For Women’s History Month, the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to feature just a few of the many amazing female voices in our list, whether the author or subject of one of our books. Academics, artists, political leaders—they are all here, manifesting in various ways the feminine genius.
“It is thus my hope, dear sisters, that you will reflect carefully on what it means to speak of the ‘genius of women,’, not only in order to be able to see in this phrase a specific part of God’s plan which needs to be accepted and appreciated, but also in order to let this genius be more fully expressed in the life of society as a whole, as well as in the life of the Church.”
—Letter of Pope John Paul II to Women
For the sophisticated moralist:
Erika Bachiochi’s The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision explores an all but forgotten intellectual history that asserts a moral vision of women’s rights and argues for a reawakening of this tradition as an alternative to modern feminism’s focus on autonomy. This book is unique in its treatment of the moral roots of women’s rights in America and its critique of the movement’s current trajectory. A smart and sophisticated application of Mary Wollstonecraft’s thought, Bachiochi’s work serves as a guide for how we might better value the culturally essential work of the home and thereby promote authentic personal and political freedom.
“The Rights of Women shows clearly that feminism took a wrong turn, especially following The Feminine Mystique. It also illuminates beautifully a path back to a more magnanimous feminism—one based on a true anthropology of womanhood, rather than the crabbed and diminished anthropology that today’s feminists have mistakenly embraced.”
—Praxis Circle
For the aspiring journalist:
Waed Athamneh’s Defiance in Exile: Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan offers a glimpse into Syrian refugee women’s stories of defiance and triumph in the aftermath of the Syrian uprising. Athamneh presents the first book-length examination of refugee women’s own words about torment, struggle, and persecution—and of an enduring spirit that defies a difficult reality. Their stories speak of nearly insurmountable social, economic, physical, and emotional challenges and provide a distinct perspective of the Syrian conflict.
“The accounts are vivid and well-presented, and we need to hear such voices to counteract the often hostile rhetoric about Syrian refugees that one hears in North Atlantic countries.”
—Kim Shively, author of Islam in Modern Turkey
For the curious interdisciplinary student:
Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century is an in-depth study examining the social, religious, and philosophical thought of Simone Weil, focusing especially on the depth of its challenge to contemporary philosophical and religious studies. In a world where little is seen to have real meaning, Eric O. Springsted presents a critique of the unfocused nature of postmodern philosophy and argues that Weil’s thought is more significant than ever in showing how the world in which we live is, in fact, a world of mysteries. For Weil, social and political questions cannot be separated from the supernatural. For her, rather, the world has a sacramental quality, such that life in the world is always a matter of life in God—and life in God, necessarily a way of life in the world.
“The book is a product of a lifetime of close and thoughtful engagement with Weil’s writings in which, to some extent, Weil’s thought and Springsted’s have become intertwined, such that it becomes hard to tease one out from the other. He is a guide with something to share not only with those new to Weil’s thought, but those who have explored her highways and byways on many occasions.”
—Philosophical Investigations
For the educator and activist:
Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Documentary Portrait of an Early Civil Rights Pioneer, 1900–1959 is a collection of Burroughs’ writings that encapsulates her work as a theologian, philosopher, activist, educator, intellectual, and evangelist. Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879–1961) is just one of the many African American intellectuals whose work has been long excluded from the literary canon. This book represents a landmark contribution to the African American intellectual historical project by allowing readers to experience Burroughs in her own words.
“In a public career that spanned six decades, the educator and civil rights activist Nannie Helen Burroughs was a leading voice in the African American community. . . . In this collection of documents, the historian Kelisha B. Graves focuses on Burroughs’s published writings on race and racism, women’s rights, and social justice. . . . Graves has raised interesting questions about ambiguities in the black protest movement in the first half of the twentieth century.”
—The Journal of American History
For the lover of provocative poetry:
Winner of the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Inheritance of Haunting, by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, is a collection of poems contending with historical memory and its losses and gains carried within the body, wrought through colonization and its generations of violence, war, and survival. Invoking individual and collective ghosts inherited across diverse geographies, this collection queers the space between past, present, and future. These poems are written for immigrants, queer and transgender people of color, women, Latin Americans, diasporic communities, and the many impacted by war.
“This collection is a rumination on the memories, the violence and the acts of liberation that live in the body across generations of colonization, war, and upheaval. . . . Representing the voices of individual and collective ghosts from across Latin America, this collection asks us to account for the past and to celebrate the lives that come after.”
—Electric Lit
For the inquisitive mind:
Of Form & Gather marks the dazzling debut of Felicia Zamora, whose poems concern themselves with probing questions, not facile answers. Where does the self reside? What forms do we, as human beings, inhabit as we experience the world around us? Privileging journey over destination, Zamora’s poems spur the reader to immerse herself in linguistic soundscapes where the physicality of the poems themselves is, in no small part, the point: poems that challenge us to navigate the word/world as both humans and things.
“The first thing that stands out about Zamora’s poetry is the many ways she uses punctuation to create or disrupt a rhythm in her words. Emdashes, ampersands, ellipses, and semicolons abound. The “&” gathers and binds things together, doing the kind of magic Zamora alludes to in all of her poems. . . . Throughout Of Form & Gather, Zamora uses animal and ocean imagery to destroy any borders or divisions between human forms, humanity, and the natural world. . . . Perhaps Zamora’s work can be considered poetry for the Chthulucene.”
—ZYZZYVA: A San Francisco Journal of Arts and Letters
For the cultural navigator:
In The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly, Susan Muaddi Darraj expertly weaves a tapestry of the events and struggles in the lives of four Arab-American women. Hanan, Nadia, Reema, and Aliyah search for a meaningful sense of home, caught in the cultural gap that exists between the Middle East and the United States. Darraj adds the perspectives of the girls’ mothers, presented in separate stories, which illuminate the often troubled relationship between first and second generations of immigrants.
“Darraj succeeds admirably in suggesting the diversity of Palestinian-Americans: the four friends Nadia, Aliyah, Hanan, and Reema each come from a family with its own story of exile. . . . There’s a passionate sense here of inheritance as a two-way street that transforms immigrants and their children.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
For the public health scholar:
In Disturbing Spirits: Mental Illness, Trauma, and Treatment in Modern Syria and Lebanons, Beverly A. Tsacoyianis blends social, cultural, and medical history research methods with approaches in disability and trauma studies to demonstrate that the history of mental illness in Syria and Lebanon since the 1890s is embedded in disparate—but not necessarily mutually exclusive—ideas about legitimate healing. In this groundbreaking work, Tsacoyianis connects the discussion of global responsibility to scholarly debates about human suffering and the moral call to caregiving.
“Disturbing Spirits is a groundbreaking study written with remarkable clarity and empathy. Spanning over one hundred years of history and weaving together different disciplines, approaches, and a wealth of untapped primary sources, it tells the compelling story of the failure of the medical elites in Syria and Lebanon to impose modern psychiatry and erase local beliefs about the power of spirits to both cause and treat mental illnesses.”
—Sara Scalenghe, author of Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800