A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), edited by Neil Roberts, associate professor of Africana studies and faculty affiliate in political science, examines how Douglass’ autobiographies, essays and speeches analyzed and articulated core American ideals.

History professor Eiko Maruko Siniawer ’97 explores how the Japanese have thought about waste “in terms of time, stuff, money, possessions and resources from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the present” in Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018).

Jorge Semprún is “a man of many faces”—privileged grandson of Spain’s prime minister, political exile during the Spanish Civil War, French Resistance fighter in World War II, Photo of stack of recent books by faculty.Buchenwald survivor and, as a civilian, acclaimed author and screenwriter—as Spanish and comparative literature professor Soledad Fox Maura explains in the biography Exile, Writer, Soldier, Spy: Jorge Semprún (Arcade Publishing, 2018).

Massachusetts Professor of Humanities Susan Dunn explores a transformational period in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency—the hundred days between December 1940 and March 1941 as he prepared for America’s entrance into World War II—in A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days That Mobilized America (Yale University Press, 2018).

Inventing the Opera House: Theatre Architecture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2018) “is an architectural success story,” writes author E.J. Johnson ’59, Williams’ Amos Lawrence Professor of Art, emeritus, who traces the teatro all’italiano from the temporary court theaters of the late 15th century through the commedia dell’arte of the 16th to the public opera houses of the 17th.

See more works and submit updates on new publications at ephsbookshelf.williams.edu.