Faculty Books

The Young Lords: A Reader

(New York University Press)

Darrel Enck-Wanzer, assistant professor of communication studies, editor

Enck-Wanzer provides a look inside the Young Lords, a national political movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which originated as a Chicago street gang fighting gentrification and unfair evictions in Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Its politically radical members were part of the original Rainbow Coalition with the Black Panthers and the Young Patriots.

This collection of essays, speeches, pamphlets and photographs created by Young Lords members, primarily in New York and on the East Coast, includes the organization's 13-point platform and rules of discipline. The book covers the group's activism in the areas of education, health care, police injustice and gender equality.

Breaking Through the Noise: Presidential Leadership, Public Opinion and the News Media

(Stanford University Press)

Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha, associate professor of political science, and Jeffrey S. Peake, Clemson University

The authors discuss how modern presidents use media strategies, ranging from national television addresses to local news coverage of their domestic travel, to influence the media's agenda and, through it, the public.

They argue that presidents may primarily communicate their policy priorities through news coverage, attempting to "break through the noise" not to change public opinion but to change what issues the public considers important. They also consider how the public and the media affect the president in return.

Wisdom for Parents: Key Ideas From Parent Educators

(de Sitter Publications)

Robert Keim, Northern Illinois University, and Arminta Jacobson, professor of human development and family studies, co-editors

Among the certified family life educators sharing parenting advice are UNT educational psychology faculty members Wendy Middlemiss and Angela Nievar and alumna Cynthia R. Garrison. They relate stories emphasizing character building, parent-child relationships, guidance and discipline.

The book also traces wisdom from early pioneers in family science, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, biology and medicine. Jacobson is the founder and director of the Center for Parent Education at UNT.

Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustainability

(Ashgate)

Pankaj Jain, associate professor of philosophy and religion studies

Exploring the role religious communities play in environmentalism, Jain says that Indic religious traditions include a number of rituals and myths in which the environment is revered.

However, India's growing economy and population are placing heavy pressure on the country's natural resources. He applies a non-Western model to see if nature worship inspires Hindus to act in an environmentally conscious way.

Jain also is a research affiliate with Harvard University's Pluralism Project, scholar-in-residence with GreenFaith, and a board member of the Society for Hindu Christian Studies and the Executive Advisory Council of Hindu American Seva Charities.

Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen

(Ivan R. Dee)

Jennifer Jensen Wallach, assistant professor of history

Jensen Wallach traces the life of the author best known for his novel Native Son and notes the effect of his work on later African merican writers. She follows Wright from his origins as a sharecropper's son in Mississippi to his life as an American expatriate in Paris involved with Marxism, existentialism and Pan-Africanism. She says her goal was "to examine Wright's various attempts to answer the driving question of his life, 'How can I live freely?'"

Jensen Wallach also recently co-edited the book Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas (University of Arkansas Press), exploring the arrival of the national SNCC in Little Rock in 1962. The organization's civil rights activities helped increase African American voter registration and hastened the desegregation of many public facilities in the state.

Graph-Based Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval

(Cambridge University Press)

Rada Mihalcea, associate professor of computer science and engineering, and Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan

Although graph theory and the fields of natural language processing and information retrieval have traditionally been perceived as distinct, recent research shows that the disciplines are connected.

In covering the use of graph-based algorithms for natural language processing and information retrieval, the authors bring together such diverse topics as lexical semantics, text summarization, text mining, ontology construction, text classification and information retrieval.

Mihalcea's groundbreaking research on understanding the meaning of text — critical for many natural language and information processing applications — has earned her a National Science Foundation CAREER award and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson: Early Works, 'Aesop's Fables,' 'Letters Written to and for Particular Friends' and Other Works

(Cambridge University Press)

Alexander Pettit, professor of English, editor

This Cambridge edition is the first scholarly edition of the earliest known writings of influential English author Samuel Richardson (1689–1761). His early work in religious controversialism, occasional verse and literary criticism, and his popular edition of "Aesop's Fables" informs his later novels. Pettit's introduction places the writings in the context of Richardson's career and times, and he provides extensive explanatory notes on the texts and their treatment.

Pettit also is the general editor for The Works of Tobias Smollett series (University of Georgia Press), which produced two volumes in 2011.

Transcending Racial Barriers: Toward a Mutual Obligations Approach

(Oxford University Press)

Michael O. Emerson, Rice University, and George Yancey, professor of sociology

The authors document the historical move from white supremacy to institutional racism and look at modern efforts to combat racial division in society.

They examine multiracial congregations, multiracial families, the military and sports teams as contexts that develop a core set of values among racial groups and provide the flexibility to express cultural uniqueness.

Yancey's other recent books include Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education (Baylor University Press) and Neither Jew Nor Gentile: Exploring Issues of Racial Diversity on Protestant College Campuses (Oxford University Press).

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