In Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton University Press), G. JOHN IKENBERRY, a professor of politics and international affairs, writes that America’s ability to influence the world order in the last decade has been diminished and that America must renegotiate its relationship with other countries, but the ideas that have guided U.S. leadership over the last century will endure. 


STACY WOLF, professor of theater and director of the Princeton Atelier, demonstrates how American musical theater since the Cold War has been dominated by women performers and characters in musicals ranging from West Side Story to Phantom of the Opera in Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford University Press).


After her husband of 48 years died suddenly, JOYCE CAROL OATES, a professor of the humanities and of creative writing, wrote about her grief in A Widow’s Story: A Memoir (Ecco). Booklist called it “an illuminating portrait of a marriage, a searing confrontation with death, an extraordinarily forthright chronicle of mourning, and a profound ‘pilgrimage’ from chaos to coherence.”


In Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), ROBERT DARNTON, a professor emeritus of European history, examines the 1749 investigation in France known as Affair of the Fourteen, a crackdown on citizens for unauthorized poetry recitals that ridiculed the king. Darnton traces how information and ideas spread through the poems — particularly when they were sung to familiar tunes. An online supplement includes a recording of the songs discussed in the book.


In the latest installment of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Volume 37: 4 March to 30 June 1802 (Princeton University Press), edited by BARBARA B. OBERG, senior research scholar and lecturer with rank of professor in history, Jefferson names a commissioner to handle a land sale by the Oneida Indians to the state of New York, worries about an increasingly dictatorial France taking back control of New Orleans, and prepares lists of books to be purchased for the recently established Library of Congress.


In Consciousness and the Source of Reality: The PEAR Odyssey (ICRL Press), ROBERT G. JAHN ’51 *55, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering emeritus and former dean of the engineering school, and Brenda J. Dunne summarize the controversial research and activities of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory (PEAR), which explored mind-matter interactions and closed in 2007.