New Books in Art
766 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 months ago - ★★★★★ - 10 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Art about their New Books
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Episodes
Valerie Kivelson et al., "Picturing Russian Empire" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 07, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesPicturing Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2023) appears as Russia’s imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine grinds on. The stakes could not be higher. It follows that grappling with Russia’s imperial history is inescapable. After all, “[s]elective, exaggerated or patently false reimaginings” of the past “have been central to Russia’s justification of its claims on its neighbor to the southwest,” write today’s guests in the introduction to his new edited volume. Picturing Russian Empire offer...
Peter Nelson, "Computer Games As Landscape Art" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 36 minutesPeter Nelson's book Computer Games As Landscape Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) proposes that computer games are the paradigmatic form of contemporary landscape and offers a synthesis of art history, geography, game studies and play. Like paint on canvas, the game engine is taken as the underlying medium, and using the Valve Source Engine as the primary case study, it analyses landscapes according to the technical, economic and cultural features this medium affords. It presents the single-play...
Ed Simon, "Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology" (Cernunnos, 2023)
November 05, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesIneffable, invisible, inscrutable--angels are enduring creatures across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and human experiences of the divine as mediated by spiritual emissaries are an aspect of almost every religious tradition. In popular culture, angels are often reduced to the most gauzy, sentimental, and saccharine of images: fat babies with wings and guardians with robes, halos, and harps. By contrast, in scripture whenever one of the heavenly choirs appears before a prophet or patriarch...
Maaheen Ahmed, "The Cambridge Companion to Comics" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesToday’s guest is Maaheen Ahmed, who has edited a new collection of essays, The Cambridge Companion to Comics (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This book offers both a broad diachronic perspective, reaching back to the earliest print artifacts that could be called “comic books,” and a deep synchronic view, touching on mainstream and alternative comics work, from almost every continent. Contributions include Jaqueline Berndt on the aesthetics of “manga eyes,” Daniel Stein on “racialines” in c...
"We are all latecomers": Martin Puchner's "Culture" (JP, EF)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesRecall This Book listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology, and author of many prizewinning books) from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World. And you know his feelings about Wodehouse from his Books in Dark Times confessions. Today you get to hear his views on culture as mediation and translation, all the way down. His utterly fascinatin...
Henrik Fürst and Erik Nylander, "The Value of Art Education: Cultural Engagements at the Swedish Folk High Schools" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesIs art education worthwhile? In The Value of Art Education: Cultural Engagements at the Swedish Folk High Schools (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Henrik Fürst, Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Stockholm University and Erik Nylander, Associate Professor in Education at Linköping University, explore this question using the case study of a unique form of educational institution in Sweden. Drawing on a project that examined questions of admissions, teaching, assessments, students...
Chet Van Duzer, "Frames That Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps" (Brill, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesFrames That Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps (Brill, 2023) is the first systematic exploration of cartographic cartouches, the decorated frames that surround the title, or other text or imagery, on historic maps. It addresses the history of their development, the sources cartographers used in creating them, and the political, economic, historical, and philosophical messages their symbols convey. Cartouches are the most visually appealing parts of maps, and also spaces where the cartogra...
Chris Bishop, "Medievalist Comics and the American Century" (UP of Mississippi, 2016)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesIn Medievalist Comics and the American Century (UP of Mississippi, 2016), Chris Bishop surveys the medievalist comic, its stories, characters, settings, and themes drawn from the European Middle Ages. Hal Foster's Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy, but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow remains the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has become as central to the American identity as it was to the British. The Mighty Thor reflects the leg...
Simon Grennan, "A Theory of Narrative Drawing" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017)
October 28, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourSimon Grennan's book A Theory of Narrative Drawing (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) offers an original new conception of visual storytelling, proposing that drawing, depictive drawing and narrative drawing are produced in an encompassing dialogic system of embodied social behavior. It refigures the existing descriptions of visual story-telling that pause with theorizations of perception and the articulation of form. The book identifies and examines key issues in the field, including: the relations...
Pat Thomson and Christine Hall, "Schools and Cultural Citizenship: Arts Education for Life" (Routledge, 2023)
October 28, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesWhy study the arts in school? In Schools and Cultural Citizenship: Arts Education for Life (Routledge, 2023), Pat Thomson, Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham and Christine Hall, Emeritus Professor and former Head of Education at the University of Nottingham, examine this question by introducing findings from the Tracking Arts Learning and Engagement (TALE) Project. The book reflects on perspectives of teachers, students, school managers, and arts organisations as to how “a...
Valerie Werder, "Thieves: A Novel" (Fence Books, 2023)
October 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThieves (Fence Books, 2023) is an autofictional account of a gallery girl named Valerie – an art worker in the big city, a product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to value objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-conscious creature, in the ways she can acquire and be acquired. She lives and works in a storm of things, many of which are commodities, including herself. In whip-smart, sharply hu...
Marisel C. Moreno, "Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art" (U Texas Press, 2022)
October 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDebates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art (U Texas Press, 2022) relates a journey that remains silenc...
Diana Kamin, "Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy" (MIT Press, 2023)
October 25, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesHow the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy (MIT Press, 2023), Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these instit...
Philip Jenkins, "A Storm of Images: Iconoclasm and Religious Reformation in the Byzantine World" (Baylor UP, 2023)
October 22, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesIn the eighth century, the Byzantine Empire began a campaign to remove or suppress sacred images that depicted Christ, the Virgin, or other holy figures, whether in paintings, mosaics, murals, or other media. In some cases, the campaign extended to breaking or wrecking images through what became known as iconoclasm. Over the following years, the emperors' zealous movement involved other acts that closely foreshadowed the Reformation movement that would sweep Western Europe in the sixteenth ce...
Grant H. Kester, "The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde" (Duke UP, 2023)
October 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke UP, 2023), Grant Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx...
Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik, "Maghreb Noir: The Militant-Artists of North Africa and the Struggle for a Pan-African, Postcolonial Future" (Stanford UP, 2023)
October 11, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesUpon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the African continent established military training camps in Morocco. North Africa became a haven for...
Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, eds., "Crip Authorship: Disability as Method" (NYU Press, 2023)
October 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez's Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023)is an expansive volume presenting the multidisciplinary methods brought into being by disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have convened leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media. Starting from the premise that...
Visibility
October 06, 2023 08:00 - 16 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Margaret Galvan talks about the queer politics of Visibility. In her work the activist practices of representation take concrete form in comic books, photographs, and even drawings on lecture slides! In the episode, she discusses the photography of Nan Goldin and queer comic books in the 1980s. She quotes Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” She also references This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Co...
Katrin Nahidi, "The Cultural Politics of Art in Iran: Modernism, Exhibitions, and Art Production" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
October 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourModernist Iranian art represents a highly diverse field of cultural production deeply involved in discussing questions of modernity and modernization as practiced in Iran. This book investigates how artistic production and art criticism reflected upon the discourse about gharbzadegi (westoxification), the most substantial critique of Iran's adaptation of Western modernity, and ultimately proved to be a laboratory for the negotiation of an anti-colonial concept of an Iranian artistic modernity...
Jessica Lowell Mason and Nicole Crevar, "Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art" (Vernon Press, 2023)
September 26, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesJessica Lowell Mason and Nicole Crevar's Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art (Vernon Press, 2023) boldly reasserts the importance of the Madwoman more than four decades after the publication of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal work in feminist literary criticism, 'The Madwoman in the Attic'. Since Gilbert and Gubar's work was published, the Madwoman has reemerged to do important work, rock the academic boat, and ignite social justice agency inside and outside of...
Antony Kalashnikov, "Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time" (Cornell UP, 2023)
September 23, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesAntony Kalashnikov's Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time (Cornell UP, 2023) analyzes Stalinist monument-building. From the 1930's through the Great Patriotic War, architectural monuments such as subway stations were designed to emphasize the perpetual endurance of the nation, regardless of the many crises of the period. The contemporary popularity of Stalinist-era architectural forms has endured. Why this should be so is a question worth pondering, an...
Alba Griffin, "Reading the Walls of Bogota: Graffiti, Street Art, and the Urban Imaginary of Violence" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
September 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA cultural imaginary is a structuring space through which collective understandings of cultural and society phenomena are formed, reproduced, and accepted as the norm. Reading the Walls of Bogota: Graffiti, Street Art, and the Urban Imaginary of Violence (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023) uses graffiti and street art to explore the urban imaginaries of violence in Bogotá, Colombia. These artistic forms are produced and received in different ways in different areas of the city and offer an insight int...
Bryan Rennie, "An Ethology of Religion and Art: Belief as Behavior" (Routledge, 2020)
September 16, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDrawing from sources including the ethology of art and the cognitive science of religion, An Ethology of Religion and Art: Belief as Behavior (Routledge, 2020) proposes an improved understanding of both art and religion as behaviors developed in the process of human evolution. Looking at both art and religion as closely related, but not identical, behaviors a more coherent definition of religion can be formed that avoids pitfalls such as the Eurocentric characterization of religion as belief ...
Margaret Galvan, "In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
September 16, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesIn In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (U Minnesota Press, 2023), Margaret Galvan explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones—the feminist sex wars, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the women in print movement, and countercultural grassroots periodical networks—and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. She goes deep into the records to bring together a decade’s worth of research in grassroots and university archives that include comic...
Jo Shaw and Ben Fletcher-Watson, "The Art of Being Dangerous: Exploring Women and Danger through Creative Expression" (Leuven UP, 2021)
September 13, 2023 08:00 - 26 minutesThe idea that women are dangerous - individually or collectively - runs throughout history and across cultures. Behind this label lies a significant set of questions about the dynamics, conflicts, identities and power relations with which women live today. The Art of Being Dangerous: Exploring Women and Danger through Creative Expression (Leuven UP, 2021) offers many different images of women, some humorous, some challenging, some well-known, some forgotten, but all unique. In a dazzling vari...
A Better Way to Buy Books
September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesBookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...
Marc Bonners, "Open World Structures: Architecture, Urban and Natural landscape in the Computer Game" (Büchner-Verlag, 2023)
September 07, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesWhat role do algorithms play in the construction of images and the representation of the world and weather in computer games? How does the design of rooms, levels and topographies influence the decisions and behavior of the players? Is Brutalism the first genuine architectural style of computer games? What is the importance of landscape gardens and national parks in structuring game worlds? How is nature represented in times of climate change? Particularly in the last 20 years, digital game w...
Stephen Ramsay, "On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
September 06, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesStephen Ramsey's On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities. Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media. Stephen Ramsay’s On the Dig...
Caveh Zahedi, "Digging My Own Grave: The Films of Caveh Zahedi" (Factory 25, 2015)
September 06, 2023 08:00 - 27 minutesDigging My Own Grave: The Films of Caveh Zahedi (Factory 25, 2015) is the most comprehensive collection of filmmaker Caveh Zahedi possible with 36 films including: A Little Stiff, I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, In the Bathtub of the World, Tripping with Caveh, I Am a Sex Addict, and The Sheik and I. Writings by Bill Brown, Arnold Barkus, Greg Watkins, Thomas Logoreci, Alison Bechdel, Amanda Field, Richard Clark, Britta Sjorgren, Matthew L. Weiss, Jay Duplass, Lena Dunham, Akira Lippitt, Don ...
Gennifer Weisenfeld, "Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
September 05, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesAirplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons. Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (U Chicago Press, 2023) explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japa...
Elise Herrala, "Art of Transition: The Field of Art in Post-Soviet Russia" (Routledge, 2021)
September 03, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesArt of Transition: The Field of Art in Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2022) investigates contemporary art in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union. By drawing on historical and ethnographic research, this study examines the challenges faced by Russian artists in building a field of art as their society underwent rapid and significant economic, political, and social transformation. In doing so, the book constructs a genealogy of the contemporary field of post-socialist art, and illuminates ...
John Szwed, "Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith" (FSG, 2023)
September 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWho was Harry Smith? Was he an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter? Was he a charlatan? A genius? Was he a moocher, a schmuck, a bum? As John Szwed's Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith (FSG, 2023) reveals, Smith was all of these and more. Best known for editing The Anthology of American Folk Music, Smith was also a pioneer in experimental film who Jonas Mekas considered one of the leading lights of the New American Cinema. He created paintings that attempted to transcribe be...
Heike Bauer et al., "Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders" (Syracuse UP, 2022)
September 02, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesIn Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders (Syracuse UP, 2022), contributors draw upon a rich treasure trove of Jewish women’s comics to explore the representation of Jewish women’s bodies and bodily experiences in pictorial narratives. Spanning national, cultural, and artistic borders, the essays shine a light on the significant contributions of Jewish women to comics. The volume features established figures including Emil Ferris, Amy Kurzweil, Miriam Libicki, Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl...
Hamid Keshmirshekan, "The Art of Iran in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Tracing the Modern and the Contemporary" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
August 30, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHamid Keshmirshekan's book The Art of Iran in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Tracing the Modern and the Contemporary (Edinburgh UP, 2023) deals with the exploration and theorization of Modern and Contemporary art of Iran through the examination of art movements and artistic practices in relation to other cultural, social and political discourses during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on discourses and their impact on art movements and practices and aims to sele...
Vanessa I. Corredera, "Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
August 27, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourVanessa I. Corredera’s book Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh Univeristy Press, 2022) looks at how that seventeenth-century play and its protagonist was imagined in theatre, television, and other media between 2008 and 2016. Corredera’s analysis ranges from the sketch comedy Key & Peele to Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play American Moor, from ever-persistent tradition of minstrel Othello to the reimagining of Shakespeare’s play by writers of color. Bringing together...
Travis Holloway, "How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene" (Stanford UP, 2022)
August 23, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesthe near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselve...
Adam Jasienski, "Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World" (Penn State UP, 2023)
August 21, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesPraying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn State University Press, 2023), art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait. Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of ...
Ramzi Fawaz, "The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics" (NYU Press, 2016)
August 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi’s recently pu...
Daniel Foliard, "The Violence of Colonial Photography" (Manchester UP, 2022)
August 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe late nineteenth century witnessed a rapid increase in colonial conflicts throughout the French and British empires. It was also the period in which the first mass-produced cameras became available. Colonial authorities were quick to recognise the power of this new technology, which they used to humiliate defeated opponents and project an image of supremacy across the world. Drawing on a wealth of visual materials, from soldiers’ personal albums to the collections of press agencies and gov...
What Was Contemporary Art?
August 04, 2023 08:00 - 19 minutesContemporary art in the early twenty-first century is often discussed as if the very idea of art that is contemporary is new. Yet all works of art were once contemporary. In What Was Contemporary Art? Richard Meyer reclaims the contemporary from historical amnesia, and gives the contemporary its own art history. By exploring episodes in the study, exhibition, and reception of early twentieth-century art and visual culture, Meyer retrieves moments in the history of once-current art and redefin...
Why Photography Matters
August 03, 2023 08:00 - 12 minutesPhotography matters, writes Jerry Thompson, because of how it works--not only as an artistic medium but also as a way of knowing. With this provocative observation, Thompson begins a wide-ranging and lucid meditation on why photography is unique among the picture-making arts. In Why Photography Matters, he constructs an argument that moves with natural logic from Thomas Pynchon (and why we read him for his vision and not his command of miscellaneous facts) to Jonathan Swift to Plato to Emily ...
Marnie Feneley, "Reconstructing God: Style, Hydraulics, Political Power and Angkor's West Mebon Visnu" (National U of Singapore Press, 2022)
August 02, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesIn December 1936, a villager was led by a dream to the ruins of the West Mebon shrine in Angkor where he uncovered remains of a bronze sculpture. This was the West Mebon Visnu, the largest bronze remaining from pre-modern Southeast Asia, and a work of great artistic, historical, and political significance. Prominently placed in an island temple in the middle of the vast artificial reservoir, the West Mebon Visnu sculpture was an important focal point of the Angkorian hydraulic network. Interp...
Taylor McCall, "The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe" (Reaktion Books, 2023)
August 01, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesTaylor McCall's The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe (Reaktion, 2023) is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius were the fathers of anatomy who performed the first hum...
Ben Highmore, "In Good Taste: How Britain's Middle Classes Found Their Style" (Manchester UP, 2023)
July 31, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutesHow did the rise of consumerism impact Britain? In In Good Taste: How Britain's Middle Classes Found Their Style (Manchester UP, 2023), Ben Highmore, a Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, explores this question by telling the story of key British institutions and cultural habits. The book uses a wealth of different sources, including newspapers, lifestyle magazines, shopping catalogues, plays, books, and television programmes,...
Tom Young, "Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813-1858" (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023)
July 29, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesUnmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813-1858 (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023) by Dr. Tom Young illuminates how new modes of artistic production in colonial India shaped the British state’s nationalisation of the East India Company, transforming the relationship between nation and empire. This pioneering book explores how art shaped the nationalisation of the East India Company between the loss of its primary monopoly in 1813 and its ultimate liqu...
Nina Lager Vestberg, "Picture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization" (MIT Press, 2023)
July 26, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesPicture Research: The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization (MIT Press, 2023) focuses on how pictures were saved, stored, and searched for in a time before scanners, servers, and search engines, and describes the dramatic difference it made when images became scannable, searchable, and distributable via the internet. While the camera, the darkroom, and the printed page are well-known sites of photographic production that have been replaced by cell phones, imaging so...
Brigitte Buettner, "The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture" (Penn State UP, 2022)
July 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourOpulent jewelled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in mediaeval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture (Penn State University Press, 2022), art historian ...
Robert Hillenbrand, "The Great Mongol Shahnameh" (Hali Publications et al., 2022)
July 20, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIt’s amazing that art historians like Robert Hillenbrand got to study the “Great Mongol Shahnama” at all. 500 pages of Firahdosi’s epic poem, with 300 illustrations, in a manuscript whose leaves are as wide as an ordinary person’s arms. Never completed, never bound, smuggled out of Iran by corrupt dignitaries, and separated and padded out by an unsavory Belgian art dealer. Robert Hillenbrand’s work collects all these disparate illustrations and puts them together in one book, which puts “The ...
Brahma Prakash, "Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India" (LeftWord, 2023)
July 19, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesBrahma Prakash's book Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (LeftWord, 2023) is an interesting gaze into life, art, and resistance in contemporary India. Through a wide canvas of contemporary events, the book has tried to look at how barricade becomes a symbol of excessive policing as well as a metaphor for containment. The book also reflects upon marginalized identities and the conflicting narratives of such identities with the State; which unfolds almost lik...
Eliot Borenstein, "Marvel Comics in The 1970s: The World Inside Your Head" (Cornell UP, 2023)
July 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourI am excited to welcome Eliot Borenstein to the podcast today to discuss his new monograph, Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, published through Cornell University Press in 2023. Eliot is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He has published a number of books: Soviet-Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism (Cornell University Press, 2023); Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2019); ...