The SOF/Heyman Bookshelf

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

Peace is a universal ideal, but its political life is a great paradox: "peace" is the opposite of war, but it also enables war. If peace is the elimination of war, then what does it mean to wage war for the sake of peace? What does peace mean when some say that they are committed to it but that their enemies do not value it? Why is it that associating peace with other ideals, like justice, friendship, security, and law, does little to distance peace from war? Although political theory has dealt extensively with most major concepts that today define "the political" it has paid relatively scant critical attention to peace, the very concept that is often said to be the major aim and ideal of humanity. In War for Peace, Murad Idris looks at the ways that peace has been treated across the writings of ten thinkers from ancient and modern political thought, from Plato to Immanuel Kant and Sayyid Qutb, to produce an original and striking account of what peace means and how it works. Idris argues that peace is parasitical in that the addition of other ideals into peace, such as law, security, and friendship, reduces it to consensus and actually facilitates war; it is provincial in that its universalized content reflects particularistic desires and fears, constructions of difference, and hierarchies within humanity; and it is polemical, in that its idealization is not only the product of antagonisms, but also enables hostility. War for Peace uncovers the basis of peace's moralities and the political functions of its idealizations, historically and into the present. This bold and ambitious book confronts readers with the impurity of peace as an ideal, and the pressing need to think beyond universal peace.

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites?

In this new book, Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided“mistrust of experts” but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance onscience and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased suspicion, skepticismand dismissal of scientific findings, expert opinion or even whole branches of investigation, on the other. The current mistrust of experts, Eyal argues, is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The “scientization of politics,” of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, specifically of regulatory and policy science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture. Eyal demonstrates that the strategies designed to respond to the crisis - from an increased emphasis on inclusion of laypeople and stakeholders in scientific research and regulatory decision-making to approaches seeking to generate trust by relying on objective procedures such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) – end up exacerbating the crisis, while undermining and contradicting one another.

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites?

In this new book, Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided“mistrust of experts” but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance onscience and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased suspicion, skepticismand dismissal of scientific findings, expert opinion or even whole branches of investigation, on the other. The current mistrust of experts, Eyal argues, is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The “scientization of politics,” of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, specifically of regulatory and policy science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture. Eyal demonstrates that the strategies designed to respond to the crisis - from an increased emphasis on inclusion of laypeople and stakeholders in scientific research and regulatory decision-making to approaches seeking to generate trust by relying on objective procedures such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) – end up exacerbating the crisis, while undermining and contradicting one another.

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it enter into our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied listener, created by the moving bodies of participants engaged in musical activities. Author Mariusz Kozak describes musical time as something that emerges when the listener enacts her implicit knowledge about "how music goes," from deliberate inactivity, to such simple actions as tapping her foot in time with the beat, to dancing in a way that engages her entire body.

Kozak explores this idea in the context of modernist and postmodernist musical styles, where composers create unfamiliar and idiosyncratic temporal experiences, blur the line between spectatorship and participation, and challenge conventional notions of form. Basing his discussion on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and on the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, Kozak examines different aspects of musical structure through the lens of embodied cognition and what phenomenologists call "lived time." A bold new theory derived from an unprecedented fusion of research perspectives, Enacting Musical Time will engage scholars across a range of disciplines, from music theory, music cognition, cognitive science, continental philosophy, and social anthropology.

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it enter into our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied listener, created by the moving bodies of participants engaged in musical activities. Author Mariusz Kozak describes musical time as something that emerges when the listener enacts her implicit knowledge about "how music goes," from deliberate inactivity, to such simple actions as tapping her foot in time with the beat, to dancing in a way that engages her entire body.

Kozak explores this idea in the context of modernist and postmodernist musical styles, where composers create unfamiliar and idiosyncratic temporal experiences, blur the line between spectatorship and participation, and challenge conventional notions of form. Basing his discussion on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and on the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson, Kozak examines different aspects of musical structure through the lens of embodied cognition and what phenomenologists call "lived time." A bold new theory derived from an unprecedented fusion of research perspectives, Enacting Musical Time will engage scholars across a range of disciplines, from music theory, music cognition, cognitive science, continental philosophy, and social anthropology.

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming.The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale.

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming.The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale.

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped across Union lines, upending emancipation policies that extended only to enslaved men. The Union’s response was to classify fugitive black women as “soldiers’ wives,” regardless of whether they were married—offering them some protection but placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. In the war’s aftermath, the Confederate grande dame Gertrude Thomas wrestled with her loss of status and of her former slaves. War, emancipation, and economic devastation affected her family intimately, and through her life McCurry helps us see how fundamental the changes of Reconstruction were.

Women’s War dismantles the long-standing fiction that women are outside of war and shows that they were indispensable actors in the Civil War, as they have been—and continue to be—in all wars.

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped across Union lines, upending emancipation policies that extended only to enslaved men. The Union’s response was to classify fugitive black women as “soldiers’ wives,” regardless of whether they were married—offering them some protection but placing new obstacles on their path to freedom. In the war’s aftermath, the Confederate grande dame Gertrude Thomas wrestled with her loss of status and of her former slaves. War, emancipation, and economic devastation affected her family intimately, and through her life McCurry helps us see how fundamental the changes of Reconstruction were.

Women’s War dismantles the long-standing fiction that women are outside of war and shows that they were indispensable actors in the Civil War, as they have been—and continue to be—in all wars.

New Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.

From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even in repressive historical and political contexts. School Photos in Liquid Time offers a closer look at this genre of vernacular photography, tracing how photography advances ideologies of social assimilation as well as those of hierarchy and exclusion. In Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s deft analysis, school photographs reveal connections between the histories of persecuted subjects in different national and imperial centers.