Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, her work was dismissed as derivate and was eras...

Modeled on Bad Girls of Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017), edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas stands apart from the edited volume crowd. It includes, not only academic entries,

Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytical and editorial voice when he was writing some of his ...

In her new book, Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (SUNY Press, 2017), Debarati Sen analyzes the paradoxes and promises of Fair Trade-organic tea production in Darjeeling, India.

Despite her prominent role in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain, Christabel Pankhurst has not received the same degree of attention from scholars that had been given to her mother Emmeline or her sister Sylvia.

As a believer in free thought, a campaigner for women’s rights, and as a supporter of abolition, Ernestine Rose had no shortage of causes to advocate. In The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (Oxford University Pr...

Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, in its numerous manifestations, continues to exert profound influence on the Jewish world, even as it undergoes pressure to change from both within and without. In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism,

Today we talked to Dr. Anna Muller about her latest book, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University Press, 2017). Using archival research as well as oral interviews with many of the women in her book,

Hasidic Studies: Essays in History and Gender is a collection of essays that spans over 40 years and challenges many received notions about the history of Hasidism —its origins, the evolving nature of its structure,

In Mother of the Church: Sofia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), Tatyana V. Bakhmetyeva explores an influential figure in the history of Russian Cath...

Although largely forgotten today, elocution was a popular form of domestic and professional entertainment from the late nineteenth century until around World War II. Elocution is the dramatic reading of poetry, adapted plays,

Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (Syracuse University Press, 2017) by Didem Havlioglu is at once an intellectual history and biography of sorts of Mihri Hatun, a fifteenth century Ottoman poet.

In Mexico’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women (SUNY Press, 2017), Christine Arce rightfully stresses that these two figures have greatly influenced Mexico’s national identity, arts, and popular culture. However,

When folklorist Jean Freedman first met Peggy Seeger in 1979, Freedman was an undergraduate on her junior year abroad in London, while her American compatriot had been living in the UK for two decades. Their encounter took place in the Singers’ Club,

Birth and suffering are deeply linked concepts in Buddhism, and their connection has shaped how the bodies and status of women were understood. Join us for a conversation with Amy Paris Langenberg about her book Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus a...

What are the lives of young incarcerated Latinas like? And what were their lives like before and after their incarceration? In his new book, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarceration (University of California Press, 2017),

In Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen (Rutgers University Press, 2015), Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre trace the historical evolution of the profession, analyze more than two thousand examples of chef profi...

When British planters, abolitionists and colonial officials confronted the reality of the end of the slave trade, they envisioned reproducing laborers rather than forcibly importing them. Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy,

Sasha Turner’s Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Child-Rearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children in plantation-era Jamaica. Turner argues that,

In the fifth podcast of Arguing History, Lynn Dumenil and Christopher Capozzola consider the relationship between America’s involvement in World War I and the granting of women the right to vote. As they note,

Connections between France and North Africa have long been shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and economics. This intercultural relationship has also been mediated through the arts. In Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in Fran...

The Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups are typically known for their male leaders. Men like the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and Minister Malcolm X or Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey are notable examples.

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restora...

Much attention has been drawn to the role of white women in the recent Alabama senate election and the earlier election of Donald J. Trump as president. Today’s racial and gender politics have long historic roots, according to Elizabeth McRae,

We’ve featured a few books on fashion and the Muslim world recently, all part of an effort to re-orient the study of women in the Muslim and Arabic-speaking worlds. Elizabeth Bucar’s Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press,