The University Times welcomes information about new books, journals, plays and musical compositions written or edited by faculty and staff.
Newly published works can be submitted through this link. Please keep the book descriptions short and accessible to a general audience.
Journals should be peer-reviewed. Self-published works will not be accepted. The listings also are restricted to complete works, because individual chapters, articles, works of art and poems would be too numerous.
We’ll also be highlighting some books and book talks with connections to Pitt.
If you have any questions, please contact editor Susan Jones at suejones@pitt.edu or 412-648-4294.
Book events
Scott Stern discusses “The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison ‘Promiscuous’ Women” (Beacon Press)
5-6:30 p.m. Jan. 10, G23 Graduate School of Public Health
Stern, a 2011 graduate of Pittsburgh Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill, focuses on the twisted legacies of “The American Plan” and Thomas Parran. He spent six years researching the systematic imprisonment of women in America under the guise of safeguarding public health, culminating in his book. Stern will discuss his research and its ties to the mixed legacy of Pitt Public Health’s founding dean, Thomas Parran.
New books, journals and more
“Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL” (The New Press, 2018) by Rob Ruck, professor of History in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences.
The number of boys playing football plunged over the last decade as its neurological, physical and fiscal costs became more apparent. But one group has bucked that trend — Polynesians, especially Samoans in the diaspora and American Samoa, the only place outside the United States where football has taken hold at the grassroots. In just a few decades, the sons of Samoa and Tonga, mostly young men who came of age in the U.S., have quietly become the most disproportionately over-represented demographic in college and professional football. This is their story, one set in the South Pacific and their U.S. outposts.