All USF Faculty Authored Books

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Female Biology

Jennifer Dever

Over twenty years ago I developed a course for the upper- level biology major at the University of San Francisco called

Female Biology. This was from what I perceived as a gap in the undergraduate biology curriculum- students were not learning about the evolutionary aspects of being female and studying the specific health-related issues unique to women. The information in the most widely used general biology textbooks written from a male perspective, focuses on research gained from male models by work conducted in male-led laboratories. There still exists a problem with a lack of adequate representation of women in biomedical research. The focus of the course is the unique biological aspects of the female sex. There is also an emphasis on the inequities experienced by female scientists. Topics covered include evolution and genetics of sex, gender identity, sexuality, reproduction, anatomy, and physiology. Additionally, an effort is made in this course to recognize disparities in healthcare across marginalized female and transgender populations.

Book available for free download in PDF and epub format - compatible with most eReaders.

Female Biology Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer A. Dever is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Baseball Rebels: the players, people, and social movements that shook up the game and changed America

Peter Dreier, Robert Elias, and Dave Zirin

In Baseball Rebels Peter Dreier and Robert Elias examine the key social challenges—racism, sexism and homophobia—that shaped society and worked their way into baseball’s culture, economics, and politics.

Since baseball emerged in the mid-1800s to become America’s pastime, the nation’s battles over race, gender, and sexuality have been reflected on the playing field, in the executive suites, in the press box, and in the community. Some of baseball’s rebels are widely recognized, but most of them are either little known or known primarily for their baseball achievements—not their political views and activism. Everyone knows the story of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color line, but less known is Sam Nahem, who opposed the racial divide in the U.S. military and organized an integrated military team that won a championship in 1945. Or Toni Stone, the first of three women who played for the Indianapolis Clowns in the previously all-male Negro Leagues. Or Dave Pallone, MLB’s first gay umpire. Many players, owners, reporters, and other activists challenged both the baseball establishment and society’s status quo.

Baseball Rebels tells stories of baseball’s reformers and radicals who were influenced by, and in turn influenced, America’s broader political and social protest movements, making the game—and society—better along the way.
Major league rebels : baseball battles over workers' rights and American empire

Robert Elias and Peter Dreier

A captivating history of the baseball reformers and revolutionaries who challenged their sport and society—and in turn helped change America.

Athletes have often used their platform to respond to and protest injustices, from Muhammad Ali and Colin Kaepernick to Billie Jean King and Megan Rapinoe. Compared to their counterparts, baseball players have often been more cautious about speaking out on controversial issues; but throughout the sport’s history, there have been many players who were willing to stand up and fight for what was right.

In Major League Rebels: Baseball Battles over Workers' Rights and American Empire, Robert Elias and Peter Dreier reveal a little-known yet important history of rebellion among professional ballplayers. These reformers took inspiration from the country’s dissenters and progressive movements, speaking and acting against abuses within their profession and their country. Elias and Dreier profile the courageous players who demanded better working conditions, battled against corporate power, and challenged America’s unjust wars, imperialism, and foreign policies, resisting the brash patriotism that many link with the “national pastime.”

American history can be seen as an ongoing battle over wealth and income inequality, corporate power versus workers’ rights, what it means to be a “patriotic” American, and the role of the United States outside its borders. For over 100 years, baseball activists have challenged the status quo, contributing to the kind of dissent that creates a more humane society. Major League Rebels tells their inspiring stories.
Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination

Mary E. Kite, Lisa S. Wagner, and Bernard E. Whitley Jr.

Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of what psychological theory and research have to say about the nature, causes, and reduction of prejudice and discrimination. It balances a detailed discussion of theories and selected research with applied examples that ensure the material is relevant to students.

This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated and addresses several interlocking themes. It first looks at the nature of prejudice and discrimination, followed by a discussion of research methods. Next come the psychological underpinnings of prejudice: the nature of stereotypes, the conditions under which stereotypes influence responses to other people, contemporary theories of prejudice, and how individuals’ values and belief systems are related to prejudice. Explored next are the development of prejudice in children and the social context of prejudice. The theme of discrimination is developed via discussions of the nature of discrimination, the experience of discrimination, and specific forms of discrimination, including gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, ability, and appearance. The concluding theme is the reduction of prejudice.

The book is accompanied by a comprehensive website featuring an Instructor Manual that contains activities and tools to help with teaching a prejudice and discrimination course; PowerPoint slides for every chapter; and a Test Bank with short answer and multiple-choice exam questions for every chapter.

This book is an essential companion for all students of prejudice and discrimination, including those in psychology, education, social work, business, communication studies, ethnic studies, and other disciplines. In addition to courses on prejudice and discrimination, this book will also appeal to those studying racism and diversity.
The Fragrant Companions: A Play About Love Between Women

Yu Li, Stephen Roddy, and Ying Wang

Two young gentry women meet by chance at a nunnery in Yangzhou, where they fall in love at first sight. After they exchange poetry and recognize each other’s literary talents, their emotional bond deepens. They conduct a mock wedding ceremony at the nunnery and hatch a plan to spend the rest of their lives together. Their schemes are stymied by a series of obstacles, but in the end the two women find an unlikely resolution—a ménage-à-trois marriage.

The Fragrant Companions is the most significant work of literature that portrays female same-sex love in the entire premodern Chinese tradition. Written in 1651 by Li Yu, one of the most inventive and irreverent literary figures of seventeenth-century China, this play is at once an unconventional romantic comedy, a barbed satire, and a sympathetic portrayal of love between women. It offers a sensitive portrait of the two women’s passion for each other, depicts their intellectual pursuits and resourcefulness, and celebrates their partial triumph over social convention. At the same time, Li caustically mocks the imperial examination system and deflates the idealized image of the male scholar.

The Fragrant Companions is both an indispensable source for students and scholars of gender and sexuality in premodern China and a compelling work of literature for all readers interested in China’s rich theatrical traditions
Black Feminist Sociology: perspectives and praxis

Zakiya Luna and Whitney N Laster Pirtle

Black Feminist Sociology offers new writings by established and emerging scholars working in a Black feminist tradition. The book centers Black feminist sociology (BFS) within the sociology canon and widens is to feature Black feminist sociologists both outside the US and the academy. Inspired by a BFS lens, the essays are critical, personal, political and oriented toward social justice. Key themes include the origins of BFS, expositions of BFS orientations to research that extend disciplinary norms, and contradictions of the pleasures and costs of such an approach both academically and personally. Authors explore their own sociological legacy of intellectual development to raise critical questions of intellectual thought and self-reflexivity. The book highlights the dynamism of BFS so future generations of scholars can expand upon and beyond the book’s key themes.
Defining Excellence in Simulation Programs

Juli C. Maxworthy, Janice C. Palaganas, Chad A. Epps, Yasuharu Okuda, and Mary E. Mancini

Official publication of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare. This text meets the needs of the increasing numbers of healthcare practitioners, researchers, and educators using simulation techniques for education, assessment, and research. Provides clear definitions and best practices for the many types of simulation programs. It adeptly covers all areas of program management, including staffing, funding, equipment, and education models. Definitive guide to designing, building, and implementing successful cost-effective research-based simulation programs.
Rock Tao

David Meltzer, Patrick James Dunagan, and Marina Lazzara

Edited by Patrick James Dunagan. ROCK TAO is a rambling cohesive rock-n-roll poetics diary originally written in 1965 as Meltzer listened to KEWB in San Francisco transcribing lyrics of top hit songs. Along the way, he samples scientists, philosophers, psychologists, musicians, starlets... figures who defined what the sixties would come to be and how they would be remembered. ROCK TAO is penetrating in its critical view of the consumer culture taking shape in America. Meltzer said, "...I began examining what is famous in America as a way to sight those archetypal inventions peculiar to the land." He presciently anticipated the homogenizing walmartification of how the country would develop over the next 50 years.
Person to Person Peacebuilding, Intercultural Communication and English Language Teaching : Voices from the Virtual Intercultural Borderlands

Amy Jo Minett, Sarah E. Dietrich, and Didem Ekici

This book maps the discursive terrain and potential of person to person peacebuilding as it intersects with, and is embedded in, intercultural communication. It foregrounds the voices and discourses of participants who came together in the virtual intercultural borderlands of online exchange through a service-learning project with a non-profit organization which focused on peace through education in Afghanistan, primarily through English language tutoring. By analyzing the voices and perspectives of US-based tutors who are pre-service teachers of English as an Additional Language, in equal measure with the voices and perspectives of adult English learners in Afghanistan, the authors examine how intercultural interactants begin to work as peacebuilders. The participants describe the profound transformations they undergo throughout their intercultural tutoring journeys, transformations which evidence three dimensions of person to person peacebuilding: the personal, relational and structural. Inspired by these voices, the book further explores ways teachers and teacher educators of language and intercultural communication can more deliberately leverage the affordance of peacebuilding, whether face to face or in the virtual intercultural borderlands of online exchange.
Western Sahara: war, nationalism, and conflict irresolution

Stephen Zunes and Jacob Mundy

The Western Sahara conflict has proven to be one of the most protracted and intractable struggles facing the international community. Pitting local nationalist determination against Moroccan territorial ambitions, the dispute is further complicated by regional tensions with Algeria and the geo-strategic concerns of major global players, including the United States, France, and the territory’s former colonial ruler, Spain. Since the early 1990s, the UN Security Council has failed to find a formula that will delicately balance these interests against Western Sahara’s long-denied right to a self-determination referendum as one of the last UN-recognized colonies. The widely-lauded first edition was the first book-length treatment of the issue in the previous two decades. Zunes and Mundy examined the origins, evolution, and resilience of the Western Sahara conflict, deploying a diverse array of sources and firsthand knowledge of the region gained from multiple research visits. Shifting geographical frames—local, regional, and international—provided for a robust analysis of the stakes involved.

With the renewal of the armed conflict, continued diplomatic stalemate, growing waves of nonviolent resistance in the occupied territory, and the recent U.S. recognition of Morocco’s annexation, this new revised and expanded paperback edition brings us up-to-date on a long-forgotten conflict that is finally capturing the world’s attention.
A Symmetry: poems

Ari Banias

Unsettling the myth of an ordered reality through uncanny repetitions and elliptical inquiry, A Symmetry considers the inscriptions of nationhood, language, and ancestral memory. A window washer wields an impossibly long mop in the mirrored pane of a Greek government building; strangers mesmerize us while they fold sheets into perfect corners. "Artists who design border wall prototypes are artists / who say they 'leave politics out of it.'" In meditative wanderings and compressed, enigmatic lyrics, Ari Banias probes the sometimes-touching, often-violent mundane to draw out the intimate, social proportions of our material world.
The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: videography, aesthetics, and politics in Israel and Palestine

Liat Berdugo

Drawing on unprecedented access to the video archives of B'Tselem, an Israeli NGO that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, Liat Berdugo lays out an argument for a visual studies approach to videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine.

Using video stills as core material, it discusses the politics of videographic evidence in Israel/Palestine by demonstrating that the conflict is one that has produced an inequality of visual rights. The book highlights visual surveillance and counter surveillance at the citizen level, how Palestinians originally filmed to “shoot back” at Israelis, who were armed with shooting power via weapons as the occupying force. It also traces how Israeli private citizens began filming back at Palestinians with their own cameras, including personal cell phone cameras, thus creating a simultaneous, echoing counter surveillance.

Complicating the notion that visual evidence alone can secure justice, the Weaponized Camera in The Middle East asks how what is seen, but also who is seeing, affects how conflicts are visually recorded. Drawing on over 5,000 hours of footage, only a fraction of which is easily accessible to the public domain, this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies and battlegrounds of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
An OER Collection of Composer Biographies

Giacomo Fiore and Kumiko Uyeda

A collection of 25 composer biographies, with illustrations and photographs. Composer birth dates range from 1098 to 1982.

This work was funded by a 2021 Gleeson Library OER Faculty Grant.

It is published under an Open License: CC BY-NC-SA.
An OER Collection of Primary Sources for Western Art Music

Giacomo Fiore and Kumiko Uyeda

This collection of primary sources is for An OER Collection of Composer Biographies.

It was funded by a 2021 Gleeson Library OER Faculty Grant and is published under an Open License: CC BY-NC-SA.
An OER Western Art Glossary

Giacomo Fiore and Kumiko Uyeda

This glossary is for An OER Collection of Composter Biographies.

It was funded by a 2020 Gleeson Library Grant and is published under an Open License: CC BY-NC-SA.
Educating for Peace and Human Rights: an introduction

Maria Hantzopoulos and Monisha Bajaj

Over the past five decades, both peace education and human rights education have emerged distinctly and separately as global fields of scholarship and practice. Promoted through multiple efforts (the United Nations, civil society, grassroots educators), both of these fields consider content, processes, and educational structures that seek to dismantle various forms of violence, as well as move towards cultures of peace, justice and human rights. Educating for Peace and Human Rights Education introduces students and educators to the challenges and possibilities of implementing peace and human rights education in diverse global sites. The book untangles the core concepts that define both fields, unpacking their histories and conceptual foundations, and presents models and key research findings to help consider their intersections, convergences, and divergences. Including an annotated bibliography, the book sets forth a comprehensive research agenda, allowing emerging and seasoned scholars the opportunity to situate their research in conversation with the global fields of peace and human rights education.
Shifters

Randy James

Part memorial, part snapshot, part fancy, Shifters is a testament to the self and the act of seeing. A meditation on Blackness and queerness under duress, Shifters reacts to the power of the moment and finds joy in the power of the actor and the witness.
Ghosts, City, Sea

Yin Wang and Andrea Lingenfelter

A bilingual career-spanning selection of poems by Wang Yin, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter. With GHOSTS CITY SEA, Wang Yin and Lingenfelter have assembled three sets of poems written between 1987 and 2015 that showcase the depth and breadth of a cosmopolitan poet whose work ranges through his native Shanghai and outward to achieve a unique synthesis of influences and insights across cultures and eras, both Chinese and otherwise. This edition features a set of Wang Yin's photographs, documenting both his travels and Shanghai's contemporary art scene.
Revival Season

Monica West

Every summer, fifteen-year-old Miriam Horton and her family pack themselves tight in their old minivan and travel through small southern towns for revival season: the time when Miriam’s father—one of the South’s most famous preachers—holds massive healing services for people desperate to be cured of ailments and disease.This summer, the revival season doesn’t go as planned, and after one service in which Reverend Horton’s healing powers are tested like never before, Miriam witnesses a shocking act of violence that shakes her belief in her father—and in her faith.

When the Hortons return home, Miriam’s confusion only grows as she discovers she might have the power to heal—even though her father and the church have always made it clear that such power is denied to women. Over the course of the next year, Miriam must decide between her faith, her family, and her newfound power that might be able to save others, but, if discovered by her father, could destroy Miriam.

Celebrating both feminism and faith, Revival Season is a story of spiritual awakening and disillusionment in a Southern, black, Evangelical community. Monica West’s transporting coming-of-age novel explores complicated family and what it means to live among the community of the faithful.
A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

Rachel Brahinsky and Alexander Tarr

An alternative history and geography of the Bay Area that highlights sites of oppression, resistance, and transformation.

A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area looks beyond the mythologized image of San Francisco to the places where collective struggle has built the region. Countering romanticized commercial narratives about the Bay Area, geographers Rachel Brahinsky and Alexander Tarr highlight the cultural and economic landscape of indigenous resistance to colonial rule, radical interracial and cross-class organizing against housing discrimination and police violence, young people demanding economically and ecologically sustainable futures, and the often-unrecognized labor of farmworkers and everyday people.

The book asks who had—and who has—the power to shape the geography of one of the most watched regions in the world. As Silicon Valley's wealth dramatically transforms the look and feel of every corner of the region, like bankers' wealth did in the past, what do we need to remember about the people and places that have made the Bay Area, with its rich political legacies?

With over 100 sites that you can visit and learn from, this book demonstrates critical ways of reading the landscape itself for clues to these histories. A useful companion for travelers, educators, or longtime residents, this guide links multicultural streets and lush hills to suburban cul-de-sacs and wetlands, stretching from the North Bay to the South Bay, from the East Bay to San Francisco. Original maps help guide readers, and thematic tours offer starting points for creating your own routes through the region.
A Way of Proceeding: Ethical Decision-Making for Management Students at Jesuit Colleges

Kimberly Rae Connor PhD

This "textbook" includes assignments (group and individual) suggested readings, and lectures for a 7 week course in Ethical Decision making. Although it was designed for an MBA program, the content has been adapted for other students and programs. Also included in the appendix is the full text for Management Exercises, a professional and spiritual development formation program based on the Spiritual Exercises that accompanies students and can be offered as a co-curricular or for credit. The content is designed to be built online on a Canvas platform.

Kimberly Rae Conner is a Professor of Ethics in the School of Management at the University of San Francisco. She has a PhD in religion and literature and has published widely on African American religious life and cultural production, multicultural pedagogy, and Ignatian Spirituality.

This work was made possible by the Open Education pilot grant at Gleeson Library | Geschke Center.
Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California

Patrick James Dunagan, Marina Lazzara, and Nicholas James Whittington

'Roots and Routes' gathers essays, talks, interviews, statements, notes, and other prose writings by poets who studied and/or taught at the New College of California’s Masters in Poetics program over the course of its nearly 30-year existence. The collection evokes a much-needed anti-hierarchical, even anarchic, pedagogy in poetry, poetics, and the literary arts, and is part of a general reevaluation of standard higher education models on Creative Writing. As such it will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars interested in America’s recent literary history, as well as to poets outside the academy and the general reader interested in US poetry and poetics.
Patrice Lumumba: an anthology of writers on black liberation

Michaela Mullin, Noelia Cerna, Aqueila M. Lewis-Ross, Tureeda Mikell, Elena Serrano, and Tongo Eisen-Martin

The Patrice Lumumba anthology collects the liberatory words of 24 authors, many of whom call Oakland, California, home. Herein are explorations of contemporary colonization, the racial/physical/mental/physic abuses of power, locations of home, alternative modes of work, the health profession, and the healing powers of history. These poems are a call to action for collective change—now.
Disruptive Transport: Driverless Cars, Transport Innovation and the Sustainable City of Tomorrow

William Riggs

With the rise of shared and networked vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and other transportation technologies, technological change is outpacing urban planning and policy. Whether urban planners and policy makers like it or not, these transformations will in turn result in profound changes to streets, land use, and cities. But smarter transportation may not necessarily translate into greater sustainability or equity. There are clear opportunities to shape advances in transportation, and to harness them to reshape cities and improve the socio-economic health of cities and residents. There are opportunities to reduce collisions and improve access to healthcare for those who need it most—particularly high-cost, high-need individuals at the younger and older ends of the age spectrum. There is also potential to connect individuals to jobs and change the way cities organize space and optimize trips.

To date, very little discussion has centered around the job and social implications of this technology. Further, policy dialogue on future transport has lagged—particularly in the arenas of sustainability and social justice. Little work has been done on decision-making in this high uncertainty environment–a deficiency that is concerning given that land use and transportation actions have long and lagging timelines.

This is one of the first books to explore the impact that emerging transport technology is having on cities and their residents, and how policy is needed to shape the cities that we want to have in the future. The book contains a selection of contributions based on the most advanced empirical research, and case studies for how future transport can be harnessed to improve urban sustainability and justice.
Frida in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist

Celia Stahr

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo adored adventure. In November, 1930, she was thrilled to realize her dream of traveling to the United States to live in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York. Still, leaving her family and her country for the first time was monumental.

Only twenty-three and newly married to the already world-famous forty-three-year-old Diego Rivera, she was at a crossroads in her life and this new place, one filled with magnificent beauty, horrific poverty, racial tension, anti-Semitism, ethnic diversity, bland Midwestern food, and a thriving music scene, pushed Frida in unexpected directions. Shifts in her style of painting began to appear, cracks in her marriage widened, and tragedy struck, twice while she was living in Detroit.

Frida in America is the first in-depth biography of these formative years spent in Gringolandia, a place Frida couldn't always understand. But it's precisely her feelings of being a stranger in a strange land that fueled her creative passions and an even stronger sense of Mexican identity. With vivid detail, Frida in America recreates the pivotal journey that made Senora Rivera the world famous Frida Kahlo.