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Our emeriti publish in a wide range of fields. Browse the most recent publications below and find even more in the publications archive.
James R. Barrett
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A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance
By David Montgomery, Edited by Shelton Stromquist and James R. Barrett
A foundational figure in modern labor history, David Montgomery both redefined and reoriented the field. This collection of Montgomery’s most important published and unpublished articles and essays draws from the historian’s entire five-decade career.
Po-Shek Fu
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Hong Kong Media and Asia’s Cold War
Hong Kong Media and Asia's Cold War discusses how China, Taiwan, and the U.S. fought to mobilize Hong Kong cinema and print media to sway ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia and across the world. Central to this propaganda and psychological warfare was the emigre media industry. This period was the “golden age” of Mandarin cinema and popular culture. Throughout the 1967 Riots and the 1970s, the emergence of a new, local-born generation challenged and reshaped the Cold War networks of émigré cultural production, contributing to the gradual decline of Hong Kong's cultural Cold War. Through untapped archival materials, contemporary sources, and numerous interviews with filmmakers, magazine editors, and student activists, Po-Shek Fu explores how global conflicts were localized and intertwined with myriad local historical experiences and cultural formation.
John A. Lynn II
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"John Lynn has again applied his admirable talents to an often neglected aspect of warfare, this time looking at the evolution of policies and practices dealing with prisoners and detainees. I share his admiration for the example of Major General Douglas Stone in Iraq, and also agree very much that the challenges of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism may indeed re-emerge despite contrary official expectations. This detailed analysis should be read by all future policy makers faced with the complexities of modern conflict and its impacts."-- Conrad Crane, author of Cassandra in Oz: Counterinsurgency and Future War
Megan McLaughlin
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What Today Withholds: Autism and Human Rights in America
In What Today Withholds: Autism and Human Rights in America, Megan McLaughlin takes us on a harrowing journey through the institutions that neglect, reject, demean, punish, torture, and even kill autistic people in the United States. Her book reveals autistics' appallingly short life expectancy, the discrimination they face as they go about their everyday lives, and the needless cruelties they endure from early childhood on. What lies behind these abuses? McLaughlin argues that it is our society's continuing refusal to accept autistics as fully human.
Winton U. Solberg
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Edmund J. James and the Making of the Modern University of Illinois, 1904-1920
(2024 University of Illinois Press)
In 1904, Edmund J. James inherited the leadership of an educational institution in search of an identity. His sixteen-year tenure transformed the University of Illinois from an industrial college to a major state university that fulfilled his vision of a center for scientific investigation. The authoritative conclusion to a four-part history, Edmund J. James and the Making of the Modern University of Illinois, 1904–1920 tells the story of one man’s mission to create a university worthy of the state of Illinois.
Mark D. Steinberg
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Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay: Sex, Crime, Violence, and Nightlife in the Modern City
(2025 Bloomsbury)
Using public storytelling as driving force, this book explores everyday social moralities relating to stories of sex, crime, violence, and nightlife in the 1920s city space. Focusing on capitalist New York, communist Odessa, and colonial Bombay, Mark D. Steinberg taps in to the global dimension of complex everyday moral anxiety that was prevalent in a vital and troubled decade. Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay compares and connects stories of the street in three compelling cosmopolitan port cities. It offers novel insights into significant and varied areas of study, including city life, sex, prostitution, jazz, dancing, gangsters, criminal undergrounds, cinema, ethnic and racial experiences and conflicts, prohibition and drinking, street violence, 'hooliganism' and other forms of 'deviance' in the contexts of capitalism, colonialism, communism, and nationalism.
Maria Todorova
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The Balkans: Mission Possible
(2025 Mandelbaum verlag)
In her book The Balkans: Mission Possible, Maria Todorova takes stock of decades of research on the Balkans. The book, which can be read as a companion volume to the author's definitive work Inventing the Balkans, consists of three parts, whose titles are inspired by the action film series Mission Impossible. The first part traces the Balkans' origins and decline, as well as the fallout from this development, and addresses some of the failures and lessons learned over the past decades. The second part describes the various approaches to capturing this moving object (dead reckoning), focusing in particular on the question of the suitability of post- and decoloniality as recent additions to Balkan epistemology. In the third part (rogue nation), the power and pitfalls of framing are demonstrated using short biographies of relatively unknown people from Bulgaria.