Excerpts Category
The Ryman Auditorium and Architecture of Middle Tennessee
Sep. 14, 2020—Nashville has seen unprecedented growth in recent decades, and the city continues to wrestle with questions about the preservation of its historic structures. A new reissue of Architecture of Middle Tennessee—now available from Vanderbilt UP—revisits and expands upon a book that wrestled with similar questions almost half a century ago. When it was first published in 1974, Architecture...
Excerpt: Hidden Nature
Aug. 18, 2020—More than 10,000 known caves lie beneath the state of Tennessee according to the Tennessee Cave Survey, a nonprofit organization that catalogs and maps them. Thousands more riddle surrounding states. In the new book Hidden Nature: Wild Southern Caves, officially out this week from Vanderbilt UP, Michael Ray Taylor tells the story of this vast underground...
Excerpt: What the Signs Say
Jun. 15, 2020—What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn is officially out this week from Vanderbilt UP. Written by Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr, the book explores the impact of storefronts and their signage and argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation of the place known as Brooklyn,...
Excerpt: Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain
Apr. 17, 2020—Food, Texts, and Cultures in Latin America and Spain is officially out this week from Vanderbilt UP. Edited by Rafael Climent-Espino and Ana M. Gómez-Bravo, the book comprises 14 essays that showcase the eye-opening potential of a food lens within colonial studies, ethnic and racial studies, gender and sexuality studies, and studies of power dynamics,...
Excerpt: Between the Rocks and the Stars
Apr. 15, 2020—Vanderbilt UP is excited to share that we have two new books out this week. The first is Between the Rocks and the Stars: Narratives in Natural History by Stephen Daubert. Between the Rocks and the Stars dives deep into the relationships that shape the natural world. It presents a collection of vignettes from the...
Excerpt: Sex, Skulls, and Citizens
Mar. 16, 2020—Vanderbilt UP has a new book out this week—Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860–1910) by Ashley Elizabeth Kerr. Analyzing a wide variety of late-nineteenth-century sources, Sex, Skulls, and Citizens argues that Argentine scientific projects of the era were not just racial encounters, but were also conditioned by sexual relationships in...
Excerpt: Enduring Postwar
Dec. 16, 2019—This week brings the official publication date of Enduring Postwar: Yasuoka Shōtarō and Literary Memory in Japan by Kendall Heitzman. Writer Yasuoka Shōtarō (1920–2013) was perfectly situated to become Japan’s premier chronicler of the Shōwa period, the span of Japanese history corresponding to the reign of Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito) from 1926 to 1989. Over fifty...
Excerpt: Surviving the Peace
Nov. 15, 2019—Today marks the official publication date of Surviving the Peace: The Struggle for Postwar Recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina by journalist and human rights activist Peter Lippman. An exemplar of long-form, on-the-ground reporting, Surviving the Peace describes two decades of postwar life in Bosnia, specifically among those fighting for refugee rights of return. Unique in its breadth...
Eerie Excerpts
Oct. 31, 2019—This Halloween, Vanderbilt UP is celebrating the holiday with eerie excerpts from several of our books. We hope you enjoy this summoning of spirits, wailing of wind, and explication of a not-quite-murder ballad. First, we have an excerpt from Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South by Andrew...
Excerpt: Threads from the Web of Life & The Shark and the Jellyfish
Oct. 4, 2019—A popular tweet has been going around Twitter this past week that calls to mind a recent Vanderbilt UP publication: Threads from the Web of Life & The Shark and the Jellyfish by Stephen Daubert. Newly available as a tête-bêche paperback, the book offers 42 surprising stories from nature, ranging from prehistory to the present, and...