New Books in British Studies
1,231 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Britain about their New Books
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Episodes
Geoffrey Parker and Colin Martin, "Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England's Deliverance In 1588" (Yale UP, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn July 1588 the Spanish Armada sailed from Corunna to conquer England. Three weeks later an English fireship attack in the Channel--and then a fierce naval battle--foiled the planned invasion. Many myths still surround these events. The genius of Sir Francis Drake is exalted, while Spain's efforts are belittled. But what really happened during that fateful encounter? Drawing on archives from around the world, Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker also deploy vital new evidence from Armada shipwre...
Elizabeth T. Hurren, "Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Hidden Histories of the Dead: Disputed Bodies in Modern British Medical Research (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces ...
Isabel Huacuja Alonso, "Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders" (Columbia UP, 2022)
March 02, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesFrom news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Isabel Huacuja Alonso examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners. Huacuja Alonso argues that desp...
Frances Howard, "Global Perspectives on Youth Arts Programs: How and Why the Arts Can Make a Difference" (Policy Press, 2022)
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesHow can the arts make the world a better place? In Global Perspectives on Youth Arts Programs: How and Why the Arts Can Make a Difference (Policy Press, 2022), Frances Howard, a Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Care and Community at Nottingham Trent University, analyses the opportunities for social change and social justice offered by youth arts programmes. The book combines a detailed ethnography of a youth arts programme in the UK, along with rich and detailed comparative case studies. Drawi...
Caroline Dodds Pennock, "On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe" (Knopf, 2023)
February 26, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOn Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (Knopf, 2023) by Dr. Caroline Dodds Pennock presents a landmark work of narrative history that shatters our Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery. We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the “Old World” encountered the “New”, when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. But, as Dr. Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, T...
Nicolai Jørgensgaard Graakjær, "The Sounds of Spectators at Football" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
February 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe sounds of spectators at football (soccer) are often highlighted – by spectators, tourists, commentators, journalists, scholars, media producers, etc. – as crucial for the experience of football. These sounds are often said to contribute significantly to the production (at the stadium) and conveyance (in televised broadcast) of 'atmosphere.' The Sounds of Spectators at Football (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Nicolai Jørgensgaard Graakjær addresses why and how spectator sounds contribute to the ...
Anthony Bale, "Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
February 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourMargery Kempe: A Mixed Life (Reaktion Books, 2022) is a new account of the medieval mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe. Kempe, who had fourteen children, traveled all over Europe and recorded a series of unusual events and religious visions in her work The Book of Margery Kempe, which is often called the first autobiography in the English language. Anthony Bale charts Kempe’s life and tells her story through the places, relationships, objects, and experiences that influenced her. Extensive quot...
Adrian Fraser, "The 1935 Riots in St Vincent: From Riots to Adult Suffrage" (U West Indies Press, 2016)
February 25, 2023 09:00 - 2 hoursSt Vincent was among the earliest of the British Caribbean colonies to have experienced labour disturbances in the 1930s. While disturbances in the other Caribbean colonies were largely associated with the plantations and with strikes, in St Vincent the riots broke out on the grounds of the court house during a meeting of the Legislative Council on the upper floor. The 1935 Riots in St Vincent: From Riots to Adult Suffrage (U West Indies Press, 2016) is the first comprehensive treatment of th...
Joseph T. Stuart, "Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great War" (Catholic U of America Press, 2022)
February 24, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourChristopher Dawson (1889-1970) was a British historian who was deeply shaken by the Great War (1914-1918) and sought to explore the history of different cultures and religions to understand the catastrophe that had befallen the modern world. In doing so, Dawson would develop a “cultural mind” that served to guide his style of scholarship; it was interdisciplinary by nature (incorporating anthropology, sociology, history, and comparative religion). This ran contrary to the prevalent academic t...
Elizabeth Lhost, "Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia" (UNC Press, 2022)
February 24, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesBeginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But professionals, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere,...
Oren Kessler, "Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
February 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn spring 1936, the Holy Land erupted in a rebellion that targeted both the local Jewish community and the British Mandate authorities that for two decades had midwifed the Zionist project. The Great Arab Revolt would last three years, cost thousands of lives—Jewish, British, and Arab—and cast the trajectory for the Middle East conflict ever since. Yet incredibly, no history of this seminal, formative first “Intifada” has ever been published for a general audience. The 1936–1939 revolt was th...
Leila Jancovich and David Stevenson, "Failures in Cultural Participation" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
February 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFor the past two decades, the arts and cultural establishment in the UK has been trying to engage a broader set of audiences in their work. Countless initiatives to make the arts more accessible to the public and to make them more relevant have been advocated for in policy and funding settlements. But the dial on who participates and how much has not shifted, despite many thousands of projects trying to address the problem. And this isn’t even the punchline. Not only do the interventions not ...
Alan Meades, "Arcade Britannia: A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade" (MIT Press, 2022)
February 18, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesThe story of the British amusement arcade from the 1800s to the present. Amusement arcades are an important part of British culture, yet discussions of them tend to be based on American models. Alan Meades, who spent his childhood happily playing in British seaside arcades, presents the history of the arcade from its origins in traveling fairs of the 1800s to the present. Drawing on firsthand accounts of industry members and archival sources, including rare photographs and trade publications...
Kathy E. Ferguson, "Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesWhile the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture (Duke UP, 2023), Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at p...
Mary C. Flannery, "Practicing Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England" (Manchester UP, 2019)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutesPracticing shame investigates how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to safeguard their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame. A combination of inward reflection and outward comportment, this practice of 'shamefastness' was believed to reinforce women's chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others by means of conventional gestures. Practicing Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England (Manchester UP, 2019) u...
Spencer Jones, "The Darkest Year: The British Army on the Western Front 1917" (Helion and Company, 2021)
February 14, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Darkest Year: The British Army on the Western Front 1917 (Helion and Company, 2021), leading First World War historians examine key aspects of the British Army's campaign on the Western Front in 1917. It includes studies of the Battle of Arras, Third Battle of Ypres, and Battle of Cambrai, as well as examinations of British Army strategy, morale, tactics, training, and intelligence gathering. It is the fourth book in Spencer Jones's award-winning series which examines the British Army ...
Lisa Haushofer, "Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition" (U California Press, 2022)
February 14, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFrom Gail Borden’s meat biscuit to John Harvey Kellogg’s peptogenic foods for race betterment and Fleishmann’s yeast as both technology of empire and imperfect tool of the global struggle with malnutrition, Lisa Haushofer’s Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition (University of California Press, 2022) brings together case studies of American and British foods developed and marketed in the century 1840-1940 as modern, scientific miracles of nutritional efficiency―of “doing more.” ...
Suzanne Francis-Brown, "World War II Camps in Jamaica: Refugees, Internees, Prisoners of War" (U West Indies Press, 2022)
February 12, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBetween 1939 and 1947, the Caribbean island of Jamaica--then a British colony--was haven or detention centre for thousands of displaced Europeans; an often under-recognized contribution to the Allied war effort. A civilian camp accommodated evacuees from Gibraltar and, belatedly, provided sanctuary for groups of mainly Jewish refugees. Others who had fled Europe ahead of looming fascist threats would be interned in military detention camps whose populations were swollen by German and Italian ...
M. Christhu Doss, "India after the 1857 Revolt: Decolonising the Mind" (Routledge, 2022)
February 12, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesIn India after the 1857 Revolt: Decolonising the Mind (Routledge, 2022), M. Christhu Doss brings together some of the most cutting-edge thoughts by challenging the cultural project of colonialism and critically examining the multi-dimensional aspects of decolonization during and after the 1857 revolt. He demonstrates that the deep-rooted popular discontent among the Indian masses, followed by the revolt, generated a distinctive form of decolonization movement—redemptive nationalism that chall...
The Future of the News: A Discussion with Roger Mosey
February 11, 2023 09:00 - 33 minutesWhat is the future of news? In the twentieth century Western-educated journalists championed impartial, unbiased news – which always seemed rather odd as everyone agreed it wasn’t possible for journalists to shed all their biases. That fundamental contradiction has been replaced by something even more problematic – fake news and worse than that, fake news which people believe and even the idea that everyone can publish their own news. So where are we headed in the twenty first century. Roger ...
Jane Hwang Degenhardt, "Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHow were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about the all-controlling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency? Jane Hwang Degenhardt's book Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford...
John Goodlad, "The Salt Roads: How Fish Made a Culture" (Birlinn, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Salt Roads: How Fish Made a Culture (Birlinn, 2022) by John Goodlad is the extraordinary story of how salt fish from Shetland became one of the staple foods of Europe, powered an economic boom and inspired artists, writers and musicians. It ranges from the wild waters of the North Atlantic, the ice-filled fjords of Greenland and the remote islands of Faroe to the dining tables of London’s middle classes, the bacalao restaurants of Spain and the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe. As well as...
Francis M. Carroll, "America and the Making of an Independent Ireland: A History" (NYU Press, 2021)
February 08, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesOn Easter Day 1916, more than a thousand Irishmen stormed Dublin city center, seizing the General Post Office building and reading the Proclamation for an independent Irish Republic. The British declared martial law shortly afterward, and the rebellion was violently quashed by the military. In a ten-day period after the event, fourteen leaders of the uprising were executed by firing squad. In New York, news of the uprising spread quickly among the substantial Irish American population. Initia...
Ben Burgis, "Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters" (Zero Books, 2022)
February 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters (Zero Books, 2022), Ben Burgis reminds readers about what was best in Hitchens's writings and helps us gain a better understanding of how someone whose whole political life was animated by the values of the socialist left could have ended up holding grotesque positions on Iraq and the War on Terror. Burgis' book makes a case for the enduring importance of engaging with Hitchen's complicated legacy. Ben Bur...
Matthew Taylor, "Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939-45" (Routledge, 2020)
February 04, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday we are joined by Matthew Taylor, Professor of History at De Montfort University, and author of Sport and the Home Front: Wartime Britain at Play, 1939-1945 (Routledge, 2022). In our conversation, we discussed why studies of British sport histories have frequently neglected the Second World War, how various arms of the British state attempted to mobilize sport during the conflict, and how and why ordinary people included sport in their everyday life despite the deprivations of the era. I...
Curtis Runstedler, "Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
February 03, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesCurtis Runstedler's book Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of t...
Angela Hui, "Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter" (Trapeze, 2022)
February 02, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesFood journalist Angela Hui grew up in rural Wales, as daughter to the owners of the Lucky Star Chinese takeaway. Angela grew up behind the counter, helping take orders and serve customers, while also trying to find her place in this small Welsh town. In her new memoir, Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood behind the Counter (Trapeze, 2022), she writes about the surprisingly central role the takeaway plays in rural Britain: Name me one other room where you can blow out birthday candles, watch a ...
The 10,000 Year Build-Up to Brexit: A Conversation with Ian Morris
February 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHow did Britain become a global superpower? Historian and classicist Ian Morris thinks geography has a lot to do with it. Prof. Morris discusses his latest book, Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000 Year History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) which traces the long history of Britain's complex relationship with the European continent. He draws surprising parallels between characters ranging from the Roman Britons and Nigel Farage, to the Papacy and the European Union. Prof....
Book Talk 57: Anne Fernald and Rajgopal Saikumar on Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" (1938)
January 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourVirginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at home oppresses women in ways that resemble those of fascism abroad. Two great Woolf experts, Professor Anne Fernald, editor of two editions of Mrs. Dalloway which she movingly discusses on another Think About It episode, and Rajgopal Saikumar, who is completing a dissertation on Woolf, Hurston, Baldwin and Gandhi and the “duty to disobey” at NYU, ...
Corey Lee Wrenn, "Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain's First Colony" (SUNY Press, 2021)
January 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIrish vegan studies are poised for increasing relevance as climate change threatens the legitimacy and longevity of animal agriculture and widespread health problems related to animal product consumption disrupt long held nutritional ideologies. Already a top producer of greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union, Ireland has committed to expanding animal agriculture despite impending crisis. The nexus of climate change, public health, and animal welfare present a challenge to the hegemon...
David S. Painter and Gregory Brew, "The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951-1954" (UNC Press, 2023)
January 28, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBeginning with the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry in spring 1951 and ending with its reversal following the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in August 1953, the Iranian oil crisis was a crucial turning point in the global Cold War. The nationalization challenged Great Britain's preeminence in the Middle East and threatened Western oil concessions everywhere. Fearing the loss of Iran and possibly the entire Middle East and its oil to communist control, the United Stat...
Francesca Sobande and layla-roxanne hill. "Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
January 27, 2023 09:00 - 47 minutesWhat does it mean to be Black in Scotland today? How are notions of nationhood, Scottishness, and Britishness implicated in this? Why is it important to archive and understand Black Scottish history? In Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland (Bloomsbury, 2022) Dr. Francesca Sobande and layla-roxanne hill explore the history and contemporary lives of Black people in Scotland; reflecting on the past to make sense of the present. Based on intergenerational interviews, survey responses, photogra...
Uther Charlton-Stevens, "Anglo-India and the End of Empire" (Oxford UP, 2022)
January 26, 2023 09:00 - 41 minutesIt can be easy to think of colonies as having two populations: colonial subjects, and colonial overlords from Europe. It’s an easy narrative: one has power, status and privilege, the other does not. But in practice, European colonies created many populations in-between: groups who benefited from imperial power, yet not one of the elite. Britain’s almost two-and-a-half centuries-long presence in India created its own local Eurasian community: the Anglo-Indians, the descendents of marriages bet...
Wolfgang P. Müller, "Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215-1517" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
January 21, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesWolfgang Muller, Marriage Litigation in the Western Church, 1215- 1517 (Cambridge University Press, 2021). From the establishment of a coherent doctrine on sacramental marriage to the eve of the Reformation, late medieval church courts were used for marriage cases in a variety of ways. Ranging widely across Western Europe, including the Upper and Lower Rhine regions, England, Italy, Catalonia, and Castile, this study explores the stark discrepancies in practice between the North of Europe and...
The Future of the European Left
January 20, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesWhy is it so hard for left wing parties in the West to win elections? Some such as the UK Labour Party have headed to the centre. The history of Labour since 1979 tells the story – their record goes lost, lost, lost, lost, Blair, Blair, Blair, lost, lost, lost, lost. But what does heading the centre consist of? And are their alternative strategies? Listen to Owen Bennett Jones discuss leftist parties and what they need to do to win with Eunice Goes of the Richmond American International Unive...
Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)
January 17, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesEver since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023), Marion Turner tells the fascinating st...
Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
January 16, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesStuart Carroll's Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2023) transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or inju...
Richard Davenport-Hines, "Conservative Thinkers from All Souls College Oxford" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)
January 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAll Souls College Oxford was one of the meeting points of English public intellectuals in the twentieth century. Its Fellows prided themselves on agreeing in everything except their opinions. They included Cabinet Ministers from all the three major parties, and academics of diverse political allegiances, who met for frank conversations and lively disagreements. Davenport-Hines investigates historic strands of conservative thought: aversion to rapid and disruptive change, mistrust of majority ...
Restless Pilgrims: About CS Lewis
January 11, 2023 21:00 - 57 minutesDavid Bates, Catholic apologist and CS Lewis expert, reflects upon Lewis's conversion (how he was 'surprised by joy'), how his reason confirmed his feelings, how his theology stands on the authority of the Church and the Patristic Fathers) and his own experiences as a 'restless pilgrim.' Pints with Jack (David's podcast about Lewis) is here. Max McClean as CS Lewis in The Most Reluctant Convert is here. David's conversation with Norman Stone, the director of the movie that follows this pla...
Ciara Breathnach, "Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902" (Oxford UP, 2022)
January 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourCiara Breathnach's book Ordinary Lives, Death, and Social Class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902 (Oxford UP, 2022) focuses on the evolution of the Dublin City Coroner's Court and on Dr Louis A. Bryne's first two years in office. Wrapping itself around the 1901 census, the study uses gender, power, and blame as analytical frameworks to examine what inquests can tell us about the impact of urban living from lifecycle and class perspectives. Coroners' inquests are a combination of eyewitn...
Urvashi Chakravarty, "Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
January 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Urvashi Chakravarty excavates the ideologies of slavery that took root in early modern England in the period that preceded the development of an organized trade in enslaved persons. Despite the persistent fiction that England was innocent of racialized slavery, Chakravarty argues that we must hold early modern England—and its narratives of exceptional and essential freedom—to acc...
On W. H. Auden
January 05, 2023 10:00 - 25 minutesIn 1983, ten years after W. H. Auden’s death, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a series of readings and discussions of his work. In this episode from the Vault, Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, moderates a discussion between Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
The Bedouin and the Formation of Iraq's National Borders
January 05, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesThe British occupation of Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of Iraq's national boundaries, a process with profound and long-lasting implications for the inhabitants of Iraq's border regions. In his dissertation, "The Origins and Development of Iraq's National Boundaries, 1918-1932: Policing and Political Geography in the Iraq-Nejd and Iraq-Syria Borderlands" (University of Chicago, 2018), Dr. Carl Shook examined how Iraq's modern national borders were formed in...
Rebecca Binns, "Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism and the Avant-Garde" (Manchester UP, 2022)
January 02, 2023 09:00 - 33 minutesRebecca Binn's Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism and the Avante Garde (Manchester University Press, 2022) is the first book-length work dedicated to the life and career of Vaucher. As one of the people who defined punk's protest art in the 1970s and 1980s, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) deserves to be much better-known. She produced confrontational album covers for the legendary anarchist band Crass and later went on to do the same for Northern indie legends the Charlatans, among others. More recentl...
Jed Rasula, "What the Thunder Said: How 'The Waste Land' Made Poetry Modern" (Princeton UP, 2022)
December 28, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesWhen T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as Jed Rasula writes, "The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern." In What the Thunder Said: How 'The Waste Land' Made Poetry Modern (Princeton UP, 2022),...
Garritt van Dyk, "Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England and France" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
December 26, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourGarritt van Dyk talks about national identity, food, and cooking in this conversation about Commerce, Food, and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England and France: Across the Channel (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are" was the challenge issued by French gastronomist Jean Brillat-Savarin. Champagne is declared a unique emblem of French sophistication and luxury, linked to the myth of its invention by Dom Pérignon. Across the Channel, a cup o...
Anatoly Liberman, "Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
December 25, 2022 09:00 - 48 minutesThree centuries of English idioms—their unusual origins and unexpected interpretations. To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook. Curry favor. Drink like a fish. Eat crow. We hear such phrases every day, but this book is the first truly all-encompassing etymological guide to both their meanings and origins. Spanning more than three centuries, Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (U Minnesota Press, 2023) is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind window into the...
Stephen Dobranski, "Reading John Milton: How to Persist in Troubled Times" (Stanford UP, 2022)
December 24, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutesJohn Milton is unrivalled--for the music of his verse and the breadth of his learning. In this brisk, topical, and engaging biography, Stephen B. Dobranski brushes the scholarly dust from the portrait of the artist to reveal Milton's essential humanity and his unwavering commitment to ideals--freedom of religion and the right and responsibility of all persons to think for themselves--that are still relevant and necessary in our times. Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, is considered by many t...
Justin Dolan Stover, "Enduring Ruin: Environmental Destruction During the Irish" (U College Dublin Press, 2022)
December 24, 2022 09:00 - 17 minutesJustin Dolan Stover is Associate Professor of transnational European history at Idaho State University, where he teaches courses on war and violence, modern Irish history, and the world wars. He holds a doctorate in history from Trinity College Dublin and has held several research fellowships throughout Ireland. He is currently a research fellow with the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam. In this interview, he discusses his new book, Enduring Ruin: Environmental Destructio...
Elena Goodwin, "Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
December 23, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesFrom governesses with supernatural powers to motor-car obsessed amphibians, the iconic images of English children's literature helped shape the view of the nation around the world. But, as Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia (Bloomsbury, 2021) reveals, Russian translators did not always present the same picture of Englishness that had been painted by authors. In this book, Elena Goodwin explores Russian translations of ...