Alex Zukas | National University, San Diego (original) (raw)

Papers by Alex Zukas

Environment, space, place, Mar 1, 2022

historian and a geographer wrote the other two. The four chapters in Section IV ("Dynamics of Dis... more historian and a geographer wrote the other two. The four chapters in Section IV ("Dynamics of Distribution") all deal, in one way or another, with the role of various types of power in shaping, even determining, the manner in which scarcity manifests in different situations. All of the authors deal, explicitly or implicitly, with ideas and insights generally associated with Sen's studies about famines. 1 At the end of day, what does one make of Scarcity in the Modern World? It is a dense volume, involving multiple voices, disciplines, approaches, and perspectives. Its case studies range widely from electricity shortages in India in the early twentieth century to sanitation problems in Lagos, Nigeria, at roughly the same time, and from food shortages in China during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to the famine in the Sahel in 2012. As a result, different readers will likely be drawn to different chapters, but the overall quality of the chapters is high. Even though the relentlessness of the interrogation of "scarcity" and the intensity of the detail can be overwhelming, and the book's good questions definitely outnumber its answers, the time expended in reading The Making of Scarcity is certainly justified.

The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 2009

International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, 2009

Environment, Space, Place, 2022

REVIEWED BY ALEX ZUKAS As Matthew Edney notes in the introduction, "This book is the product of m... more REVIEWED BY ALEX ZUKAS As Matthew Edney notes in the introduction, "This book is the product of my entire career as a map historian (so far);" it does, indeed, represent the culmination of more than thirty years of his research in the history of maps and mapping that began in graduate school (ix). From the outset of his career, Edney has followed and advocated a postmodern or poststructural approach to map studies. This book follows that theoretical approach, which is both a strength and a weakness. Adopting another theoretical approach would have enabled his desired critique of cartography without being self-refuting, as his poststructuralism turns out to be when he makes a positive case for studying mapping processes rather than cartography and "maps."1 Edney is a major and respected figure in the history of mapping. Along with Brian Harley, Denis Wood, Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, Chris Perkins, and John Pickles, he has helped reshape the field over the past thirty-plus years in the direction of "critical cartography" or "critical map studies." He has directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2005, and co-edited the fourth volume in that series, Cartography in the European Enlightenment (2019). He notes that co-editing that volume tested and tempered many of his ideas (ix). Since 2007 he has held the Osher Chair in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine.

International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, ed. Immanuel Ness, Blackwell Publishing, 2009

Glimpse, 2004

British horror cinema is often excluded from critical work dealing with European horror cinema or... more British horror cinema is often excluded from critical work dealing with European horror cinema or, as it is frequently referred to, 'Eurohorror'. This article argues that such exclusion is unwarranted. From the 1950s onwards there have been many exchanges between British and continental European-based horror production. These have involved not just international co-production deals but also creative personnel moving from country to country. In addition, British horror films have exerted influence on European horror cinema and vice versa. At the same time, the exclusion of British horror from the 'Eurohorror' category reveals limitations in that category, particularly its idealisation of continental European horror production.

The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, Immanuel Ness, ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 2009

Immanuel Ness, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009: 1979-1980

The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, Immanuel Ness, ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 2009, 2009

Clara Zetkin, née Eißner, was the most prominent German socialist of her generation to take the c... more Clara Zetkin, née Eißner, was the most prominent German socialist of her generation to take the concerns and issues of women's oppression seriously in her theoretical and practical work. Born in Wiederau, a small weavers' village in the industrialized kingdom of Saxony where her father Gottfried taught school, she saw first hand the oppressive working conditions of industrial capitalism for men and women. In 1872 the Eißner family moved to Leipzig, a seedbed of the German feminist and socialist movements. Through her mother Josephine, Clara met leaders of the German feminist movement. Graduating with honors in 1878, she had already become attracted to Marxist revolutionary socialism, in part due to the influence of the Russian revolutionary Ossip Zetkin (1848-89), who lived in Leipzig and with whom she fell in love. Ossip Zetkin was expelled from Germany under the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1880 and Clara Eißner joined him in Paris in 1882 where they worked tirelessly in the international socialist movement. They had two sons and she assumed his surname while choosing to remain unmarried to retain her German citizenship. In 1889, the year Ossip died, Clara Zetkin helped organize the inaugural meeting in Paris of the Second International from which she

Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 78 (Review of the Society for Anglo-American Studies of the 17th and 18th centuries 78) 2021, 2021

https://journals.openedition.org/1718/6535 (open access)

Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'historire, 2017

The History Teacher, 2020

A FEW YEARS AGO, the Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at my university asked faculty i... more A FEW YEARS AGO, the Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at my university asked faculty in each of its four departments (Psychology, Arts and Humanities, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences-where I am housed) to propose and develop online interdisciplinary General Education (GE) honors courses that would be offered as a series of four classes with a shared thematic emphasis. Challenging, engaging, and thematically focused, the courses were meant to help recruit majors, provide a shared experience for first-year students that exposed them to some of the disciplines and disciplinary approaches in each of our four departments, build student relationships with faculty, and develop student skills in line with GE core competencies in reading comprehension, writing, critical thinking, and historical awareness. As honors courses, the coursework and readings assigned had a greater degree of difficulty than standard GE courses. The idea was to challenge students who were already performing at a high level to develop their critical thinking and analytical skills even further. Taking a lead from recent articles in The History Teacher, I placed history, popular culture, and historical literacy at the core of a proposed history course entitled "Enchanted Capitalism: Myths,

Negotiating Waters, Nancy Pedri and Andre Dodeman, eds, Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2020

Symbolic Landscapes. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi, eds. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 33-63., 2009

Editors' Note: The approach of this chapter demonstrates symbolization not to be an intellectuali... more Editors' Note: The approach of this chapter demonstrates symbolization not to be an intellectualist deduction or Kantian construction, but rather an existential generation from pre-cognitive embodiment. Moreover, it exhibits theoretical tensions that we point out in the introduction concerning the relation between the symbolic dimension and material conditions. What strikes us is that the author's attunement to his lived experiences, his own embodiment in relation to the experienced milieu, is the motivation for trying to understand the meaning of this particular landscape through an engagement with the layers of its symbolic history. It is the non-resonance within the author's own body schema that manifests as the uncanny in his felt experience. His awakened attunement to this feeling is what drives him to research the symbolic landscape with which his embodied gestures has had to negotiate. His discussion of the genius loci of the Coachella Valley, the contemporary affluents' and the prior Cahuillas' embodied experiences, and their respective sym-bolizations, illustrates the notion that the genesis of symbolic landscapes (sym-bolic meanings) involves the lived-body in relation to the milieu (EarthBody) that is enacted in the body schema and objectivated in social/cultural practices and beliefs.

Environment, Space, Place 10, Issue 2: 29-62., 2018

World History Connected, 2016

Port cities figured prominently in Herman Moll's eighteenth-century maps of world and regional la... more Port cities figured prominently in Herman Moll's eighteenth-century maps of world and regional landmasses. Geographer to the King and the foremost British mapmaker of his day, 1 Moll's keen cartographic interest in certain areas of the world made sense once these landmasses and the resources they harbored were visualized in the wider context he intended: their availability to British economic and political interests via port cities and the "world ocean." Sometimes his enlarged views of ports took up twenty-five per cent of a map's surface and even when they were smaller they still commanded the viewer's attention. Representing in cartographic terms a widespread notion among British elites in the early eighteenth century that British economic growth depended on reliable access to the world's resources, 2 Moll (ca. 1654-1732) consciously mapped oceans as aqueous highways that allowed British commercial and political contact with every region of the world but he paid particular attention to the harbors, coasts, and port cities of the Americas and the East Indies. 3 The wind currents, the seascapes, and the views of ships, entrepôts, citadels, and maritime activity that he inscribed on his maps provided important symbolic and visual clues for interpreting the more visually commanding terrestrial shapes he drew. Those clues highlighted the importance of port cities for Britain's involvement with the nether parts of the world and for altering the global economic and political status quo to Britain's advantage, clues that teachers can help students decode in the classroom. Moll engraved world, continental, regional, and national maps for geography books, pirate memoirs, and novels but his most detailed works were the doublesheet maps he engraved on large copper plates for his atlas, The World Described. 4 First published in 1715, Moll expanded and reissued the atlas up until his death in 1732 and it continued to be reissued in different editions through the early 1780s. 5 Noted historian of cartography David Woodward called The World Described "the best general atlas of the period" 6 and we will examine how Moll represented port cities and oceans in four maps from this atlas: a map of the East Indies, a map of North America, a map of South America, and a world map. We will also consult three influential texts of the periods for which Moll engraved the maps to situate his representation of these port cities in the wider geographical and political thought of his time.

The Middle Ground Journal: World History and Global Studies, 2018

Journal of World History 25, nos. 2-3: 311-339., 2014

H erman Moll (ca. 1654-1732) was the premier British cartographer of the early eighteenth century... more H erman Moll (ca. 1654-1732) was the premier British cartographer of the early eighteenth century and a strong proponent and propagandist of British overseas expansion, South Asia being one area of particular interest to him. His maps disseminated and popularized information and perspectives propounded by European merchants, travelers, and geographers and were meant to be purchased by (mainly) British merchants, elites, and wealthy commoners interested in understanding Muslim South Asia (those areas of India and the Malay Archipelago with self-identified Muslim states) and the opportunities and challenges for British economic and political interests in that part of the world. Moll's visual and graphic vocabulary and his depictions and descriptions of Muslim areas of South Asia highlighted European commercial and political contact with the societies and empires there. While solidly Eurocentric in outlook, his maps avoided the incipient "Orientalist" attitude 1 that the major geographies of his day promoted. All in all, his maps functioned as strategic documents that promoted British engagement with well-developed, indigenous empires in South Asia and made readers aware of the possibilities and limits for an emerging British empire in the region.