For tenure-track scholars in history, publishing a monograph is one of the key parts of earning tenure.1 But many contingent scholars publish monographs as well, especially those on the job market, where search committees want to see candidates who are engaged and “productive.”2
As few historians make any significant money on their writing, just knowing that people have read their books can mean a lot to an author. Here are some history books written by contingent scholars in 2019 that you might consider as you do your end-of-the-year shopping. Afer the history books, you’ll find a similar list from scholars in literary studies.3
Disclosure: Contingent is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and the magazine will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Visit our affiliate page to purchase books by our contributors and see book lists curated by the magazine’s staff.
Samuel Avery-Quinn, Cities of Zion: The Holiness Movement and Methodist Camp Meeting Towns in America (Rowman & Littlefield)
“[This book] follows Methodists and holiness advocates from their urban worlds . . . out into the wilderness [and] examines the transformation of American Methodist camp meeting revivalism from the Gilded Age through the twenty-first Century. These transformations are a window into the religious worlds of middle-class Protestants as they struggled with economic and social change, industrialization, moral leisure, theological controversies, and radically changing city life and landscape.”
Antony Adler, Neptune’s Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea (Harvard University Press)
“We have long been fascinated with the oceans, seeking “to pierce the profundity” of their depths. In studying the history of marine science, we also learn about ourselves. Neptune’s Laboratory explores the ways in which scientists, politicians, and the public have invoked ocean environments in imagining the fate of humanity and of the planet—conjuring ideal-world fantasies alongside fears of our species’ weakness and ultimate demise.”
Christopher H. Bouton, Setting Slavery’s Limits: Physical Confrontations in Antebellum Virginia, 1801–1860 (Lexington Books)
“While physical confrontations could not overthrow the institution of slavery, they helped the enslaved set limits on their owners’ exploitation. They also afforded the enslaved the space necessary to create lives as free from their owners’ influence as possible. When masters and mistresses continually intruded into the lives of their slaves, they risked provoking a violent backlash. Setting Slavery’s Limits explores how slaves of all ages and backgrounds resisted their oppressors and risked everything to fight back.”
Stephen W. Campbell, The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America (University of Kansas Press)
“President Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States was one of the most consequential political struggles in the early nineteenth century. A fight over the bank’s reauthorization . . . provoked fundamental disagreements over the role of money in politics, competing constitutional interpretations, equal opportunity in the face of a state-sanctioned monopoly, and the importance of financial regulation…”
Casey P. Cater, Regenerating Dixie: Electric Energy and the Modern South (University of Pittsburgh Press)
“Regenerating Dixie is the first book that traces the electrification of the US South from the 1880s to the 1970s. It emphasizes that electricity was not solely the result of technological innovation or federal intervention . . . one of [its] central lessons is that people have always mattered in energy history. The story of southern electrification is part of the broader struggle for democracy in the American past and includes a range of expected and unexpected actors and events.”
Sharmishtha Roy Chowdhury, The First World War, Anticolonialism and Imperial Authority in British India, 1914–1924 (Routledge)
“Using discussions on travel, spatiality, and landscape as an entry point, The First World War, Anticolonialism and Imperial Authority in British India, 1914–1924 discusses the complex politics of late colonial India and the waning of imperial enthusiasm. This book presents a multifaceted picture of Indian politics at a time when total war and resurgent anticolonial activism were reshaping assumptions about state power, culture, and resistance.”
Elisabeth Berry Drago, Painted Alchemists: Early Modern Artistry and Experiment in the Work of Thomas Wijck (Amsterdam University Press)
“Thomas Wijck’s painted alchemical laboratories were celebrated in his day as ‘artful’ and ‘ingenious.’ They fell into obscurity along with their subject, as alchemy came to be viewed as an occult art or a fool’s errand. But these unusual pictures challenge our understanding of early modern alchemy—and of the deeper relationship between chemical workshops and the artists who represented them . . .”
Jessica Dunkin, Canoe and Canvas: Life at the Encampments of the American Canoe Association, 1880−1910 (University of Toronto Press)
“Canoe and Canvas offers a detailed portrait of the summer encampments of the American Canoe Association between 1880 and 1910 . . . A social history of sport, [the book] is particularly concerned with how gender, class, and race shaped the social, cultural, and physical landscapes of the ACA encampments. Although there was an ever-expanding arena of opportunity for leisure and sport in the late nineteenth century, as the example of the ACA makes clear, not all were granted equal access.”
Bennett Gilbert, A Personalist Philosophy of History (Routledge)
“Historical study has traditionally been built around the placement of the human at the center of inquiry. The de-stabilized concepts of the human in contemporary thought challenge this configuration . . . A Personalist Philosophy of History argues for a robust concept of personhood in our experience of the past as a way to resolve this conflict. Focused on those who know history, rather than on the abstract properties of knowledge, it extends the moral agency of persons into non-human, trans-human, and deep history domains.”
Wendy Gonaver, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880 (University of North Carolina Press)
“Though the origins of asylums can be traced to Europe, the systematic segregation of the mentally ill into specialized institutions occurred in the United States only after 1800, just as the struggle to end slavery took hold. In this book, Wendy Gonaver examines the relationship between these two historical developments, showing how slavery and ideas about race shaped early mental health treatment in the United States, especially in the South.”
Benjamin Gross, The TVs of Tomorrow: How RCA’s Flat-Screen Dreams Led to the First LCDs (University of Chicago Press)
“Drawing upon laboratory notebooks, internal reports, and interviews with key participants, Gross reconstructs the development of the LCD and situates it alongside other efforts to create a thin, lightweight replacement for the television picture tube . . . The TVs of Tomorrow is a detailed portrait of American innovation during the Cold War, which confirms that success in the electronics industry hinges upon input from both the laboratory and the boardroom.”
Sarah Handley-Cousins, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North (University of Georgia Press)
“Bodies in Blue . . . expands and complicates our understanding of wartime disability by examining a variety of bodies and ailments . . . Under the gaze of surgeons, officers, bureaucrats, and civilians, disabled soldiers made difficult negotiations in their attempts to accommodate impaired bodies and please observers. Some managed this process with ease; others struggled and suffered. Embracing and exploring this apparent contradiction, Bodies in Blue pushes Civil War history in a new direction.”
David Head, A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution (Pegasus Books)
“After the British surrender at Yorktown, the American Revolution blazed on, and as peace was negotiated in Europe, grave problems surfaced at home. A Crisis of Peace tells the story of a pivotal episode of General Washington’s leadership and reveals how the American Revolution really ended: with fiscal turmoil, political unrest, out-of-control conspiracy thinking, and suspicions between soldiers and civilians so strong that peace almost failed to bring true independence.”
Cees Heere, Empire Ascendant: The British World, Race, and the Rise of Japan, 1894-1914 (Oxford University Press)
“Empire Ascendant examines how officials and commentators across the British imperial system wrestled with the implications of Japan’s unique status as an Asian power in an international order dominated by European colonial empires . . . This account weaves together studies of diplomacy, strategy, and imperial relations to pose searching questions about how Japan’s entry into the ‘family of civilised nations’ shaped, and was shaped by, ideologies of race.”
Kendra Preston Leonard, Music for the Kingdom of Shadows: Cinema Accompaniment in the Age of Spiritualism (Humanities Commons)
“In this book, I explore the connections between music for early movies (1895-1927) involving the supernatural in the context of the culture of the time in regard to supernatural beliefs and entertainments, particularly spiritualism . . . this book helps contextualize, explain, and interpret the complex relationships between music, performance, gender, entertainment, belief, and media during the early twentieth century.”
Michael V. Metz, Radicals in the Heartland: The 1960s Student Protest Movement at the University of Illinois (University of Illinois Press)
“In 1969, the campus tumult that defined the Sixties reached a flash point at the University of Illinois . . . If the sudden burst of irrational violence baffled parents, administrators, and legislators, it seemed inevitable to students after years of official intransigence and disregard. Metz portrays campus protesters not as angry, militant extremists but as youthful citizens deeply engaged with grave moral issues, embodying the idealism, naiveté, and courage of a minority of a generation.”
Jonathan Michaels, The Liberal Dilemma: The Pragmatic Tradition in the Age of McCarthysism (Routledge)
“This volume explores the response of liberals to rightwing attacks during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, establishing it as a defensive approach aimed at warding off efforts to conflate liberalism with communism, but not at striking back at the opposing ideology of conservatism itself . . . This book finds the combination of the liberal adherence to pragmatism and political pluralism to have been responsible for the weakness of this response.”
James Parisot, How America Became Capitalist: Imperial Expansion and the Conquest of the West (Pluto Press)
“Has America always been capitalist? . . . From the first white-settler colonies, capitalist economic elements were apparent, but far from dominant, and did not drive the early colonial advance into the West . . . Society, too, was far from homogeneous – as the role of the state fluctuated . . . By looking at this fascinating and complex picture, James Parisot weaves a groundbreaking historical materialist perspective on the history of American expansion.”
Sylvia Prince, The Medici Prize
“The youngest daughter in Europe’s richest family, Caterina de’ Medici longs for the power wielded by her brothers. But when an attempt to prove her value goes horribly wrong, Caterina flees from Florence dressed as her maid. And when a Scottish guard saves Caterina’s life, she must decide whether to trust him. The last thing Scottish guard James Stewart needs is a sharp-tongued, strong-willed Medici princess under his protection. He failed to protect a woman once before and the guilt still haunts him.”
Katelynn Robinson, The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages: A Source of Certainty (Routledge)
“Odors, including those of incense, spices, cooking, and refuse, were both ubiquitous and meaningful in central and late medieval Western Europe. The significance of the sense of smell is evident in scholastic Latin texts, most of which are untranslated and unedited by modern scholars . . . While the senses have received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, this volume presents the first detailed research into the sense of smell in the later European Middle Ages.”
L. Benjamin Rolsky, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond (Columbia University Press)
“In this book, L. Benjamin Rolsky examines the ways in which American liberalism has helped shape cultural conflict since the 1970s through the story of how television writer and producer Norman Lear galvanized the religious left into action . . . The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left foregrounds the foundational roles played by popular culture, television, and media in America’s religious history.”
Lauren C. Santangelo, Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot (Oxford University Press)
“The city’s mores, rhythms, and physical layout helped to shape what was possible for organizers campaigning within it . . . Combining urban studies, geography, and gender and political history, Suffrage and the City demonstrates that the Big Apple was more than just a stage for suffrage action; it was part of the drama. As much as enfranchisement was a political victory in New York State, it was also a uniquely urban and cultural one.”
Brandon M. Schechter,The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press)
“Each chapter features a series of related objects: weapons, uniforms, rations, and even the knick-knacks in a soldier’s rucksack. These objects narrate the experience of people at war, illuminating the changes taking place in Soviet society over the course of the most destructive conflict in recorded history . . . In The Stuff of Soldiers, [Schechter] describes the transformative potential of material things to create a modern culture, citizen, and soldier during World War II.”
Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press)
“From the Cold War through today, the U.S. has quietly assisted dozens of regimes around the world in suppressing civil unrest and securing the conditions for the smooth operation of capitalism. Casting a new light on American empire, Badges Without Borders . . . shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance—and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home.”
Margaret M. Scull, The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968–1998 (Oxford University Press)
“This study uses the Troubles as a case study to evaluate the role of the Catholic Church in mediating conflict, [and] looks more broadly at the actions of the American, Irish and English Catholic Churches, as well as that of the Vatican, to uncover the full impact of the Church on the conflict. This critical analysis of previously neglected state, Irish, and English Catholic Church archival material changes our perspective on the role of a religious institution in a modern conflict.”
Nathan Spannaus, Preserving Islamic Tradition: Abū Naṣr Qūrṣāwī and the Beginnings of Modern Reformism (Oxford University Press)
“The introduction of a state-backed structure for Muslim religious institutions altered Islamic religious authority and, in turn, religious discourse. One of the major figures to emerge from this new context was Abu Nasr Qursawi (1776-1812), [who] put forward a sweeping reform of the Islamic scholarly tradition . . . In Preserving Islamic Tradition, Nathan Spannaus presents the first detailed analysis of Qursawi’s reformist project, both in its contours and broad historical setting.”
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (University of California Press)
“Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultured meat”—and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food . . . Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing?
Editor’s note: The following is a list of monographs and edited collections published in 2019 by non-TT scholars in literary studies, assembled by Rebecca Colesworthy (editor, SUNY) and Laura Hartmann-Villalta (adjunct faculty, Georgetown). Contingent Magazine is a non-profit, and pays all of its contributors. If you’ve found this book list useful, please consider supporting the work we do here.
Melissa Bradshaw and Michael P. Murphy, eds., “this needs to dance / this needs to kneel”: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith (Wipf and Stock)
“. . . the poems Levertov wrote in the last twenty years of her life, with their more explicit focus on theological themes and subjects, are among the best poems written on religious experience of any century, let alone the twentieth. The collection of essays gathered here shed vital light on this neglected aspect of Levertov studies so as to expand and enrich the scope of critical engagement.”
Rebecca Colesworthy, Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange (Oxford University Press)
“From debates about reparations to the rise of the welfare state, the decades following World War I saw a widespread turn . . . to questions about the nature and role of gifts: What is a gift? What do gifts mean and do? Which individuals and institutions have the authority to give? [Colesworthy] argues that these questions centrally shaped literary modernism . . . [offering] sustained, nuanced readings of novels and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and H.D.”
Tim Groenland, The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace (Bloomsbury)
“Focusing on selected works of fiction by Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace, authors who represent stylistic touchstones for US fiction of recent decades, Groenland presents two case studies of editorial collaboration . . . [and] shows that the critical tendency to overlook the activities of editors and to focus on the solitary author figure neglects important elements of how literary works are acquired, developed and disseminated.”
Jocelyn Hargrave, The Evolution of Editorial Style in Early Modern England (Palgrave McMillan)
“This book provides a historical study on the evolution of editorial style and its progress towards standardisation through an examination of early modern English style guides. [Hargrave] considers the variety of ways authors, editors and printers directly implemented or uniquely interpreted and adapted the guidelines of these style guides as part of their inherently human editorial practice . . .[o]ffering a critical mapping of early modern style guides.”
Nicholas R. Helms, Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters (Palgrave)
“. . . Helms uses the language of mindreading to analyze inference and imagination throughout Shakespeare’s plays, dwelling at length on misread minds in King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. Using this cognitive literary approach, Helms . . . investigates the ways in which Shakespeare’s characters can both corroborate and challenge contemporary cognitive theories of the human mind.”
David Hershinow, Shakespeare and the Truth-Teller: Confronting the Cynic Ideal (Edinburgh University Press)
“Highlighting the necessity of literary thinking to political philosophy, this book explores Shakespeare’s responses to sixteenth-century debates over the revolutionary potential of Cynic critical activity – debates . . . that inform major developments in Western intellectual history. Analysing cynic characterisations of Lear’s Fool, Hamlet and Timon of Athens, Hershinow presents new ways of thinking about modernity’s engagement with classical models and literature’s engagement with politics.”
Abigail Joseph, Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style (University of Virginia Press)
“Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book’s four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style . . . In the cases that author Abigail Joseph examines, objects become unexpected sites of queer community and desire.”
Christopher Kitson, Legacies of the Sublime: Literature, Aesthetics, and Freedom from Kant to Joyce (SUNY)
“[Kitson] offers a highly original, subtle, and persuasive account of the aesthetics of the sublime in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and science . . . close readings weave together literary works with philosophical and scientific ones in order to clarify the complex dialogues between them . . . [revealing] the neglected history of how Kant’s theory of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment cast a shadow over the next century and more of literature and thought.”
Frances Maughan-Brown, The Lily’s Tongue: Figure and Authority in Kierkegaard’s Lily Discourses (SUNY)
“Frances Maughan-Brown demonstrates how Kierkegaard argues that the key is in the act of reading itself—no text can have authority unless the reader grants it that authority because no text can entirely avoid figural language. Texts don’t speak directly; their tongue is always the lily’s tongue. What is revealed in the Lily Discourses is a groundbreaking theory of figure, which requires a renewed reading of Kierkegaard’s major pseudonymous works.”
Anna Mercer, The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Routledge)
“This book is the first to dedicate a full-length study to exploring the nature of the Shelleys’ literary relationship in depth. It offers new insights into the works of these talented individuals who were bound together by their personal romance and shared commitment to a literary career. Most innovatively, the book describes how Mary Shelley contributed significantly to Percy Shelley’s writing, whilst also discussing Percy’s involvement in her work.”
Christin Mulligan, Geofeminism in Irish and Diasporic Culture (Palgrave)
“[Mulligan] demonstrates the ways in which contemporary feminist Irish and diasporic authors . . . cross borders literally (in terms of location), ideologically (in terms of syncretive politics and faiths), figuratively (in terms of conventions and canonicity), and linguistically to develop an epistemological “Fifth Space” of cultural actualization beyond borders. This book contextualizes their work with regard to events in Irish and diasporic history and considers these authors in relation to other more established counterparts such as W.B. Yeats . . . and Mairtín Ó Cadhain.”
Jennifer H. Oliver, Shipwreck in French Renaissance Writing: The Direful Spectacle (Oxford University Press)
“In the sixteenth century, a period of proliferating transatlantic travel and exploration, and, latterly, religious civil wars in France, the ship is freighted with political and religious, as well as poetic, significance; symbolism that reaches its height when ships–both real and symbolic–are threatened with disaster . . . The dramatic potential of both the disaster and the process of rebuilding is exploited throughout the century . . . shipwreck is not only the end, but often forms the beginning of a story.”
Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz, eds., Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism (Penn State University Press)
“From the modernist classic Nightwood to the late verse play The Antiphon, Barnes’s distinctive voice has long resisted any easy assimilation into specific groupings of authors or texts. Responding to expansions of canons and critical questions that have shaped modernist studies since the late twentieth century, the chapters in this volume bring new thinking to her full oeuvre and collectively demonstrate that the study of modernism necessarily includes the study of Barnes.”
Seth Perlow, The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric (University of Minnesota Press)
“An enlightening examination of the relationship between poetry and the information technologies increasingly used to read and write . . . Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that aren’t normally considered “digital.” Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, Perlow develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world . . .”
Albert Rolls, Thomas Pynchon: The Demon in the Text (Edward Everett Root)
“Rolls analyzes [a wide range of] material to produce a reading of Pynchon that teases out the importance of the relationship among the public figure Thomas Pynchon, the private individual Tom Pynchon (who, Rolls demonstrates, resides in the text as a sort of Maxwell-Demon-like entity), and those who read Pynchon and sometimes attempt to learn about his life. The result is a study of Pynchon as an idea rather than a life of Pynchon . . .”
Helen Rydstrand, Rhythmic Modernism: Mimesis and the Short Story (Bloomsbury)
“Through detailed close readings of non-fiction and short stories, Helen Rydstrand shows that textual rhythms comprised the substance of modernist mimesis . . . Rhythmic Modernism demonstrates how many modernist writers . . . were profoundly invested in mimicking a substratum of existence that was conceived as rhythmic, each displaying a fascination with rhythm, both as a formal device and as a vital, protean concept that helped to make sense of the complex modern world.”
Clare Stainthorp, Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet (Peter Lang)
“Constance Naden (1858–1889) is a unique voice in Victorian literature and science. This book, the first full-length critical account of her life and works, brings into focus the reciprocal nature of Naden’s poetry, philosophical essays and scientific studies. The development of Naden’s thinking is explored in detail, with newly discovered unpublished poems and notes from her adolescence shedding important light upon this progression.”
Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books 1450-1800: A Practical Guide (Wiley)
“Designed [for] students, researchers, and librarians . . . [this] is a clear and accessible introduction to working with books made in the first centuries of the printing press. The first half . . . describes how books were made in the hand-press period, from making blank sheets of paper through to printed and gathered sheets ready to be sold. The second half guides readers through how to understand and use such books, whether they are encountering them in a library or looking at them on a computer screen.”
Kim Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema (Bloomsbury)
“Since the late 1990s a new language has emerged in film scholarship and criticism in response to the popularity of American directors such as Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and David O. Russell. Increasingly, adjectives like ‘quirky’, ‘cute’, and ‘smart’ are used to describe these American films, with a focus on their ironic (and sometimes deliberately comical) stories, character situations and tones . . . Wilkins argues ‘American eccentric cinema’ presents a formal and thematic eccentricity that is distinct to the American context.”
Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington, Refocus: The Films of Spike Jonze (Edinburgh University Press)
“[This] is the first collection of essays on this important and original contemporary filmmaker. Each of Jonze’s feature films . . . is discussed at length, focusing on issues of authorship, narration, genre and adaptation. As well as the textual aspects of Jonze’s feature films, the contributors consider his work in music videos and shorts – investigating his position as a filmmaker on the blurred boundaries between studio and independent modes of production.”
- A monograph is a book, usually but not always single-authored, based on original research. Plenty of works of history you see in bookstores are not monographs, because they’re primarily synthesizing other people’s research.
- If these scholars get tenure-track jobs on the strength of their productivity, including their published book, they often have to write another book to earn tenure.
- Yes, you may notice some of them are considerably more expensive than most of the books you’d find in your local independent bookstore. We’d love to be able to pay a historian who works at a university press to write a mailbag for us on exactly why that is. You can help us get there.