Category: Meet the Author

Dilemma after Dark: Balancing Sleep and Breastfeeding

In her newly published book, author Cecília Tomori explores a major challenge for new parents, the nighttime balance of sleep and breastfeeding. Nighttime Breastfeeding: An American Cultural Dilemma, published in October, is the result of her long-term ethnographic study alongside new parents and how they cope with the pressures of parenthood. Following, the author gives insight into this in-depth study which eventually became her book.

 

 

As an anthropologist seeking to learn about breastfeeding, I had the privilege of visiting new parents who had just returned home from the hospital after the birth of their first child. During these visits, the joy of becoming parents was visible in the way parents gazed upon one another and held their newborns in their arms. Their joy, however, was often complicated by exhaustion and uncertainty over some fundamental concerns: breastfeeding and sleeping at night.

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Mathematics, A Fundamental Communication Tool

Two days after the United States announced its intention to launch an artificial satellite, on July 31, 1956, the Soviet Union announced its intention to do the same. Sputnik 1 was launched on October 4, 1957, beating the United States and stunning people all over the world. According to Carl L. Devito’s Science, SETI, and Mathematics, we have come a long way since then. Following is the author’s reflection on his volume.

 

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Mathematics is as much a part of our humanity as music and art.

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Homage to a Historian: A Festschrift for David Warren Sabean

This post was submitted to Berghahn by the authors of Kinship, Community, and Self: Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean, forthcoming in December 2014.

 

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A Festschrift celebrates a scholar’s entire career. A collection of essays written by students or those inspired by the academic’s work, a Festschrift is typically presented to the honoree on the occasion of her or his 75th birthday.

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Lanes of Trade and Belonging in London

Though their significance in London society is not much discussed in historical study, German merchants had a major impact on social and commercial life in England from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Author Margrit Schulte Beerbühl explores this topic in The Forgotten Majority: German Merchants in London, Naturalization, and Global Trade 1660-1815. Following, the author gives a bit more insight into her love of subject and the work to turn this enthusiasm into a book.

 

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What drew you to the study of German merchants in London during this specific time frame (1660-1815)?

 

That period was a black hole in historical research. Academic studies on Germans in London ended with the closure of the Hanseatic Steelyard about 1600 and did not set in again before the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

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Religion, TV Drama, and Life in Africa

 

Television dramas set in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, offer viewers interesting commentaries on life in the African city, according to Katrien Pype. The connection between real-life and filmic melodrama, conversion narratives, Christian songs and testimonies are described in her book, The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama: Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa, now available in paperback. Following, the author gives a synopsis of two popular TV shows in Kinshasa, Kalaonga and The Heritage of Death. These descriptions are followed by clips from each serial.

 

 

 

Kalaonga

(produced between March 2004 and November 2005)

 

The serial opens in the Dark World. Baaba, the Devil, accompanied by two demons, is listening to his daughter, the siren Kalaonga.

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Origins, ‘Kaffee und Kuchen’

A look through history at gender roles in Ottoman cities from Sofia to Istanbul, Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective on Ottoman Urban History will be published later this month. Editor Nazan Maksudyan has a deep-seated interest in the topic, which is connected to her relationship with her grandmother. Below is an excerpt from the book about life in Turkey and the women’s relationship. The text is followed by a photo collection of the editor’s family, namely, her grandmother Maryam Maksudyan.

 

 

While working on putting together this volume, my intent was to have a range of essays that covered a wide array of subjects, and the final product proudly bears witness to this initial hope. Yet, when trying to prepare the introductory section and reflecting on the two keywords in the title of the book, “women” and “city,” I could not help but remember Edward Hopper’s famous painting, Chop Suey from 1929.

 

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The Road to Belonging is Paved with Charity

Catherine Trundle’s recently published volume Americans in Tuscany: Charity, Compassion, and Belonging explores the lives of American female migrants to Italy, and follows a collection of women as they navigate Tuscan society in an attempt to integrate. The author discovered that these women have used charitable acts as a road map to guide their quest to belong. Following, the author provides more information about her background and how it led her to share the stories of this migrant group.

 

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What drew you to the study of American female migrants in Italy and their quest for inclusion?

 

I had conducted previous ethnographic work on American migrants to rural New Zealand, and was fascinated with what it meant to be an American abroad – how one’s sense of nationality and citizenship gets transforms through engagements with the stereotypes that others have of the migrant self, and how ‘culture’ gets characterized and sometimes essentialized in the process.

 

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The Political Backdrop of French Film

Fifty years of French cinema get their close-up in Hugo Frey’s Nationalism and the Cinema in France: Political Mythologies and Film Events, 1945-1995, published in July. Following, the author offers readers a new angle on the volume, which is itself a fresh perspective on French film against a nationalistic backdrop.

 

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Why did you write this book? What were your original aims?

 

The motivations for undertaking this research are complicated and now date from some time ago. Having written a study of the director Louis Malle (2004), I wanted to continue to develop my knowledge of French cinema, while still connecting to my other interests in national historiography and the collective memory of the Vichy period. However, I did not want to work on a conventional book about either ‘great French films of recent times’ or indeed something that just rehashed familiar debates already presented in titles such as Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome.

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Cinematic Gazing ‘Beyond the Looking Glass’

Ana Salzberg’s newly published monograph, Beyond the Looking Glass: Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood, takes a closer look into the private and public personas of classic Hollywood’s female stars. Following, the authors shares more about her subject and offers a fresh glimpse of the “narcissism” of the female star.

 

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What drew you to the study of the female star in classic cinema? And what inspired you to research and write on this topic?

 

One of the remarkable things about golden-age stars is that you meet them virtually everywhere these days: Turner Classic Movies, DVD box-sets, biographies, bio-pics – not to mention their digitally animated counterparts in commercials. On a very immediate level that we all – not just researchers – experience, old Hollywood has new life.

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The Wounds of our Warriors

Just because one cannot see wounds does not mean they are not there. Pamela Moss and Michael J. Prince analyze war-derived psychological trauma in their co-authored volume, Weary Warriors: Power, Knowledge, and the Invisible Wounds of Soldiers. Following, the authors share their personal backgrounds and further insight into their volume.

 

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How were you drawn to the topic of invisible wounds of combatants?

 

Michael J. Prince: In a personal way, my interest in the subject of weary warriors comes from being the son of a Second World War veteran. My father served in the Royal Canadian Air Force overseas as flying officer, wireless operator and air gunner, so I grew up in a family in which these topics were, at times, discussed. In a professional way, my work on developments in welfare states highlighted the significant place of wars, soldiers, and veterans in the struggles around the formation of social programs.

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