Before World Literature offers an account of Arabic literary history through the lens of the reception of one of the most widely read Arabic texts of the postclassical period: the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, a twelfth-century collection of fifty trickster stories written in an elaborate and highly allusive form of prose.

Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers offers a detailed history of the newspapers that Frederick Douglass edited during his lifetime and highlights how his periodicals were collective productions. Benjamin Fagan places Black organizing at the center of the story of Douglass’s newspapers, and his newspapers at the center of the story of Black organizing.

In The Matter of Virtue, Holly A. Crocker explores what happened to virtue when late medieval and early modern English poets thought about the material body not as a tool of an empowered male agent but rather, and as women more frequently experienced it, as something fragile and open, subject but also connected to others.

Mass produced of tin-lead alloys and cheap to purchase, medieval badges were brooch-like objects displaying familiar images. Sumptuously illustrated, Medieval Badges considers all badges, whether they originated in religious or secular contexts, and highlights the ways in which badges could confer meaning and identity on their wearers.

This collective study of the James siblings—Alice, William, and Henry—lights up their shared intellectual project: showing how minds meet in a world teeming with possibilities and risks. Philosophical Siblings offers a fresh way of thinking about literary encounters, one that approaches even the most iconic texts with serious lightness.

Negotiating Mistrust examines a wide diversity of patients and healers—and interactions between them—in Niamey, Niger through the analytical prism of mistrust. Author Scott M. Youngstedt offers a holistic study of the medical landscape in Niamey by focusing on the intersections between three medical sectors: traditional, Islamic, and biomedical.

Standardizing Empire traces the rise of military-industrial capitalism. It explains how the US military’s overseas presence in places like South Korea during the Cold War led to a globalized economy, which facilitated both South Korea’s “economic miracle” and the decline of US industrial might.

The Gospel of Work and Money is the first collection to explore forms of coercive labor education as connected global phenomena across modern history and foreground the many ways that ‘work’ remains the primary pedagogical lens of capital in our present era.

Syd Carpenter (b. 1953) is a nationally recognized, Philadelphia-based ceramic artist whose work gives sculptural form to African American farming and gardening traditions. Featuring more than one hundred color images and essays by leading scholars, this retrospective catalogue presents the first comprehensive resource on her art.

Liberty’s Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment, quickly became a holding tank for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation’s promise of liberty. Reissued with a new preface that connects these early penitentiaries to our present debates over mass incarceration.