2023: A year of books written by H&S faculty

This past year, faculty from Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences published books on a wealth of topics including politics and elections, race in colonial French Africa, poetry that draws parallels between Shakespeare’s Black characters and current events, war, free will, gender identities, social behavior in ants and humans, the Ottoman Empire, Latino immigrant families in the U.S., and the mathematics of shuffling cards.

We invite you to explore their works from 2023 and return to the Books in Brief series in the future to view newly published books that were shared with us by H&S faculty. Books are listed in order by publication date, with the most recent first.

Defense Budgeting for a Safer World: The Experts Speak

Authors: Michael J. Boskin, John Rader, and Kiran Sridhar

Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship

Author: Rachel Jean-Baptiste

The Ecology of Collective Behavior

Author: Deborah M. Gordon

The War That Must Not Occur

Author: Jean-Pierre Dupuy

Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures

Author: Gabrielle Hecht

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will

Author: Robert M. Sapolsky

The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives

Authors: Brook Manville and Josiah Ober

We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care

Authors: Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein

The Mathematics of Shuffling Cards

Authors: Persi Diaconis and Jason Fulman

Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life

Author: Asad L. Asad

When I Waked, I Cried To Dream Again

Author: A. Van Jordan

What Even Is Gender?

Authors: R.A. Briggs and B.R. George

Election Day: How We Vote and What It Means for Democracy

Author: Emilee Booth Chapman

The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason

Author: Josiah Ober

The Cartel System of States: An Economic Theory of International Politics

Authors: Avidit Acharya and Alexander Lee

Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State

Author: Anna Grzymała-Busse

Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire

Author: Nora Elizabeth Barakat

Shared and Institutional Agency: Toward a Planning Theory of Human Practical Organization

Author: Michael E. Bratman

The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism

Author: Lerone A. Martin

Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence

Author: Emanuele Lugli

The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s 

Author: Alexander Nemerov

Words in My World series

Author: Nandi Sims

Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala 

Author: Joel Cabrita

The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War

Author: Peter Stansky

Life: A Journey Through Science and Politics

Author: Paul R. Ehrlich