Sara A. Howard is the Librarian for Gender & Sexuality Studies and Student Engagement at Princeton University. In her work, Sara focuses on the importance of self-care for librarian and researcher alike, and seeks to transform research services for traditionally underserved populations. Prior to Princeton, Sara held…
Monthly Book Recommendations
November 2024
Gender and elections : shaping the future of American politics. Edited by Susan J. Carroll, Richard L. Fox
The fourth edition of Gender and Elections offers a systematic, lively, multi-faceted account of the role of gender in the electoral process through the 2016 elections. This timely, yet enduring, volume strikes a balance between highlighting the most important development for women as voters and candidates in the 2016 elections and providing a more long-term, in-depth analysis of the ways in which gender has helped shape the contours and outcomes of electoral politics in the United States. Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding and interpreting presidential elections, presidential and vice-presidential candidacies, voter participation and turnout, voting choices, congressional elections, the political involvement of Latinas, the participation of African American women, the support of political parties and women's organizations, candidate communications with voters, and state elections. Without question, Gender and Elections is the most comprehensive, reliable, and trustworthy resource on the role of gender in electoral politics.

4th edition, Edited by Susan J. Carroll, Rutgers University, New Jersey, Richard L. Fox, Loyola Marymount University, California.
Monthly Book Recommendations
October 2024
The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter
From the master of the literary supernatural and author of The Bloody Chamber, a startling tale of the redemptive power of physical and emotional love.
One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother's wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her childhood, she is sent to London to live with relatives she has never met: Aunt Margaret, beautiful and speechless, and her brothers, Francie, whose graceful music belies his clumsy nature, and the volatile Finn, who kisses Melanie in the ruins of the pleasure gardens. And brooding Uncle Philip loves only the life-sized wooden puppets he creates in his toyshop. This classic gothic novel established Angela Carter as one of our most imaginative writers and augurs the themes of her later creative work.

Monthly Book Recommendations
September 2024
The worlds I see : curiosity, exploration, and discovery at the dawn of AI by Fei-Fei Li
"The moving memoir of a girl coming of age as an immigrant in America who finds her calling as a scientist at the forefront of the AI/Machine Learning revolution. Fei-Fei Li is known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence (AI). But her career in science was improbable from the start. Moving from China's middle class to American poverty, her family navigated the hardships of immigrant life while struggling to care for an ailing mother at every step. However, Fei-Fei's adolescent knack for physics endured, sparking a journey that would lead her to computer science, experimental cognitive science, and, ultimately, the still-obscure world of AI. It positioned her to make a defining contribution to the breakthrough we now call the AI revolution and brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities-and the extraordinary dangers-of the technology she loves. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century's defining moments from the inside"-- Provided by publisher.

Monthly Book Recommendations
August 2024
LGBTQ fiction and poetry from Appalachia, edited by Jeff Mann & Julia Watts.
"This collection, the first of its kind, gathers fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia.
Like much Appalachian literature, these works are pervaded with an attachment to family and the mountain landscape, yet balancing queer and Appalachian identities is an undertaking fraught with conflict. This collection confronts the problematic and complex intersections of place, family, sexuality, gender, and religion with which LGBTQ Appalachians often grapple.
With works by established writers such as Dorothy Allison, Silas House, Ann Pancake, Fenton Johnson, and Nickole Brown and emerging writers such as Savannah Sipple, Rahul Mehta, Mesha Maren, and Jonathan Corcoran, this collection celebrates a literary canon comprising writers who give voice to what it means to be Appalachian and LGBTQ"-- Provided by publisher.

Monthly Book Recommendations
July 2024
Mouths of rain : an anthology of Black lesbian thought, edited by Briona Simone Jones
"A groundbreaking collection tracing the history of intellectual thought by Black Lesbian writers, in the tradition of The New Press's perennial seller Words of Fire"-- Provided by publisher.
Briona Simone Jones, the editor, also served as the keynote speaker for the Gender & Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium 2024.
The event focused on exploring the intersections of gender, queerness, race, sexuality, and the freedom to exist and thrive in our bodies, emphasizing the critical role our profession plays in these discussions.

Monthly Book Recommendations
June 2024
Pride parades and LGBT movements: political participation in an international comparative perspective
Today, Pride parades are staged in countries and localities across the globe, providing the most visible manifestations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex movements and politics.
Pride Parades and LGBT Movements contributes to a better understanding of LGBT protest dynamics through a comparative study of eleven Pride parades in seven European countries – Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK – and Mexico. Peterson, Wahlström and Wennerhag uncover the dynamics producing similarities and differences between Pride parades, using unique data from surveys of Pride participants and qualitative interviews with parade organizers and key LGBT activists.

Monthly Book Recommendations
May 2024
Student resistance: a history of the unruly subject by Mark Edelman Boren
Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject observes the rise and progression of student activism across the globe. By selecting critical case studies from the medieval to modern period, Mark Boren reveals how friction between activists and the academy can culminate in a violent struggle for power.
This timely revision of Student Resistance continues to reflect on the vital role that resistance plays in the evolution of modern societies and the book remains an essential text for both students and scholars of youth activism.

Archiving Student Activism at Princeton
The Princeton University Archives launched the Archiving Student Activism at Princeton (ASAP) initiative in December of 2015 to collect and preserve individual and organizational records created by Princeton students who engage in activism on a broad range of issues and perspectives, both on campus and off. The records in this collection document a range of political and social issues, including sexual assault, gender equality, immigration, refugee crises (Syria), racism and anti-racism.

First One Hundred Days Collection, 2017
The First One Hundred Days Collection is a collation of protest material created by members of the Princeton University community in response to the administration of Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States. This collection contains various posters, flyers, photographs, and digital files from the Princeton University community's participation in campus and national activism efforts.

Monthly Book Recommendations
April 2024
Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science
Because today's DNA testing seems so compelling and powerful, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: "in our blood" is giving way to "in our DNA." In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously-and permanently-undermined. - Provided by Publisher

Monthly Book Recommendations
March 2024
The Women's House of Detention : a queer history of a forgotten prison by Hugh Ryan
"The Women's House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women's imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City's Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates--Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur--were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women's prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition--and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women's House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired."-- Provided by publisher.

"The Women's House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women's imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City's Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates--Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur--were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women's prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition--and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women's House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired."-- Provided by publisher.
Monthly Book Recommendations
February 2024
Unfree: migrant domestic work in Arab states by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
"A stirring account of the experiences of migrant domestic workers, and what freedom, abuse, and power mean within a vast contract labor system. In the United Arab Emirates, there is an employment sponsorship system known as the kafala. Migrant domestic workers within it must solely work for their employer, secure their approval to leave the country, and obtain their consent to terminate a job. In Unfree, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas examines the labor of women from the Philippines, who represent the largest domestic workforce in the country. She challenges presiding ideas about the kafala, arguing that its reduction to human trafficking is, at best, unproductive, and at worst damaging to genuine efforts to regulate this system that impacts tens of millions of domestic workers across the globe."-- Provided by publisher

Monthly Book Recommendations
January 2024
The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia by Gayle Salamon
The Life and Death of Latisha King examines a single incident, the shooting of 15-year-old Latisha King by 14-year-old Brian McInerney in their junior high school classroom in Oxnard, California in 2008. The press coverage of the shooting, as well as the criminal trial that followed, referred to Latisha, assigned male at birth, as Larry. Unpacking the consequences of representing the victim as Larry, a gay boy, instead of Latisha, a trans girl, Gayle Salamon draws on the resources of feminist phenomenology to analyze what happened in the school and at the trial that followed. In building on the phenomenological concepts of anonymity and comportment, Salamon considers how gender functions in the social world and the dangers of being denied anonymity as both a particularizing and dehumanizing act.

LGBTQIA+ Periodical and Ephemera Collection
The LGBTQIA+ Periodical and Ephemera Collection is a repository of items that span a variety of subjects and languages and supports research, teaching, and private study. This collection is comprised of LGBTQIA materials including: periodicals, magazines, ephemera and monographs. The collection is international in scope, largely concentrated from the 1950's to the early 2000's. New materials are added to the collection on an ongoing basis.
Materials within the collection are described using historical terms and the current language of the LGBTQIA+ community. Our goal is to ensure these records reflect the robust and dynamic language of the community and accurately describe the physical and intellectual contents of the collection. To help ensure this we welcome feedback from users.

Monthly Book Recommendations
December 2023
Langston's Salvation by Wallace Best
Winner of the 2018 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in Textual Studies, presented by the American Academy of Religion
Langston's Salvation offers a fascinating exploration into the religious thought of Langston Hughes. Known for his poetry, plays, and social activism, the importance of religion in Hughes’ work has historically been ignored or dismissed. This book puts this aspect of Hughes work front and center, placing it into the wider context of twentieth-century American and African American religious cultures. Best brings to life the religious orientation of Hughes work, illuminating how this powerful figure helped to expand the definition of African American religion during this time.
