Spanning six centuries and seven countries, the Middeldorf Collection—assembled by the late eminent art historian Ulrich Middeldorf—provides an extraordinary overview of major personalities and of political, social, cultural, and religious events as depicted in more than 350 medals and plaquettes. Illustrated in full color and accompanied by extensive documentation are commemorations of kings, queens, emperors, poets, composers, physicians, artists, inventors, popes, cardinals, and bishops. Papal annual and jubilee medals and delightful French reliefs from the Belle Époque complement medals from the eras of Louis XIV and XV, Napoleon, and the Risorgimento. Highlights of the collection are Italian medals from the 17th century and later—periods that until recently have received little scholarly attention.

Medals and Plaquettes in the Ulrich Middeldorf Collection at the Indiana University Art Museum: 15th to 20th Centuries

Arts & Photography

Flaten, Arne R.

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Indiana Univ. Pr

Transit: A Novel (Global African Voices)

Waiting at the Paris airport, two immigrants from Djibouti reveal parallel stories of war, child soldiers, arms trafficking, drugs, and hunger. Bashir is recently discharged from the army and wounded, finding himself inside the French Embassy. Harbi, whose wife, Alice, has been killed by the police, is there too―arrested earlier as a political suspect. An embassy official mistakes Bashir for Harbi's son, and as Harbi does not deny it, both will be exiled to France, Alice's home country. This brilliantly shrewd and cynical universal chronicle of war and exile, translated into English for the first time, amounts to a lyrical and reflective history of Djibouti and its tortuous politics, crippled economy, and devastated moral landscape.

Transit (Global African Voices)

Literature & Fiction

Waberi, Abdourahman A.

United States

One of the great visionaries and pioneers of modern architecture, Le Corbusier was a master of light, declaring it both a fundamental basis of architecture and the key to personal well-being. In this portfolio of 160 photographs taken over 40 years, Henry Plummer captures Le Corbusier’s inspired use of natural light in three of his greatest achievements: the small pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp, the Dominican monastery of Sainte Marie de La Tourette, and the parish church of Saint-Pierre in Firminy-Vert, all in France. In these modest religious works Le Corbusier deploys light to create enchanted, emotionally charged spaces wedded to the cosmic rhythm of sunlight and season. Cosmos of Light reveals how the artist reimagined sacred space and charted new ways that buildings can both reveal and inhabit the universe around them.

Cosmos of Light: The Sacred Architecture of Le Corbusier

Plummer, Henry

Architecture

African Art and Agency in the Workshop (African Expressive Cultures)

History & Criticism

Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future

Ottoman historical writing of the 15th and 16th centuries played a significant role in fashioning Ottoman identity and institutionalizing the dynastic state structure during this period of rapid imperial expansion. This volume shows how the writing of history achieved these effects by examining the implicit messages conveyed by the texts and illustrations of key manuscripts. It answers such questions as how the Ottomans understood themselves within their court and in relation to non-Ottoman others; how they visualized the ideal ruler; how they defined their culture and place in the world; and what the significance of Islam was in their self-definition.

History

Middle East

Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected.

Material Ecocriticism

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Health patterns in Southeast Asia have changed profoundly over the past century. In that period, epidemic and chronic diseases, environmental transformations, and international health institutions have created new connections within the region and the increased interdependence of Southeast Asia with China and India. In this volume leading scholars provide a new approach to the history of health in Southeast Asia. Framed by a series of synoptic pieces on the "Landscapes of Health" in Southeast Asia in 1914, 1950, and 2014 the essays interweave local, national, and regional perspectives. They range from studies of long-term processes such as changing epidemics, mortality and aging, and environmental history to detailed accounts of particular episodes: the global cholera epidemic and the hajj, the influenza epidemic of 1918, WWII, and natural disasters. The writers also examine state policy on healthcare and the influence of organizations, from NGOs such as the China Medical Board and the Rockefeller Foundation to grassroots organizations in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Histories of Health in Southeast Asia: Perspectives on the Long Twentieth Century (China Medical Board Centennial Series - Philantropic and Nonprofit Studies)

Asia

Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944

The center of the art world before the war, Paris fired the Nazis’ greed. The discovery of more than 1,500 prized paintings and drawings in a private Munich residence, as well as a recent movie about Allied attempts to recover European works of art, have brought Nazi plundering back into the headlines, but the thievery was far from being limited to works of art. From 1942 onwards, ordinary Parisian Jews―mostly poor families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe―were robbed, not of sculptures or paintings, but of toys, saucepans, furniture, and sheets. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews tells how this vast enterprise of plunder was implemented in the streets of Paris by analyzing images from an album of photographs found in the Federal Archives of Koblenz. Brought from Paris in 1945, the photographs were cataloged by the staff of the Munich Central Collecting Point. Beyond bearing witness to the petty acts of larceny, these images provide crucial information on how the Germans saw their work. They enable us to grasp the "Nazi gaze" and to confront the issue of the relation between greed and mass destruction.

Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews: A Photographic Album, Paris 1940-1944

GENSBURGER, Sarah

Photography & Video

In The Grand Scribe’s Records: Volume X, readers can follow Ssu-ma Qian’s depiction of the later years of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (r. 140–87 BC). The volume begins with four chapters describing the Han’s attempts to subdue states north, east, south and west of the empire. The subsequent long biography of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju (179–117) presents one of the era’s major literary figures who came to oppose the Emperor’s expensive military campaigns against these states. It is followed by an equally extended portrayal of Liu An (d. 122), King of Huai-nan, who was seen as an internal threat and forced to commit suicide. The final chapters recount narratives of the ideal officials (all predating the Han) and the Confucians the Emperor championed.

The Grand Scribe's Records: The Memoirs of Han China

Ch'ien, Ssu-ma

Ancient Civilizations

Chronicles the experiences of the crewmen of the torpedoed World War II cruiser as they struggled to survive in the Pacific Ocean for four days

Abandon Ship!: Death of the U.S.S. Indianapolis

NEWCOMB, Richard F.

Military

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