Bookshelf

(Oxford University Press, 2025).

This popular hit tune by Dolly Parton is the subject of Hamessley’s second book focused on the singer, songwriter, actress, philanthropist, and businesswoman’s music and song-writing. It follows Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton (2020), which provided a comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that shaped Parton’s songwriting. According to the publisher’s website, this new book provides “a deep dive into ‘Jolene,’ one of Dolly Parton’s most well-known songs.”

(Bloomsbury, 2025).

Marking 70 years since the murder of Emmett Till, this volume co-edited with George Yancy, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, is a collection of essays by a wide range of Black scholars who take up Till’s casket as a focal point for reflection on anti-Black racism, past and present, in hopes of rallying people against it as we turn toward the future. 

(Routledge, 2025).

Along with co-editors Don Waldman of Colgate University and Qi Ge ’06, Jensen’s former student and now an associate professor of economics at Vassar College, this latest edition of the book first published in 1998 is described by the publisher as blending “a rigorous theoretical introduction to industrial organization with empirical evidence, real-world applications, and case studies.” This, along with the range of theoretical and applied problems and exercises it provides, makes it “one of the leading undergraduate texts on industrial organization,” according to the description.

(Fortress Press, 2025).

According to the publisher: “The gospels were not the only books in antiquity to retell the same story. Ancient readers had their own language for describing works that retread the same narrative ground. Different versions of a story were imagined as sharing a narrative core, called a hypothesis. Early Christian readers adopted this conceptual model in order to describe gospel literature, legitimize its pluriformity, and limit its diversity. Even before the term ‘hypothesis’ appeared explicitly, however, readers imagined gospels in roughly the same way. Christians did not radically reimagine the literary character of gospels at the end of the second century, when hypothesis language first appeared. Rather, the components of this model are already present in the earliest evidence for the reception of gospels. The standard model for thinking about pluriform narrative traditions in Hellenistic literary culture shaped the production and interpretation of gospel literature from the very beginning.”

(Routledge, 2025)

According to the publisher, “This comprehensive and cross-cultural study examines three-dimensional structural replicas of the Santa Casa, or Holy House of the Virgin Mary, and related circulating visual and textual media.

(Lexington Books, 2024)

The volume, co-edited with Marzia Caporale and Habib Zanzana from the University of Scranton, is the first to investigate post-2000 French banlieue (periurban) cinema through an intersectional lens. Some interpretive axes and areas of critical investigation include toxic masculinity, hypermasculinity, female identity at the intersection of gender, age, race, and socioeconomic status, queer identities and spaces, sexual politics, patriarchal dominance, and artistic expression as a form of resistance.

(Sticking Place Books, 2024)

MacDonald is the author of five volumes of A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers and more than two dozen other books. Named an Academy Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences in 2011, he says about this work:

(Oxford University Press, 2024)

Oscar-winning documentarians, filmmakers, a cine-historian and video-essayist, the list goes on. Throughout this volume, which completes MacDonald’s “avant-doc trilogy,” readers will find interviews and essays that “model a generalist approach to modern audiovisual media, prioritizing remarkable cinematic accomplishments that can get lost within our overwhelming modern mediascape.”

(Oxford University Press, 2025).

Along with Merouan Mekouar, a York University social scientist, Jumet compiled “narratives from 19 scholars, representing 15 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, South America, Central Asia, and South Asia, who conducted fieldwork in their native repressive and/or illiberal countries,” according to the publisher’s description.

(Lexington Books, 2024)
As the publisher notes, "This edited volume investigates the reconfiguration of gender in French banlieue cinema, interrogating whether the films produced over the last two decades provide new and viable models of resistance to dominant modes of power. Contributors take a critical approach which identifies gender as a marker of both body and identity politics to highlight the need to overcome a binary approach to banlieue aesthetics, which limits inquiry into the basis of conflict. Given that a feminization — and, to some extent, queering — of the once exclusively masculine space is underway, contributors ultimately conclude that the banlieue and its on-screen representations cannot be properly understood unless intersectionality as a systematic approach is applied as an interpretive lens. Scholars of film, gender studies, and sociology will find this book particularly useful."