LSU Faculty Published Books

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The Best American Short Plays 2011-2012

2013
William W. Demastes

Draws from works produced by some of America's finest theater companies in an effort to capture the wide range of styles, topics, and regional tastes that typifies American theater.
The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stoppard

2013
William W. Demastes

Tom Stoppard is widely considered to be one of the most important dramatists of contemporary theatre. In this Introduction, William Demastes provides an accessible overview of Stoppard's life and work, exploring all the complexity and variety that makes his drama so unique. Illustrated with images from a diverse range of Stoppard productions, the book provides clear evaluations of his major works, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties, Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia, to provide the most up-to-date assessment available. Detailed chapters situate each play in the context of its sources, which include Shakespeare and contemporary existential thought, espionage, quantum physics, chaos theory, romanticism, landscape design, nineteenth-century European intellectual thought and European totalitarianism. The book also includes a section on Stoppard's Academy Award-winning film Shakespeare in Love.
Student Teaching: A Journey in Narratives

2013
Kenneth James Fasching-Varner

Join nine pre-service teachers as they share their experiences, challenges, and victories through a series of powerful narratives. Committed to making the process more transparent for those embarking on a similar journey, the chapter authors share honest, personal, and heartfelt viewpoints about what it means to become a teacher. The nine pre-service teachers in this volume all participated in a yearlong student teaching in the renowned Elementary Holmes Master of Arts in Teaching program at Louisiana State University.
Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age

2013
John Fletcher

Preaching to Convert offers an intriguing new perspective on the outreach strategies of U.S. evangelicals, framing them as examples of activist performance, broadly defined as acts performed before an audience in the hopes of changing hearts and minds. Most writing about activist performance has focused on left-progressive causes, events, and actors. Preaching to Convert argues against such a constricted view of activism and for a more nuanced understanding of U.S. evangelicalism as a movement defined by its desire to win converts and spread the gospel.

The book positions evangelicals as a diverse, complicated group confronting the loss of conservative Christianity's default status in 21st-century U.S. culture. In the face of an increasingly secular age, evangelicals have been reassessing models of outreach. In acts like handing out Bible tracts to strangers on the street or going door-to-door with a Bible in hand, in elaborately staged horror-themed morality plays or multimillion-dollar creationist discovery centers, in megachurch services beamed to dozens of satellite campuses, and in controversial "ex-gay" ministries striving to return gays and lesbians to the straight and narrow, evangelicals are redefining what it means to be deeply committed in a pluralist world. The book's engaging style and careful argumentation make it accessible and appealing to scholars and students across a range of fields.
Pop Corpse

2013
Lara Glenum

Poetry. Drama. "Father lend me your megabone / & I'll lend u my shotgun mouth". A radiant brew of emoticon opera, fairytale fan-fiction, and chat-room flame war, POP CORPSE! follows a heroine mermaid on her devoutly disarming search for "realness." Along the way, Glenum dismantles pieties of both the left and the right, proposing new models of configuring text, voice, body and species-hood for those who swim in the increasingly fetid waters of the 21st century.
Image Restoration: Fundamentals and Advances

2013
Bahadir Kursat Gunturk

Image Restoration: Fundamentals and Advances responds to the need to update most existing references on the subject, many of which were published decades ago. Providing a broad overview of image restoration, this book explores breakthroughs in related algorithm development and their role in supporting real-world applications associated with various scientific and engineering fields. These include astronomical imaging, photo editing, and medical imaging, to name just a few. The book examines how such advances can also lead to novel insights into the fundamental properties of image sources.

Addressing the many advances in imaging, computing, and communications technologies, this reference strikes just the right balance of coverage between core fundamental principles and the latest developments in this area. Its content was designed based on the idea that the reproducibility of published works on algorithms makes it easier for researchers to build on each other's work, which often benefits the vitality of the technical community as a whole. For that reason, this book is as experimentally reproducible as possible.

Topics covered include:

Image denoising and deblurring Different image restoration methods and recent advances such as nonlocality and sparsity Blind restoration under space-varying blur Super-resolution restoration Learning-based methods Multi-spectral and color image restoration New possibilities using hybrid imaging systems

Many existing references are scattered throughout the literature, and there is a significant gap between the cutting edge in image restoration and what we can learn from standard image processing textbooks. To fill that need but avoid a rehash of the many fine existing books on this subject, this reference focuses on algorithms rather than theories or applications. Giving readers access to a large amount of downloadable source code, the book illustrates fundamental techniques, key ideas developed over the years, and the state of the art in image restoration. It is a valuable resource for readers at all levels of understanding.
Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life

2013
Benjamin Kahan

In this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality. Celibacies focuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation. Celibacies offers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.
The Offshore Drilling Industry and Rig Construction in the Gulf of Mexico

2013
Mark J. Kaiser

Jackups, semisubmersibles and drillships are the marine vessels used to drill offshore wells and are referred to collectively as mobile offshore drilling units (MODUs). MODUs are supplied through newbuild construction and operate throughout the world in highly competitive regional markets. The Offshore Drilling Industry and Rig Construction Market in the Gulf of Mexico examines the global MODU service and construction industry and describes the economic impacts of rig construction in the United States.

The industrial organization and major players in the contract drilling and construction markets are described and categorized. Dayrates in the contract drilling market are evaluated and hypotheses regarding dayrate factors are tested. Models of contractor decision-making are developed, including a net-present value model of newbuilding investment and stacking decisions, and market capitalization models are derived. Jackup construction shipyards and processes are reviewed along with estimates of labor, equipment, and material cost in U.S. construction. Derivation of newbuild and replacement cost functions completes the treatise.

The comprehensive and authoritative coverage of The Offshore Drilling Industry and Rig Construction Market in the Gulf of Mexico makes it an ideal reference for engineers, industry professionals, policy analysts, government regulators, academics and other readers wanting to learn more about this important and fascinating industry.
African Pasts, Presents, and Futures: Generational Shifts in African Women's Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse

2013
Touria Khannous

African Pasts, Presents, and Futures: Generational Shifts in African Women's Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse, by Touria Khannous, provides a history of African women's cultural production, as well as an alternative approach to the arguments that have traditionally dominated post-colonial studies in general, and African and gender studies in particular. It examines some of the more overarching questions that are prevalent in the works of African women authors, who position themselves within the contexts of Islam, feminism, nationalism, modernity, and global and postcolonial politics, thus engaging in the construction of socio-political platforms for reform in their home countries. The book explores different aspects of women's agency at the political, cultural, social, religious and aesthetic level, and highlights their civil society activism and push for legal reform. It also traces their opinions on a range of social and political questions and underscores fundamental shifts in their positions and concerns through the different generations.
Introduction to Thermodynamics of Mechanical Fatigue

2013
Michael M. Khonsari

Fatigue is probabilistic in nature and involves a complex spectrum of loading history with variable amplitudes and frequencies. Yet most available fatigue failure prediction methods are empirical and concentrate on very specific types of loading. Taking a different approach, Introduction to Thermodynamics of Mechanical Fatigue examines the treatment of fatigue via the principles of thermodynamics. It starts from the premise that fatigue is a dissipative process and must obey the laws of thermodynamics. In general, it can be hypothesized that mechanical degradation is a consequence of irreversible thermodynamic processes. This suggests that entropy generation offers a natural measure of degradation.
Environmental Toxicology: Selected Entries from the Encyclopedia of Sustainability Science and Technology

2013
Edward A. Laws

Environmental Toxicology provides a detailed, comprehensive introduction to this key area of sustainability and public health research. The broad coverage includes sections on ecological risk assessment, monitoring, mechanisms, fate and transport, prevention, and correctives, as well as treatment of the health effects of solar radiation and toxicology in the ocean. The 23 state-of-the-art chapters provide a multi-disciplinary perspective on this vital area, which encompasses environmental science, biology, chemistry, and public health.
Crime Modeling and Mapping Using Geospatial Technologies

2013
Michael Leitner

Recent years in North America have seen a rapid development in the area of crime analysis and mapping using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology.
In 1996, the US National Institute of Justice (NIJ) established the crime mapping research center (CMRC), to promote research, evaluation, development, and dissemination of GIS technology. The long-term goal is to develop a fully functional Crime Analysis System (CAS) with standardized data collection and reporting mechanisms, tools for spatial and temporal analysis, visualization of data and much more. Among the drawbacks of current crime analysis systems is their lack of tools for spatial analysis.
For this reason, spatial analysts should research which current analysis techniques (or variations of such techniques) that have been already successfully applied to other areas (e.g., epidemiology, location-allocation analysis, etc.) can also be employed to the spatial analysis of crime data. This book presents a few of those cases.
Building Playgrounds, Engaging Communities: Creating Safe and Happy Places for Children

2013
Marybeth Lima

We accomplish extraordinary things when we do ordinary things together. This heartfelt and hopeful conviction led LSU professor Marybeth Lima to begin the LSU Community Playground Project as a way to involve her students in the larger Baton Rouge community. Fifteen years and over seven hundred students later, Building Playgrounds, Engaging Communities tells the remarkable story of the Playground Project's ongoing partnership with area public schools to design and build safe, fun, accessible, kid-designed playgrounds.

Lima's experiences with the Playground Project range from outright failures to hard-won victories. Overcoming the challenges of working with scarce resources and persevering despite many setbacks, Lima and her students succeeded with hope, humor, and dedication.

Building Playgrounds, Engaging Communities emphasizes the major impact people have when they work together for the common good whether by building playgrounds, establishing neighborhood gardens, or participating in honest, respectful conversations. To this end, Lima provides an appendix with practical advice for local engagement. People wanting to make a difference in their communities can use this book as a road map; those active in long-term endeavors will draw on it for ideas and inspiration.
The Court of Comedy: Aristophanes, Rhetoric, and Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens

2013
Wilfred E. Major

The Court of Comedy: Aristophanes, Rhetoric, and Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens, by Wilfred E. Major, analyzes how writers of comedy in Classical Greece satirized the emerging art of rhetoric and its role in political life. In the fifth century BCE, the development of rhetoric proceeded hand in hand with the growth of democracy both on Sicily and at Athens. In turn, comic playwrights in Athens, most notably Aristophanes, lampooned oratory as part of their commentary on the successes and failures of the young democracy. This innovative study is the first book to survey all the surviving comedy from the fifth century BCE on these important topics. The evidence reveals that Greek comedy provides a revealing commentary on the incipient craft of rhetoric before its formal conventions were stabilized. Furthermore, Aristophanes' depiction of rhetoric and of Athenian democratic institutions indicates that he fundamentally supports the Athenian democracy and not, as is often argued, oligarchic opposition to it. These conclusions confirm recent work that reinterprets the early development of rhetoric in Classical Greece and offer fresh perspectives on the debate over the role of comedy in early Greek democracy. Throughout, Major capitalizes on recent progress in understanding of the performance dynamics of Classical Greek theater.
Years of Plenty, Years of Want: France and the Legacy of the Great War

2013
Benjamin Franklin Martin

The Great War that engulfed Europe between 1914 and 1918 was a catastrophe for France. French soil was the site of most of the fighting on the Western Front. French dead were more than 1.3 million, the permanently disabled another 1.1 million, overwhelmingly men in their twenties and thirties. The decade and a half before the war had been years of plenty, a time of increasing prosperity and confidence remembered as the Belle Epoque or the good old days. The two decades that followed its end were years of want, loss, misery, and fear. In 1914, France went to war convinced of victory. In 1939, France went to war dreading defeat.

To explain the burden of winning the Great War and embracing the collapse that followed, Benjamin Martin examines the national mood and daily life of France in July 1914 and August 1939, the months that preceded the two world wars. He presents two titans: Georges Clemenceau, defiant and steadfast, who rallied a dejected nation in 1918, and Edouard Daladier,hesitant and irresolute, who espoused appeasement in 1938 though comprehending its implications. He explores novels by a constellation of celebrated French writers who treated the Great War and its social impact, from Colette to Irène Némirovsky, from François Mauriac to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. And he devotes special attention to Roger Martin du Gard, the1937 Nobel Laureate, whose roman-fleuve The Thibaults is an unrivaled depiction of social unraveling and disillusionment.

For many in France, the legacy of the Great War was the vow to avoid any future war no matter what the cost. They cowered behind the Maginot Line, the fortifications along the eastern border designed to halt any future German invasion. Others knew that cost would be too great and defended the "Descartes Line": liberty and truth, the declared values of French civilization. In his distinctive and vividly compelling prose, Martin recounts this struggle for the soul of France.
Carbonate Reservoirs: Porosity and Diagenesis in a Sequence Stratigraphic Framework

2013
Clyde H. Moore

The 2nd Edition of Carbonate Reservoirs aims to educate graduate students and industry professionals on the complexities of porosity evolution in carbonate reservoirs. In the intervening 12 years since the first edition, there have been numerous studies of value published that need to be recognized and incorporated in the topics discussed. A chapter on the impact of global tectonics and biological evolution on the carbonate system has been added to emphasize the effects of global earth processes and the changing nature of life on earth through Phanerozoic time on all aspects of the carbonate system. The centerpiece of this chapter--and easily the most important synthesis of carbonate concepts developed since the 2001 edition--is the discussion of the CATT hypothesis, an integrated global database bringing together stratigraphy, tectonics, global climate, oceanic geochemistry, carbonate platform characteristics, and biologic evolution in a common time framework. Another new chapter concerns naturally fractured carbonates, a subject of increasing importance, given recent technological developments in 3D seismic, reservoir modeling, and reservoir production techniques.

Detailed porosity classifications schemes for easy comparison Overview of the carbonate sedimentologic system Case studies to blend theory and practice\.
Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo. 1960-1965

2013
Lise A. Namikas

Winner of the 2013 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title

Battleground Africa traces the Congo Crisis from post-World War II decolonization efforts through Mobutu's second coup in 1965 from a radically new vantage point. Drawing on recently opened archives in Russia and the United States, and to a lesser extent Germany and Belgium, Lisa Namikas addresses the crisis from the perspectives of the two superpowers and explains with superb clarity the complex web of allies, clients, and neutral states influencing U.S.-Soviet competition.

Unlike any other work, Battleground Africa looks at events leading up to independence, then considers the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the series of U.N.-supported constitutional negotiations, and the crises of 1964 and 1965. Finding that the U.S. and the USSR each wanted to avoid a major confrontation, but also misunderstood its opponent's goals and wanted to avoid looking weak or losing its political standing in Africa, Namikas argues that a series of exaggerations and misjudgements helped to militarize the crisis, and ultimately, helped militarize the Cold War on the continent.
Gods of the Mississippi

2013
Michael Pasquier

From the colonial period to the present, the Mississippi River has impacted religious communities from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Exploring the religious landscape along the 2,530 miles of the largest river system in North America, the essays in Gods of the Mississippi make a compelling case for American religion in motion--not just from east to west, but also from north to south. With discussion of topics such as the religions of the Black Atlantic, religion and empire, antebellum religious movements, the Mormons at Nauvoo, black religion in the delta, Catholicism in the Deep South, and Johnny Cash and religion, this volume contributes to a richer understanding of this diverse, dynamic, and fluid religious world.
Stealing Things: Theft and the Author in Nineteenth-Century France

2013
Rosemary A. Peters

Stealing Things traces the representations of thieves and thievery in nineteenth-century French novels. Re-reading canonical texts by Balzac, the Comtesse de S gur, and Zola through the lens of crime, Peters highlights bourgeois anxiety about ownership and objects while considering the impact of literature on popular attitudes about crime and its legislation and punishment. A detailed analysis of the role of objects, this work chronicles nineteenth-century changes in legal attitudes, popular mentalities, and individual and social identity, focusing particularly on the resulting transformations in representations of gender, class, and (criminal) subjectivity.
Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences

2013
John Protevi

A deep exploration of the many possibilities inherent in linking Gilles Deleuze's philosophy to contemporary science, John Protevi's Life, War, Earth demonstrates how Deleuze's ontology of the virtual, intensive, and actual can enhance our understanding of important issues in cognitive science, biology, and geography. Protevi illustrates how a Deleuzian approach can illuminate a wide range of concerns and subjects, including ancient and contemporary warfare, human individuation processes, the "granularity problem," panpsychism, the E. coli bacterium, the assassination attempt on U.S. representative Gabrielle Giffords, and the affective dimensions of the Occupy movement.

Frequently ambitious but always rooted in the empirical, Life, War, Earth shows how the social and the somatic are not opposed to each other but are interwoven on three time scales--the evolutionary, the developmental, and the behavioral--and on three political scales--the geopolitical, the bio-neuro-political, and the technopolitical.

Deeply attuned to the internalities of the thought of Deleuze, the book offers a unique reading of his corpus and a useful method for applying Deleuzian techniques to the natural sciences, the social sciences, political phenomena, and contemporary events.
The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger

2013
Françous Raffoul

Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers. His ground-breaking works have had a hugely significant impact on contemporary thought through their reception, appropriation and critique. His thought has influenced philosophers as diverse as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Adorno, Gadamer, Levinas, Derrida and Foucault, among others. In addition to his formative role in philosophical movements such as phenomenology, hermeneutics and existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction and post-modernism, Heidegger has had a transformative effect on diverse fields of inquiry including political theory, literary criticism, theology, gender theory, technology and environmental studies.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger is the definitive reference guide to Heidegger's life and work, presenting fifty-eight original essays written by an international team of leading Heidegger scholars. The volume includes comprehensive coverage of Heidegger life and contexts, sources, influences and encounters, key writings, major themes and topics, and reception and influence. This is the ideal research tool for anyone studying or working in the field of Heidegger Studies today.
Insects and Sustainability of Ecosystem Services

2013
Timothy Duane Schowalter

With few exceptions, insects are perceived in industrialized countries as undesirable pests. In reality, relatively few insects interfere with us or our resources. Most have benign or positive effects on ecosystem services, and many represent useful resources in non-industrialized countries. Challenging traditional perceptions of the value of insects, Insects and Sustainability of Ecosystem Services explores the ways insects affect the ecosystem services we depend upon. It also fosters an appreciation for the amazing diversity, adaptive ability, and natural roles of insects.

The book discusses how the ways in which we manage insects will determine an ecosystem's capacity to continue to supply services. It reviews aspects of insect physiology, behavior, and ecology that affect their interactions with other ecosystem components and ecosystem services, emphasizing critical effects of insects on the sustainability of ecosystem processes and services. The author examines the integration of insect ecology with self-regulatory aspects of ecosystems that control primary production, energy and nutrient fluxes, and global climate--functions that underlie the sustainability of ecosystem services.

Clearly, we need environmental policies that meet needs for pest control where warranted, but do not undermine the important contributions of insects to sustaining ecosystem processes and services. With in-depth coverage of the multiple, often compensatory, effects of insects on various resources or ecosystem services and on the consequences of control tactics for those resources or services, Insects and Sustainability of Ecosystem Services recommends changes in perspectives and policies regarding insects that will contribute to sustainability of ecosystem services.
Competitive Sorption and Transport of Heavy Metals in Soils and Geological Media Geological Media

2013
Hussein Magdi Selim

Most reported incidents of soil contamination include an array of heavy metals species rather than a single ion. The various interactions in these multicomponent or multiple-ion systems significantly impact the fate and transport of heavy metals, and competition for sorption sites on soil matrix surfaces is a common phenomenon. Because of this, considering competitive sorption is an important part of predicting contaminant transport. Competitive Sorption and Transport of Heavy Metals in Soils and Geological Media gives you the information needed to understand heavy metals' sorption and transport in the vadose zone and aquifers.

The book brings together state-of-the art research on the competitive sorption and mobility of single versus multiple heavy metal species. It also relates the transport mechanisms to the processes that govern sorption mechanisms. The work offers new experimental evidence on the fate of multiple heavy metals in soil columns and new field results on how multiple ions influence the mobility of metals in the soil profile under water-unsaturated flow.

Emphasizing modeling approaches, the book begins with an overview of the competitive behavior of heavy metals. It then takes a closer look at various heavy metals, discussing their behavior in tropical soils, speciation and fractionation, accumulation, migration, competitive retention, and the contamination of water resources at the watershed scale. The book also presents extensive data on phosphate, a commonly used fertilizer, and its role in facilitating the release of trace elements. The final chapter looks at the effect of waterlogged conditions on arsenic and cadmium solubilization.

Edited by an internationally recognized researcher and featuring expert contributors, this comprehensive work addresses the complex physical and chemical phenomena of sorption mechanisms. Presenting the latest research, it helps you to better predict the potential mobility of multiple heavy metals in soils.
Chemicals from Biomass: Integrating Bioprocesses into Chemical Production Complexes for Sustainable Development

2013
Debalina Sengupta

Chemicals from Biomass: Integrating Bioprocesses into Chemical Production Complexes for Sustainable Development helps engineers optimize the development of new chemical and polymer plants that use renewable resources to replace the output of goods and services from existing plants. It also discusses the conversion of those existing plants into faci.
Against Dogmatism: Dwelling in Faith and Doubt

2013
Madhuri M. Yadlapati

Many contemporary discussions of religion take an absolute, intractable approach to belief and nonbelief that privileges faith and dogmatism while treating doubt as a threat to religious values. As Madhuri M. Yadlapati demonstrates, however, there is another way: a faith (or nonfaith) that embraces doubt and its potential for exploring both the depths and heights of spiritual reflection and speculation. Through three distinct discussions of faith, doubt, and hope, Yadlapati explores what it means to live creatively and responsibly in the everyday world as limited, imaginative, and questioning creatures. She begins with a perceptive survey of diverse faith experiences in Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Protestant Christianity and then narrows her focus to Protestant Christianity and Hinduism to explore how the great thinkers of those faiths have embraced doubt in the service of spiritual transcendence.

Yadlapati traces religious perspectives on trust, humility, belonging, commitment, and lively skepticism as they relate to faith and doubt. Drawing on various doctrines, scriptures, and the writings of great religious thinkers such as C. S. Lewis, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Raimon Panikkar, Yadlapati demonstrates how doubt can serve to enhance faith, not hinder it. Defending the rich tapestry of faith and doubt against polarization, Against Dogmatism reveals an ecumenical middle way, a spiritual approach native to traditions in which faith and doubt are interwoven in constructive and dynamic ways.