Books in Arts

The Social Audience of Prayer: A Rhetorical and Canonical Study of Individual Lament Psalms

by W. Derek Suderman, Eisenbrauns, 2026

Lament psalms are often imagined as private cries to God. Yet most laments are also directed outward—toward friends, foes, and entire communities. The Social Audience of Prayer reveals how the psalmist’s words reach beyond the divine to demand recognition, solidarity, and change from a human audience as well.

W. Derek Suderman offers the first sustained study of the social audience in lament psalms, showing how laments consistently engage both God and society. Through close rhetorical analysis, he uncovers shifts in address that highlight the psalmist’s strategies for confronting enemies, rallying supporters, and provoking divine action. Individual lament psalms emerge here as multifaceted performances that intertwine theological appeal and social persuasion. Suderman situates this insight within a broader canonical framework, examining how psalm superscriptions, the book of Job, and the passion narrative in the Gospel of Mark extend and reshape the social dynamics of lament.

Explaining Extreme Belief and Behavior: Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Challenges

Edited by Rik Peels and Lorne Dawson, Oxford, 2026

This volume takes a step back from the many specific explanations of extreme belief and behavior that we find in the literature on such phenomena as conspiracy theorizing, extremism, fanaticism, fundamentalism, and terrorism. It explores the very project of explaining extreme belief and behavior. The first part of the volume concerns various fundamental theoretical and contextual issues. What is the relationship between understanding and explaining extremism? What is it about extreme beliefs that challenges our capacity to explain them? What are the pitfalls of current approaches, and why are explanations so urgently needed? The second part then moves on to explore related methodological issues. What does providing an explanation entail? What are the desiderata for viable explanations—including what is the relationship between understanding and explaining, qualitative and quantitative data, macro-, meso-, and microlevels of analysis, first-person and third-person accounts, attitudes and behaviors, or beliefs and actions? The third part explores related empirical issues and challenges. How should we conceive and integrate insights into such related phenomena as the turn to extremism in a particular context (e.g., a country or historical circumstance, such as a conflict), the rise of extremist movements, and the turn to extremism by individuals? What conceptual, theoretical, and methodological resources are available or can be created?

God's Angry Men: The Political Legacy of the John Birch Society

by Carmen Celestini, Bloomsbury, 2026

God's Angry Men examines a historical timeline from the 1930s through the early 1990s of the communications and interactions between corporations, religious leaders, and wealthy individuals, wherein both individuals and societal forces strategically planned to politically mobilize a percentage of conservative Christians in support of a form of Christian nationalism and libertarianism.

The John Birch Society (JBS) well known for its conspiracy theories is often dismissed for its political impact in the United States. Far from just an organization that utilized fear-based conspiracies, the JBS was a political movement that stemmed from the political aspirations of industry leaders, wanting to ensure a far-right, Christian, free-enterprise supporting mobilization that would ensure the election of a Conservative Messiah to the White House. Celestini explores the eternal battle for the Christian foundations of the nation via culture war issues and the political legacy of the JBS in the 21st century.

Disciplinary Divides in the Study of Law and Politics

Edited by Emmett Macfarlane and Kate Puddister, University of Toronto Press, 2026

This book studies the "disciplinary divides" between law and political science, including conceptual, methodological, and normative differences in how each field approaches policy, institutions, and legal phenomena.

Disciplinary Divides in the Study of Law and Politics critically analyses these fault lines and proposes strategies to bridge them. The chapters identify key gaps, disagreements, and challenges in the study of law and politics through fresh empirical analyses, including studies of rights (such as Charter and Indigenous rights) and of institutional actors and processes – courts, legislatures, executives, expert witnesses, judicial selection, constitutional amendment, and government lawyers. The volume addresses a wide range of legal domains, including constitutional, administrative, immigration and refugee, federalism, and electoral law, while also highlighting areas where deeper interdisciplinary engagement is needed. Several chapters contribute to theoretical development, and many adopt a forward-looking perspective, identifying urgent research questions and setting future research agendas. Collectively, the contributions demonstrate how greater interdisciplinary collaboration can enhance our understanding of law’s relationship to power, public policy, and society.

How Data Need People: The Social and Epistemic Practice of a Data-Rich Science

By Götz Hoeppe, Cambridge University Press, 2026

From genome sequencing to large sky surveys, digital technologies produce massive datasets that promise unprecedented scientific insights. But data, for being good to use and reuse, need people – scientists, technicians, and administrators – as embodied, evaluative, social humans. In this book, anthropologist Götz Hoeppe draws on an ethnography of astronomical research to examine the media and practices that scientists and technicians use to instruct graduate students, make diagrams for data calibration and discovery, organize collaborative work, negotiate the ethics of open access, encode their knowledge in datasets – and undertake social inquiries along the way. This book offers a reflection on the sociality of data-rich research that will benefit attempts to integrate human and machine learning. It will be of interest for students and scholars in data science and science and technology studies, as well as in anthropology, sociology, history, and the philosophy of science. This book is also available Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Edited by Kevin G. Cai, Edward Elgin Publishing, 2026

This timely book investigates the power rivalry between the US and China, examining the internal forces that are shaping both nations’ foreign policies, the geopolitical and economic dynamics of their competition, and its profound impact on global politics, economics, and security.

Quilt 

by Catherine Dubeau, Leméac, 2026.

Ce serait l’histoire d’une professeure en études françaises, d’une ex-mannequin étudiant aux beaux-arts et d’un prêtre défroqué. Le récit se déroulerait entre 1948 et 2022, du Québec à la Californie, en passant par l’Ontario et la Suisse romande. On pourrait le lire en petites bouchées ou tout d’un trait. Les personnages auraient perdu leurs corps. La romancière le chercherait avec eux. Les pères seraient comme des astres avec leur satellite de fille. On y trouverait un collier de souvenirs et de rêves, une mosaïque de blessures et de baumes. Dès lors se profilerait le récit de ce qui reste quand le père n’y est plus, des routes que l’on prend pour quitter l’orbite.Ce serait une étonnante courtepointe, faite de morceaux dépareillés, mais cousus serrés.

Quilt tells the story of a professor in French Studies, a former model studying Fine Arts, and a defrocked priest. It takes place between 1948 and 2022, from Québec to Ontario and all the way to Switzerland and California. To be consumed in bite-sized pieces or all at once, it is the fragmented story of people who have lost their bodies, left looking, and the narrator who helps them in their search. Fathers appear as stars surrounded by their circling, satellite daughters, all in a chain of memories and dreams: a mosaic of wounds and balms. It is the story of that which remains after the father is gone, and the roads leading out of orbit. It is a remarkable quilt made of mismatched but tightly bound pieces.

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place

Edited by Arnab Dutta Roy, Paul Ugor and Simone Maria Puleo, Nebraska, 2026

In recent decades authors from across the world have adopted and adapted the bildungsroman literary genre to reflect on coming of age in postcolonial spaces and places. The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place emphasizes matters of space, place, and environment—concepts intrinsically linked to the bildungsroman’s processes of meaning-making and critique.

From Latin America to South Asia to Africa, the contributors focus on three distinct but interrelated themes: ecology, cultural geography, and mediascapes. They consider aesthetic formations that address the themes of spatiality, youth, individual and collective experiences of social stagnation or growth, the unique challenges faced by certain global subjects on account of the places they inhabit, and whether or not futurity is guaranteed for them. This unique collection delves into myriad features of the postcolonial bildungsroman, enlarging our theoretical understanding of the genre as well as of media and literature in the postcolonial world.

Narrating Transitional Justice: Memory in the Age of Truth and Reconciliation

Edited by Paul Ugor and Bonny Ibhawoh, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2026

In truth and reconciliation settings, particular narratives are recounted by victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and legal experts, each employing distinct rhetorical strategies. Their testimonies, reported by the media and represented in various cultural forms, profoundly influence public understanding and collective memory in post-conflict societies.

Authored by an interdisciplinary team of international scholars across the humanities and social sciences, policymakers and cultural producers, Narrating Transitional Justice examines truth and reconciliation commissions as acts of public storytelling. Contributors elaborate on how these testimonies function as creative grist for cultural producers to reconstruct, redefine, and reappraise transitional justice work. They further examine the inimitable insights that creative imaginaries – in the form of literature, theatre, film, fine art, popular music, street art, and online media – offer about the remaking of nations fractured by long histories of human rights violations.

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions

Edited by Arnab Dutta Roy and Paul Ugor, University of Alberta Press, 2026

Offering a fresh comparative lens, this volume demonstrates how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to explore local themes around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. Chapters examine identity, sexuality, human rights, the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization, and a host of other issues in work from a wide range of postcolonial locations across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Forging productive engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman over time, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the Global South. With essays from multiple continents, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman makes a crucial intervention to the existing scholarship on this influential genre and a unique contribution to the study of world literature.