UMassD Book Cake Series UMassD Book Cake Series

About Book Cakes

The publication of a book is a significant scholarly accomplishment. The Provost’s Office and the Office of Research and Innovation plan to recognize this accomplishment by inviting the campus community to join us for cake and congratulate our faculty authors on campus.  If you have a forthcoming book publication, email Associate Provost Shannon Jenkins, and we will arrange a book cake for you!

The Provost’s Office and the Office of Research and Innovation invite you to our Book Cake Celebrations.

1. November 12, 2025 Celebration
   1. Book to be featured: Screening Precarity, Dr. Anupama Arora
   2. About the Author: Dr. Arora is Professor in the Department of English and Communication and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.  
   3. About the Book: Her book, Screening Precarity, was published by the University of Michigan Press in September 2025.  The book explores the role that Hindi films play in how precarity is mediated by film, and what that mediation reveals about both contemporary India and the social life of the movies. Incorporating film and media studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and South Asian studies, Screening Precarity is an intervention in the politics of representation, particularly, of how marginal identities are shaped, scripted, and screened when neoliberalism and authoritarianism enmesh. It is also a cultural analysis of how the biggest film industry in the world is embedded in global media networks and marshals state power and star power, national histories and transnational fantasies, structural impossibilities, and individual agency to tell the story of a period marked by incredible insecurity, violence and the absence of collective political alternatives.
2. April 14, 2025 Celebration
   1. Book to be featured: The Art of Retreat, Dr. Laurel Hankins
   2. About the Author: Dr. Hankins is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Communication in the College of Arts and Sciences.
   3. About the Book: Her book, The Art of Retreat, will be published in May 2025 by Bucknell University Press. The political and cultural fantasy of home as a retreat from the pressures of the world first emerged in the U.S. alongside two major nineteenth-century literary movements: Romanticism and domestic fiction. Upending accepted gendered narratives from this period, The Art of Retreat posits that these movements originated from a domestic culture already in transition, in which home was frequently a more complicated site of self-interested pleasure, coerced labor, creole social reproduction, homosocial intimacy, bachelor whimsy, petty tyranny, racial abuse, and transgender capacity. The early national periodicals, sketches, and novels examined here lend themselves to this interpretation. Hankins argues that the literary tradition emerging from these decades—one that aligned creative genius with domestic retreat—reminds us that a politics that appeals to private feeling must reckon with new interpretations of labor, kinship, andreform in exchange for the promise of consensual citizenship.