Four Georgia Southern faculty members publish books taking research beyond the library
Four Georgia Southern University professors are using their original research to bring new light to historic topics. Their recently published books span topics from European history to an American novelist to a reexamination of Sherman’s March through Georgia. Through research that takes a deep dive into their fields of study, they bring a more complete understanding of their topics to a broad audience.
“Temporal Forms and the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean” by Lindsey Chappell, Ph.D., associate professor
Chappell spent a decade traveling the world studying British literature and culture to create her recently published book “Temporal Forms and the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean.” Chappell’s work goes beyond previous research to examine how storytelling in the Mediterranean factors into the creation of British national identity. The book takes readers from the Holy Land to Italy to tell the story of how the former world’s largest empire created its own mythological identity. Her research was so groundbreaking, it was published by Cambridge University Press, one of the top academic publishers in the United Kingdom.
Chappell stepped inside the halls of Italian archives, including the British Institute of Florence, unraveling a Victorian-era scroll containing ancient family histories. She even learned Italian to study the documents firsthand in their native language. At the British Library in London, Chappell pored over documents that survived the firebombings of World War II, but were kept secret until the courts forced their hidden records to be revealed for the first time in the 1990s. Chappell says spending the time and effort to do archival research in person is essential to discovering the full picture.
“Digitization is important because it makes the content accessible to a broader range of people, but it’s not the same as that physical encounter with objects,” said Chappell. “It’s never going to capture the relational sense of standing next to artwork. Do I feel small next to it? How is it being preserved? How noisy is it in the preservation space? All of that sensory information is part of the research.”
“Understanding Octavia E. Butler” by Kendra R. Parker, Ph.D., associate professor
“Understanding Octavia E. Butler” could be described as Parker’s life work. The newly published book explores both the chronology of Butler’s work and its genres. Parker’s work takes the study of Butler’s writing to new heights by going beyond her science fiction and fantasy novels and exploring her nonfiction and romance works that have not received as much academic attention.
A lifelong fan of science fiction and fantasy, Parker fell in love with Butler’s books during her graduate studies at Howard University. Her mentor Gregory Jerome Hampton, Ph.D., brought Parker along on a journey of discovery through Butler’s writing. It was during Parker’s grief of the untimely passing of Hampton that the University of South Carolina Press approached her about writing a book examining Butler as an author. Parker found solace in adapting Butler’s story into a versatile book that can be equally enjoyed as an academic textbook or a personal leisure read.
Parker knew that she wanted to do more than just study Butler through archival documents, so she traveled to Pasadena, California, to experience as much of Butler’s life as possible. In addition to spending a month in Butler’s archives at The Huntington Library, Parker rode the same bus route that Butler used to take, visited her high school and talked to people who lived in her neighborhood. Standing next to Butler’s burial site and looking at the distant San Gabriel Mountains, mountains that Butler used to lovingly refer to as “my mountains,” Parker absorbed the experience of seeing the world through Butler’s eyes. Completing the story of Butler’s work through this experiential research was a deeply personal achievement after years of hard work.
“I’ve been writing this book longer than I realized I was writing it,” said Parker. “The work that I have done on her started before I even had the contract. It was really good to put years of work into perspective.”
“Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the History of Emancipation” by Bennett Parten, Ph.D., assistant professor
The story of Sherman’s March to the Sea is familiar to many Georgians in one way or another, most often told as the battles and destruction of a military campaign. But Parten offers a different perspective by delving into the often overlooked story of thousands of enslaved people who experienced the march as a journey into freedom. In his recently published book “Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the History of Emancipation,” Parten uses firsthand accounts to allow the reader to see the march from a new perspective.
Researching the experiences of freedmen presented unique challenges. With few accounts written directly by those who were emancipated, Parten had to get creative to find sources. One key source was the massive bureaucracy of the Union Army. Parten worked through volumes of documents recording the movements of Sherman’s army and the growing crowd of freedmen following along. Parten paired these documents with diaries written by Union soldiers that told of their curiosity when meeting emancipated people for the first time. An important consideration was that these documents were written from the soldiers’ perspective and not the emancipated people, so Parten used other contemporary sources to screen for potential biases.
“Sometimes when you’re writing about enslaved people, laborers or colonized people, they might not always appear in the historical record,” said Parten. “Sometimes the best we can do is use well-grounded historical inferences to make judgments and perform a balancing act to avoid going too far with sheer speculation. I think we owe it to ourselves and the people we’re writing about to really think critically about what their own experiences, perspectives, ambitions or aims might have been.”
“Narrative Analytics and Stock Market Forecasting: How Popular Stories Help Inform Investment Strategies” by Nicholas Mangee, Ph.D., Truist Chair in Money & Banking
Going beyond the numbers to reveal the human element of financial forecasting is the heart of Mangee’s newest work, “Narrative Analytics and Stock Market Forecasting,” where he advances the Novelty-Narrative Hypothesis (NNH) as a new way to study markets. Mangee has been a pioneer in the field of narrative finance. His newest book helps readers understand how diverse interpretations of unique events shape the market just as much as numbers do.
Across his research output, Mangee has applied textual news analytics to millions of financial reports to assess the implications of NNH. In doing so, he noticed that surprising, or novel, events and the way they were interpreted by investors had a large impact on how related stocks performed. Dissecting how sudden, unexpected changes affected the way people reacted on the market has unlocked a new way of thinking about equity market fluctuations.
“You can look at spreadsheets all day if you wish,” said Mangee. “Ultimately, you’re going to have to tell a story and you’re going to have to be a meaning-maker of this otherwise inanimate data.”
Mangee’s first book, “How Novelty and Narratives Drive the Stock Market: Black Swans, Animal Spirits and Scapegoats,” laid the foundation for how NNH works. The sequel book brings together Google Trends, corporate disclosures and RavenPack data to make market projections accessible to anyone interested in the world of investments. Mangee says it’s all about showing that markets are not grossly irrational and stories are not noise, they help provide much needed relevance realization and contextualized meaning from nonroutine events.
“It’s a rational way for individuals to cope with instability and the true uncertainty that unforeseeable change causes,” said Mangee. “Humans are inherently meaning-makers and stock markets are naturally meaning-making systems.”
You can explore a permanent collection of works from Georgia Southern faculty, staff, students and alumni at the GS Authors Lounge. A celebration each spring recognizes works published over the previous year.
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