Below are the newly tenured faculty and a brief explanation of the books or materials they hand-picked to be purchased and book plated in their honor.
Motoko Akiba
The Women of Suye Mura by Robert J. Smith & Ella Wiswell (1982)
As an international student from Japan, I began my doctoral study in comparative education under the guidance of my academic advisor, Dr. Gerry K. LeTendre in 1998. One day I was lamenting to Gerry how Japanese young women’s morality declined in the recent years. He handed me a copy of The Women of Suye Mura and told me to read it. I thought that it would take me a while to finish reading this book as a first-year graduate student who was overwhelmed with coursework and assistantship responsibilities. I opened the first page one night and could not stop reading it until dawn. This ethnography of women in a rural village in Japan is based on the extensive journal of Ella Wiswell who lived in Suye Mura from 1935 to 1936 with her anthropologist husband, John Embree. This book transported me to Suye Mura in prewar Japan. As I read the vivid narrative about the conversations Ella Wiswell had as a trusted participant in Suye Mura, I felt as if I was part of the inner circles of these women. My perception about the traditional Japanese women as filial daughters, obedient wives, and compliant mothers was completed transformed when I learned the lives of strong-willed women of independent mind in Suye Mura. This book taught me the power of high-quality research to enhance our understanding of people’s lives beyond time and spatial boundaries. My scholarship has continued to be inspired by this book as I engage in my comparative studies of educational policies, school systems, teachers, and students in Japan, the United States, and other countries.
Michelle Arbeitman
Drosophila: A Laboratory Handbook is often called the fly bible, with good reason. It is a comprehensive reference book that covers nearly all aspects of fruit fly biology. While this book is encyclopedic, the text is written in an informative, accessible and interesting way. The field of Drosophila molecular-genetic analyses has moved forward at a remarkably fast pace and there is a deep literature in many sub-fields. This handbook has compiled and synthesized useful information for scientists in a wide-range of fields. Even in the age of the Internet, I continue to find this book an invaluable laboratory resource. I have used this book since I was a graduate student and have a well-worn copy in my laboratory here at Florida State University.
Amy Baco-Taylor
Shawn Bayern
Mel Eisenberg was my Contracts professor and a mentor of mine; more recently it’s been my honor to work with him as a coauthor and friend. I read his book, The Nature of the Common Law, as a first-year law student. It’s a profound, deeply important demonstration of how morality, policy, and experience inform the law, and in some ways it’s the foundation of a lot of my own work. More personally, Mel is simply a wonderful person, and it was largely his example that inspired me to become a law professor.
Walter Boot
Essentials of Behavioral Research: Methods and Data Analysis, by Robert Rosenthal and Ralph Rosnow
I believe that few things are as beautiful as a well-designed experiment. In behavioral research, rigorously conducted studies can uncover fundamental answers to questions regarding the nature of thought, emotion, and human experience. These discoveries have important implications for theory, but also have implications for the safety and well-being of real people. This is why it is crucial to get these answers right, and few have done more to ensure that experimental designs provide valid answers to these important questions than Rosenthal and Rosnow. This book (along with Artifacts in Behavioral Research) has been crucial to my development as a scientist and has inspired much of my work on cognitive interventions and intervention design. We are currently experiencing a resurgence in the field of Psychology with respect to thinking about issues of demand characteristics, placebo effects, replication, and statistical power. However, it is rare in these discussions to hear a point that hasn’t already been made before (and extremely lucidly and elegantly) by Robert Rosenthal and Ralph Rosnow.
Amy Burdette
I selected this book because it is the most comprehensive writing on religion and health, my primary area of research. I have used this book as a reference throughout my career.
Lisa Carlson Lyons
Circadian Clocks, Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology
During my Ph.D. research, if someone asked me about my research interests I would reply that my interests were gene regulation and molecular genetics. I thought of myself as a molecular geneticist that just happened to be studying the regulation of genes involved in the circadian clock. However, by the end of my Ph.D., my perspective changed completely. I realized the importance of the endogenous circadian clock for coordination of the metabolic, physiological and behavioral activities of an organism and the magnitude of the regulatory outputs of the circadian clock. When I started my post-doctoral research, I thought of myself as a circadian biologist. This shift in perspective facilitated my development as a scientist that considered both system level interactions as well as intracellular cell signaling and molecular processes. This volume on circadian clocks is a collection of reviews highlighting the latest research on circadian clocks and circadian rhythms and provides detailed information on the molecular and cellular function of circadian oscillators, the cellular integration and the regulation of the core circadian clock, and the systems level and genome wide impact of the circadian clock. Importantly, this volume also presents recent circadian research on the impact of the circadian clock on human physiology and diseases such as diabetes, cancer, sleep disorders, drug addiction and mood disorders and what the circadian clock means for treatment of these diseases. The broad perspective of this volume will provide a valuable resource for students serving as an excellent introduction to the material for those not familiar with circadian biology as well as an important resource for undergraduates and graduate students in biology and neuroscience.
Jonathan Clark
Researchers have been attempting to build legged robots that move like humans or other animals for more than half a century, but until the mid-1980s none of these could run in anything close to a bio-like manner. That changed with a series of brilliant hopping robots developed by Marc Raibert’s group. The simple principles that made this transition from slow, cumbersome walking machines to fast, dynamic runners are elegantly captured in Raibert’s book Legged Robots that Balance. I can still remember the day as a grad student that I first read his book. It was a beautiful day and I was sick of being in the lab, so I took a trip to the beach to do a “little light reading.” Not only did I actually finish the book that day, but it changed my whole attitude toward designing and building robots. I went on to work on running robots as a graduate student, and then as a postdoc and new faculty my research lead to a study of dynamic climbing, and eventually to the development of a new class of fast, vertically running robots. A journey that can trace its intellectual roots directly back to the approach outlined in Legged Robots that Balance.
Joseph Gabriel
Kävik the Wolf Dog tells the story of a sled dog and his friendship with Andy, a young boy who rescues him after he is wounded in a plane crash. Kävik and Andy are later separated, and Kävik travels alone over 2,000 miles to return to the only person who ever cared for him. In addition to being a great tale, I chose Kävik the Wolf Dog because Kävik’s difficult journey to return to Andy reminds me of the arduous process of getting tenure. The fact that the book was published in the same year I was born also somehow seems relevant. Most importantly, however, Kävik the Wolf Dog is my son’s favorite book. I chose it for him.
Jens Grosser
Spending time as a masters student in the 'Selten School of Behavioral Economics' at the University of Bonn was a very fortunate opportunity for me and has markedly influenced my career. Reinhard Selten has received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2004, but what was even more important to me was that he founded the field of Experimental Economics (jointly with Vernon Smith on the other side of the Atlantic), my main research area. At the time, there was no better place to learn the 'art' of conducting economics experiments and to this day, Professor Selten emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary and creativity - doing things differently.
Jingjiao Guan
This is a good introductory book for learning human anatomy and physiology. I used it as the textbook for the first course that I have ever taught, and I am still using it. I spent more time reading this book than any other books during the past five and half years, and I always enjoy reading it.
Kathy L. Guthrie
I chose The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal by Parker Palmer because of the impact this book has had on me in regards to my teaching philosophy and research agenda. In this book Palmer discusses how higher education should be focusing on educating students at the intersection of loving to learn and learning to love. This concept has been a profound and inspiring place to come from when working with students. Not only in the teaching and advising of college students, but also researching college student development and leadership education at this intersection has helped me to integrate an ethic of care into every aspect of my work.
Irena Hutton
Finance
Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies, 5th ed. by Tim Koller, Marc Goedhart, and David Wessels
Fengfeng Ke
I have learned a lot by writing this book, which is my first one and driven by my first funded research project. It represents a starting point for me.
Kenneth L. Knappenberger, Jr.
I knew immediately that I Lost My Kisses was the appropriate book to commemorate my tenure at Florida State University. I owe much of my success to my wife, Jane, who has done a remarkable job of helping me balance family life, which includes three young children, in the midst of building a demanding career. I Lost My Kisses is a family favorite that we have read several times with our children, and it has been especially helpful when work-related travel causes me to be away from my family. I chose this book because it reflects the significant achievement that tenure is not only for me, but for also my family.
Trevor Luke
I chose T. J. Cornell's The Fragments of the Roman Historians because it well represents the challenge I and other historians of antiquity face as we cull through the precious writings of ancient witnesses of the Roman world in order to construct our own historical interpretations. These bits of history suggest a rich and vast landscape that invites our inquiring eyes and minds, albeit through small windows. Fragments are pieces of written history quoted by later authors with their own agendas. When reflecting on the complicated process through which these traces of the past have made their journey to our time, I not only marvel at the wonder of it, but I am also reminded of the importance of care and good judgment in scholarship, which must temper the intoxication of imagination and creativity.
My hope is that FSU students of the ancient world will put this invaluable collection of evidence to good use as they learn how to be both judicious and adventurous in their scholarship.
Andrei Malaev-Babel
To commemorate my tenure, I selected a book about Yevgeny Vakhtangov - a theatre artist, who has served as an inspiration for generations of actors and directors around the globe. Some were inspired by his formal innovations; others admired his gift of facilitating top performances from his casts. I happen to value, above all, Vakhtangov’s gift of being a brilliant teacher, and leader, capable of inspiring and mobilizing creative collectives. This is why Yevgeny Vakhtangov: A Critical Portrait is immensely important to me - not only as the first book I authored - but also as a way to absorb the lessons of leadership and inspiration – so crucial to my path as a teacher.
Picture: https://www.ncf.edu/andrei-malaev-babel
Vasubandhu Misra
Dr. Narasimhan, unknown to many but revered by an extremely small minority of humble beings of forest and cave dwellers in southwestern, India epitomize the character of a selfless being. In an increasingly competitive world, this book reminds me to be grounded in humility and solicitousness. Incidentally this book is written by my parents, who I recollect from my impressionable teenage years, were painstakingly gathering evidence of this great man’s achievements that redefined the paradigm of a caregiver in my mind.
Owen Mundy
Art
Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973-1983 by Allan Sekula
http://art.fsu.edu/People/Faculty/Owen-Mundy
Joshua Newman
I have chosen my first book, Embodying Dixie, in part because the publication of this project in 2010 represents the culmination of nearly a decade of field research in, and writing about, the cultural political of the U.S. South. In this book, I explore the role that sport and other forms of physical culture have played in reproducing dominant cultural and identity politics in higher educational settings in the Dixie South. As one reviewer of the book put it: “this is a substantial piece of academic work, linking social theory with organizational and marketing theory to explicate the cultural politics bound to practices of sport consumerism. The empirical depth of the qualitative analysis is perhaps only bested by its historical treatments of racial identities, intercollegiate sport, and higher education in the U.S. South” (Pringle, 2011). Further, this book has served as a jumping-off point for many other lines of inquiry that have come to shape my research agenda in the years since.
La Tonya Noel
David Orozco
This book helped me look at business from a non-traditional perspective. One of the lessons I learned from this book is that entrepreneurship and creativity arise in the most unexpected places, and should be nurtured wherever they arise. Ever since I read this book, I've devoted a substantial part of my academic career to promoting this goal.
Debra Osborn
The Handbook of Counseling Psychology provides important snapshots and summaries of empirical findings, theoretical foundations, and emerging trends within the field of counseling psychology. I chose this set because there's a little something for everybody in the two volumes. As a faculty member specializing in career counseling, I partially see the value of my own career through the lens of how many others I have helped realize their goals. My hope is that this handbook will help inspire research in a variety of areas related to counseling, and in turn, have a positive impact on the lives of those we serve.
Anant Paravastu
This classic text on the principles of nuclear magnetism is of great value to the FSU community.
Darin R. Rokyta
Judith Rushin
Agnes Martin was a Canadian born abstract artist whose work reflected her life, a contemplative existence that operated on regular rhythmic meter – a gracious model for anyone interested in simple living. And like her life, she pared her paintings down to their most essential elements, consisting of subtle, gridded lines on bands of transparent colors. Critics celebrated her as a minimalist but she dismissed this association, for unlike the objective works produced by the Minimalist movement, her work is intuitive, spiritual, and gestural. That the gestures recorded in her gridded paintings are inconspicuous, quietly indexing her body movements through carefully drawn pencil lines rather than grand brushstrokes, is simply a statement of her modesty.
The book I have chosen, Agnes Martin: Writings is out of print and yet I consider it essential reading for anyone serious about living the art life. I hope this book will provide inspiration to a new generation of artists. Agnes Martin has had an enormous influence on the way I have shaped my own creative practice. I write this explanation on March 22, 2014, which would have been Agnes Martin’s 102 birthday, and in her memory I have just freed myself of two truckloads of unnecessary possessions.
Yiyuan She
This book develops modern methods and in particular the "generic chaining" to bound stochastic processes. One of the must-haves for researchers interested in statistical analysis.
Dennis E. Slice
My undergraduate mentor at the College of Charleston, Dr. Phil Dustan, asked me to program the computation of what I thought was a rather strange value for some measurements he had collected. Reaching to his bookshelf, he retrieved a first edition copy of Biometry by Sokal and Rohlf. He showed me the equation (univariate variance) and explained that if I went to graduate school at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, I could learn about such things directly from the authors.
I did, and Dr. F. James Rohlf became my dissertation advisor and Dr. Robert R. Sokal served on my committee. I can think of no better way to recognize the contribution of these teachers, mentors, colleagues, and friends than to choose as my selection for the FSU Library the latest (4th) edition Biometry.
Scott M. Stagg
Anathem, by Neil Stephenson
When I think about my time at FSU and being an academic in general, the thing I always lament is not having enough time to focus and engage in uninterrupted thought. Teaching, writing papers, writing grants, directing graduate students: all are enjoyable, and doing them well requires uninterrupted and deep thought. Time is precious and in very short supply. Time is a central theme in Anathem, a work of science fiction by Neil Stephenson. Anathem is set in a world where academics have cloistered themselves off from the rest of the world and only make contact with the outside every 1, 10, 100, or 1000 years depending on their academic order. This in some ways is an academic’s dream: to step away from all the distractions and have time simply to think. There is great value in uninterrupted thought, and Anathem continues to inspire me to make time for distraction-free deep thought. There are a lot of things about Anathem that speak to me as an academic and a scientist. Touching on themes of quantum physics and the multiverse hypothesis, Anathem really captures what it’s like to be a scientist: to observe something unexpected and not be able to think about anything else until you’ve figured out what it means. This is what drove me to become a professor, and continues to guide my research today.
Xinlin Tang
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
In this most recent book of his series on information technology (IT) and productivity, Erik Brynjolfsson combines his knowledge of rapidly evolving digital technologies and relevant economics with co-author Andrew McAfee to give us a colorful and accessible picture of dynamic forces that are shaping our lives, our work, and our economies. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.
Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds—from lawyers to truck drivers—will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.
I believe that this book can be a good addition to our collection of IT books, as it examines the impact of evolving technology at a macro-level and initiates the discussions on strategies for survival and prosperity.
Miles Taylor
In 2003 while I was in graduate school, I took a Structural Equation Modeling Class with Ken Bollen and read this book for the first time. In the decade since, there has not been a single text I have referenced as much as this one. I have utilized these techniques, in some form, in the majority of my own publications. This book is the seminal text on the specific methodology, but its relevance for me in my own career is much broader. It symbolizes the power of interdisciplinary scholarship in moving a research field forward and exemplifies excellence in teaching applied statistical methods to those engaged in substantive research. I have now come full circle, assigning this book to my own students.
Franita Tolson
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison was the last book that I read before I graduated from high school, but notably, it was the first book that introduced me to the complexities of balancing one’s racial identity with the other aspects of one’s personality. The Invisible Man is the story of an African-American protagonist who feels invisible because other characters in the book, driven by racism and/or political ideology, ignore the complexities of his personal identity; over the course of the novel, the narrator feels less like a person worthy of respect and more like a tool used to advance the goals of others. As a young reader, I was most struck by the narrator’s attempt to find meaning in his life by defining himself through the validation of other people, only to be betrayed by these same people later in the story. It is not until the end of the book, lying in a sewer, that the narrator realizes he has to remain true to himself, first and foremost, rather than trying to conform to the stereotypes and expectations imposed on him by other people. The Invisible Man taught me about the importance of recognizing and staying true to my personal identity. My identity as a legal scholar and my commitment to social justice are central to who I am as a person, and because of The Invisible Man, I learned very early on that I have to honor and nurture these aspects of my identity.
O. Arda Vanli
Experimental Design with Applications in Management, Engineering and the Sciences
Paul D Berger, Robert E. Maurer
Statistical design and analyses of experiments for improving engineering systems is one of my research and teaching areas. The reason I picked this book is because of its approach in explaining the concepts in a manner that makes it easy to understand and apply experimental design techniques. This is a hard to find feature in most of the other more classical books of this topic. While classical texts are needed for sure to better understand the underlying theory, texts with applied focus is also very important, and this text fills this important need. For users who do not wish to go into theory or do not have the mathematical background but still want to apply effectively the experimental design principles this book is very valuable.
Diana Williams
My research interest is in neuroendocrine control of food intake and body weight. In this field, the hypothalamus has typically been center stage and other brain regions are often overlooked. As a graduate student, I focused on the role of the caudal brainstem in energy balance. William Blessing's book, The Lower Brainstem and Bodily Homeostasis, was published in 1998, the year I began graduate school. This book was an important reference for me as I began to develop my dissertation research, and remains a comprehensive resource on the topic today.
Shelbie D. Witte
The movie Teachers served as a critical text in both my dissertation and my current research in critiquing popular films that depict schools and teachers. Popular culture is often a mirror of ‘real life’, but it can also serve as a narrative that influences the real world through educational policy. As much as we might like to believe the classroom is a pure space set apart from the biases of American political rhetoric, we know that this is not the case. The political narratives constructed by politicians and legislators impact our work as educators. The manipulation of cultural archetypes, including the dystopian film representations of schools and teachers, in order to create compelling narratives in support of policy, is also part of the context within which we work as educators. The past 25 years have been laden with reform efforts (A Nation at Risk, Secondary Education Act [NCLB]), but the monumental changes in educational policies and practices that have occurred over the last two and a half decades were enabled by a sense of urgency manufactured and sold to the American public through popular culture such as Teachers.
Zhaohua Wu
Modern science and technology are developing at an unprecedented pace, as is the size of data we collect from numerous sources. Under such a circumstance, powerful analysis methods that can extract essential information from data become more welcome than ever. This book introduces a third generation time-frequency-energy analysis method (behind the Fourier Transform and Wavelet Analysis), which is characterized by its adaptiveness and locality. In the book, chapters on different aspects of this new analysis method were written by major developers of the method. Applications to selected fields of science and engineering were also included. The book is a new edition of a well-sold book under the same name and by the same publisher.
Jimmy Yu
Ming Qing minjian zongjiao jingjuan wenxian 明清民間宗教經卷文獻 (Scriptural and Literary Collection of Chinese Popular Religions). Taibei: Xinwenfeng chuban gufen youxian gongsi, 2006. 12 volumes.
Scholars of premodern Chinese Buddhism tend to focus on prescriptive canonical Buddhist scriptures over descriptive realities of Buddhist practice. To provide a more complete picture of how Buddhism was perceived and practiced on the ground for the majority of the populace, apocryphal Buddhist scriptures are an extremely important source of information on the doctrinal modifications and transformations. These scriptures also reveal how Buddhist notions were gradually adapted into preexisting Chinese conceptions of the world. The Ming Qing minjian zongjiao jingjuan wenxian (Scriptural and Literary Collection of Chinese Popular Religions) in 12 volumes is the first collection ever produced of premodern popular apocryphal Buddhist scriptures. The focus is on the Ming and Qing dynasties (14th centuries through early 20th centuries). The collection contains a wealth of resources for my own research on Buddhism in the Ming Dynasty.
Changchun Zeng
Polymeric materials touch almost every aspect of our life. They are used in such diverse areas from aerospace to consumer electronics to biomedical applications, to name a few. They are so ubiquitous in our life that we neglect to realize their pervasiveness. Yet the effective use of polymeric materials to a great extent depends on processing technologies governed by the materials’ properties, among which rheological properties, or the flow/deformation characteristics under force, are of fundamental importance. “Rheology” and “processing” of polymers are the subjects of the two-volume monograph. I have selected this book for the importance of the subjects, the breadth of the materials systems covered, and the author’s rigorous treatments and discussions on theories, and meticulous attention to detail, which stands out among monographs of similar nature. It can be used both as textbook for people who are new to the field and as good go-to reference for experienced polym