A Different Summer Reading List: New Releases from UMW Professors

Escape from escapism with scholarly titles from local academics.

By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Summer reading lists usually focus on the light, frothy, and escapist, but if you’re looking for something more weighty and thought-provoking, try these recent releases from professors at the University of Mary Washington:

The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales

By Chris Foss, Professor of English
Published by University of Virginia Press, 2025

Oscar Wilde is known for witty and decadent plays and novels, such as “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” but he also published two volumes of fairy tales that often feature main characters who don’t fit in. Foss’s book is the first to examine these characters and Wilde’s work in general through the lens of disability studies. According to UVA press, the book shows that, “Even though Wilde unflinchingly represented the extent to which these peculiar bodies suffered rejection by society, he encouraged his readers to embrace them and to advocate for emotional responses that engage love and kindness toward both individual transformation and social change.”

German Memorials, Motifs and Meanings: A Cultural History in Bronze, Wood and Stone

By Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Associate Professor of German
Published by University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

This books examines lesser-known, often out-of-the-way German memorials that have survived through the centuries— “enchanted stones, magical trees, raised fists, stone circles, and similar evocative symbols derived from myth, folklore, Christianity, national iconography, and post-Holocaust imagery,” according to the publisher. “Along with a consideration of the historical and social circumstances of each memorial and its motifs, author Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich answers the questions of why and how these cultural markers survive the passage of time and how they endure.”

Contentious Union: Black Baptist Schools and White Baptist Money in the Jim Crow South

By Mary Beth Matthews, Professor of Religious Studies
Published by University of Tennessee Press, 2025

This book is about three historically Black institutions—Richmond Theological Seminary in Virginia, Central City College in Georgia, and American Baptist Theological Seminary in Tennessee—which were supported in part by white Baptist donors, and about how the institutions navigated that tension. According to the publisher, these “oppositional spaces,” as Matthews calls them, “gave their communities access to the ground floor of the civil rights movement … Ultimately, Mathews’s book is a fascinating and complex account that uses the history of these three institutions to illuminate the origins of the long struggle for civil rights.”

Proximity to Power: Rethinking Race and Place in Alexandria, Virginia

By Krystyn Moon, Professor of History and American Studies
Published by University of North Carolina Press, 2025

This book takes a look at Alexandria’s African-American community, starting in the mid-1800s and continuing through the present, examining how the city’s proximity to the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., impacted its residents’ access to schools and transportation compared to other southern towns. Moon “highlights the long-standing advocacy and agency of Alexandria's Black residents, adding further nuance to our understanding of the relationship between race and place,” according to the publisher.

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