Four professors from Georgia Southern University have recently published books that expand the understanding of various historical and cultural topics. Their works cover a range of subjects, including European history, American literature, the Civil War era in Georgia, and financial markets.
Lindsey Chappell, Ph.D., associate professor, authored “Temporal Forms and the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean.” Chappell spent ten years conducting research across different countries to study British literature and culture. Her book examines how storytelling in the Mediterranean region contributed to forming British national identity. To gather her material, Chappell visited archives in Italy such as the British Institute of Florence and reviewed documents at the British Library in London. She highlighted the importance of direct archival work: “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.”
Kendra R. Parker, Ph.D., associate professor, released “Understanding Octavia E. Butler.” This book analyzes both well-known and lesser-studied genres within Butler’s writing career. Parker became interested in Butler’s work during graduate studies at Howard University under mentor Gregory Jerome Hampton, Ph.D., whose passing influenced Parker’s decision to write about Butler when approached by University of South Carolina Press. Parker conducted experiential research by traveling to Pasadena, California—Butler’s hometown—where she visited places significant to Butler’s life and spent time at The Huntington Library reviewing archival materials. Reflecting on her process, Parker said: “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.”
Bennett Parten, Ph.D., assistant professor, wrote “Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the History of Emancipation.” The book offers an alternative view on Sherman’s March by focusing on enslaved people who experienced emancipation during this period rather than solely recounting military events. Parten relied heavily on Union Army records and soldiers’ diaries while acknowledging their limitations due to being written from non-emancipated perspectives; he used additional sources for context: “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.”
Nicholas Mangee, Ph.D., Truist Chair in Money & Banking at Georgia Southern University College of Business Administration (https://parker.georgiasouthern.edu/coba/), published “Narrative Analytics and Stock Market Forecasting: How Popular Stories Help Inform Investment Strategies.” Mangee’s work introduces readers to narrative finance through his Novelty-Narrative Hypothesis (NNH), which suggests that stories surrounding market events influence investor behavior as much as data does. His approach involves analyzing millions of financial reports using textual analytics tools such as Google Trends and RavenPack data (https://www.ravenpack.com/). Mangee emphasized storytelling’s role in making sense of 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.” He further explained: “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.”
Georgia Southern maintains a permanent collection highlighting faculty scholarship through its GS Authors Lounge; each spring there is an event recognizing works published over the previous year.
