Publications in Partnership With the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton Uni

Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. Kevin M. Kruse is associate professor of history at Princeton University. By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. The Spaces of the Modern City historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia, Cold War-era West Berlin, and postwar Los Angeles. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema. Informed by a range of theoretical writings, this collection offers a fresh and truly global perspective on the nature of the modern city. The contributors are Sheila Crane, Belinda Davis, Mamadou Diouf, Philip J. Ethington, David Frisby, Christina M. Jiménez, Dina Rizk Khoury, Ranjani Mazumdar, Frank Mort, Martin Murray, Jordan Sand, and Sarah Schrank. "This ambitious collection of essays is the result of a series of seminars at Princeton University aimed at developing fresh thinking about the city as a dynamic physical space that 'shapes, and is shaped by, power, economy, culture and society.' A fascinating introductory essay by Gyan Prakash outlines recent urban theorising and counters the idea that, in an age of globalisation, specific cityscapes are losing their significance: our urban experiences still depend on 'local lifeworlds', rich with memories and imagination." "This is a very ambitious collection of diverse, high quality essays. Prakash is certainly right that the study of the modern city is stuck in the literature of European metropolises, and I fully agree with the direction he stakes out in his introduction. The Spaces of the Modern City may be worth its price simply for the introduction."-Thomas Bender, author of The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea "This is an interesting and substantial collection of essays. Combining conceptual sophistication with rich historical studies, the book moves beyond familiar reference points in debates about urban modernity to open up nuanced perspectives on experiences in a wide range of places and periods. The volume makes a significant addition to the growing literature on cities and urbanism."-David Pinder, Queen Mary, University of London "Its global reach and attention to history make this wonderfully ambitious collection unusual. It is very much in line, in terms of scope and conception, with where historically minded urban studies should be heading. Its interdisciplinarity, determination to look beyond the typical Western cities, and insistence on urban centers remaining the source of local concerns-all this is to the good. This is a real landmark volume."-Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of China's Brave New World: And Other Tales for Global Times.

Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. His books include Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, and The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life (both Princeton). Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism. Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges in Noir Urbanisms is the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience. In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rubén Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang. "Noir Urbanisms deserves to be widely read and debated. In describing why inequalities or disasters have occurred, this becomes a lesson for the architects and urban designers master-planning cities of the future."---Esme Fieldhouse, Blueprint Magazine "This collection of essays is a welcome addition to urban cultural studies. By bridging the history of dystopian imaginings and urban social and cultural history, it opens up new territory for interdisciplinary discussion."-Jordan Sand, Georgetown University "This is an exciting collection ranging across an impressive disciplinary span, including not only history and film studies but also anthropology, geography, and modern languages. The volume combines scholarly rigor with political and social engagement, and is full of eloquence and insight. It speaks to researchers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who are concerned with the place of urban spaces in the dystopic visions of modernity."-Jackie Stacey, University of Manchester

Michael Laffan is professor of history at Princeton University. His books include The Makings of Indonesian Islam (Princeton). Max Weiss is assistant professor of history and Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi'ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon. Fear is ubiquitous but slippery. It has been defined as a purely biological reality, derided as an excuse for cowardice, attacked as a force for social control, and even denigrated as an unnatural condition that has no place in the disenchanted world of enlightened modernity. In these times of institutionalized insecurity and global terror, Facing Fear sheds light on the meaning, diversity, and dynamism of fear in multiple world-historical contexts, and demonstrates how fear universally binds us to particular presents but also to a broad spectrum of memories, stories, and states in the past. From the eighteenth-century Peruvian highlands and the California borderlands to the urban cityscapes of contemporary Russia and India, this book collectively explores the wide range of causes, experiences, and explanations of this protean emotion. The volume contributes to the thriving literature on the history of emotions and destabilizes narratives that have often understood fear in very specific linguistic, cultural, and geographical settings. Rather, by using a comparative, multidisciplinary framework, the book situates fear in more global terms, breaks new ground in the historical and cultural analysis of emotions, and sets out a new agenda for further research. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Alexander Etkind, Lisbeth Haas, Andreas Killen, David Lederer, Melani McAlister, Ronald Schechter, Marla Stone, Ravi Sundaram, and Charles Walker. "[S]imply establishing that fear has been a significant factor in history, that it is experienced and represented diversely, and that it forms an inescapable part of our collective memory and contemporary motivation is enough to make the book worth the read and hopefully to inspire more studies of fear and other emotions in society and history."---Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database "The history of the emotions has become one of the most dynamic fields in historical research in the twenty-first century. By focusing on one emotion-fear-this volume adds another dimension to our understanding of the way people negotiated their encounters with other people and events in the past. It is a riveting read."-Joanna Bourke, author of Fear: A Cultural History "Ambitious and timely, this book truly advances the discussion of fear across considerable time and regional space. This result is an important next step in emotions history, and a direct link to a variety of developments in the political and religious sphere."-Peter N. Stearns, provost of George Mason University "Fear is the condition we live in. Or is it? In this timely book, a stellar cast of experts uncovers a perplexing array of concrete historical instances of fear, from the eighteenth-century Tupac Amaru Rebellion in colonial Latin America to Dutch Islamophobia in 2010. The reader will come away with a sense of the mind-boggling diversity of practices by which fear has been experienced. This book harbors a small hope that the current politics of fear might become history."-Jan Plamper, Goldsmiths, University of London

Daniel T. Rodgers is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University. Bhavani Raman is an associate professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Helmut Reimitz is a professor in the Department of History at Princeton University.. In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The essays offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing--dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks--remains stationary. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Celia Applegate, Peter Brown, Harold Cook, April Masten, Mae Ngai, Jocelyn Olcott, Mimi Sheller, Pamela Smith, and Nira Wickramasinghe. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions. "Cultures in Motion represents first-rate scholarship and opens up a critical new space for historiography. Exploring the movement of things, ideas, and other cultural forms, the book-and the introduction in particular-gives an independent existence and importance to such work, and raises original questions about historical change and intercultural understandings."-Thomas Bender, author of A Nation Among Nations "This book provides a new approach to finding a language to describe the new realities that emerge from the interactions of geographically or temporally different cultural practices, material objects, and languages, as they meet in a given, shared space. The essays are engaging in subject matter and persuasively written, and the introduction is superb."-Barbara Metcalf, professor of history emerita, University of California, Davis "This successful collection of essays focuses on the inherent instability of cultural spheres and the increasing recognition that traditional models of comparative, global, and transcultural/transnational investigation do not do justice to the complexities of human history. Cultures in Motion defines the contours of a new way of thinking and researching cultural history."-Patrick J. Geary, Institute for Advanced Study

Philip Nord is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University. His books include France 1940: Defending the Republic. Katja Guenther is associate professor of history at Princeton. She is the author of Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines. Max Weiss is associate professor of history and Near Eastern studies at Princeton. His books include In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi'ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon. For decades, scholars and public intellectuals have been predicting the demise of religion in the face of secularization. Yet religion is undergoing an unprecedented resurgence in modern life-and secularization no longer appears so inevitable. Formations of Belief brings together many of today's leading historians to shed critical light on secularism's origins, its present crisis, and whether it is as antithetical to religion as it is so often made out to be. Formations of Belief offers a more nuanced understanding of the origins of secularist thought, demonstrating how Reformed Christianity and the Enlightenment were not the sole vessels of a worldview based on rationalism and individual autonomy. Taking readers from late antiquity to the contemporary era, the contributors show how secularism itself can be a form of belief and yet how its crisis today has been brought on by its apparent incapacity to satisfy people's spiritual needs. They explore the rise of the humanistic study of religion in Europe, Jewish messianism, atheism and last rites in the Soviet Union, the cult of the saints in colonial Mexico, religious minorities and Islamic identity in Pakistan, the neuroscience of religion, and more. Based on the Shelby Cullom Davis Center Seminars at Princeton University, this incisive book features illuminating essays by Peter Brown, Yaacob Dweck, Peter E. Gordon, Anthony Grafton, Brad S. Gregory, Stefania Pastore, Caterina Pizzigoni, Victoria Smolkin, Max Weiss, and Muhammad Qasim Zaman. "A multifaceted and nuanced approach to the origins of secularist thought." "Anyone inserted in the dialectical relations between religion and modernity should consult this thought-provoking volume.-Yontan Glazer-Eytan, Renaissance Quarterly" "This erudite book demonstrates that everything of value comes with its own limitations and problems, and that we must therefore find a proper way to live with both religion and secularism. A deep historical reflection on the complex human condition, Formations of Belief will be of enormous interest to historians, scholars of religion, and philosophers."-Rajeev Bhargava, author of The Promise of India's Secular Democracy "Formations of Belief is a significant contribution to recent interpretations of a global religious resurgence since the 1980s and offers a nuanced account of the complex interplay between religious and secular forms of knowledge over time. Its contributors are world-class scholars who revisit the once seemingly self-evident relationship between modernization and secularism, illuminating the religious origins of secular ideas, the varieties of secularism, the effects of Western imperialism on shaping the relationship between religion and secularism in postcolonial states, and more. The book's range is stunning."-Carolyn J. Dean, author of The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide "This book brings together a superb group of historians who offer a rich variety of perspectives on the complex connections between religion, secularist thought, and political power. Formations of Belief is instructive and deeply rewarding, both in its details and in the integrated picture that emerges."-Hans Joas, Humboldt University of Berlin and University of Chicago "Extremely timely. The richly detailed and persuasively argued essays in this book make a unique contribution to ongoing inquiries into the origins, nature, and futures of religious belief and its opposites."-Hen