LibGuides: AUB Faculty and Staff Book Publications: 2019-Present: Fine Arts and Art History

Books by year

Mimesis, Expression, Construction: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory by Fredric Jameson; Octavian Esanu (Editor)
Publication Date: 2024
Mimesis, Expression, Construction brings Fredric Jameson's famous Duke University seminar on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into print for the first time. Transcribed and edited from audio recordings taken by Octavian Esanu of the original seminar at Duke University in 2003, Mimesis, Expression, Construction reproduces Jameson and his students' engagement with Aesthetic Theory, one of the most influential theories of modernist aesthetics.

APA citation:

Jameson, F. (2024). Mimesis, expression, construction: Fredric Jameson's seminar on aesthetic theory [transcribed and edited by Octavian Esanu]. Repeater. Available at UL

and a time to see less : Or what my father sees most probably by Walid Sadek
Publication Date: 2024
Here live the near-blind. In their eyes the city dwells like aureoles on suckling lips. Here they apprehend the city with knowledge viscous and immediate. And here they also live uneasily, for tranquility is found only in pictures they are disinclined to make. In essays, letters and aphorisms, this book makes near-blindness tangible as one condition of living in. protracted war.

APA citation:

Sadek, W. (2024). and a time to see less: Or what my father sees most probably. Motto Books / Agial Art Gallery. Available at UL

Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe by Sarah Schell
Publication Date: 2023
Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe explores the Office of the Dead as a site of interaction between text, image, and experience in the culture of commemoration that thrived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Office of the Dead was a familiar liturgical ritual, and its perceived importance and utility are evident in its regular inclusion in devotional compilations, which crossed the boundaries between lay and religious readers.

APA citation:

Schell, S. (2023). Image and the office of the dead in late medieval Europe: Regular, repellant, and redemptive death. Amsterdam University Press.

Contemporary art and capitalist modernization by Octavian Esanu (Editor)
Call Number: J 709.04:C761e
Publication Date: 2021
This book addresses the art historical category of "contemporary art" from a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on non-Western instantiations of "the contemporary." The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption - called "contemporary art" - emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization.

APA citation:

Esanu, O. (Ed.). (2021). Contemporary art and capitalist modernization: A transregional perspective. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003044345 Available at UL

The postsocialist contemporary: the institutionalization of artistic practice in Eastern Europe after 1989 by Octavian Esanu; Amelia Jones (Series edited by); Marsha Meskimmon (Series edited by)
Call Number: J 701.03:E741p
Publication Date: 2021
This book discusses how network managers and artists participated in the construction of a new social order (mission to build a western ‘open society’ by means of art) by studying the programme's rise, evolution, impact and broader ideological and political consequences. Rather than recounting a history, its engages critically with 'contemporary art' as the aesthetic paradigm of late-capitalist market democracy.

APA citation:

Esanu, O. (2021). The postsocialist contemporary: The institutionalization of artistic practice in Eastern Europe after 1989. Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526158017 Available at UL

Book chapters by year

APA citation:

Auji, H. (2022). Picturing knowledge: Visual literacy in nineteenth-century Arabic periodicals. In M. S. Graves & A. D. Seggerman (Eds.), Making modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (pp. 73-93). Indiana University Press. https://iupress.org/9780253060341

APA citations:

Assaf, S.(2021). Speaking the unspeakable: On directing Wannous. In S. Mejcher-Atassi & R. Myers (Eds.), The theatre of Sa'dallah Wannous: A critical study of the Syrian playwright and public intellectual (pp. 142-156). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108973182.009 Available at UL

Esanu, O. (2021). Art form and nation form: Contemporary art and the postnational condition. In O. Esanu (Ed.), Contemporary art and capitalist modernization: A transregional perspective (pp. 80-97). Routledge. Available at UL

Esanu, O. (2021). CarbonART 96 and the 6th kilometer, SCCA Chișinău 1996. In O. Esanu (Ed.), Contemporary art and capitalist modernization: A transregional perspective (pp. 184-205). Routledge. Available at UL

Esanu, O. (2021). Three questions for Terry Smith: Peripherality, postmodernity, multiplicity - Reconceiving the origins of contemporary art [interview with Terry Smith]. In O. Esanu (Ed.), Contemporary art and capitalist modernization: A transregional perspective (pp. 98-118). Routledge. Available at UL

Farhat, M. (2021). Beirut's great 'Umari Mosque: History, memory, and post-war reconstruction. In E. Baboula & L. Jessop (Eds.), Art and material culture in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds: Studies in honour of Erica Cruikshank Dodd (pp. 205-237). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004457140_010 Available at UL

Franses, R. (2021). To not know God: Geometrical abstraction and visual theology in Islamic art. In E. Baboula & L. Jessop (Eds.), Art and material culture in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds: Studies in honour of Erica Cruikshank Dodd (pp. 265-285). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004457140_012 Available at UL

Harutyunyan, A. (2021). The 3rd floor cultural movement, Yerevan 1987-1994. In O. Esanu (Ed.), Contemporary art and capitalist modernization: A transregional perspective (pp. 153-168). Routledge. Available at UL

Harutyunyan, A. (2021). Towards a historical understanding of post-Soviet presentism. In O. Esanu (Ed.), Contemporary art and capitalist modernization: A transregional perspective (pp. 17-30). Routledge. Available at UL

APA citation:

Assaf, S. (2020). No demand no supply: Documentary theatre transforming the mainstream media. In B. Rahimi (Ed.), Theater in the Middle East: Between performance and politics (pp. 143-158). Anthem Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvx8b7k2.14 Available at UL