New Reference Books: Spring 2020

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology is the most complete reference resource for the field of anthropology and interrelated areas, providing an authoritative and expert overview of the concepts, research, and techniques that together define the discipline. Under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Hilary Callan former director of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2000-2010) and fourteen internationally respected voices acting as Associate Editors, the Encyclopedia features contributions from a team of over 800 international scholars making this a work of unparalleled depth and breadth of knowledge. Over 1,000 entries, ranging from concise summaries to longer writings, present the reader with in-depth discussions of hundreds of key topics, including: ecology, human evolution, gender, health, language and education, kinship, politics, and power, as well as biographical entries of many of the world's most influential founding anthropologists. Organized alphabetically and written for both the specialist and the general reader, the Encyclopedia is a landmark reference resource for students and scholars engaged within the broad and dynamic field of anthropology, and those studying and working within the related disciplines of psychology, medicine, religious studies, and sociology. This work is also available as an online resource at www.encyclopediaofanthropology.com.

The SIPRI Yearbook is as an authoritative and independent source of data and analysis on armaments, disarmament and international security. It provides an overview of developments in international security, weapons and technology, military expenditure, arms production and the arms trade, and armed conflicts and conflict management, along with efforts to control conventional, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.This 50th edition of the SIPRI Yearbook covers developments during 2018, including- Armed conflicts and conflict management, with an overview of armed conflicts and peace processes as well as a focus on global and regional trends in peace operations, Military expenditure, international arms transfers and developments in arms production, World nuclear forces, with an overview of each of the nine nuclear-armed states and their nuclear modernization programmes- Nuclear arms control, featuring North Korean-US nuclear diplomacy, developments in the INF Treaty and Russian-US nuclear arms control and disarmament, and implementation of Iran's nuclear deal, Chemical and biological security threats, including the investigation of allegations of chemical weapon use in the Middle East and the attempted assassination in the United Kingdom, Conventional arms control, with a focus on global instruments, including efforts to regulate lethal autonomous weapon systems and explosive weapons in populated areas, and dialogue on international cyber security, Dual-use and arms trade controls, including developments in the Arms Trade Treaty, multilateral arms embargoes and export control regimes, including the challenges of seeking to control transfers of technology as well as annexes listing arms control and disarmament agreements, international security cooperation bodies, and key events in 2018.

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) encompassed a group of artists, musicians, novelists, and playwrights whose work combined innovative approaches to literature, film, music, visual arts, and theatre. With a heightened consciousness of black agency and autonomy along with the radical politics of the civil rights movement, the Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers these figures represented a collective effort to defy the status quo of American life and culture. Between the late 1950s and the end of the 1970s, the movement produced some of America's most original and controversial artists and intellectuals. In Encyclopedia of the Blacks Arts Movement, Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis have collected essays on the key figures of the movement, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, Sun Ra, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, and Archie Shepp. Additional entries focus on Black Theatre magazine, the Negro Ensemble Company, lesser known individuals including Kathleen Collins, Tom Dent, Bill Gunn, June Jordan, and Barbara Ann Teer and groups, such as AfriCOBRA and the New York Umbra Poetry Workshop. The Black Arts Movement represented the most prolific expression of African American literature since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Featuring essays by contemporary scholars and rare photographs of BAM artists, Encyclopedia of the Blacks Arts Movement is an essential reference for students and scholars of twentieth-century American literature and African American cultural studies.

This reference investigates the role of landscape in popular works and in doing so explores the time in which they were written. Literary Geography: An Encyclopedia of Real and Imagined Settings is an authoritative guide for students, teachers, and avid readers who seek to understand the importance of setting in interpreting works of literature, including poetry. By examining how authors and poets shaped their literary landscapes in such works as The Great Gatsby and Nineteen Eighty-Four, readers will discover historical, political, and cultural context hidden within the words of their favorite reads. The alphabetically arranged entries provide easy access to analysis of some of the most well-known and frequently assigned pieces of literature and poetry. Entries begin with a brief introduction to the featured piece of literature and then answer the questions: "How is literary landscape used to shape the story?"; "How is the literary landscape imbued with the geographical, political, cultural, and historical context of the author's contemporary world, whether purposeful or not?" Pop-up boxes provide quotes about literary landscapes throughout the book, and an appendix takes a brief look at the places writers congregated and that inspired them. A comprehensive scholarly bibliography of secondary sources pertaining to mapping, physical and cultural geography, ecocriticism, and the role of nature in literature rounds out the work. Discusses books and poems covered on the AP English Literature and Composition exam, the most-assigned pieces of literature on high school reading lists, and well-loved contemporary books. Examines specific pieces of literature in the geographical and historical context in which they were written, making this book especially relevant to core curriculum standards. Provides comprehensive content that is unique in the library market. Includes recommendations of complimentary works. Features organization alphabetical by work, making it easy to navigate. Maintains an accessible style useful for high school and general education college courses.

Cold War-era FBI files on famous scientists, including Neil Armstrong, Isaac Asimov, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Alfred Kinsey, and Timothy Leary. Armed with ignorance, misinformation, and unfounded suspicions, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover cast a suspicious eye on scientists in disciplines ranging from physics to sex research. If the Bureau surveilled writers because of what they believed (as documented in Writers Under Surveillance), it surveilled scientists because of what they knew. Such scientific ideals as the free exchange of information seemed dangerous when the Soviet Union and the United States regarded each other with mutual suspicion that seemed likely to lead to mutual destruction. Scientists Under Surveillance gathers FBI files on some of the most famous scientists in America, reproducing them in their original typewritten, teletyped, hand-annotated form. Readers learn that Isaac Asimov, at the time a professor at Boston University's School of Medicine, was a prime suspect in the hunt for a Soviet informant codenamed ROBPROF (the rationale perhaps being that he wrote about robots and was a professor). Richard Feynman had a "hefty" FBI file, some of which was based on documents agents found when going through the Soviet ambassador's trash (an invitation to a physics conference in Moscow); other documents in Feynman's file cite an informant who called him a "master of deception" (the informant may have been Feynman's ex-wife). And the Bureau's relationship with Alfred Kinsey, the author of The Kinsey Report, was mutually beneficial, with each drawing on the other's data. The files collected in Scientists Under Surveillance were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by MuckRock, a nonprofit engaged in the ongoing project of freeing American history from the locked filing cabinets of government agencies. The Scientists Neil Armstrong, Isaac Asimov, Hans Bethe, John P. Craven, Albert Einstein, Paul Erdos, Richard Feynman, Mikhail Kalashnikov, Alfred Kinsey, Timothy Leary, William Masters, Arthur Rosenfeld, Vera Rubin, Carl Sagan, Nikola Tesla.

Sound Studies is the primary theoretical and empirical alternative to our understanding of media and culture by visual means. The field is now well established as a serious area of research and study. Concentrating on the history of audio media, Sound Studies explores the nature of sound and listening, and its role in modern experience and perception. Furthermore, the sub-discipline questions the adequacy of previous visually based epistemologies of media and culture to offer a comprehensive understanding and interpretation of central facets of everyday life, historically, comparatively and in terms of present-day experience. Sound Studies investigates the different ways in which people experience the world of sound and how sound is embedded in culture, history, institutions, design, architecture, and technologies. If Sound Studies incorporates the sonic turn in Media Studies and coheres around Cultural Studies, it also extends into Urban Studies, Aesthetics, History, Architecture, and Anthropology. It looks at the wide array of sonic experiences in society to include sound, music, and silence. In so doing it goes beyond the traditional disciplines of Ethnomusicology, History of Music, and the Sociology of Music. As research in and around Sound Studies flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge's acclaimed Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of interdisciplinary literature. Edited by a leading scholar, Sound Studies gathers foundational and canonical work, together with innovative and cutting-edge applications and interventions. With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Sound Studies is an essential work of reference. For the novice or advanced student, the collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. And, for the more advanced scholar, it will be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar and sometimes overlooked texts. For both, Sound Studies will be valued as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

This volume represents the first major bibliography on Black theatre and performance in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Canada. Unlike previous bibliographies on the topic, this work gives equal weight to Africa and the African Diaspora, and to biographical/critical material and play texts themselves. John Gray has collected more than 4,000 entries from a broad range of media, books, dissertations and theses, unpublished papers, periodical and newspaper articles, films, and videotapes. More than 650 playwrights and theatre groups from 45 countries are featured, as are performance genres that range from masquerades and carnival celebrations to the most recent works of noted playwrights such as Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott. The work is organized into two categories: studies of specific geographic areas and countries, and materials on individual playwrights. Within these categories, works cited are further divided according to the type of material, such as book, journal, or dissertation. Also included are a listing of major bibliographies on African-American theatre, and two appendices that cite reference works and provide a regional listing of African and African Diaspora playwrights and theatre companies. A set of four indexes, covering artists, play titles, subjects, and authors of cited works, conclude the book and provide easy access to its comprehensive listings. This unique work will be an important resource for courses in African studies, theatre arts, and minority and ethnic studies. It will also be a useful addition to the reference collections of college, university, and public libraries.