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From anthropological surveys and rap artist autobiographies to Victorian literature and high fantasy, six Loyola faculty members share the books on their summer reading list and how they’re preparing for the next semester.
Associate Professor, School of Environmental Sustainability
What projects are you working on this summer?
Over the past year, my team of undergraduate research assistants in SES collected data on the relationship between plant root biomass, nutrient uptake, and ecosystem services, and separately, on the chemicals plants produce that help or hinder the growth of other plants. This summer, I’ll be creating drafts of two papers that I’ll then refine with the students in the fall.
I’m also starting to offer Guided Nature Explorations for retreat groups at LUREC, so I’m cramming my brain with information on all of the ecologies of the species we commonly find at LUREC.
Tell us about a book you always recommend to fellow readers.
I always recommend The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They compile and reconsider anthropological evidence to suggest that humans have been much more intentional and diverse about how they arrange their societies than the common myth of “primitive” non-Western societies suggests. I find it useful for breaking out of the mental rut that makes our current arrangement of society seem so inescapable.
What is on your summer reading list?
People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America by Robert Michael Morrissey. I’m attempting to understand the socio-ecological history of LUREC for my Guided Nature Explorations and Loyola environmental historian Ben Johnson gave me this book. It explores the relationships between Native Americans in the region, agriculture, bison, fire, and European trading alliances in the mix of prairies, woodlands, and savannas that defines Illinois’ ecology until very recently.
Emily Yuko Hallet
Assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences
What projects are you working on this summer?
This summer, I’m working on projects asking: why humans started eating small prey like rabbits, birds, and fish so late in our evolutionary history, and what methods we used to hunt them; how well do models of past climate agree with “on the ground” paleoclimate records; and when did humans start engineering or “domesticating” landscapes, and did our sister species also do this?
Tell us about a book you always recommend to fellow readers.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. This book will inspire you to write what you know.
What is on your summer reading list?
For research, I’m reading Face Paint: The Story of Makeup by Lisa Eldridge. Students are eager to know when humans started decorating themselves, and while there is a rich historical record of personal ornamentation, we don’t know much about it in the prehistoric record.
I’m also reading Archaeology of Illinois: The Deep History of the Prairie State, published by the Illinois State Archeological Survey. Dr. Christopher Hernandez in Anthropology, Dr. Laura Gawlinski in Classical Studies, and I just completed our first season of an archaeology field school at the LUREC campus, and this book was invaluable for starting that research.
Finally, I’m reading Tasting History: Explore the Past through 4,000 Years of Recipes by Max Miller. I love food history and researching the origins of different ingredient combinations and subsistence strategies. I think it would be fun to write a Paleolithic cookbook someday.
For fun, I’m reading Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna, which is a collection of stories with and about my favorite director, as well as King Sorrow by Joe Hill and The Passenger series by Cormac McCarthy.
Matthew Howard
Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Public Communication & Advocacy, School of Communication
What projects are you working on this summer?
I’m focused on two things: the first is my book about Hallyu, or the “Korean Wave,” and its conflicted historical relationships with Korean diasporas. The second is I’ll be doing archival research at the Chicago Public Libraries looking into Chicago’s K-Town(s).
Tell us about a book you always recommend to fellow readers.
It’s hard to choose one, so either Babel or The Poppy War, both by R.F. Kuang. Babel is probably the single best piece of fiction if you want to understand how empires really work on and through people, technologies, and institutions. The silver in that story perfectly speaks to the importance of media and communication technologies within those power structures. The Poppy War is less on-the-nose for someone in Media Studies, but I do think it is the most important piece of high fantasy fiction written in the past couple of decades.
What is on your summer reading list?
I’m reading Transpacific, Undisciplined, edited by Lily Wong, Christopher B. Patterson, and Chien-ting Ling. The book features essays by a variety of scholars from many disciplines, approaches, and theoretical frameworks. The key unifying factor is their investment in the idea of the “Transpacific” not as a geographic label, but as a way to think about space, power, and labor relations.
I’m also reading Baekbeomilji (The Diary of Kim Gu) by Kim Gu as a part of a larger grounding in peninsular Korean history that I see as necessary for my ongoing research and teaching work. History isn’t just stuff in the past; it’s also the way those things ripple outward in the long term. With that in mind, I’m building my ongoing interest in Korean nationalism from the independence movement in the first half of the twentieth century through today.
Finally, I’m reading Koreatown, Los Angeles by Shelley Sang-hee Lee, which is a history of KTown in LA. It examines the way that KTown emerged as a specific kind of enclave and containment space where Korean migrants made their own community, but were soft-segregated from white neighborhoods in Los Angeles. As I embark on my own work on Koreatown Chicago, I’m hoping it will help me frame that work both methodologically and as a connection.
Priyanka Jacob
Associate Professor in the Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences
What projects are you working on this summer?
This summer I’m teaching my graduate seminar for English MA and PhD students on Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa; or The History of a Young Lady, one of the longest novels in the English language, which is about sixteen hundred pages long. I’m writing about Richardson’s book and its play with time—its procrastinations, circularities, suspensions, and accelerations—while also walking my graduate students through the intense and immersive experience of reading such a long book over the compressed timeline of a six-week summer term.
Amidst all the recent reports about how reading is a dying skill, I invite students at all levels to experience dwelling in a book, over time. The novel constructs its own temporal space, one that rewards attention and endurance, that expands our contemplative and empathic capacities, and that offers a psychic salve that we need now more than ever.
Tell us about a book you always recommend to fellow readers.
As a scholar of nineteenth-century British literature, I always recommend Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. It’s not as well-known as Jane Eyre, but in my opinion, it’s much more interesting. It’s narrated by a resentful, depressed, yet very compelling protagonist, and it’s about emigration, unrequited love, and leaning into loneliness. I regularly get emails from students who read this with me and are still thinking about it after the class ends.
What is on your summer reading list?
My summer reading project is to go through all the books in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials universe, as this summer marks the release of the last book in the recent Book of Dust trilogy, stories that precede and follow the events of the classic His Dark Materials series. As a treat, I’m starting back at the very beginning, so that I can linger in this world book after book.
Literary lingering is kind of my thing, so I had to check out On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, a multi-volume work in Danish, with the first four volumes currently available in English translation. I’m really curious about this work’s representation of time and repetition, but also in its form as a multi-volume novel.
Up next is Scrap by Calla Henkel. This is a novel about a scrapbooking artist piecing together a mysterious death from bits of paper evidence. The premise intrigued me, as I have written about the paper scrap in Victorian sensation fiction and I’m always interested in novels that interrogate the medium of print and material of paper.
Holly Mattix-Kramer
Professor and Chair of Public Health Sciences, Parkinson School of Health Sciences and Public Health
What projects are you working on this summer?
I’m working with a team of clinicians, health service researchers, and medical, public health, and undergraduate students to examine how quality improvement programs impact hypertension care. I’m spending a lot of time mentoring students and editing their abstracts and manuscripts. It’s fun work because we’re able to accomplish so much with this great team.
Tell us about a book you always recommend to fellow readers.
The book I recommend over and over again is Evicted by Matthew Desmond. I teach a course on homelessness and its intersection with public health, and I always ask my students to read this book. The author shows readers how one small misstep for individuals or families can lead to eviction and its very messy aftermath. It describes the process of eviction and what a prior eviction can mean for an individual or a family seeing a place to live.
What is on your summer reading list?
I am a few chapters into The Rules of Contagion by Adam Kucharski. The book is super interesting because it shows how the mathematics behind an infectious disease spread can be applied to other phenomena, such as the spread of ideas, implementation of a new drug, smoking or drug habits, and even financial decline during recessions.
Lavar Pope
Clinical Professor of Political Science, Arrupe College
What projects are you working on this summer?
I’m working on two major projects this summer. One is a research project looking closely at autobiographies of rap artists from local U.S. scenes. While my American Rap Scenes focuses on U.S. scenes, the approach is more about factors on the growth of the scenes that is about direct stories from people from the scenes. Given the sheer amount of autobiographical and biographical material, this project will likely be an ongoing effort for several years. I’m also working on revising materials for my U.S. Government and Citizenship course. I want to be sure the textbook and resources for that course are much more tailored to students and the course content I want to teach.
Tell us about a book you always recommend to fellow readers.
There are quite a few I recommend in the area of local rap autobiographies. One would be My Infamous Life by Queens rapper Albert “Prodigy” Johnson of Mobb Deep and author Laura Checkoway. It was one of the first rap autobiographies that I read that seemed utterly honest.
The second book would be Sentences by New York City rapper Percy “MF Grimm” Carey and author Ronald Wimberly. In addition to being genuine and candid, it is also a graphic novel and very quick read that most people will be able to finish in a couple of days. Both books speak to the experiences of Black youth in American cities.
What is on your summer reading list?
Additional biographies of rap artists connected to local U.S. geographies are on my list. I try to read at least one each week during the summer. The ones I’m most excited about are: The Chronicles of DOOM by S.H. Fernando Jr., The Way I Am by Eminem, Ladies First by Queen Latifah, The Book of Jose by Fat Joe, My Journey into the Wu-Tang by U-God, Split Decision by Ice-T, Luminary Icon by Sha-Rock, and The Marathon Don’t Stop: The Life and Times of Nipsey Hustle by Rob Kenner. I’m excited to hear about how they describe their journey before and after rap celebrity.
Explore these books and build your own summer reading list at the University Libraries.
