The creativity and expertise of St. Lawrence faculty is on full display in books enjoyed by scholars and avid readers around the globe. This roundup features St. Lawrence faculty books published within the last several months.
Bob Cowser
Professor of English Bob Cowser’s fifth book, The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay, published by Edinburgh University Press, features 35 essayists, literary critics, and writing instructors. According to the publisher, “It further explores the relationship between the essay and other forms, such as philosophical writing, the column, science writing, the novel, the lyric, and the advert as well as the essay in digital spaces.”
Cowser is the author of three nonfiction books, including Green Fields: Crime, Punishment and a Boyhood Between, which won ’"Best Memoir 2010" from the Adirondack Center for Writers and was cited in the Best American Essays 2012. His research focuses on the essay, Modernism, and film adaptation. At St. Lawrence, Cowser has taught courses in nonfiction writing, film, and American literature since 1998, and has taught abroad in France, England, and Denmark.
Ana Maria Spagna
Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Ana Maria Spagna’s ninth book, Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and (Maybe) a Massacre, published by Torrey House Press in February 2023, replaces convenient narratives of the American West with nuance and complexity, revealing the danger in forgetting or remembering atrocities when history is murky and asking what allegiance to a place requires.
Spagna stumbled upon a story: one day in 1875, according to lore, on a high bluff over the Columbia River, a group of local Indigenous people murdered a large number of Chinese miners—perhaps as many as 300—and pushed their bodies over a cliff into the river. The little-known incident was dubbed the Chelan Falls Massacre. Despite having lived in the area for more than 30 years, Spagna had never before heard of this event. She set out to discover exactly what happened and why.
Consulting historians, archaeologists, Indigenous elders, and even a grave dowser, Spagna uncovers three possible versions of the event: native people as perpetrators; white people as perpetrators, or it didn’t happen at all.
Jeff Maynes
Associate Professor of Philosophy Jeff Maynes, along with Steve Gimbel of Gettysburg College, wrote Personal Memories of Early Analytic Philosophy: Analytic Logic/ Synthetic Lives, published by Palgrave Macmillan.
The book is a collection of interviews featuring philosophers, mathematicians, and their family members that tell the story of early 20th-century analytic philosophy in inter-war Germany and Austria. Philosophers Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap are among those featured.
Maynes’ research focuses on the study of what counts as a good philosophical argument. Maynes regularly teaches classes like “Reasoning, Environmental Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind,” and a First-Year Program (FYP) titled “Sherlock Holmes and the Art and Science of Reasoning.” He holds a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University and a B.A. from Gettysburg College.
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