Professor of dance Judith Hamera’s Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization (Oxford University Press) argues that deindustrialization cannot be understood apart from issues of race, specifically art by African Americans that represents relationships with capitalism in times of economic transition. Hamera discusses how Michael Jackson’s performances and plays featuring Detroit contain valuable lessons about decades of structural changes in the U.S. economy.

History professor Julian Zelizer has gathered leading historians’ writings on the legacy of Barack Obama. The Presidency of Barack Obama (Princeton University Press) delves into the issues that shaped his eight years in office.

Associate professor of French Christy Wampole traces the history of the root as a metaphor in Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor (University of Chicago Press). Drawing on many fields, Wampole describes how the evolution of this common metaphor, from the family tree to the rhetoric of nationalism, has had far-reaching political and social consequences.