UChicagoReads: Fall 2025 New Releases from The University of Chicago Press

UChicagoReads features books written by UChicago staff, faculty, students, and alumni or those written about University topics. Do you know of a book we should feature? Do you have a book of your own? Email us at uchicagointranet@uchicago.edu.

Originally founded in 1890 as one of the three main divisions of the University of Chicago, The University of Chicago Press publishes books and journals with a mission “to disseminate scholarship of the highest standard and to publish serious works that foster public understanding, provide an authoritative foundation for informed dialogue, and enrich the diversity of cultural life.” Twice a year, The Press releases seasonal catalogs announcing new titles.

In this edition of UChicagoReads, we’re featuring three titles by UChicago faculty that appear in the Fall 2025 catalog. For more new releases from The Press, you can peruse the complete Fall 2025 catalog at your leisure.

Primacies: Experience, Expression, and the Jewish Imagination

Michael Fishbane
© 2025 | 272 pages

Synopsis

A powerful exploration of how literature expresses and transforms our earliest preverbal experiences.

Primacies begins with the assertion that our earliest preverbal experiences are accompanied by a primary language—a universal expression of tears, cries, and laughter offered long before we learn our distinctive, ordinary languages. For Michael Fishbane, these “primacies” release the raw feelings of our existential condition and catalyze our most powerful literary expressions of sorrow, joy, and fulfillment.

In this book, Fishbane explores how ancient, medieval, and modern literature and poetry express and transform these primal sensations. Building on his theological project begun in Sacred Attunement and Fragile Finitude, Fishbane offers here a radically new lived hermeneutics that seeks to do nothing less than redefine the relationship between experience and language.

About the author

Michael Fishbane is the Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. He was trained in Semitic languages, biblical studies, and Judaica. His writings span from the ancient Near East and biblical studies to rabbinics, the history of Jewish interpretation, Jewish mysticism, and modern Jewish thought. Professor Fishbane received a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other major grants, and has twice been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University. He is a member of the American Academy of Jewish Research, and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in Textual Studies by the National Foundation of Jewish Culture.

What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan

Steven Rings
© 2025 | 360 pages

Synopsis

Discover a new side of the songs of Bob Dylan by exploring the virtues of rough sounds, peculiar intonation, and a raspy voice.

Folk troubadour, rock star, country crooner—for a musician who adopted so many personas, Bob Dylan always sounds like himself. While he’s written many of the most iconic and impactful lyrics of the past sixty years, Dylan’s music has also reshaped our sonic imagination with his ragged voice, wailing harmonica, and rough-hewn guitar. Music theorist Steven Rings argues that such sonic imperfections are central to understanding Dylan’s songs and their appeal. These blemishes can invoke authenticity or persona, signal his social commitments, and betray his political shortcomings.

About the author

Steven Rings is associate professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. He is a music theorist whose research focuses on popular music, voice, and transformational theory. Rings is the author of Tonality and Transformation and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory. Rings teaches tonal and post-tonal theory at the undergraduate and graduate levels, the history of theory, and a class on musical interpretation and criticism in the College Core. He has served on the faculty of the Mannes Institute for Advanced Study in Music Theory and is the series editor of Oxford Studies in Music Theory. He has also served as Chair of the University of Chicago Society of Fellows and is Resident Dean at Campus North Residential Commons.

Divided Parties, Strong Leaders

Ruth Bloch Rubin
© 2025 | 240 pages

Synopsis

Drawing on nearly a century of legislative history, this careful account invites readers to think anew about when, why, and how leaders of divided parties wield power in Congress. For decades, legislative scholars have viewed party divisions as critical constraints on congressional leadership. The more a party’s rank and file disagree with one another, the weaker their leaders are predicted to be; as member preferences converge, leader power is thought to increase.

Alternatively, Ruth Bloch Rubin argues that party divisions are not inherently limiting. Divided Parties, Strong Leaders highlights and examines variation in how members of party factions choose to work together. She shows that leaders of divided parties are well positioned to overcome, and even draw strength from, their divided ranks when the collaborative efforts of their coalitions’ competing factions are evenly matched. By contrast, their capacity to get what they want is more limited when one faction has out-collaborated its competition.

About the author

Ruth Bloch Rubin is associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Building the Bloc: Intraparty Organization in the U.S. Congress. Rubin studies American politics, with a substantive focus on legislative institutions, political parties, and American political development. Combining archival and interview data, her current work explores how divisions within political parties drive congressional development and structure lawmaking.