Immediate and spontaneous, the blues focuses on the present moment, creating an experience of time for performer and listener. Julia Simon, professor of French, offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the forms of temporality produced by and reflected in the blues within the historical context of Jim Crow segregation, sharecropping, racist violence and migration. (Oxford University Press/Sept. 15, 2017)

Journalist Sasha Abramsky, a lecturer in the University Writing Program, sets out to uncover what things frighten us most: from terrorist attacks to illegal immigrants to the Zika virus, and posits why our fears are in many cases misplaced; how this hysteria is often based on issues of race, segregation, class and inequality; and how we cannot let it define us. (Nation Books/Sept. 5, 2017)

By Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, professor of science and technology studies, and cinema and digital media. In close readings of such films as Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique (2004), she demonstrates the ways in which the filmmakers engage and evaluate the recent reconceptualization of Europe’s borders, mythic figures and identity paradoxes. (Columbia University Press/August 2017)