The Archives & Special Collections unit of the Library is proud to host a series of Author Talks to give CSI authors an opportunity to discuss the research that went into their books. The next event will be held on Tuesday, Mar. 12 in the Library (Building 1L), Room 216 at 2:30pm, and will feature the following speakers/works:

-David Allen,  Department of Education: Observar Juntos el Trabajo de los Estudiantes (Looking Together at Student Work), Universidad Rosario Editorial, 2012.

This first Latin American edition of Looking Together at Student Work  provides teachers and administrators with strategies and resources for working together to examine and discuss student work such as essays, projects, art work, and math problems. The authors present three examples of structured conversations, or protocols: the Collaborative Assessment Conference, the Tuning Protocol, and the Consultancy. The book also offers case studies from schools that developed their own protocols. 

-Jay Arena,  Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work: Driven from New Orleans, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Arena explores the drastic transformation of New Orleans’s public housing from public to private in the early 1980s, exposing the social disaster visited on the city’s Black urban poor long before Katrina. His book reveals the true nature—and cost—of reforms promoted by an alliance of a neoliberal government, nonprofits, community activists, and powerful real estate interests. 

-Hildegard Hoeller,  Department of English: From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in 19th Century American Fiction, University of New Hampshire Press, 2012.

Hoeller argues that 19th-century American culture was driven by and deeply occupied with the tension between gift and market exchange. Rooting her analysis in the period’s fiction, she shows how American novelists from Hannah Foster to Frank Norris grappled with the role of the gift based on trust, social bonds, and faith in an increasingly capitalist culture based on self-interest, market transactions, and economic reason. Placing the notion of sacrifice at the center of her discussion, Hoeller taps into the poignant discourse of modes of exchange, revealing central tensions of American fiction and culture. 

-Chris Verene,  Department of Performing and Creative Arts: Family, Twin Palms Publishers, 2010.

Verene’s photographs of his family make the viewer feel like one of them, a part of the clan. Although the color in which the images are printed is warm and sensual and floods his subjects with a sweet romance, he avoids glamour. The images have lessons to teach about the inroads of aging, disability, and other aspects of the human predicament with which viewers experienced in visits back home identify. 

This event is co-sponsored by the Office of the Provost/Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs.