New Books in Film
651 episodes - English - Latest episode: 12 days ago - ★★★★★ - 13 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Film about their New Books
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Episodes
Rayna Denison, "Anime: A Critical Introduction" (Bloomsbury, 2015)
December 16, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourRayna Denison’s Anime: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2015) uses genre as a window into the evolving global phenomenon of Japanese animation. Denison’s wide-ranging analysis tackles the anime themselves – including classics such as Astro Boy, Akira, Urotsukidōji, Spirited Away, and Natsume’s Book of Friends – but also the mechanics behind anime production and distribution in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Tracking anime’s circulation through these locations over time ...
Matthew H. Brown, "Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address" (Duke UP, 2021)
December 15, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourIn Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address (Duke UP, 2021), Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to...
"Bambi" isn't about what you think it's about: Jack Zipes explains
December 15, 2021 09:00 - 39 minutesMost of us think we know the story of Bambi—but do we? The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (Princeton UP, 2022) is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers’ images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film—an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature’s innocence—which was based on a 1928 English translation of a novel by the Austrian Jewish writer Felix Salten. This ma...
Kate Fortmueller, "Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID" (U Texas Press, 2021)
December 09, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourBy March 2020, the spread of COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions, forcing widespread shutdowns across industries, including Hollywood. Studios, networks, production companies, and the thousands of workers who make film and television possible were forced to adjust their time-honored business and labor practices. In Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID (U Texas Press, 2021), Kate Fortmueller asks what happened when the coronavirus closed Holly...
Alisa Freedman, "Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost" (Association for Asian Studies, 2021)
December 08, 2021 09:00 - 58 minutesAlisa Freedman's book Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost (Association for Asian Studies, 2021) explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. Since the 1950s, U.S. television programs have taken the role of “curators” of Japan, displaying and explaining selected aspects for viewers. Beliefs in U.S. hegemony over Japan underpin this curation process. Japan...
Caetlin Benson-Allott, "The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television" (U California Press, 2021)
December 06, 2021 09:00 - 56 minutes“Made of light and later sound, the film experience cannot be touched, but that does not mean it is immaterial.” So writes Dr. Caetlin Benson-Allott in her third academic monograph, The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television (University of California Press, April 2021). In The Stuff of Spectatorship, Dr. Benson-Allott turns away from that canonical concept of medium specificity to explore the nature of material specificity. How might the cinematic and televisual appa...
Noah Isenberg ed., Shelley Frisch, trans., "Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna" (Princeton UP, 2021)
December 01, 2021 09:00 - 49 minutesBefore Billy Wilder became the screenwriter and director of iconic films like Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a freelance reporter, first in Vienna and then in Weimar Berlin. Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (Princeton UP, 2021) brings together more than fifty articles, translated into English for the first time, that Wilder (then known as Billie) published in magazines and newspapers between September 1925 and November 1930. Fr...
John Holmes McDowell et al., "Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
November 30, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourThe volume, Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change, edited by John Holmes McDowell, Katherine Borland, Rebecca Dirksen, and Sue Tuohy (University of Illinois Press, 2021), illustrates the power of performing diverse environmentalisms to highlight alternative ways of human beingness to improve the prospects for maintaining life on the planet under threat. In the interview, I spoke with editors John McDowell and Rebecca Dirksen, who detail how poetics and perform...
Raymond C. Kuo, "Following the Leader: Alliance Design, Security Strategies, and Institutional Emulation" (Stanford UP, 2021)
November 29, 2021 09:00 - 54 minutesNations have powerful incentives to ensure that their military alliances are well-structured. Successful military alliances set long-lasting foundations for global and regional order, while unsuccessful ones can perpetuate and widen conflict. In Following the Leader: International Order, Alliance Strategies, and Emulation (Stanford UP, 2021), Kuo argues that nations do not consistently construct contextually appropriate military alliances. Rather, they often ignore their own security interest...
Kate Fortmueller, "Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production" (U Texas Press, 2021)
November 18, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourDespite their considerable presence in Hollywood, extras and working actors have received scant attention within film and media studies as significant contributors to the history of the industry. Looking not to the stars but to these supporting players in film, television, and, recently, streaming programming, Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production (University of Texas Press, 2021), highlights such actors as precarious laborers whose work as freela...
Genevieve Yue, "Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality" (Fordham UP, 2020)
November 03, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe female form has been a fraught site of filmic meaning – of desire and violence, of sex and death – from the very beginnings of cinema. But how deep do these meanings travel? How are our understandings of gender and sexuality not the stuff of screen representation but shaped by film technology and culture as well? Published in November 2020 by Fordham University Press, Genevieve Yue’s Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, “in rich archival and technical detail… examines three sites of ...
Gary Bettinson, "The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance" (Hong Kong UP, 2014)
October 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe widely acclaimed films of Wong Kar-wai are characterized by their sumptuous yet complex visual and sonic style. This study of Wong’s filmmaking techniques uses a poetics approach to examine how form, music, narration, characterization, genre, and other artistic elements work together to produce certain effects on audiences. Bettinson argues that Wong’s films are permeated by an aesthetic of sensuousness and “disturbance” achieved through techniques such as narrative interruptions, facial ...
Esther De Dauw, "Hot Pants and Spandex Suits: Gender Representation in American Superhero Comic" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
October 21, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesSuperman, Batman, Captain America, and Iron Man are names that are often connected to the expansive superhero genre, including the multi-billion-dollar film and television franchises. But these characters are older and have been woven into American popular culture since their inception in the early days of comic books. The history of these comic book heroes are histories that include bulging muscles, flashy fight scenes, four-color panels, and heroic rescues of damsels in distress. Esther De ...
Rebecca L. Stein, "Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2021)
October 20, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bystanders and police. Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (Stanford UP, 2021) studies this phenomenon from the vantage point of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Here, cameras have proliferated as political tools in the hands of a broad range of actors and institutions, including Palestinian activists, I...
Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson, "Reclaiming Popular Documentary" (Indiana UP, 2021)
October 19, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe documentary has achieved rising popularity over the past two decades, thanks to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Despite this fact, documentary studies still tends to favor works that appeal primarily to specialists and scholars. Reclaiming Popular Documentary (Indiana UP, 2021) reverses this longstanding tendency by showing that documentaries can be--and are--made for mainstream or commercial audiences. Editors Christie Milliken and Steve Anderson, who consider popular documenta...
Cyrus R. K. Patell, "Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
October 18, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourFrom A New Hope to The Rise of Skywalker and beyond, this book offers the first complete assessment and philosophical exploration of the Star Wars universe. Lucasfilm: Filmmaking, Philosophy, and the Star Wars Universe (Bloomsbury, 2021) examines the ways in which these iconic films were shaped by global cultural mythologies and world cinema, as well as philosophical ideas from the fields of aesthetics and political theory, and now serve as a platform for public philosophy. Cyrus R. K. Patell...
Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai, "The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
October 15, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode I chatted with Leslie Barnes and Joseph Mai, two scholars of film, about their new anthology The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul out with Rutgers University Press, 2021. As a child Rithy Panh survived the Khmer Rouge regime yet lost his immediate family during those awful years. He was fortunate enough to emigrate to France where he studied film and became a prolific director. Rithy Panh is now the most important film maker in Cambodia and in the Khmer diaspora. Co...
Richard Grusin and Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, "Ends of Cinema" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
October 13, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourAt the dawn of the digital era in the final decades of the twentieth century, film and media studies scholars grappled with the prospective end of what was deemed cinema: analog celluloid production, darkened public movie theaters, festival culture. The notion of the “end of cinema” had already been broached repeatedly over the course of the twentieth century—from the introduction of sound and color to the advent of television and video—and in Ends of Cinema (U Minnesota Press, 2020), contrib...
Luci Marzola, "Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building the Studio System" (Oxford UP, 2021)
October 13, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourLuci Marzola's book Engineering Hollywood: Technology, Technicians, and the Science of Building Studio System (Oxford University Press, 2021) tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before. Using extensive archival research, Marzola's book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organi...
Phil Rosenzweig, "Reginald Rose and the Journey of 12 Angry Men" (Fordham UP, 2021)
October 11, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourPhil Rosenzweig's Reginald Rose and the Journey of 12 Angry Men (Fordham Press, 2021) is the first biography of a great television writer, and the story of his magnum opus In early 1957, a low-budget black and white movie opened across the country. Consisting of little more than a dozen men arguing in a dingy room, it was a failure at the box office and soon faded from view. Today, 12 Angry Men is acclaimed as a movie classic, revered by the critics and beloved by the public, and widely perfo...
Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)
October 07, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourA platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Al...
Mathias Clasen, "A Very Nervous Person's Guide to Horror Movies" (Oxford UP, 2021)
October 01, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourFilms about chainsaw killers, demonic possession, and ghostly intruders. Screaming audiences with sleepless nights or sweat-drenched nightmares in their immediate future. Presumably, almost everybody has experience with horror films. Some people would even characterize themselves as horror fans. But what about the others—the ones who are curious about horror films, but also very, very nervous about them? In A Very Nervous Person's Guide to Horror Movies (Oxford University Press, 2021), Mathia...
Stephen Lee Naish, "Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency" (New Star Books, 2021)
September 29, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourMovies open a window into our collective soul. In Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency (New Star Books, 2021), Stephen Lee Naish guides us through recent cinematic phenomena that reflect/refract our contemporary political existence. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. He is the author of several books on film, politics, music, and pop culture. He lives in Kingston, Ontario. He has appeared on the New Books Network three times for previous books...
Erin Y. Huang, "Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility" (Duke UP, 2020)
September 26, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourErin Y. Huang’s Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility (Duke UP, 2020) is an expansive and ambitious book that explores the affective territory of “neoliberal post-socialist China” as it manifests in contemporary Chinese (language) cinema. Pushing beyond the geographic boundaries of the PRC and the confines of art cinema, Huang’s book reads the post-socialist condition as it manifests in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and across a variety of film genres. The term urban horro...
Amanda Konkle and Charles Burnetts, "Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Nuanced Postnetwork Television" (Syracuse UP, 2020)
September 24, 2021 08:00 - 53 minutesThe new collection, Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: Nuanced Postnetwork Television (Syracuse University Press, 2021) by Amanda Konkle and Charles Burnetts explores the hit series with an off-putting title and a decidedly retrograde premise. The CW dramedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a surprising choice for critical analysis. But, loyal viewers quickly came to appreciate the show’s sharp cultural critique through masterful parody, and this strategy has made it a critical darling and earned it ...
Kristian Petersen, "Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology" (Ilex Foundation, 2021)
September 17, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourKristian Petersen’s new edited volume Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (Ilex Foundation and Harvard University Press, 2021), introduces the subject of Muslims and film. The volume contains nineteen chapters that engage a range of film industries, including Hollywood and Bollywood, but also movies from the Philippines, Indonesia, Nigeria, Italy, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and much more. This collection challenges its readers to taking seriously the complex ways in Muslims are represente...
Martin Harris, "Leatherface Vs. Tricky Dick: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as Political Satire" (Headpress, 2021)
September 15, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe Watergate scandal was a horror show. What better way to satirize it than with a horror movie? The Texas Chain Saw Massacre written by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel premiered in October 1974, mere weeks after the resignation and pardon of Richard Nixon brought an uncertain end to the most corrupt and criminal presidency in American history. The film had been conceived, written, shot, edited, and produced precisely as Watergate was playing out, and those responsible for Chain Saw unhesitatingl...
Bernard F. Dick, "Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood" (U Kentucky Press, 2021)
September 15, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourFrom Double Indemnity to The Godfather, the stories behind some of the greatest films ever made pale beside the story of the studio that made them. In the golden age of Hollywood, Paramount was one of the Big Five studios. Gulf + Western's 1966 takeover of the studio signaled the end of one era and heralded the arrival of a new way of doing business in Hollywood. In Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood (University of Kentucky Press, 2021), Bernard Dic...
Cameron Crookston, "The Cultural Impact of Rupaul's Drag Race: Why Are We All Gagging?" (Intellect, 2021)
September 06, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesIn The Cultural Impact of RuPaul's Drag Race: Why are we all Gagging? (Intellect, 2021) Cameron Crookston has compiled chapters from scholars in theatre and performance studies, English literature, cultural anthropology, media studies, linguistics, sociology, and marketing. The collection analyzes the global impact of RuPaul's drag race on local, live cultures, fan cultures, queer representation, and the very fabric of drag as an art form in popular cultural consciousness. The collection goes...
Chenshu Zhou, "Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China" (U California Press, 2021)
July 28, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourAt a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (U California Press, 2021) advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s R...
Scott Krzych, "Beyond Bias: Conservative Media, Documentary Form, and the Politics of Hysteria" (Oxford UP, 2021)
July 23, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourScott Krzych's book Beyond Bias: Conservative Media, Documentary Form, and the Politics of Hysteria (Oxford University Press, 2021) offers the first scholarly study of contemporary right-wing documentary film and video. Drawing from contemporary work in political theory and psychoanalytic theory, the book identifies what author Scott Krzych describes as the hysterical discourse prolific in conservative documentary in particular, and right-wing media more generally. In our chat, Scott and I re...
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, "Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
July 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourMichel-Rolph Trouillot wrote that “the silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.” Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games (University Press of Mississippi, 2021) illustrates how this hol...
James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati, "Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice" (Routledge, 2020)
July 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDrawing together 18 contributions from leading international scholars, Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice (Routledge, 2021) conceptualizes the history and theory of cinema’s century-long relationship to modes of exploration in its many forms, from colonialist expeditions to decolonial radical cinemas to the perceptual voyage of the senses made possible by the cinematic apparatus. In my conversation with them, James and Leo review the theory behind cinema of explorat...
Ellen Seiter and Stefania Marghitu, "Teen TV" (Routledge, 2021)
July 09, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourStefania Marghitu's Teen TV (Routledge, 2021)explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ways in which television has embraced youth subcultures, tracing the shifts in American and global televisual and youth cultures. Organized chronologically, Teen TV starts with Baby Boomers and moves to Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z as a way to contextualize and discuss cultural and historical contexts of teen television and television audiences. ...
Rossen Djagalov, "From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third Worlds" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2020)
July 06, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWould there have been a Third World without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. Although most histories of these geopolitical blocs and their constituent societies and cultures are written in reference to the West, the interdependence of the Second and Third Worlds is evident not only from a common nomenclature but also from their near-simultaneous disappearance around 1990. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Th...
Frank Burke et al., "A Companion to Federico Fellini" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020)
July 05, 2021 08:00 - 45 minutesFederico Fellini’s distinct style delighted generations of film viewers and inspired filmmakers and artists around the world. In Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern, renowned Fellini scholar Frank Burke presents a film-by-film analysis of the famed director’s cinematic output from a theoretical perspective. The book explores Fellini’s movement from relatively classic filmmaking to modernist reflexivity and then to ‘postmodern reproduction’. Burke moves from analysis of...
Carey Purcell, "From Aphra Behn to Fun Home: A Cultural History of Feminist Theater" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)
June 25, 2021 08:00 - 55 minutesTheatre has long been considered a feminine interest for which women consistently purchase the majority of tickets, while the shows they are seeing typically are written and brought to the stage by men. Furthermore, the stories these productions tell are often about men, and the complex leading roles in these shows are written for and performed by male actors. Despite this imbalance, the feminist voice presses to be heard and has done so with more success than ever before. In From Aphra Behn...
Badia Ahad-legardy, "Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
June 23, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesNostalgia has received increasing attention for its role in shaping contemporary social and political life in the United States. Dr. Badia Ahad-Legardy distinguishes Afro-Nostalgia as a framework to think about the relationship between affect, black historical memory, and joy. Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2021) mines black aesthetic practices that return to the past to generate good feelings for black audiences and makers. The past ...
Veronika Pehe, "Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture" (Berghahn Books, 2020)
June 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourScholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. Veronika Pehe's Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Po...
Lisa Z. Sigel, "The People's Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America" (Reaktion Books, 2020)
June 18, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe People's Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America (Reaktion Books, 2020) is a beautifully written and groundbreaking historical study of homemade, handmade and amateur pornographic artifacts. Covering everything from erotic scrimshaw to amateur videos on the web, Lisa Sigel offers a fascinating account of what ordinary people thought about sexuality and desire. This hidden chapter of American sexual history is not only a much-needed counterbalance to ahistorical arguments which ...
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, "Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper" (Duke UP, 2021)
June 17, 2021 08:00 - 42 minutesIsabel Rosario Cooper, if mentioned at all by mainstream history books, is often a salacious footnote: the young Filipino mistress of General Douglas MacArthur, hidden away at the Charleston Hotel in DC. Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke University Press: 2021) by Professor Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez refuses to reduce Cooper’s life to that simple statement. The book investigates Cooper’s life both in the Philippines, where she was a famed vaudeville and film actress, and...
Sean Guynes and Martin Lund, "Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics" (Ohio State UP, 2020)
June 17, 2021 08:00 - 58 minutesIn Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics (Ohio State UP, 2020), Sean Guynes and Martin Lund have assembled more than fifteen chapters that interrogate our thinking about superheroes, especially those written and created in the United States, and how those heroes participate in reifying the whiteness of American politics, culture, and worldview. Even as we have seen attempts to diversify the representation within the superhero genre, there is a continued reinscribing of the n...
Exploring the Diasporic Imagination in Recent Indonesian Popular Novels and Films (2000-2020)
June 03, 2021 08:00 - 22 minutesSince 2000, there has been a boom in Indonesian popular novels and films set overseas, showing young Indonesians living in foreign countries and having life changing adventures there. In the last 20 years, there have been at least 150 such novels and films released – many more than in the first 55 years of Indonesian independence. In this episode, Associate Professor David Reeve speaks to Dr Natali Pearson about his latest project looking at Indonesian romance novels and films set overseas, d...
Heather Berg, "Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism" (UNC Press, 2021)
June 03, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourEvery porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (UNC Press, 2021) details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from s...
Patrick Maille, "The Cards: The Evolution and Power of Tarot" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
June 01, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn The Cards: The History and Power of Tarot (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Patrick Maille examines the history of Tarot cards and their place in popular culture. The Cards starts with an extensive review of the history of Tarot from its roots as a game to its supposed connection to ancient Egyptian magic, through its place in secret societies, and to its current use in meditation and psychology. Part Two delves into specific areas of popular culture—art, television, movies, and com...
Sergio Rigoletto, "Le norme traviate: Saggi sul genere e sulla sessualità nel cinema e nella televisione italiana" (Meltemi Publishers, 2020)
May 31, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWhat does it mean to “upend a norm,” which is the translation of the title of Sergio Rigoletto’s recent study “Upended norms: essays on gender and sexuality in Italian cinema and television.” Rigoletto focuses on Italian audiovisual texts from the mid-20th century until today, asking questions about how these media helped mark the boundaries of social norms in Italy as well as chart the threats to those boundaries made by sexually active women, foreigners, drag queens, homosexuals and other q...
Pamela Hamilton, "Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale" (Koehler Books, 2021)
May 28, 2021 08:00 - 35 minutesThe name of Dorothy Hale is not well known these days. In the 1920s, she enjoyed a career on Broadway as a dancer, including in a leading role with Fred Astaire. When an accidental injury ended that career, she auditioned, successfully, for the filmmaker Samuel Goldwyn and landed a part opposite Ronald Coleman, who would later star in Lost Horizon. But Dorothy’s film career did not take off, and she moved into art, writing, and museum work in support of her second husband, Gardner Hale, a wel...
Michael D. Nichols, "Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe" (McFarland, 2021)
May 21, 2021 08:00 - 45 minutesBreaking box office records, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has achieved an unparalleled level of success with fans across the world, raising the films to a higher level of narrative: myth. Michael D. Nichols's Religion and Myth in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (McFarland, 2021) is first book to analyze the Marvel output as modern myth, comparing it to epics, symbols, rituals, and stories from world religious traditions. Nichols places the exploits of Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, ...
David Monod, "Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890–1925" (UNC Press, 2020)
May 19, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourVaudeville is one of the most famous styles of theater in American history, a font of showbiz legend and the training ground for a generation of stars. It’s also one of the least studied. In his new book, Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890-1925 (UNC Press, 2020), Professor David Monod examines Vaudeville as both a cultural form and a for-profit industry, connecting the two to produce a remarkably cohesive portrait of a vast phenomenon. The genre, he argues, was related to...
Kathleen Collins, "From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole: A Life with Television" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
May 13, 2021 08:00 - 56 minutesIn her new book From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole: A Life with Television (University of Mississippi Press, 2021) TV scholar and fan Kathleen Collins reflects on how her life as a consumer of television has intersected with the cultural and technological evolution of the medium itself. In a narrative bridging television studies, memoir, and comic, literary nonfiction, Collins takes readers alongside her from the 1960s through to the present, reminiscing and commiserating about some of what ...