppression. Women of color who work in LIS are often placed in the position of balancing the ideal of the library and archive providing good customer service and being an unbiased environment with the lived reality of receiving microaggressions and other forms of harassment on a daily basis from both colleagues and patrons. This book examines how lived experiences of social identities affect women of color and their work in LIS.

Chapter 16. Reflections on the Intersection of Publishing and Librarianship: The Experiences of Women of Color - Charlotte Roh, University of San Francisco
Inside the World of the Eunuch: A Social History of the Emperor's Servants in Qing China

Melissa S. Dale

The history of Qing palace eunuchs is defined by a tension between the role eunuchs were meant to play and the life they intended to live. This study tells the story of how a complicated and much-maligned group of people struggled to insert a degree of agency into their lives. Rulers of the Qing dynasty were determined to ensure the eunuchs' subservience and to limit their influence by imposing a management style based upon strict rules, corporal punishment, and collective responsibility. Few eunuchs wielded significant political power or lived in a lavish style during the Qing dynasty. Emasculation and employment in the palace placed eunuchs at the center of the empire, yet also subjected them to servile status and marginalization by society. Seeking more control over their lives, eunuchs serving the Qing repeatedly tested the boundaries of subservience to the emperor and the imperial court. This portrait of eunuch society reveals that Qing palace eunuchs operated within two parallel realms, one revolving around the emperor and the court by day and another among the eunuchs themselves by night where they recreated the social bonds--through drinking, gambling, and opium smoking--denied them by their palace service. Far from being the ideal servants, eunuchs proved to be a constant source of anxiety and labor challenges for the Qing court. For a long time eunuchs have simply been cast as villains in Chinese history. Inside the world of the eunuch goes beyond this misleadingly one-dimensional depiction to show how eunuchs actually lived during the Qing dynasty.
Sketch of the Artist (The Page Poets Series)

Patrick James Dunagan

Nothing believable is to be found in what I have to say.

Even when speaking to friends as intimate

as any I may have

nothing feels less relevant or of interest

than what I have to share.

I rush along much too quick.

The slowness of silently sharing

I know nothing of.

(from back cover)
Switching Sides: How a Generation of Historians Lost Sympathy for the Victims of the Salem Witch Hunt

Tony Fels

For most historians living through the fascist and communist tyrannies that culminated in World War II and the Cold War, the Salem witch trials signified the threat to truth and individual integrity posed by mass ideological movements. Work produced in this era, including Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Marion L. Starkey's The Devil in Massachusetts, left little doubt that most intellectual's sympathies lay with the twenty innocent victims who stood up to Puritan intolerance. In Switching Sides, Tony Fels traces a remarkable shift in scholarly interpretations of the Salem witch hunt from the post--World War II era up through the present. Determined to champion the common people of colonial New England, dismissive toward liberal values, and no longer instinctively wary of utopian belief systems, the leading works on the subject to emerge from 1969 through the early 2000s highlighted economic changes, social tensions, racial conflicts, and political developments that served to unsettle the accusers in the witchcraft proceedings. These interpretations, still dominant in the academic world, encourage readers to sympathize with the perpetrators of the witch hunt, while at the same time showing indifference or even hostility toward the accused. Readers will come away from Switching Sides with a sound knowledge of what is currently known about the Salem witch hunt--and pondering the relationship between works of history and the ideological influences on the historians who write them. --Book cover
Trumpism: The Politics of Gender in a Post-Propitious America

Laura Finley and Matthew Johnson

Timely and important, this collection focuses on the meaning of the 2016 presidential campaign and the election of Donald J. Trump as it relates to gender. Authored by scholars in political science, international studies, sociology, peace and conflict studies, psychiatry, and social work, as well as feminist activities from various backgrounds, chapters focus on campaigning for Hillary Clinton; how Trump won the election over a highly qualified female candidate; Trump's hyper-masculine posturing; the meaning of the election for marginalized populations; the effect of the election on survivors of sexual assault; proposed policies related to women; and how to teach and parent in the era of Trump. Further, the book offers an appendix of recommended resources for persons seeking to better understand the election and its effect on gender relations in 2016 and beyond.
In the Field: Life and Work in Cultural Anthropology

George Gmelch and Sharon Bohn Gmelch

"This book offers students an invaluable look at what cultural anthropologists do when they are in the field. Through fascinating and often entertaining, accounts of their lives and work in varied cultural settings, the authors describe the many forms fieldwork can take, the kinds of questions anthropologists ask, and the common problems they encounter. From these accounts and the experiences of the student field workers the authors have mentored over the years, In the field makes a powerful case for the value of the anthropological approach to knowledge."--Provided by publisher
Eminent Domain and Economic Growth: Perspectives on Benefits, Harms, and New Trends

Joaquin Gonzalez

Eminent domain is integral to a government’s legal ability to take private property for a public purpose. If used correctly, the owners are paid the fair market value for their property, few citizens are inconvenienced and everyone benefits. Bad-faith abuses of eminent domain typically make the front pages of news outlets, and receive news coverage from television stations, in cities throughout our nation. To educate citizens and prevent future abuse, this book exposes both the good and the bad aspects of government’s ability to use their power of eminent domain to acquire private property.