Rereads 20th-century American literature as it has portrayed adoption across racial lines, from Faulkner to Kingsolver

In Kind of Kin by award-winning author Rilla Askew, when a church-going, community-loved, family man is caught hiding a barn-full of illegal immigrant workers, he is arrested and sent to prison. This shocking development sends ripples through the town—dividing neighbors, causing riffs amongst his family, and spurring controversy across the state. Using new laws in Oklahoma and Alabama as inspiration, Kind of Kin is a story of self-serving lawmakers and complicated lawbreakers, Christian principle and political scapegoating. Rilla Askew’s funny and poignant novel explores what happens when upstanding people are pushed too far—and how an ad-hoc family, and ultimately, an entire town, will unite to protect its own.

Mock tells readers what scientists have discovered about the disturbing side of family conflice in the natural world. He offers a rare perspective on the family as testing ground for the evolutionary limits of selfishness.

Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work documents the social and material contributions of older persons to their families in settings shaped by migration, their everyday lives in domestic and community spaces, and in the context of intergenerational relationships and diasporas. Much of this work is oriented toward supporting, connecting, and maintaining kin members and kin relationships—the work that enables a family to reproduce and regenerate itself across generations and across the globe.

A unique variety of approaches to all aspects of urban culture in the ancient world can be found in Urban Dreams and Realities in Antiquity, a collection of 19 essays addressing ancient cities from an interdisciplinary perspective. As the title indicates, the volume considers both how ancient people lived in their cities as physical structures and how they thought with them as ideas and symbols. Essays in this volume deal with texts and sites from Spain to South India, but there is a particular focus on the archaeology and epigraphy of Roman-era Italy, civic identity in the Roman provinces, the Hebrew Bible and Early Christian literature, Vergil and other imperial Latin authors.