Faculty Publications
 
Samplings of books and other media from the 2003-04 academic year that were submitted to the Office of Communications.

More Than One Struggle:
The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee
Jack Dougherty, Assistant Professor and Director of Educational Studies
University of North Carolina Press, 2004
253 pages
Traditional narratives of black educational history suggest that African Americans had a unified voice concerning Brown v. Board of Education, but Dougherty counters that interpretation, demonstrating that black activists engaged in multiple, overlapping, and often conflicting strategies to advance the race by gaining greater control over schools. He tells the story of black school reform movements in Milwaukee from the 1930s to the 1990s, highlighting the multiple perspectives within each generation. In profiles of leading activists, he shows how different generations redefined the meaning of the Brown decision over time to fit the historical conditions of their particular struggles. Dougherty concludes by showing how historical perspective can shed light on contemporary debates over race and education reform.

Dāna: Giving and Getting in Pali Buddhism
Ellison Banks Findly, Professor of Religion and International Studies
Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, Delhi, 2003
432 pages
This book argues that donation (dāna) is one of the central practices of early Buddhism for, without it, Buddhism would not have survived and flourished in the many centuries of its development and expansion. Early Buddhist donation draws on older Vedic beliefs and practices, especially those involving funeral ceremonies and the ritual transfiguration of the ancestors. Buddhist relationships between donors and renunciants developed quickly into a complex web that involves material life and the views about how to attend to it. Questions of how to properly acquire and use wealth, how to properly give and receive individual and communal gifts, how to think about using and transferring merit, and what constitutes proper food, robes, lodging, and medicine are central to the “dāna contract.” The dāna system reflects the changing dynamics of life in northern India as wealth and leisure time increase and as newly powerful groups of people look around for alternative religious affiliation. Buddhist dāna’s great success is due to the early and continuing use of accommodation with other faiths as a foundational value, thus allowing the tradition to adapt to changing circumstances.

Race to the Sky:
The Wright Brothers Versus the United States Government
Stephen B. Goddard, adjunct faculty
McFarland & Company, Inc., 2003
222 pages
In the pioneering days that led up to the first successful flight, the United States government spent a great deal of money to assure that the first flyers would be Americans. This funding attracted such talented inventors as Alexander Graham Bell and Samuael Pierpont Langley. Orville and Wilbur Wright, however, refused government support, fearing strings attached, and decided to go it alone. This book follows the struggle between the Wright Brothers and the government and documents the mix of high ideals and cloak-and-dagger tactics of each side.

The Houses and Collections of the Marquis de Marigny
Alden R. Gordon, Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Art History
The Provenance Index of The Getty Research Institute, 2003
677 pages
Between 1750 and his death in 1781, the Marquis de Marigny—brother of Madame de Pompadour, courtier to Louis XV, and one of 18-century France’s important patrons of art and architecture—amassed a collection that was broad in scope, progressive in taste, and exceptional in quality and provenance. This book offers a transcription of the exhaustive inventory of Marigny’s estate—which Professor Gordon rediscovered at the Archives Nationales de France in 1982—together with an essay in which he not only sketches Marigny’s life and times but also re-creates the interiors and grounds where the paintings, statues, books, household goods, and other property listed in the inventory were displayed and used.

A Moral Ontology for a Theistic Ethic: Gathering the Nations in Love and Justice
Frank G. Kirkpatrick, Ellsworth Morton Tracy Lecturer and Professor of Religion and Dean of the First-Year Program
Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003
197 pages
This book develops a moral ontology for a theistic ethic that engages the work of contemporary moral and political philosophers and reaffirms the relevance of a theistic tradition of God’s relation to the world reflected in the fundamental teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Drawing on recent thought in the nonreligious fields of psychology and political and moral philosophy, which build around the concept of human flourishing in community, Kirkpatrick argues that a theistic ethic need not be the captive of parochial or sectarian theological camps. He proposes a common or universal ethic that transcends the fashionable ethnocentric “incommensurate differences” in morality alleged by many postmodernist deconstructionists. In the wake of religious strife post 9/11/01, the book argues for a common morality built on the inclusivity of love, community, and justice that can transcend sectarian and parochial boundaries.

Radiant Cool:
A Novel Theory of Consciousness
Dan Lloyd, Professor of Philosophy
The MIT Press, 2004
357 pages
Professor Grue is dead (or is he?). When graduate student/sleuth Miranda Sharp discovers him slumped over his keyboard, she does the sensible thing—she grabs her dissertation and runs. Little does she suspect that soon she will be probing the heart of two mysteries, trying to discover what happened to Grue and trying to resolve the profound neurophilosophical problem of consciousness. The book is a mystery thriller, but it is based on a serious and thought-provoking foundation of phenomenology, neural networks, and brain imaging. These matters are considered more deeply in a lengthy, non-fiction afterward called “The Real Firefly: Reflections on a Science of Consciousness.”

Visual Meaning the Bayeux Tapestry: Problems and Solutions n Picturing History
J. Bard McNulty, James J. Goodwin Professor of English, Emeritus
The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003
87 pages
The more than 900-year-old Bayeux Tapestry has long been admired for its vivid depiction of the invasion of England in 1066 by William the Conqueror. But scholars have been baffled by the tapestry’s apparent lack of historical accuracy. Despite the fact that its scenes show real events, the tapestry pictures some incidents that never happened, shows persons in places where they didn’t go, and mixes up the sequence of important actions. It also includes Aesop’s fables; modern histories don’t. This new book argues that the Bayeux Tapestry, far from being historically flawed, is in fact a well-conceived depiction of the conquest of England, its so-called anomalies being part of a deliberate program. To understand the tapestry’s message, McNulty says, viewers must put aside modern ideas of what constitutes legitimate history. In proposing new critical approaches to the tapestry, he cites materials not usually examined in Bayeux Tapestry criticism: editorial cartoons, accounts of Wallace Warfield Simpson and Princess Diana, interpretive methods of St. Augustine, and movie music, among others. The book also tackles the problem of the tapestry’s border images—small, marginal pictures of birds, beasts, and people embroidered above and below the main scenes of the Conquest. Many scholars have dismissed these images as random designs, unrelated to the main story. McNulty, for the first time, shows how the borders directly and meaningfully comment on the tapestry’s account of the Conquest, following a well-planned program. The Bayeux Tapestry “is a far more intellectually satisfying account than it is commonly taken to be,” McNulty says. His book gives scholars and general readers new reason to admire this priceless treasure.

Poetry Reading
Hugh Ogden, Professor of English
2003
This CD features poet Hugh Ogden reading 42 of his own poems. Ogden has published three books of poetry along with two chapbooks, and has won three Connecticut Commission on the Arts writing grants as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.


 

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