{"title":"Melissa Adler","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"cruising-the-library-book-melissa-adler-9780823276363","title":"Cruising the Library","description":"Cruising the Library examines the ways in which library classifications have organized sexuality and sexual perversion. The author studies the Library of Congress Subject Headings and Classification, as well as the Library of Congresss Delta Collection, a restricted collection of obscenity until 1964.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49617040408849,"sku":"CIN0823276368G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008577339665,"sku":"NIN9780823276363","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51232776388881,"sku":"NGR9780823276363","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823276368.jpg?v=1751422718"},{"product_id":"cruising-the-library-book-melissa-adler-9780823276356","title":"Cruising the Library","description":"Cruising the Library offers a highly innovative analysis of the history of sexuality and categories of sexual perversion through a critical examination of the Library of Congress and its cataloging practices. Taking the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemologies of the Closet as emblematic of the Library’s inability to account for sexual difference, Melissa Adler embarks upon a detailed critique of how cataloging systems have delimited and proscribed expressions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in a manner that mirrors psychiatric and sociological attempts to pathologize non-normative sexual practices and civil subjects.  Taking up a parallel analysis, Adler utilizes Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black as another example of how the Library of Congress fails to account for, and thereby “buries,” difference. She examines the physical space of the Library as one that encourages forms of governmentality as theorized by Michel Foucault while also allowing for its utopian possibilities. Finally, she offers a brief but highly illuminating history of the Delta Collection. Likely established before the turn of the twentieth century and active until its gradual dissolution in the 1960s, the Delta Collection was a secret archive within the Library of Congress that housed materials confiscated by the United States Post Office and other federal agencies. These were materials deemed too obscene for public dissemination or general access. Adler reveals how the Delta Collection was used to regulate difference and squelch dissent in the McCarthy era while also linking it to evolving understandings of so-called perversion in the scientific study of sexual difference.  Sophisticated, engrossing, and highly readable, Cruising the Library provides us with a critical understanding of library science, an alternative view of discourses around the history of sexuality, and an analysis of the relationship between governmentality and the cataloging of research and information—as well as categories of difference—in American culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008605847825,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008608469265,"sku":"NIN9780823276356","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/082327635X.jpg?v=1751012037"},{"product_id":"peculiar-satisfaction-book-melissa-adler-9781531511944","title":"Peculiar Satisfaction","description":"How Thomas Jefferson’s vision for knowledge shapes what we know and how we access it—and why that matters more than ever   As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Peculiar Satisfaction examines how the ideals and contradictions of the nation’s founding live on in libraries, archives, and museums. Thomas Jefferson championed an informed citizenry as essential to democracy, yet the systems he built to organize knowledge reinforced racial and ideological hierarchies that persist today.   Melissa Adler explores Jefferson’s lasting influence on public institutions, from his personal library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress, to his archival practices in gov­ernment record-keeping and his museum at Monticello as a site of colonial knowledge production. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she reveals how his methods of classification and preservation shaped national memory and democratic participation.   Drawing from archival research and critical theory, Peculiar Satisfaction exposes the paradoxes of access, exclusion, and control embedded in information systems. As censorship and disinformation threaten democracy, Adler argues that understanding these foundational structures is essential to defending the role of knowledge in public life.   Offering a fresh perspective on the ways information, power, and race have shaped American institutions, this book will engage scholars and general readers interested in how libraries, archives, and museums influence history, democracy, and collective memory and argues for a nuanced understanding of these institutions at a critical moment where disinformation and authoritarian rule threaten to undo them.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51769992544529,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51769992675601,"sku":"NGR9781531511944","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52694073147665,"sku":"NIN9781531511944","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781531511944.jpg?v=1761990651"},{"product_id":"peculiar-satisfaction-book-melissa-adler-9781531511937","title":"Peculiar Satisfaction","description":"How Thomas Jefferson's vision for knowledge shapes what we know and how we access it – and why that matters more than ever  As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Peculiar Satisfaction examines how the ideals and contradictions of the nation's founding live on in libraries, archives, and museums. Thomas Jefferson championed an informed citizenry as essential to democracy, yet the systems he built to organize knowledge reinforced racial and ideological hierarchies that persist today.   Melissa Adler explores Jefferson's lasting influence on public institutions, from his personal library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress, to his archival practices in government record-keeping and his museum at Monticello as a site of colonial knowledge production. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she reveals how his methods of classification and preservation shaped national memory and democratic participation.   Drawing from archival research and critical theory, Peculiar Satisfaction exposes the paradoxes of access, exclusion, and control embedded in information systems. As censorship and disinformation threaten democracy, Adler argues that understanding these foundational structures is essential to defending the role of knowledge in public life.   Offering a fresh perspective on the ways information, power, and race have shaped American institutions, this book will engage scholars and general readers interested in how libraries, archives, and museums influence history, democracy, and collective memory and argues for a nuanced understanding of these institutions at a critical moment where disinformation and authoritarian rule threaten to undo them.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51770015252753,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51770015351057,"sku":"NGR9781531511937","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52700950266129,"sku":"NIN9781531511937","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781531511937.jpg?v=1761391179"},{"product_id":"surveillance-in-the-empire-of-liberty-book-melissa-adler-9798765145623","title":"Surveillance in the Empire of Liberty","description":"Examines the formation of a surveillance state through a close examination of Thomas Jefferson's plantation management techniques and political actions.   With the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the horizon, Melissa Adler leads readers to reexamine the principles and foundations upon which the United States is based. By analyzing Thomas Jefferson’s surveillance technologies and practices, including his Farm Book, algorithmic formulas, and land management policies, this book provides a new understanding of the limits to aspirations toward good government, liberty, security, and equality in the United States. In addition to being the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, which famously states that “all men are created equal,” many of Jefferson’s writings feature the rationalization of the enslavement, displacement, and killing of Black and Indigenous peoples. Adler argues that information architectures are mechanisms by which cultural and political divisions endure, and that close examination of Jefferson’s surveillance techniques reveals some of the processes by which problems associated with settler colonialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy have become systemic.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53638269731089,"sku":"NLS9798765145623","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9798765145623.jpg?v=1781007413"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-melissa-adler.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}