Wilma Davidson, EdD - Business Writing: What Works, What Won’t
Wilma Davidson’s how-to guide has amassed tens of thousands of sales in North America, but it came as a surprise when Taiwan-based Heliopolis Culture Group suggested bringing the work to Chinese booksellers.
Intrigued by a huge, untapped market, Davidson and her publisher readily agreed. With the first copies rolling off the presses last spring, the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus instructor of professional and technical writing can now affirm her work has been published in Chinese.
“Of course, I was honored and thrilled that they approached us for international rights,” Davidson said. “They told us they wanted to offer it to people in the business world, so they can benefit from the ideas in the book on how to compose effective business correspondence.”
Sales in the Asian market will depend on promotion and how the book is mass-marketed there. Already, nearly 50,000 copies of her three editions have sold in North America, with a digital version available as well.
Jody L. McBrien, EdD - Educational Policies and Practices of English-Speaking Refugee Resettlement Countries
Debate over migration often focuses on refugees and asylum seekers while ignoring the thousands of children not included in the decision to leave their homelands.
Jody L. McBrien, PhD, examines the academic challenges created by this issue from the perspective of six English-speaking refugee resettlement countries in her new book.
A professor of education at USF Sarasota-Manatee, McBrien’s book examines resettlement efforts in the United States and five other countries amid increasing migration.
In 2018, UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, estimated the number of displaced people at a record 68.5 million worldwide.
“Our hope is not only to compare challenges, but also to describe successes by which teachers and policymakers can consider new approaches to help refugee and asylum-seeking children,” McBrien said. “Policymakers, teachers, social service
providers and the general public need to understand ways to help resettled refugees become productive members in their new countries of residence.”
James Unnever, PhD - Building a Black Criminology: Race, Theory and Crime
Co-edited by Shaun L. Gabbidon, PhD, and Cecilia Chouhy, PhD, Professor of Criminology James Unnever’s book challenges prevailing theories arguing that all racial and ethnic groups commit crimes for the exact same reasons.
“What we are saying is the mainstream theories are invalid because they negate the influence of systemic racism on African-American offenders,” he said.
Instead, racism should be at the forefront when explaining crime among African-Americans because of its sweeping effect across generations of blacks.
“The assumption of Black Criminology is that if blacks never experienced any sort of racism, their likelihood of committing a crime would be equal to that of whites,” said Unnever, a USF Sarasota-Manatee campus criminologist.
Unnever and his co-editors spent 18 months on the 408-page book, which includes contributions from 21 other criminologists.
Cassandra Yacovazzi, PhD - Escaped Nuns: Anti-Catholicism and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America
Cassandra Yacovazzi, PhD, was exploring anti-Catholic bias in 19th-Century America when she noticed references to self-described escaped nun Maria Monk, who penned a scathing attack on consecrated life. A huge success, selling more than 300,000 copies in pre-Civil War America, Monk’s book spawned dozens of equally derisive imitations – even though it turned out Monk was a fraud who never lived as a nun in a convent or otherwise.
“The campaign against convents in antebellum America was a far-reaching movement, as popular as abolitionism, the common school movement, urban reform and anti-Mormonism,” said Yacovazzi, a USF Sarasota-Manatee campus assistant history professor.
“While anti-Catholic and nativist impulses propelled this campaign in part, nuns’ nonconformity to female gender norms of true womanhood—their rejection of marriage, motherhood and ideals of domesticity—rendered them conspicuous targets of attack among the vanguards of accepted behavior.”