New Books in Performing Arts
850 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with scholars of the performing arts about their new books
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Episodes
Shakespeare's "Henry V" Part 1: The Story
July 03, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesHenry V is one of the most celebrated of Shakespeare’s history plays. In the 1590s, Shakespeare wrote a series of eight plays based on English chronicle history, telling the stories of civil wars and wars abroad, of the rise and fall of kings. Henry V was an English monarch who won great military victories in France in the early 1400s, and Shakespeare dramatizes his famous victory at Agincourt. In this play, Shakespeare gives us the most heroic of his kings — while also showing us the process...
Adrian Rifkin, "Future Imperfect: The Past Between My Fingers..." (2021)
July 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThen let the story really begin in 1968, though it has little to do with May. By chance it opens in January of that year, and it really concerns me rather than the world of political events, though these are always on my mind, as they were always on my mind. Future Imperfect: The Past Between My Fingers... (2021), Adrian Rifkin’s short Bildungsroman sets beside each other the fault lines of events and moments recalled without a diary with the verification and sometimes undermining effects of ...
The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age
July 01, 2023 08:00 - 19 minutesFeature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age. Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the ...
Marie Arleth Skov, "Punk Art History: Artworks from the European No Future Generation" (Intellect, 2023)
June 30, 2023 08:00 - 40 minutesIn her book, Punk Art History: Artworks from the European No Future Generation (Intellect Books, 2023), Marie Arleth Skov examines the punk movement of the 1970s to early 1980s. Through archival research, interviews, and an art historical analysis, Skov situates punk as an art movement. It is about pop, pain, poetry, presence, and about a ‘no future’ generation refusing to be the next artworld avant-garde, instead choosing to be the ‘rear-guard’. Skov draws on personal interviews with punk ar...
TaTa Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara
June 29, 2023 21:15 - 17 minutesTristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenștok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances including multilingual (and nonlingual) shoutin...
Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Part 3: The Language
June 26, 2023 08:00 - 29 minutesIn Part 3, Professor Tiffany Stern offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches. You’ll discover the surprising biblical resonances in a speech by the foolish Bottom and see how the epilogue shifts the play from a story about magic to a magic spell placed on the audience itself. Speeches and Performers: Titania, 2.1, “Set your heart at rest: The Fairyland buys not the child …” (Amanda Harris) Bottom, 4.1, “When my cue comes, call me …” (Dame Harriet Walter) Oberon, 5....
Michael Gray, "Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan-Vol. 1 Language & Tradition" (FM Press, 2023)
June 22, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesSong & Dance Man is an established classic, available again for Dylan fans and scholars alike on the 50th Anniversary of the original edition. The work in these three volumes has been called “Monumental, endlessly illuminating.” (Rolling Stone) “Probably the greatest book about the work of a single popular musician ever to have been published.” (London Review Bookshop) and "The definitive critical work." (Evening Standard). Author Michael Gray is recognized as a world authority on the work an...
Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Part 2: Context and Questions
June 19, 2023 08:00 - 20 minutesPart 2 addresses the play's central questions about comedy, tragedy, and passion by examining its language and plot motifs. Professor Tiffany Stern will guide you through the play’s sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, but always honest exploration of love — where it comes from and why it doesn’t always make sense. You’ll also discover how A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects the way that Shakespeare’s own company performed his plays, and why that knowledge can help you become a better reader of...
Roy Christopher, "Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism" (MIT Press, 2022)
June 12, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesBoogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a ...
Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" Part 1: The Story
June 12, 2023 08:00 - 20 minutesA Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most popular romantic comedies. At the same time, it’s a play that explores the darker and more dangerous side of love. Four young lovers flee into the forest where their romantic entanglements become even more entangled thanks to the magic of the fairy king, Oberon — who also puts a spell on his wife, Titania, so she falls in love with Bottom, a man with an enchanted donkey’s head. In this course, you’ll learn the story of A Midsummer Night’s...
Paul Metsa and Rick Shefchik, "Blood in the Tracks: The Minnesota Musicians Behind Dylan's Masterpiece" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
June 11, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesThe story of the Minneapolis musicians who were unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album. When Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks in New York in September 1974, it was a great album. But it was not the album now ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the ten best of all time. “When something’s not right, it’s wrong,” as Dylan puts it in “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go”—and something about that original recording led him to a studio ...
Arturo Rodríguez Morató and Alvaro Santana-Acuña, "Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)
June 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat are the latest developments in the sociology of the arts? In Sociology of the Arts in Action: New Perspectives on Creation, Production, and Reception (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Arturo Rodríguez Morató, a Professor of Sociology and current Director of the CECUPS (Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Society) at the University of Barcelona, and Alvaro Santana-Acuña, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Whitman College, bring together 12 leading researchers to present new empiri...
Rumi, "Gold" (New York Review of Books, 2022)
June 10, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesIn this conversation, we discuss Haleh Liza Gafori's masterful new translations of poetry by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic and poet. Rumi's work is well-known in the West, but has often been encountered through the work of translators without direct knowledge of Persian language or culture. Haleh Liza Gafori's intimate knowledge of both, as well as her singer's knack for the sound of language, lends these translations both authoritativeness and beauty. The poems in Gold (New York Revi...
Robin James, "The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence" (UNC Press, 2023)
June 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1983, an Ohio radio station called WOXY launched a sonic disruption to both corporate rock and to its conservative home region, programming an omnivorous range of genres and artists while being staunchly committed to local independent art and media. In the 1990s, as alternative rock went mainstream and radio grew increasingly homogeneous, WOXY gained international renown as one of Rolling Stone's "Last Great Independent Radio" stations. The station projected a philosophy that prioritized s...
Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Part 3: The Language
June 05, 2023 08:00 - 32 minutesIn Part 3, Professor Michael Dobson offers close-readings of some of the play’s most important speeches, including Brutus’s deliberation over Caesar’s assassination and the rival speeches given by Brutus and Antony to “Friends, Romans, countrymen” at Caesar’s funeral — speeches that display the potential power of rhetoric. Speeches and Performers: Brutus, 2.1, “It must be by his death …” (Anton Lesser) Caesar, 3.1, “I could be well moved …” (“I am as constant as the Northern Star”) (Andrew Wo...
Xiaomei Chen, "Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture" (Columbia UP, 2023)
June 05, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesXiaomei Chen's book Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture (Columbia UP, 2023) looks at three "founding fathers" of Chinese spoken drama: Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian. Dr. Chen argues that these three theatre artists laid the groundwork for Mao-era Chinese drama during the earlier Republic period, and that there is more continuity between the two periods than has typically been supposed. She also argues that these artists were not mere victims of hea...
Monika Raesch, "Abbas Kiarostami: Interviews" (UP of Mississippi, 2023)
June 04, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesThe cinephile community knows Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) as one of the most important filmmakers of the previous decades. This volume illustrates why the Iranian filmmaker achieved critical acclaim around the globe and details his many contributions to the art of filmmaking. Kiarostami began his illustrious career in his native Iran in the 1970s, although European and American audiences did not begin to take notice until he released his 1987 feature Where’s the Friend’s House? His films def...
Lance Esplund, "The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art" (Basic, 2018)
June 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhat is art, and who gets to define it? Museums have long staked a claim on knowing what to show, but there has always been a wide range of how viewers engage with art. There is also a wide range of artists and what is considered art, from classical masters like Titian to modern conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp. Lance Esplund is an art critic, journalist, educator, and author. His book, titled The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art, is about telling the reader how t...
Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Part 2: Characters and Questions
May 29, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesPart 2 focuses on the play’s key interpretive questions: how we are invited to judge the central characters. Is Caesar, in Shakespeare’s story, really a tyrant who needed to be killed? Is Brutus a noble political hero or a misguided egoist? With Professor Michael Dobson, you’ll discover how Shakespeare restructured this familiar story to make easy judgments impossible. Professor Dobson also discusses the Roman values that the characters strive to embody and how these values generate friendshi...
A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia
May 29, 2023 08:00 - 51 minutesWriter and academic Anthony Gardner (NSK from Kapital to Capital, Politically Unbecoming) interviews Marko Ilić about his new book A Slow Burning Fire, which documents Yugoslavia's cultural output throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. This first comprehensive study of the former Yugoslavia's alternative art scene tells the origin stories of some of the most significant artists of the late twentieth century. In Yugoslavia from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, state-supported Students' Cultural Cen...
Lisa McCormick, "The Cultural Sociology of Art and Music: New Directions and New Discoveries" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
May 28, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesHow can sociology help us understand art and music? In The Cultural Sociology of Art and Music: New Directions and New Discoveries (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), the editor Lisa McCormick, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, draws together the latest research in cultural sociology that examines art and music. Global in scope, and eclectic in choice of subjects and methods, the book is united by the shared approach of the strong programme in cultural sociology. As a res...
Black Film, British Cinema II
May 25, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesClive Nwonka and Anamik Saha discuss their forthcoming book Black Film, British Cinema II (publishing in March with Goldsmiths Press), a book which brings together scholars, thinkers and practitioners to consider the politics of blackness in contemporary British cinema and visual practice. Black Film British Cinema II considers the politics of blackness in contemporary British cinema and visual practice. This second iteration of Black Film British Cinema, marking over 30 years since the groun...
Heather Augustyn, "Rude Girls: Women in 2 Tone and One Step Beyond" (2023)
May 25, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesIn her latest book, Rude Girls: Women in 2 Tone and One Step Beyond (Sally Brown Publishing, 2023), Heather Augustyn explores the ska revival in the UK during the lates 1970s and 1980s. The 2 Tone label represented unity of black and white in both the content of the songs, and appearance of the bands. While race may have been central to this declaration, where did gender fit in? Many bands had few, if any, women in their lineup and so women had to do it for themselves. Empowered by punk and i...
Brad Krumholz, "Why Do Actors Train?: Embodiment for Theatre Makers and Thinkers" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
May 24, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesWhy Do Actors Train?: Embodiment for Theatre Makers and Thinkers (Bloomsbury, 2023) powerfully demystifies the actor-training process by focusing on acting as embodied cognition. In this framework, thought is action and action is thought. Krumholz uses the frame of embodied cognition to analyze which specific skills are actually being developed through several acting exercises. He bypasses typical acting-coach encouragements to "stop thinking" and "get out of your head," instead insisting tha...
The Place Is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain
May 24, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesNick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles discuss The Place Is Here (Sternberg Press, 2019) and the range of perspectives on black art in Thatcherite Britain offered by the collection of artworks, essays, and conversations found in the book. The Place Is Here begins to write a missing chapter in British art history: work by black artists in the Thatcherite 1980s. Richly illustrated, with more than two hundred color images, it brings together artworks, essays, archives, and conversations that map the v...
Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden: A Girl's Life in the Incredible String Band
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourDamon Kruskowski, author of Ways of Hearing and The New Analog, previously member of Galaxie 500 and currently a member of Damon & Naomi interviews Rose Simpson about her book Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden. Rose is an English former musician. Between 1968 and 1971, she was a member of the Incredible String Band, with whom she sang and played bass guitar, violin, and percussion. Between 1967 and 1971 Rose Simpson lived with the Incredible String Band (Mike Heron, Robin Williamson and Licorice Mc...
Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Part 1: The Story
May 22, 2023 08:00 - 22 minutesJulius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, telling the story of one of history’s most famous events. In this tense political thriller, the Roman senator Brutus must decide whether to assassinate the powerful military general Julius Caesar in order to save Roman Republic — and the audience must decide whether Brutus made the right choice. In this course, you’ll learn how Shakespeare dramatized the historical event of Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, and particularly how he linke...
Mark LeVine, "We'll Play Till We Die: Journeys Across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslim World" (U California Press, 2022)
May 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn We'll Play till We Die: Journeys across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslim World (University of California Press, 2022), Mark LeVine, Professor at University of California, Irvine, dives into the revolutionary youth music cultures of Muslim societies before, during, and beyond the waves of resistance that shook the region from Morocco to Pakistan. This sequel to his celebrated 2008 musical travelogue Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam, s...
Catherine Russell, "The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
May 17, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesFrom The Lady Eve, to The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck played parts that showcased her multidimensional talents but also illustrated the limits imposed on women in film and television. Catherine Russell’s A to Z consideration of the iconic actress analyzes twenty-six facets of Stanwyck and the America of her times. Russell examines Stanwyck’s work onscreen against the backdrop of costuming and other aspects of filmmaking. But she also views the actress’s off-screen performance within the Holl...
Shakespeare's "Othello" Part 3: The Language
May 15, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesIn Part 3, Professor Farah Karim-Cooper offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll also hear a special commentary on Othello by actor Keith Hamilton Cobb, author and performer of the acclaimed one-man show American Moor (https://americanmoor.com/), which examines the experience and perspective of black men in America through the metaphor of William Shakespeare’s character, Othello. Speeches and Performers: Othello, 1.3, “Her father loved me …” (Keith Hamilton ...
Sebanti Chatterjee, "Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
May 14, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutesSebanti Chatterjee's book Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality (Bloomsbury, 2023) is about sacred and secular choirs in Goa and Shillong across churches, seminaries, schools, auditoriums, classrooms, reality TV shows, and festivals. Voice and genre emerge as social objects annotated by tradition, nostalgia, and innovation. Piety literally and metaphorically shapes the Christian lifeworld, predominantly those belonging to the Presbyterian and Catholic denominations. ...
Naomi McDougall Jones, "The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood" (Beacon, 2020)
May 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood (Beacon, 2020) by Naomi McDougall Jones is a brutally honest look at the systemic exclusion of women in film—an industry with massive cultural influence—and how, in response, women are making space in cinema for their voices to be heard. Generation after generation, women have faced the devastating reality that Hollywood is a system built to keep them out. The films created by that system influence everything fr...
Mark Goodall, "Gathering of the Tribe: A Companion to Occult Music on Vinyl" (Headpress, 2022)
May 12, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesIn his new series, Gathering of the Tribe (Headpress, 2022) Mark Goodall explores the mysterious power of sound and tone. Each book in the series is devoted to reviewing records that reveal divide and cosmic laws, voyages to other worlds, or use sound as a tool for transformation. Volume One: Acid explores the key explores the key aspects of the acid experience, these being principally the way in which psychedelic drugs intensify sensory impressions (sound and vision); the ability to experien...
Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value
May 10, 2023 08:00 - 25 minutesC. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp read from Saturation, a book that offers an analysis of racial representation and controversy in the art world. Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the right representative from a group or a larger plurality of embodied difference would absolve art institutions from historic forms of exclusion. This book offers another approach, taking into account not only questions of racia...
Fiona Gregory, "Actresses and Mental Illness: Histrionic Heroines" (Routledge, 2018)
May 09, 2023 08:00 - 45 minutesActresses and Mental Illness: Histrionic Heroines (Routledge, 2018) investigates the relationship between the work of the actress and her personal experience of mental illness, from the late nineteenth through to the end of twentieth century. Over the past two decades scholars have made great advances in our understanding of the history of the actress, unearthing the material conditions of her working life, the force of her creative agency and the politics of her reception and representation....
Shakespeare's "Othello" Part 2: Characters and Questions
May 08, 2023 08:00 - 20 minutesPart 2 delves into the characters’ psychologies and how character is created by speech — how Othello’s language reflects his changing sense of self and how Iago carries out his plot with particular rhetorical strategies. With Professor Farah Karim-Cooper, you’ll also address questions of race in Othello, including the question of whether the play’s depiction of a racist society makes it a racist play. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming ...
Brian Valente-Quinn, "Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa" (Northwestern UP, 2021)
May 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBrian Valente-Quinn is an Associate Professor of Francophone African studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His book, Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa, was published at Northwestern University Press in 2021. Senegalese Stagecraft explores the theatrical stage in Senegal as a site of poetic expression, political activism, and community engagement. In their responses to the country’s colonial heritage, as well as through their innovations on the c...
Philip Ewell, "On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
May 03, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesOn Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023) by Philip Ewell is an unflinching look at white supremacy and the academy, specifically in the discipline of music theory, although Ewell’s insights and arguments can apply just as well to all music studies and most, if not all, other academic fields. Using meticulous research and his own experiences, Ewell documents the results of music theory’s white racial frame. He shows how the power traditi...
James Charney, "Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
May 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe study of classic and contemporary films can provide a powerful avenue to understand the experience of mental illness. In Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), James Charney, MD, a practicing psychiatrist and long-time cinephile, examines films that delve deeply into characters' inner worlds, and he analyzes moments that help define their particular mental illness. Based on the highly popular course that Charney taught at Yale University...
Shakespeare's "Othello" Part 1: The Story
May 01, 2023 08:00 - 21 minutesWilliam Shakespeare’s Othello is the only one of his tragedies to feature a black male protagonist. Othello is a black general who elopes with a white noblewoman called Desdemona — a marriage that Iago, Othello’s comrade-in-arms, plots to destroy. In this course, you’ll learn Othello’s story, explore the complicated impact of race on Othello’s society and Othello himself, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part...
Katherine Gillen et al., "The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en la Frontera" (ACMRS, 2023)
April 30, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesFirst performed in the Milagro Theater of Portland, Oregon in 2014, Olga Sanchez Saltveit’s ¡O Romeo! imagines William Shakespeare, late in his life, writing a play set in Mexico about a conquistador and his beloved, a woman from Tenochtitlán. Shakespeare tells Rifke, his Spanish housekeeper that his conquistador protagonist will “integrate” his beloved’s “life and faith with” his own. Rifke who has received letters from her missionary brother living in the Americas responds, “Los conquistado...
Annie Zaleski, "Lady Gaga: Applause" (Palazzo Editions, 2022)
April 30, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesAs one of the world's best-selling musicians, Lady Gaga has set the musical bar high. Since her debut album, The Fame (2008), she has sold more than 124 million records and scooped numerous awards, including twelve Grammy Awards and eighteen MTV Music Video Awards. Yet she is much more than a musician. At the helm of the Haus of Gaga--a close-knit circle of behind-the-scenes creatives--Lady Gaga is a performance artist like no other; her forward-thinking fashions and innovations mark her out ...
Craig Leonard, "Uncommon Sense: Aesthetics after Marcuse" (MIT Press, 2022)
April 29, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesIn Uncommon Sense: Aesthetics after Marcuse (MIT Press, 2022), Craig Leonard argues for the contemporary relevance of the aesthetic theory of Herbert Marcuse, an original member of the Frankfurt School and icon of the New Left, while also acknowledging his philosophical limits. This account reinvigorates Marcuse for contemporary readers, putting his aesthetic theory into dialogue with anti-capitalist activism. Craig Leonard speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about anti-art, habit, the practice of ...
David Shulman and Heike Oberlin, "Two Masterpieces of Kuttiyattam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam" (Oxford UP, 2019)
April 27, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesKūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. David Shulman and Heike Oberlin's Two Masterpieces of Kuttiyattam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam (Oxford UP, 2019) focuses on Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the two great masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. It provides fundamental general remarks and relates them to pan-Indian reflections on aesthetics, philology, ritual studies, and history. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of S...
Will York, "Who Cares Anyway: Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age" (Headpress, 2023)
April 25, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesIn Who Cares Anyway: Post-Punk San Francisco and the End of the Analog Age (Headpress, 2023), Will York draws on over 100 interviews with musicians, artists, and scene participants as well as zines and other ephemera from the time period to chronicle post-punk San Francisco. York starts with the Punk Era and moves through Post Punk, Hard Core, the Eighties and into the Nineties, to explore the golden age of analog DIY culture, from the dark cabaret of Tuxedomoon and Factrix, the apocalyptic s...
Shakespeare's "As You Like It" Part 3: the Language
April 24, 2023 08:00 - 24 minutesAs You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedies. It is also his most daring exploration of sex, gender, and identity. In the Forest of Arden, Rosalind flips the script of romantic convention and pursues the man she loves — while she is disguised as a man. In this course, you’ll learn the story of As You Like It, unpack the complex games it plays with gender and performance, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and li...
Shakespeare's "As You Like It" Part 3: the Language
April 24, 2023 08:00 - 24 minutesAs You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedies. It is also his most daring exploration of sex, gender, and identity. In the Forest of Arden, Rosalind flips the script of romantic convention and pursues the man she loves — while she is disguised as a man. In this course, you’ll learn the story of As You Like It, unpack the complex games it plays with gender and performance, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and li...
Rachel Anne Gillett, "At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris" (Oxford UP, 2021)
April 22, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourRachel Gillett's At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the world of the French "Jazz Age" in the years after the First World War. Tracing the common ground and differences between communities of African American, French Antillean, and French West African artists who lived, performed, and interacted with one another in the French capital during the 1920s and 30s, the book asks questions about Blackness, Frenchness, ...
Catherine Grant, "A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art" (Duke UP, 2022)
April 22, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesIn A Time of One's Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art (Duke UP, 2022) Catherine Grant examines how contemporary feminist artists are turning to broad histories of feminism ranging from political organizing and artworks from the 1970s to queer art and activism in the 1990s. Exploring artworks from 2002 to 2017 by artists including Sharon Hayes, Mary Kelly, Allyson Mitchell, Deirdre Logue, Lubaina Himid, Pauline Boudry, and Renate Lorenz, Grant maps a revival of feminism that takes ...
Jonathan Gray, "Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste" (NYU Press, 2021)
April 20, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesIn this episode, our host Sim Gill discusses the book Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste (2021) by Jonathan Gray. You’ll hear about: A brief history of the book and its connection to global studies of media and communication; The role of media and cultural studies in amplifying the voices of dislikers, and how can scholars in these fields better understand and appreciate the register of dislike; The method of refractive audience analysis as a way to understand how ...