New Books in Performing Arts
850 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with scholars of the performing arts about their new books
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Episodes
Stanley Wells, "What Was Shakespeare Really Like?" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
February 26, 2024 09:00 - 36 minutesSir Stanley Wells is one of the world's greatest authorities on William Shakespeare. Here he brings a lifetime of learning and reflection to bear on some of the most tantalising questions about the poet and dramatist that there are. How did he think, feel, and work? What were his relationships like? What did he believe about death? What made him laugh? This freshly thought and immensely engaging study wrestles with fundamental debates concerning Shakespeare's personality and life. The mysteri...
Imani D. Owens, "Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean" (Columbia UP, 2023)
February 23, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators’ rela...
Kareem Khubchandani, "Decolonize Drag" (OR Books, 2023)
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 37 minutesKareem Khubchandani’s book Decolonize Drag (OR Books, 2024) explores the intricate interplay among gender, colonialism, and drag performance. It illustrates how gender serves as a tool of colonial governance, stifling diverse forms of expression, while also delving into how contemporary drag both mirrors and disrupts these entrenched institutional hierarchies. Through the lens of select performers, Khubchandani unveils how they use their art to satirize, deconstruct, and resist colonialism an...
Bryce Henson, "Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil" (U Texas Press, 2023)
February 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourKnown as Black Rome, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, is a predominantly Black city. The local art, food, and dance are closely linked to the population's African roots. Yet many Black Brazilian residents are politically and economically disenfranchised. Bryce Henson details a culture of resistance and activism that has emerged in response, expressed through hip-hop and the social relations surrounding it. Based on years of ethnographic research, Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil...
Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, "Kubrick: An Odyssey" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
February 06, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesThe definitive biography of the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, presenting the most in-depth portrait yet of the groundbreaking filmmaker. The enigmatic and elusive filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has not been treated to a full-length biography in over twenty years. Kubrick: An Odyssey (Pegasus Books, 2024) fills that gap. This definitive book is based on access to the latest research, especially Kubrick's archive at the University of the Arts, London, as well...
Mark Guarino, "Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
February 05, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe untold story of Chicago's pivotal role as a country and folk music capital. Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country music, the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary offspring of those scenes. I...
Murray Forman and Mark V. Campbell, "Hip Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production" (Intellect, 2023)
February 04, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDespite the vast popularity and cultural influence of hip-hop, efforts to archive its history are still in fairly early stages. Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production (Intellect, 2023), edited by Mark V. Campbell and Murray Forman, focuses on the cultural and political aspects of those undertakings. It addresses practical aspects, including methods of collection, curation, preservation, and digitization, and critically analyzes institutional power, community engage...
Courtney Brannon Donoghue, "The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere" (U Texas Press, 2023)
February 04, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesConversations about gender equity in the workplace accelerated in the 2010s, with debates inside Hollywood specifically pointing to broader systemic problems of employment disparities and exploitative labor practices. Compounded by the devastating #MeToo revelations, these problems led to a wide-scale call for change. Courtney Brannon Donoghue's book The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere (U Texas Press, 2023) traces female-driven filmmaking across development, financing, ...
Michael O'Malley, "The Beat Cop: Chicago's Chief O'Neill and the Creation of Irish Music" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
February 03, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesFrancis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activities in his biography of O’Neill, The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Born in Ireland in 1848, O’Neill emigrated to the United States soon after the Civil War was over and eventually joined the Chicago Police Department. He rose through the ranks and became Chief of Police in 19...
Merin Shobhana Xavier, "The Dervishes of the North: Rumi, Whirling, and the Making of Sufism in Canada" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe thirteenth-century Muslim mystic and poet Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) is a popular spiritual icon. His legacy is sustained within the mystical and religious practice of Sufism, particularly through renditions of his poetry, music, and the meditation practice of whirling. In Canada, practices associated with Rumi have become ubiquitous in public spaces, such as museums, art galleries, and theatre halls, just as they continue to inform sacred ritual among Sufi communities. The Dervishes ...
Sheila Marie Bock, "Claiming Space: Performing the Personal Through Decorated Mortarboards" (Utah State UP, 2023)
February 02, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesClaiming Space: Performing the Personal through Decorated Mortarboards (Utah State University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sheila Bock examines the growing tradition of decorating mortarboards at college graduations, offering a performance-centred approach to these material sites of display. Taking mortarboard displays seriously as public performances of the personal, this book highlights the creative, playful, and powerful ways graduates use their caps to fashion their personal engagement with notion...
Andrew David Jackson, "The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
January 30, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDr. Andy Jackson’s The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) examines an unexplored area of South Korean cinema history – the 1985-1997 growth of art film exhibition, consumption, and cinephilia. This moment of heightened interest in art film altered how many Koreans conceptualised cinema and helped pave the way for the critical success of South Korean film. This historical study analyses the cultural, political, social, an...
Eugenio Refini, "Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy" (Legenda, 2022)
January 25, 2024 09:00 - 53 minutesAs per William Shakespeare, ‘all the world’s a stage’. But what if the human soul was a stage too? What if the stage of the world and the stage of the soul coincided? And what if the soul was also the main character of the play? These questions are at the core of Eugenio Refini's book Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy (Legenda, 2022), which explores pedagogical uses of allegorical drama in Italy in the decades around 1600, with a focus on the place of...
Aaron Carnes, "In Defense of Ska: The Ska Now More Than Ever Edition" (Clash Books, 2023)
January 21, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe era of ska shame is officially over, and ska fans no longer need to hide in the basement, skanking alone. The creator of the popular podcast In Defense of Ska has doubled down on defending the checkered flag genre with his new edition of In Defense of Ska: Ska Now More Than Ever Edition (Clash Books, 2024). The original version was chosen by Pitchfork as one of the best music books of 2021, and was an official recommended read in Rolling Stone’s June 2021 issue. In this expanded version, ...
Jessica Goethals, "Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
January 20, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe Roman singer, courtesan, and writer Margherita Costa won prominence and fame across the courts of Italy and France during the mid-seventeenth century. She secured a steady stream of elite patrons – including popes, queens, grand dukes, and influential cardinals – while male poets and librettists wrote celebratory poetry on her behalf. In addition to her appearances as a soprano on the opera stage, Costa published a remarkable fourteen full-length texts across an expanse of genres: burlesq...
Adriana Helbig, "ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid" (Oxford UP, 2023)
January 19, 2024 09:00 - 44 minutesAdriana Helbig's book ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023) offers a micro ethnography of economic networks that impact the daily lives of Romani musicians on the borders of the former Soviet Union and the European Union. It argues that the development aid allotted to provide economic assistance to Romani communities, when analyzed from the perspective of the performance arts, continues to marginalize the poorest among them. Through their structu...
Aniefiok Ekpoudom, "Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain" (Faber and Faber, 2024)
January 19, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesWhy is music important to place, and place important to music? In Where We Come From: Rap, Home and Hope in Modern Britain (Faber and Faber, 2024), Aniefiok Ekpoudom, a freelance writer and storyteller from South London, tells the story of UK Rap and Grime music. In doing so he tells the story of Modern British culture. The book uses three places- South London, South Wales, and the Midlands, and three case studies of some of UK Rap and Grime’s leading artists. In doing so, the book powerfully...
Miles P. Grier, "Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn his new book Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (University of Virginia Press, 2023), Miles P. Grier argues that blackness in Othello and the texts that it influenced should be understood as deeply material, transferable, and unstable. The defining of alphanumerical and dramatic characters, while represented as settled, was anything but. As Miles writes in the book, “Before the racial categories of high scientific racism were elaborated in the late eighteen...
Matt Singer, "Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesOnce upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn’t check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB. You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it “two thumbs up.” On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they’d ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize—the first ever awarded to a film critic—for his work at t...
Michael Quinn Dudley, "The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy" (Cambridge Scholars, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesFor nearly 200 years, people have questioned the identity of Shakespeare; however, this debate is often dismissed by most scholars as “just a conspiracy theory,” with the life of the poet-playwright being “beyond doubt.” And yet, the documented facts related to the man from Stratford are meagre—where they exist at all—forcing biographers to rely heavily on their own imaginations. The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy: Knowledge, Rhetoric, Identity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing,...
Selby Wynn Schwartz, "The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives" (U Michigan Press, 2019)
January 11, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesSelby Wynn Schwartz writes about gender, performance, and the politics of embodiment. Her articles have been published in Women & Performance, PAJ, Dance Research Journal, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Critical Correspondence, Ballet-Dance Magazine, In Dance, The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, and the forthcoming anthology (Re)Claiming Ballet. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature and currently teaches writing at Stanford University. The Bodies of Others: D...
Matthew Kennedy, "On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide" (Oxford UP, 2024)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the oceans of ink devoted to the monumental movie star/businesswoman/political activist Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (1932-2011), her beauty and not-so-private life frequently overshadowed her movies. While she knew how to generate publicity like no other, her personal life is set aside in this volume in favor of her professional oeuvre and unique screen dynamism. In On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide (Oxford UP, 2024), her marriages, illnesses, media firestorms, perfume empire, violet...
Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay, "Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan" (U Texas Press, 2023)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourA literary and visual exploration of the songs of Steely Dan. Steely Dan's songs are exercises in fictional world-building. No one else in the classic-rock canon has conjured a more vivid cast of rogues and heroes, creeps and schmucks, lovers and dreamers and cold-blooded operators--or imbued their characters with so much humanity. Pulling from history, lived experience, pulp fiction, the lore of the counterculture, and their own darkly comic imaginations, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker summo...
Elizabeth Eva Leach, "Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesHow was music important to medieval society? In Medieval Sex Lives:The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders (Cornell UP, 2023), Prof Elizabeth Eva Leach, a Professor of Music at the University of Oxford explores the history and content of the Douce 308 manuscript to tell the story of the cultural and sexual scripts that framed courtly life in the Medieval era. The book tells the long history of the idea of courtly love, as well as using contemporary theories and cultural prac...
Plot
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 18 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Pardis Dabashi tells us about plot. A plot consists of a change with stakes that establish norms. This seemingly simple structure shapes novels, films, politics, and our world, from easy seductions of comfort to difficult promises of liberation. In the episode, Pardis references Thomas Edison’s 1903 film, Electrocuting an Elephant, which is super sad, and kind of terrifying, but an economical explanation of plot. She also discusses Max Ophüls’s 1953 film, The E...
W. K. Stratton, "The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesOn June 18, 1969, "The Wild Bunch" premiered to critical success. Over the past 50 years it has been rightly recognized as one of the landmark films from the end of the Hollywood studio system. Yet it was developed out of chaos, with a controversial director who had already largely burned his bridges with Hollywood studios. Sam Peckinpah worked for years to film a story that both illustrated the end of the “Old West” and also showed how newer filmmakers wanted to proceed with their newfound i...
Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourSuspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a hypnotic trance, the philosopher warned, an audience can become susceptible to ideology and "myth". In Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (Bloomsbury), Patrick Ffrench explains that although Barthes was wary of film, he engaged deeply with it. Barthes' thought was, Ffrench argues, punctuated by the experience of watching films -...
Laurent Dubois, “The Banjo: America’s African Instrument” (Harvard UP, 2016)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesMost scholars of popular music use songs, artists, and clubs as the key texts and sites in their exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of music. Laurent Dubois‘ new book looks at the history of an instrument, the banjo, to help us better understand American history and culture. Dubois also helps readers understand the banjo as part of an Afro-Atlantic musical heritage. In The Banjo: Americas African Instrument (Harvard University Press, 2015), Dubois examines ho...
Bryan McCann, "The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era" (U Alabama Press, 2017)
December 26, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourOn this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Bryan McCann (he/his)--Associate Professor of Communication at Louisiana State University--on a dope new work of cultural criticism The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (University of Alabama Press, 2017). The Mark of Criminality positions the work of key gangsta rap artists--Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur--as well as the controversies their w...
Walter Greason and Tim Fielder, "The Graphic History of Hip Hop" (NYC Department of Education, 2023)
December 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHip Hop turned 50 this year. It has been five decades since DJ Cool Herc played a party in the Bronx that gave birth to a global cultural revolution. To honor this anniversary and teach this history, the New York City Department of Education has published The Graphic History of Hip Hop. Dr. Walter Greason wrote the text, which is beautifully illustrated by Afrofuturist graphic artist Tim Fielder. As the first in a series of collaborative graphic novels, The Graphic History of Hip Hop brings ...
Nate Patrin, "The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock 'n' Roll to Synthwave" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
December 23, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesIn The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock 'n' Roll to Synthwave (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Nate Patrin examines how the link between film and song endures as more than a memory. It is, in fact, a sort of cultural symbiosis that has mutually influenced movies and pop music, a phenomenon Patrin tracks through the past fifty years, revealing the power of music in movies to move the needle in popular culture. Rock 'n' roll, reggae, R&B, jazz, techno, and hip-hop: ea...
Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, "Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry" (Oxford UP, 2023)
December 23, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourKey Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt tells a new story about the history of the music business and the ten technological advances that disrupted it over the last century. In recent years, narratives about the music industry tend to hew to a common theme: it was humming along for decades until the Internet and Napster came along and disrupted it. Key Changes shows that this view is incorrect: th...
Michelle R. Scott, "T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners' Booking Association in Jazz-Age America" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
December 18, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesBlack vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) played a foundational role in the African American entertainment industry. T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America by Michelle R. Scott (University of Illinois Press, 2023) examines this circuit of vaudeville theaters active between 1920 and 1930 which booked blues singers, comedians, dancers...
Lawrence Sherman and Dennis Plies, "Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music" (Columbia UP, 2023)
December 16, 2023 09:00 - 43 minutesWhenever a person engages with music--when a piano student practices a scale, a jazz saxophonist riffs on a melody, a teenager sobs to a sad song, or a wedding guest gets down on the dance floor--countless neurons are firing. Playing an instrument requires all of the resources of the nervous system, including cognitive, sensory, and motor functions. Composition and improvisation are remarkable demonstrations of the brain's capacity for creativity. Something as seemingly simple as listening to...
Between Jesus and Krishna: Christian Encounters with South Indian Temple Dance
December 15, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesOne of the eight national dances of India, bharatanatyam, partly originates from the area around Tranquebar. During the time that Tranquebar was a Danish colony, devadasis, women who did service at temples through dance, were patronized by the Thanjavur royal court. In 1623, a Danish–Icelandic soldier routinely observed the devadasis dancing outside the Masilamaninathar temple opposite Fort Dansborg, which he was guarding. His accounts of the dancers are interesting at two levels; first, they...
Rob Harvilla, "60 Songs That Explain The 90s" (Twelve, 2023)
December 12, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesA companion to the #1 music podcast on Spotify, this book takes listeners through the greatest hits that define a weirdly undefinable decade. The 1990s were a chaotic and gritty and utterly magical time for music, a confounding barrage of genres and lifestyles and superstars, from grunge to hip-hop, from sumptuous R&B to rambunctious ska-punk, from Axl to Kurt to Missy to Santana to Tupac to Britney. In 60 Songs That Explain The 90s (Twelve, 2023), Ringer music critic Rob Harvilla reimagines ...
Ervin Malakaj, "Anders als Die Andern" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
December 11, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesReleased in 1919, "Anders als die Andern" (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today. Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexol...
Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, "Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine" (Callaway, 2023)
December 09, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesSeveral years ago, a treasure trove containing some 6,000 original Bob Dylan manuscripts was revealed to exist. Their destination? Tulsa, Oklahoma. The documents, as essential as they are intriguing—draft lyrics, notebooks, and diverse ephemera— comprise one of the most important cultural archives in the modern world. Along with countless still and moving images and thousands of hours of riveting studio and live recordings, this priceless collection now resides at The Bob Dylan Center in Tuls...
Hilary French, "Ballroom: A People’s History of Dancing" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 42 minutesIn the early twentieth century, American ragtime and the Parisian tango fuelled a dancing craze in Britain. Public ballrooms were built throughout the country, providing a glamorous setting for dancing. The new English style, defined in the 1920s and followed by the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the 1930s, ensured that ballroom dancing continued to be the most popular British pastime until the 1960s, rivalled only by cinema. Ballroom: A People's History of Dancing (Reaktion, 2022...
Ramsey Lewis and Aaron Cohen, "Gentleman of Jazz: A Life in Music" (Blackstone, 2023)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesThis immersive new autobiography provides insight into the early life and illustrious career of the late great Ramsey Lewis, one of the most popular jazz pianists of all time. Beginning with his childhood growing up in Chicago's Cabrini Green neighborhood, Ramsey Lewis recounts his memories of the music in his parents' church and his early piano lessons. As he learned classical technique, Lewis also absorbed countless jazz records and heard gospel music weekly, finally becoming a performer hi...
Jackie Lubeck, "To The Good People of Gaza: Theatre for Young People by Jackie Lubeck and Theatre Day Productions" (Methuen Drama, 2022)
December 02, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesTo The Good People of Gaza: Theatre for Young People by Jackie Lubeck and Theatre Day Productions (Methuen Drama, 2022) ties together nineteen plays produced by Theatre Day Productions, one of the foremost community theatres in the Middle East. Written by playwright Jackie Lubeck, this collection responds to the siege on Gaza and the Israeli military operations from 2009 to 2014, reflecting how Gazan youth deal with trauma, loss and urban destruction. But these plays are also surprisingly fun...
Daniel Herbert, "Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film" (U California Press, 2023)
December 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDaniel Herbert's book Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film (U California Press, 2023) tells the improbable story of New Line Cinema, a company that cut a remarkable path through the American film industry and movie culture. Founded in 1967 as an art film distributor, New Line made a small fortune running John Waters’s Pink Flamingos at midnight screenings in the 1970s and found reliable returns with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in the 1980s. By 200...
Poppy Corbett et al., "Creative Histories of Witchcraft: France, 1790–1940" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 30, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourHow can researchers study magic without destroying its mystery? Drawing on a collaborative project between the playwright Dr. Poppy Corbett, the poet Anna Kisby Compton, and the historian Dr. William G. Pooley, Creative Histories of Witchcraft: France, 1790–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) presents thirteen tools for creative-academic research into magic. These are illustrated through case studies from France (1790–1940) and examples from creative outputs: write to discover; borrow for...
Richard Schoch, "Shakespeare’s House: A Window onto his Life and Legacy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
November 29, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesIn the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 – known colloquially as the 'Birthplace' – remains the chief shrine. It's not as romantic as Anne Hathaway's thatched cottage, it's not where he wrote any of his plays, and there's nothing inside the house that once belonged to Shakespeare himself. So why, for centuries, have people kept turning up on the doorstep? In Shakespeare’s House: A Window onto his Life and Legacy (Blo...
Vid Simoniti, "Artists Remake the World: A Contemporary Art Manifesto" (Yale UP, 2023)
November 29, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesArtists Remake the World: A Contemporary Art Manifesto (Yale UP, 2023) puts forward an account of contemporary art’s political ambitions and potential. Surveying such innovations as evidence-driven art, socially engaged art, and ecological art, the book explores how artists have attempted to offer bold solutions to the world’s problems. Simoniti systematises the perspectives of contemporary art as a force for political and social change. At its best, he argues, contemporary art allows us to i...
Michael Rushton, "The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
November 25, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesShould governments fund the arts? In The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Michael Rushton, Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Affairs and a Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, explores a variety of frameworks for thinking about this question, from liberal and egalitarian justifications, through to communitarian, conservative, and multiculturalist ideas. The book outlines the economic method ...
Mia Mask, "Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
November 24, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesDid you know Sidney Poitier was a western icon? In a genre best known for John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, African American actors and directors have played an important role in both shaping, and subverting, Hollywood westerns. In Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western (U Illinois Press, 2023), Vassar College film professor Mia Mask unravels the history of Black westerns dating back to 1910s and 1920s rodeo films, all the way through modern iterations such as Django Unchained (2...
Ina Rupprecht, ed., "Persecution, Collaboration, Resistance: Music in the ‘Reichskommissariat Norwegen’ (1940–45)" (Waxmann Verlag, 2020)
November 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhen Germany invaded Norway on 9 April 1940, the long lasting bilateral relations changed fundamentally. Immediately, the administration of the ‘Reichskommissariat Norwegen’ responsible for culture and therein music together with the Norwegian puppet regime’s department for culture implemented the adaption to the new, official National Socialist guidelines. The diversity of music in Norway during the occupation is presented in this book by Norwegian and German authors, confronting research on...
Warren Zanes, "Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's 'Nebraska' (Crown, 2023)
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesWithout Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen might not be who he is today. The natural follow-up to Springsteen's hugely successful album The River should have been the hit-packed Born in the U.S.A. But instead, in 1982, he came out with an album consisting of a series of dark songs he had recorded by himself, for himself. But more than forty years later, Nebraska is arguably Springsteen's most important record--the lasting clue to understanding not just his career as an artist and the vision behind i...
Pavitra Sundar, "Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
November 15, 2023 09:00 - 57 minutesPavitra Sundar's book Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema (U Michigan Press, 2023) is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic im...