Tag: Book


Department Celebrates Publication of Dr. Erik Peterson’s The Life Organic

On February 2, the Department of History celebrated the publication of Dr. Erik Peterson’s The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics. Dr. Peterson’s book tells the story of scientists in the late nineteenth nd early twentieth century who pursued a middle road of investigation between mechanists, those who argued that living beings were simply complex machines, and vitalists, who believed that animals and humans possessed a “vital spark,” an ineffable essence that separated living and […]

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Department Celebrates Dr. Teresa Cribelli’s New Book

The History Department came together on Thursday, September 22, to celebrate the publication of Dr. Teresa Cribelli’s new book, Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels: Modernization in the Nineteenth Century, published this year by Cambridge University Press. The book presents an account of modernization and innovation in nineteenth-century Brazil. Unlike previous scholarship, which described these transformations as a North American or European import, Cribelli’s work places Brazilian actors at the center of her narrative, illuminating a distinctly Brazilian view of modernization. […]

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Associate Professor Holly Grout’s new book examines the transformation of feminine ideals in Third Republic France

Associate Professor Holly Grout’s book The Force of Beauty: Transforming French Ideas of Femininity in the Third Republic, published by LSU Press in June 2015, examines the effects of the meteoric growth of the cosmetics industry in France’s third republic and its effects on conventional standards of womanhood. Grout moves beyond the narrative of beauty culture as a tool for sociopolitical subjugation to show how it also targeted women as important consumers in major markets and created new avenues by […]

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