Selected Published Books by Columbian College Faculty

Interactions among individuals representing culturally dissimilar and politically unequal groups are a ubiquitous feature of modern life. In Navigating Power: Cross-Cultural Competence in Navajoland by Gelaye Debebe, assistant professor of organizational sciences, is concerned with how these interactions affect task coordination in organizational settings. Debebe draws upon qualitative data from an inter-organizational relationship between an Anglo and Navajo organization and focuses on two contrasting patterns of interaction: ignoring and suppressing context, and reading and writing context.

That Said: New and Selected Poems, written by Professor of English Jane Shore, extends her lifelong, vivid exploration of memory—her childhood in New Jersey, her Jewish heritage, her adult years in Vermont.

The Imprint of Business Norms on American Education, written by Assistant Professorial Lecturer in Anthropology Dameon Alexander, explores the existence of certain capitalist realities in the American education system to find a balance between the distinct ideologies of education and business. This book is a theory-building exercise that centers on a descriptive multiple-case study of two senior high schools: a private, Jesuit school with a mission to educate students for university disciplines and a public charter school designed for career preparation, both located in Washington, D.C.

The Company We Keep: Occupational Community in the High-Tech Network Society, authored by Professorial Lecturer in Sociology Daniel Marschall, is an absorbing ethnography that sheds light on the nature of the computer technology industry marked by highly skilled jobs and rapid technological change. He chronicles the employees' experiences at IntenSivity, a technology workplace, examining how the workers characterize their occupational culture, share values and work practices, and help one another within their community.

In Prove It On Me, Assistant Professor of History Erin D. Chapman explores the gender and sexual politics of this modern racial ethos and reveals the constraining and exploitative underside of the New Negro era's vaunted liberation and opportunities. Chapman's cultural history documents the effects on black women of the intersection of primitivism, New Negro patriarchal aspirations, and the early twentieth-century consumer culture.

The First Modern Jew, by Assistant Professor of History Daniel B. Schwartz, provides a riveting look at how Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew.

In Watergate: A Novel, Professor of English Thomas Mallon portrays Nixon’s presidency through the lens of seven characters in and out of the White House. Mallon takes his readers on a journey through major locations, including Camp David, the Senate Caucus Room, the District of Columbia jail, and the Dupont Circle mansion of Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter. The book brings a new perspective to an often retold story of scandal and mystery.

In his book The Ahhiyawa Texts, Chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Eric Cline provides, for the first time, English translations of all twenty-six Ahhiyawa texts along with commentary and brief expositions on the historical implications of each text. Scholars often identify the controversial area of Ahhiyawa, a land referred to in these texts found in the Hittite capital of Hattusa dating to the fifteenth-thirteenth centuries B.C.E., with the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean world.