Faculty Books
Art in Renaissance Rome
Eunice Howe, professor of art history, is one of the few Americans, and one of the very few women, to publish a book in the Vatican’s prestigious Studi e Testi series. Her book, Art and Culture at the Sistine Court: Platina’s “Life of Sixtus IV” and the Frescoes of the Hospital of Santo Spirito (Citta del Vaticano, 2005), reveals the culture of collaboration that flourished at the court of Sixtus IV, the pope who built the Sistine Chapel and other distinctive works of Renaissance Rome. The court’s creators of illuminated manuscripts, epigraphy and history-writing, as well as paintings, architecture and sculpture, drew from common sources. Howe reveals how this intermingling of art and scholarship was promoted by the first Vatican Librarian, humanist Bartolomeo Platina.
Beyond Oil and Gas
In Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy (J. Wiley & Sons, 2006), Nobel Laureate George Olah, Distinguished Professor and director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Institute, and his co-authors Loker chemist Alain Goeppert and Professor G.K. Surya Prakash, the Olah Nobel Laureate Chair in Hydrocarbon Chemistry, present a detailed but accessible discussion of how to deal with the looming crisis and environmental problems associated with the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels. In addition to an overview of the pros and cons of major energy sources, the book proposes methanol as a viable alternative to diminishing oil and gas resources. The book explores the promise of the methanol-based fuel cell (invented by Olah, Prakash and colleagues) and other technologies in powering the future and reducing pollution.
Surveying Yiddish Literature
As editor and translator of Introduction to Yiddish Literature (Oxford University Press, 2005), Jerold C. Frakes, professor of German and comparative literature in USC College, makes Jean Baumgarten’s comprehensive survey of a fascinating literature accessible to scholars and non-specialists alike. The book provides students and scholars of medieval, Renaissance and early modern European cultures with an exemplary survey of the broad and deep literary tradition in Yiddish. The hundreds of text citations and bibliographical references that are the scholarly basis of the study have been verified, and the citations translated anew directly from the original source.
The Best Sentences
Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Graphics Press, 2006), a new book by Virginia Tufte, Distinguished Professor Emerita of English in USC College, offers a unique approach to improving one’s writing. Tufte writes that her book “is not about errors but about successes. It is about developing an eye and an ear for techniques that work.” Tufte presents — and comments on — more than 1,000 excellent sentences by writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, in order to see how good writers actually use the generous structural resources of the English language.
Southern California Collection
Editor-in-chief James Ragan, program director of USC College’s Master of Professional Writing Program, and his team of poetry and fiction editors have gathered the work of established national and international poets, artists and novelists as well as the work of new authors for the latest volume of The Southern California Anthology (Vol. XXI) (MPW Program, 2006). Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “School in Beslan” is here, as well as Ragan’s “On Liberty and Church Streets: for the 3,025 dead in Manhattan, how I listen to their absence.” Included with these poems and short stories are works by winners of the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize for 2004 and 2005. |
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