The Ultimate Brown Reading List
Shopping period is a window into all of the incredible courses that Brown has to offer. However, it always leaves me with an ache for all the things I won’t have time to learn each semester. This spring, I shopped 16 courses in an effort to squeeze the most out of my last semester. In each class, I made a point of collecting the syllabus so that if I couldn’t take the course, I could look through the readings in my free time (read: after I graduate).But in no world would I be able to read all of the books for all the courses; I wanted to know which to choose. So I asked professors: If a student could only read one book or reading from your course syllabus this semester, which would it be?The result of this is the Ultimate Brown Reading List, a compilation of readings that Brown professors consider the best or most impactful, and that capture the core of each course. If you find yourself with free time, but it’s long after you’ve lost your loose-leaf syllabi from shopping period, check here for which book to pick up.Considering the wealth of courses and corresponding syllabi on Brown's campus, this could be the first of many "ultimate" reading lists. If you are a professor and you would like to provide a recommendation, email me at ksf@brown.edu. If you are a student and want to know what your professors think is the most important book on their syllabus, ask them to contribute!Monkey, Sí, Manuel MuñozRalph Rodriguez, ETHN0790A: Latino/a LiteratureIf a student could only read one story from my Latina/o literature syllabus, I would choose Manuel Muñoz's "Monkey, Sí." It would make them want to read everything else. "Monkey, Sí" powerfully tells a tale of sexuality, identity, unrequited love, and trauma. It grippingly brings you into the lives of two young men, Nestor and Tomás. Indeed, one of the things that makes the narrative so engaging is that the narrator brings you into the story through a first person plural narrative point of view. The story will wreck you and make you want to know more. It will teach you about love and how authors construct narrative sympathy.What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, Peggy Pascoe Robert Self, HIST1530: The Intimate State: The Politics of Gender, Sex, and Family in the U.S., 1873-Present"If a student could read only one book . . ." Is there a sadder beginning of a sentence in the English language? What an impossible choice, in the sea of transformative books in which faculty and students swim at Brown. But here's one from my "Intimate State" course this semester (HIST 1530) that I would strongly recommend: the late Peggy Pascoe's What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford, 2010). Pascoe shows, at the granular level of state law and at the conceptual level of national culture, how for more than a century following the Civil War, Americans used marriage law to produce gender and racial hierarchies--to make race, as the title suggests. Pascoe shows us how marriage is a legal technology of social ordering, not a neutral container for the sentimental coupling of individuals. And in doing that, she equips us to understand far more than marriage, but our entire social world as produced through the vast landscape of institutions we may be otherwise inclined to take for granted.Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Herman MelvillePhilip Gould, ENGL1560B: MelvilleIt's Melville's magnum opus and his White Whale of defeat.
Making Up People, Ian HackingJennifer Lambe, HIST1830M: From Medieval Bedlam to Prozac Nation: Intimate Histories of Psychiatry and SelfI'm tempted to answer with one of our earliest (and shortest) readings: Ian Hacking's "Making Up People." Hacking urges us to think about what we mean when we talk about "social constructivism"--how is it that certain "human kinds" (multiple personality disorder, homosexuality, autism) come to be, sometimes only to disappear again. Students often find Hacking perplexing at first, frustrating later on, but ultimately elucidatory. We also have great conversations about Ethan Watter's (imperfect but intriguing) Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. What happens, he asks, when "our" human kinds, born of a specific social and historical context, travel (sometimes quite forcibly) to "other" places?Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana CavareroAnna Bialek, RELS1380B: Ethics of VulnerabilityThis book argues for a reorientation of discussions of terrorism from focusing on the perpetrators (or potential perpetrators) to the victims, who demand care and attention instead of inciting further violence or pre-emptive attack. Cavarero writes brilliantly of the confusions and catastrophes created by focusing on perpetrators, and makes a powerful case for elevating bodily vulnerability in conversations about contemporary violence. The book challenges many prevailing assumptions about crime, guilt, and where our attention should be focused when bad things happen, making much more available for consideration and critique in these difficult discussions.Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, Frédéric LordonJeremy Powell, MCM1203I: Media, or AffectThe book I'd like to recommend is Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Written by the French economist Frédéric Lordon in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, Willing Slaves incorporates the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza's robust philosophy of affects into a Marxist analytical framework in order to understand how contemporary capitalism goes about making those whom it exploits desire their own exploitation. Lordon's book is neither the most foundational text on my syllabus (that would be Spinoza's own Ethics, one of the core texts of the Enlightenment), nor the most central to the goal of my course, which primarily explores applications of affect theory to the study of media. But, for Brown students in 2016, it's surely the most urgent.“Fragments, on Love and Desire,” SapphoStephen Merriam Foley, ENGL0100Q: How Poems SeeI recommend the poetry of Sappho, the woman from archaic Lesbos, whose lyrics are not heard but overheard, whose direct and moving voice is unmistakable centuries later. Only a few poems survive intact but the fragments are treasures:“Like the sweet-apple reddening high on the branch,High on the highest, the apple-pickers forgot,Or not forgotten, but one they couldn’t reach…”A Seventh Man, John BergerVazira Zamindar, HIST0150D: Refugees: A Twentieth-Century History[The book] moved me when I read it the first time, and still does every time I re-read it.Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, Herman Melville / Po' Sandy, Charles W. ChesnuttDashiell Wasserman, ENGL0200L: Trial and Error: Law in American Literature and FilmI’ll cheat and offer a tie between two short stories, both of which are quick but powerful reads invoking law, narrative, and society.Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is the enigmatic tale of a lonesome law-copyist who “prefers” neither to do his work nor to take care of himself—nor even to remove himself when the office challenges location. “Bartleby” even inspired slogans for Occupy Wall Street. In short, paperwork has never been more gripping.Drawing on the folk tradition of hoodoo, Charles W. Chesnutt's "Po' Sandy" tells the story of a slave named who is transformed by his wife into a tree—yes, you read correctly—which is, in turn, hewed for lumber. "Po' Sandy" presents a forceful challenge to the legal reasoning that a person can be property, inviting us to think about the people who are, and have been, made and unmade by the law.Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air, David MacKayJason Harry and Lawrence Larson, ENGN0020: Transforming Society-Technology and Choices for the FutureWe have found that the book "Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air" by David MacKay is a wonderful resource in understanding the role that renewable sources of energy can (and can't) play in powering the world. It explains in very approachable language the in's and out's of global energy usage and supply, and carefully examines the logic, opportunities, and limitations of replacing traditional sources with renewables. The book takes no position, but rather just lays out the facts and numbers. The material can get somewhat technical and a little mathematical at times (hence, this book may not be everyone's cup of tea!), but the story is all the clearer for it.Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn / New Theory about Light and Colors, Isaac NewtonJoan Richards, SCSO1000: Introduction to Science and Society: Theories and Controversies / HIST1976I: The World of Isaac NewtonFrom the SCSO 1000 syllabus, I would recommend that everyone read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is a classic, that has served as the starting point for the enormous variety of work, from Ian Hacking to Bruno Latour to Anne Fausto-Sterling, that make up Science Studies today.It is hard to find a similarly accessible work from HIST1976I. I would always recommend that everyone read at least one work of Isaac Newton. The Principia is clearly a bridge too far for most of us, but when supplemented by some basic research into his life and times, his 1671 "New Theory about Light and Colors" may be more accessible.