In the Footsteps of a Shadow: North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa enters the imaginations of these gifted American poets like a frightening medicine, challenging them to self-divide, multiply, renounce stability, and relish in the dead-time that our culture so vehemently abhors. Like a slippery thorn in the myth of bigger, better individualism, Pessoa seems to have privately solicited these poets for disturbing conversations about nothing: a nothing that he promotes as everything. -Larissa Szporluk This lush florilegium of poetic evocations, variations, and inquiries is a beautiful testament to how far and fruitfully Pessoa\u27s shadow reaches. -Richard Zenith This book is one of a kind. What it reveals is how a master of nothingness can inspire an endless fabric of thingness woven by others. This book offers us echoes and reechoes springing from a void. It is a reworking of Genesis. Overwhelming. -Alexis Levitin This superb anthology offers ample testimony to Pessoa\u27s place now in the North American literary mainstream as well as to the momentum towards this distinction that has been building over time. -Onésimo Almeida Source: Publisherhttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/spp_books/1005/thumbnail.jp

Towards Connecting Requirements with Developer Artifacts in a Local Context: Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for the paper: Towards Connecting Requirements with Developer Artifacts in a Local Contex

Higher Amounts of Habitual Physical Activity Changes the Relationship between Hot Flashes and Subclinical Cardiovascular Disease Risk

The menopausal transition is associated with increased risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Hot flashes (HF), a cardinal symptom of menopause, have been associated with increased CVD risk, particularly in perimenopausal women. Flow-mediated dilation (FMD) is an indicator of endothelial function and a subclinical CVD risk factor. Lower FMD has been associated with more HF. As moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) is recognized to reduce CVD risk, our goal was to determine whether higher levels of MVPA change the relationship between HF and FMD in perimenopausal women. Healthy perimenopausal women had HF measured objectively using sternal skin conductance for 24 h. MVPA was determined using 7 days of actigraphy. Endothelial function was measured via brachial artery FMD on the non-dominant arm. Pearson correlations and multiple regression analyses were used to evaluate relationships between variables. Simple slopes analysis was performed to understand how MVPA moderates the relationship between HF and FMD. Lower FMD tended to correlate with a higher objective HF rate, and this relationship was stronger for HF measured during waking hours. Controlling for age and BMI, HF and the interaction between HF and MVPA were significant predictors of FMD. Simple slope analysis showed a significant HF effect on FMD with lower (−1SD) MVPA, whereas there was no significant relationship between HF and FMD with higher (+1SD) MVPA. These results suggest that MVPA moderates the relationship between FMD and objective HFs in perimenopausal women

Classical Sanskrit for Everyone A Guide for Absolute Beginners

Surprisingly, Classical Sanskrit for Everyone is indeed for everyone. Playing tour guide to the \u27curious,\u27 the \u27Yoga aficionado,\u27 and the \u27scholar\u27 on an efficient itinerary through Sanskrit grammar and its philosophical cultures, Keating\u27s book is refreshingly accessible and useful. Replete with an excellent analysis of important features of Sanskrit with analogies to English usage and learned \u27pandit points,\u27 it also provides supplemental discussions of Sanskrit poetry and philosophy and up-to-date online resources. Pop culture references and a playfully funny tone, at turns, disarm the uninitiated reader and give the scholar a fresh perspective on how to teach this language to a new generation of eager learners. --Deven M. Patel, University of Pennsylvania Source: Publisherhttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/phi_books/1009/thumbnail.jp

River Valley Radical Futures

River Valley Radical Futures is a gallery exhibition that will be shown at A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton from May 2-25, 2025. This exhibit builds on 2 years of work, supported by a CEEDS Faculty Fellowship, the Humanities and Social Science Labs, and the Design Thinking Initiative. The exhibit will display an illustrated map of the Connecticut River Valley in a future 100 years beyond the fall of capitalism. This map has been co-created with about 13 local groups who build alternative economies in the Valley today. The exhibit will also include work from six local artists who are making artifacts that are excavated from the future envisioned by the map

“My Father Was a Wandering Aramean”: Biblical Conceptions of Migration and Their Relevance to Contemporary Immigration Debates in the United States

Ancient Israel’s foundational story enshrined the notion that its ancestors emigrated to the land of Canaan, a land that they were forced to leave repeatedly and to which they kept returning. Examples of this recurring biblical motif include: Abraham’s emigration from Mesopotamia and subsequent flight from Canaan to Egypt and return to Canaan; Jacob’s forced exile to Mesopotamia and his return to Canaan that is followed by his family’s eventual emigration to Egypt; the Israelites’ journey to Canaan from Egypt; the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem that resulted in forced migrations to Babylonia and Egypt; and the eventual return of some of the exiles to the Persian province of Judea. This national origin story left a significant imprint on a number of biblical laws and narratives that show a deep concern for resident aliens and certain foreigners. This chapter will explore the complexity of the biblical terrain surrounding ancient Israel’s self-perception as an immigrant people and the effect this had on the biblical understanding and treatment of various categories of non-Israelites. Along the way, we will interrogate in what ways the biblical materials and conceptual categories can or cannot be usefully mapped upon and applied to the contemporary immigration crisis in the United States.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/rel_books/1022/thumbnail.jp

Syrian Regime Resilience and State Power Through Contracting Stateness: The Cases of al-Hasakeh and Aleppo

This chapter challenges the concepts of state weakness and state fragility that treat territorial control and control over the means of violence as key indicators of state strength in the context of civil war. We demonstrate that during the years of civil war in Syria, including periods when its survival was most precarious, the Assad regime’scapacity to manage processes of state contraction and state reassertion played a critical role in its endurance.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/mes_books/1002/thumbnail.jp

Black Prison Intellectuals: Writings from the Long Nineteenth Century

How early Black prison writing shaped Black intellectual movements In this book, Andrea Stone recovers critical, understudied writings from early archives to call into question the idea that the Black prison intellectual movement began in the twentieth century. In fact, nearly two centuries before Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver, Black prisoners were serving as thought leaders and contributing to political movements. By illuminating their pathbreaking voices, Stone shows that prison writing from this era was a foundational part of Black American intellectualism. Grounding her work in a history of the disproportionately high incarceration of Black Americans, Stone traces the arc of Black prison writing from 1795 to 1901. She analyzes gallows literature, court records, newspaper coverage, and parole request letters, arguing that parole requests represent an undervalued, vital literary genre. Most of the writers featured in this book were effectively treated as enemies of the state, leading Stone to a question that continues to resonate in America today: what is the distinction between criminal and enemy, and how are those categories intertwined with Blackness in the United States Black Prison Intellectuals sheds light on the roots of issues like structural racism and mass incarceration. Looking at an important literary tradition that contributed to the Black American intellectual movement, this book helps readers better understand the present as a moment in the long journey toward a racially just society. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. — Provided by publisher.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/eng_books/1025/thumbnail.jp

Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory

An innovative and much-needed critical work on music and memorialization in relation to AIDS, 9/11, and anti-Black violence in America Music has long served as a powerful medium for communal mourning and remembrance in times of crisis. Audible Loss examines musical responses to three major crises in US society at the turn of the twenty-first century: the AIDS epidemic, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ongoing conditions of anti-Black violence. Analyzing a range of works written to commemorate these losses, Andrea Zarafshon Moore explores how contemporary classical music (aka “new music”) frames and narrates these crises, gives voice to grief, imagines other possibilities, and makes loss audible. These crises are read alongside one another to reveal the ways they are mutually imbricated, while also recognizing the sheer commemorative dominance of 9/11 in this century. Attending to broader debates and discourses through which commemoration is always filtered and the ways interpretive consensus has been sought and articulated in both musical and other memorial forms, Moore probes the conventional claims of commemoration, particularly those for the necessity of remembrance to “healing” and the prevention of future crises. Audible Loss concludes by reflecting on the limits of existing commemorative forms and the possibility, even necessity, of new ones. Taking the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, it proposes that while memorials of all kinds may provide outlets for collective remembrance and even mourning, their power to forge a sense of collectivity is diminished as public discourse grows more fragmented. Deeply informed yet highly approachable, Audible Loss is a major contribution to the fields of music and memory studies and essential reading for anyone interested in memory culture in the United States today.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/mus_books/1002/thumbnail.jp