Category Archives: George Mason University Press

Latest release from George Mason University Press: The Trials of Rasmea Odeh

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The George Mason University Press has published The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship by Steven Lubet, which has been described as a gripping, accessible, and engaging narrative, invaluable for discussion of the issues of citizenship, statehood, and the limits of legality.

About the book: On February 21, 1969, a bomb exploded in the largest supermarket in Jerusalem. The blast killed two and injured many more, triggering an intense search for the terrorists behind the plot. Israeli security forces quickly apprehended, tortured, tried and eventually convicted twenty-one year-old Palestinian Rasmea Odeh for murder. Twenty-five years later, however, found Odeh not serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison, but starting a new life in the United States, first in Detroit and later in Chicago, eventually becoming a naturalized citizen and working as a community organizer. Her arrest by US federal authorities in 2013 on charges of unlawful procurement of citizenship and subsequent trial ignited defenders and detractors, even as the facts of the case, the previous conviction and those of Odeh’s life were obscured or ignored.

Based on extensive research, The Trials of Rasmea Odeh: How a Palestinian Guerilla Gained and Lost U.S. Citizenship separates fact from fiction as it follows the remarkable twists of this story, even—or especially—where those facts subvert one political narrative or another. The result is that rare book that is both an extraordinary achievement of scholarly research and a gripping, accessible and engaging narrative, making it an invaluable resource for discussion of the issues of citizenship, statehood and the limits of legality it engages.

About the author: Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law where he directed the Bartlit Center on Trial Advocacy from 1988-2021. He is the author of numerous books on trial advocacy and the legal profession, with a specialization in the history of American political trials. His scholarly articles have been published in top legal journals, and his popular essays have appeared in national newspapers, as well as outlets such as Slate, Salon, Politico, and The Daily Beast. His commentaries have been heard on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”

What an exemplary gem of scholarship! Combining thorough inquiry with critical empathy, Lubet has written a superb classic that young scholars whatever their field will benefit from reading. The Trials of Rasmea Odeh is truly one of the most impressive books I’ve ever read!

-David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

Professor Lubet takes no shortcuts with this book, unflinchingly examining the record of Odeh’s life … Professor Lubet is able to explain the underlying law and legal strategy in a way that is clear and comprehensible without losing any technical nuance. He brings the courtroom alive to the reader, showing how both political and legal strategies influenced how the case was litigated. [It] is beautifully written and will be of interest to a wide audience.

-Cassandra Burke Robertson, John Deaver Drinko-Baker Hostetler Professor of Law and Director, Center for Professional Ethics, Case Western Reserve University School of Law

In The Trials of Rasmea Odeh, Professor Lubet weaves together an intricate historical and legal account of Middle Eastern conflict and U.S. denaturalization. Rasmea Odeh’s story, told with nuance and in crisp jargon-free prose, grips the reader every bit as much as a fictional thriller would. Professor Lubet leaves us with a highly informative and fascinating book of great value to scholars and nonspecialists alike.”

-Irina Manta, Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Center for Intellectual Property Law, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University

About the George Mason University Press: The George Mason University Press supports the academic mission of George Mason University by publishing peer-reviewed, scholarly works of distinction, written by authors from a wide range of intellectual perspectives, for a diverse, worldwide readership. Learn more and view our current catalog here.

FRAME II awarded $1,175,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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“Federated Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education II” awarded a $1,175,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

By law, any material required for the education of a disabled student must be made accessible for them in a timely manner. In the United States, the legal obligation to provide accessible learning materials falls on individual educational institutions, and universities and colleges across the country are scrambling to meet their responsibilities to students with special information-access needs. The staff of disability services offices (DSOs) spend a great deal of time and effort remediating printed texts, transforming them into a variety of electronic formats to improve access for students with print disabilities. Because many of the same texts are commonly assigned at multiple institutions, the result is a wasteful duplication of effort as the DSO staff at each independent university must start the remediation work over again.

For the last two years, the University of Virginia Library has led a multi-institutional project to address this problem. With a two-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, University Librarian John Unsworth initiated an effort to create a web-based infrastructure allowing DSOs to share remediated texts, in order to reduce their nationwide duplication of effort, and thereby make it possible for the staff in these offices to achieve better outcomes for students in higher education.

That collective effort, known as “FRAME,” will now continue for another two years and expand to include new partners, thanks to a grant of $1,175,000 from The Mellon Foundation for a second phase dubbed “Federated Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education II.” Representatives of the DSO and library staff at Ohio State University will join their counterparts from George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, Texas A&M University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia, along with a development and project management team based at the UVA Library. Much of the group’s work will concentrate on expanding and improving EMMA (Educational Materials Made Accessible), a membership-based secure repository for remediated texts, and developing workflows wherein librarians and DSO staff will cooperate in uploading texts to the repository.

“For too long, most academic libraries have left accessibility to their colleagues in disability services, even though it is all about providing information resources for teaching and research. The FRAME project seeks to establish a partnership between libraries and disability service offices, to ensure that remediated content is preserved, organized, and made discoverable for re-use, reducing the duplication of staff effort in order to improve service to students (and faculty) with disabilities,” states Unsworth, who is continuing his role as principal investigator from the first FRAME grant.

Also continuing to support the project will be three major digital repositories: Bookshare, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive. Through a federated search interface, these repositories provide EMMA users with texts that have already been remediated for users with print disabilities or that are machine-readable and suitable for further remediation by DSO staff — a big advantage over having to scan a printed book. Benetech, the parent company of Bookshare, supplied much of the search infrastructure for EMMA in the first phase of the FRAME project and has committed in the second phase to sharing certain cutting-edge technologies to automate parts of the labor-intensive remediation process. In the second year of FRAME II, an additional repository will join the collaboration: the Accessible Content e-Portal sponsored by the Ontario Council of University Libraries.

Another important element of the project is the cooperation of the university presses affiliated with six of the participating universities: George Mason, Illinois, Ohio State, Vanderbilt, Virginia, and Wisconsin. As publishers of texts that might be used in higher education, the presses have all committed to contributing machine-readable versions of their publications to EMMA or one of its federated repositories.

John Unsworth is joined by FRAME II co-principal investigator J. Stephen Downie, Associate Dean for Research at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences. Professor Downie will lead a new educational initiative, developing curricular materials for professional education in library schools. The materials created by Downie and a team of expert collaborators will train library and information professionals in the information needs of students, faculty, and other library users with disabilities. Professor Downie states, “It is truly inspiring to be working with all the project partners at Illinois, Virginia and beyond to realize the promise of the FRAME II vision.”

Read more about the project’s beginnings in 2019 and Mason’s involvement.

Best Practices in Online Teaching and Learning

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George Mason University Press has partnered with Project MUSE – a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content – to make one of our recent titles, Best Practices in Online Teaching and Learning Across Academic Disciplines, available as a free resource during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read more about Project MUSE’s efforts here, and you can download the book here.

Published in 2017, Best Practices in Online Teaching and Learning across Academic Disciplines provides insights from experienced university teachers and scholars across multiple disciplines—including social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, mathematics, and professional programs such as nursing, education, and business administration—who share innovative practices, pedagogies, and instructional design techniques for online teaching and learning.

About the Press: The George Mason University Press supports the academic mission of George Mason University by publishing peer-reviewed, scholarly works of distinction, written by authors from a wide range of intellectual perspectives, for a diverse, worldwide readership.

The Libraries at Mason – Spring Issue

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Our annual issue of The Libraries at Mason magazine is now available. Special features include our Oral History Program and partnership with the Mason Osher Lifelong Learning Institute; faculty research endeavours; and our inaugural Artist-in-Residence program. We hope you enjoy this issue!

New release from GMU Press

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The George Mason University Press has released The Unlikely Reformer: Carter Glass and Financial Regulation by Matthew P. Fink.

Recently described as “the single most important lawmaker in the history of American finance,” Carter Glass nonetheless remains a much misunderstood and overlooked figure in that history. Glass is most widely remembered as the sponsor (with Henry Steagall) of the Glass-Steagall provisions of the U.S.A. Banking Act of 1933, which legally separated commercial and investment banking. But the Banking Act was the culminating achievement of a monumental career as a congressman, secretary of the Treasury, and senator—a career marked by ferocity and paradox.

Glass was a small-government conservative and vocal racist who was, however, also responsible for some of the most important progressive pieces of financial legislation in U.S. history, including the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which created mechanisms for addressing financial panics and managing the nation’s currency, and provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which created the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the model New Deal agency. In The Unlikely Reformer, Matthew Fink explains how these apparent contradictions emerged together at a pivotal moment in the modern American era. As the first new study dedicated to Carter Glass published in over seventy-five years, it updates our perspective on the welter of assumptions, beliefs, and motivations underpinning a regulatory project that continues to be topical in the tumultuous contemporary moment.

About the Author: Matthew P. Fink is the author of The Rise of Mutual Funds: An Insider’s View. He is Director of the Retirement Income Industry Association and former President of the Investment Company Institute.

About GMU Press: The George Mason University Press supports the academic mission of George Mason University by publishing peer-reviewed, scholarly works of distinction, written by authors from a wide range of intellectual perspectives, for a diverse, worldwide readership. GMU Press publishes in a variety of disciplines with special focus on the history, politics, and culture of Northern Virginia and the wider District of Columbia metropolitan area, as well as other topics such as public policy, international affairs, and higher education.