Announcing a New Series—Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History

Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History seeks to further the exploration of visual history as a distinct field of inquiry on Latin America in dialogue with other disciplinary fields. This series conceptualizes visual history as the study of images and the past in the broadest sense and asks how images have shaped Latin American cultures. The series editors invite projects that both ground visual forms of communication in the rich and complex histories through which they took shape and that examine the direct agency of images in crafting historical narratives, stimulating change, and reshaping thought.

Proposals and queries may be sent to the series editors, Ernesto Capello at ecapello@macalester.edu and Jessica Stites Mor at jessica.stites-mor@ubc.ca, and the acquiring editor Kerry Webb: kwebb@utpress.utexas.edu.

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Dr. Jessica Stites Mor is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), editor of Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), and coeditor of The Art of Solidarity: Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2018).

Ernesto Capello is an associate professor of history at Macalester College. He is the author of City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

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Announcing a new series: 21st Century Film Essentials

Donna Kornhaber, Series Editor

Cinema has a storied history, but its story is far from over. 21st Century Film Essentials offers a lively chronicle of cinema’s second century, examining the landmark films of our ever-changing moment. Each book makes a case for the importance of a particular contemporary film for artistic, historical, or commercial reasons. The twenty-first century has already been a time of tremendous change in filmmaking the world over, from the rise of digital production and the ascent of the multinational blockbuster to increased vitality in independent filmmaking and the emergence of new voices and talents both on screen and off. The films examined here are the ones that embody and exemplify these changes, crystallizing emerging trends or pointing in new directions. At the same time, they are films that are informed by and help refigure the cinematic legacy of the previous century, showing how film’s past is constantly reimagined and rewritten by its present. These are films both familiar and obscure, foreign and domestic; they are new but of lasting value. This series is a study of film history in the making. It is meant to provide a different kind of approach to cinema’s story--one written in the present tense.

Forthcoming Books

• The LEGO Movie by Dana Polan (Fall 2020)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by Patrick Keating (Spring 2021)
• The Florida Project by J.J. Murphy (Fall 2021)
• Black Panther by Scott Bukatman (Spring 2022)

About The LEGO Movie by Dana Polan

What happens when we set out to understand LEGO not just as a physical object but as an idea, an icon of modernity, an image—maybe even a moving image? To what extent can the LEGO brick fit into the multimedia landscape of popular culture, especially film culture, today? Launching from these questions, Dana Polan traces LEGO from thing to film and asserts that The LEGO Movie is an exemplar of key directions in mainstream cinema, combining the visceral impact of effects and spectacle with ironic self-awareness and savvy critique of mass culture as it reaches for new heights of creativity.

Incorporating insights from conversations with producer Dan Lin and writer-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Polan examines the production and reception of The LEGO Movie and closely analyzes the film within popular culture at large and in relation to LEGO as a toy and commodity. He identifies the film’s particular stylistic and narrative qualities, its grasp of and response to the culture industry, and what makes it a distinctive work of animation among the seeming omnipresence of animation in Hollywood, and reveals why the blockbuster film, in all its silliness and seriousness, stands apart as a divergent cultural work.

Dana Polan is a professor of cinema studies in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and former president of the Society for Cinema Studies. He is the author of eight books in film and media studies, including The Sopranos and Pulp Fiction, and approximately two hundred essays and reviews.

Announcing a New Series—Latinx: The Future is Now

Latinx: The Future Is Now is a new interdisciplinary series devoted to the evolving field of Latina/o/x studies, including Central American, Afro-Latinx, and Asian-Latinx studies. Situated at the nexus of cultural, performance, historical, food, environmental, and textual studies, the series will focus on ways in which the racial, cultural, and social formations of historical Latinx communities can engage and enhance scholarship across geographies and nationalities. The series editors invite projects that consider the multiple queer and gender-fluid possibilities that are embodied in the “x”; projects that have a feminist critique of patriarchy at the center of their intellectual work; projects that deploy a relational approach to ethnic and national groups; and projects that address the overlapping dynamics of gender, race, sexual, and national identities.

Submissions or queries may be directed to the series editors, Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, nicole.m.guidotti-hernandez@emory.edu and Lorgia Garcia-Peña, garciapena@fas.harvard.edu in addition to Senior Acquisitions Editor, Kerry Webb, kwebb@utpress.utexas.edu.

Forthcoming books in the series will be listed here as they are published: https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/series/latinx-future-now.

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Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is Professor in the Department of English at Emory University. She is an expert in Borderlands History after 1846, Transnational Feminist Methodologies, Latinx Studies, and Popular Culture and Immigration. As a public intellectual, Dr. Guidotti-Hernández has written numerous articles for the feminist magazine Ms. and the feminist blog The Feminist Wire, covering such topics as immigration, reproductive rights, and the Dream act. She also sits on the national advisory council for the Ms. and is currently on the national advisory council for Freedom University in Athens, Georgia.

Dr. Lorgia Garcia-Peña is the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Latinx Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of  award-winning book The Borders of Dominicanidad and the co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a modern-day freedom school created to support undocumented students.  

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Announcing New Lateral Exchanges Series

Lateral Exchanges: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Practices

Edited by Felipe Correa and Bruno Carvalho

Lateral Exchanges is a new series devoted to architecture and urbanism in the context of international development and globalization. Publishing research on historical and contemporary issues in design and the built environment, unrestricted by geographic focus, the series will cover several interrelated fields, including architecture, cultural studies, environmental humanities, history, landscape architecture, media and visual studies, urban planning, and urban studies.

Above all, the series will address three related questions. First, what role do architects and architecture play in historical and international development? Second, why and how have architectural and urban-planning models circulated, as concepts or realized constructions, across continents, marketplaces, and languages? Third, how have these fields’ concepts and techniques instigated cultural and intellectual exchanges beyond disciplinary boundaries and particular locales, and how should we historicize and theorize these exchanges, particularly in the context of persistent global asymmetries?

In these and other ways, Lateral Exchanges will examine the rich intellectual, social, and technical contributions that architects and architecture have made to an increasingly globalized world.

For additional information please contact series editors Bruno Carvalho (bcarvalh@princeton.edu) and Felipe Correa (fcorrea@gsd.harvard.edu) or UT Press editor-in-chief Robert Devens (rdevens@utpress.utexas.edu).

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