Five Books Chosen as Outstanding Academic Titles

Five University Press of Mississippi titles have been named to the CHOICE's 2014 Outstanding Academic Title list. UPM's contribution to this list of outstanding works are:  

• Hip Hop on Film: Performance Culture, Urban Space, and Genre Transformation in the 1980s, by Kimberley Monteyne. Now available in paperback, this book offers readers an interpretation of a once-dismissed aspect of American film history.
  
  
• The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness, by Veronica T. Watson. Now available in paperback, this is the first book to examine whiteness as an intellectual tradition within African American literature.
  
  
• Desegregating Desire: Race and Sexuality in Cold War American Literature, by Tyler T. Schmidt. A exploration of writers who examine integration through the charged lens of sexuality.
  
  
• Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study, by Catharine Savage Brosman. An impressive overview of the achievements of Louisiana writers in the Creole tradition.
  
  
• The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, by Thierry Smolderen and translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Published in English for the first time, this foundational text that places the beginning of comics well before Rodolphe Topffer

The OAT list is quite selective: it contains approximately ten percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice each year.These outstanding works have been selected for their excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to the field, and their value as important--often the first--treatment of their subject. Choice Outstanding Academic Titles are truly the "best of the best.