New Books in Gender
1,978 episodes - English - Latest episode: 16 days ago - ★★★★ - 37 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Gender about their New Books
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Episodes
Linda Eckert, "Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 24 minutesCervical cancer kills almost 350,000 women each year. What's more horrifying, is that millions have died of this disease that's nearly 100% preventable. It's no secret that healthcare is full of inequities, with a severe lack of accessible screening programs. But women's health care is also impeded by cultural, gender, and political barriers, issues that have combined to create devastating consequences. In Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dr Linda Eckert take...
Simon Joyce, "LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIt has been decades since Michel Foucault urged us to rethink "the repressive hypothesis" and see new forms of sexual discourse as coming into being in the nineteenth century, yet the term "Victorian" still has largely negative connotations. LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for re-visiting the period's thinking about gender and sexual identity at a time when our queer alliances are fraying. We think of those whose primary self-d...
Amya Agarwal, "Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesWhat is the significance of gender and masculinities in understanding conflict? Through an ethnographic study conducted between 2013 and 2016, Amya Agarwal's book Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) explores the politics of competing and sometimes overlapping masculinities represented by the state armed forces and the non-state actors in the Kashmir valley. In addition, the book broadens the understanding of women's agency through its engagement...
Barbara D. Savage, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 03, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesBorn in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life s...
Samuel Clowes Huneke, "A Queer Theory of the State" (Floating Opera Press, 2023)
November 27, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesQueer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State (Floating Opera Press, 2023) expands an earlier online essay from The Point by historian Samuel Huneke to offer a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew political engagement with democratic theorizing, Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answer...
Fae Garland and Mitchell Travis, "Intersex Embodiment: Legal Frameworks Beyond Identity and Patienthood" (Bristol UP, 2022)
November 26, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesWhat is intersex and why does it matter? What is the power of law to disrupt dominant narratives? I had a fascinating conversation with authors Dr Fae Garland and Dr Mitchell Travis about their book, Intersex Embodiment: Legal Frameworks Beyond Identity and Disorder (Bristol UP, 2023). We got into detail about these groundbreaking human rights issues. We spoke about the very real challenges faced in conducting legal research that has meaningful impact for social change. In research spanning m...
Sarah E. Stoller, "Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain" (MIT Press, 2023)
November 24, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesSarah E. Stoller, Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain (MIT Press, 2023) is the first historical examination of working parenthood in the late twentieth century--and how the concepts of "family-friendly" work culture and "work-life balance" came to be. Since the 1980s, families across the developed West have lived through a revolution on a scale unprecedented since industrialization. With more mothers than ever before in paid work and the rise of the ...
Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine et al., "When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
November 23, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesHow do Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism, and classism in the academy, one topic has been conspicuously absent from the literature--how Black women academics have found joy in the midst of adversity. Moving beyond questions of resilience, labor for others, and coping, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, Abena Ampofoa Asare, and Michelle Dionne Thompson's book When Will the Joy Come?: Black Wom...
Amy Harris, "Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBeing Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Harris is the first book-length exploration of what family life looked like, and how it was experienced, when viewed from the perspective of unmarried and childless family members. Using a microhistorical approach, Dr. Harris covers three generations of the famous musical and abolitionist Sharp family. The abundance of records the Sharps produced and preserved reveals how singl...
Terah J. Stewart, "Sex Work on Campus" (Routledge, 2022)
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTerah J. Stewart's book Sex Work on Campus (Routledge, 2022) examines the experiences of college students engaged in sex work and sparks dialogue about the ways educators might develop a deeper appreciation for-and praxis of-equity and justice on campus. Analyzing a study conducted with seven college student sex workers, the book focuses on sex work histories, student motivations, and how power (or lack thereof) associated with social identity shape experiences of student sex work. It examine...
Meghan Henning, "Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature" (Yale UP, 2021)
November 17, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn her book Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (Yale University Press, 2021), Meghan Henning illuminates how the bodies that populate hell in early Christian literature are punished after death in spaces that mirror real carceral spaces, effectually criminalizing those bodies on Earth. Contextualizing the apocalypses alongside ancient medical texts, inscriptions, philosophy, and patristic writings, this book demonstrates the...
Kimberley Ens Manning, "The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China" (Cornell UP, 2023)
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourKimberley Ens Manning's book The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China (Cornell UP, 2023) explores the formation and consolidation of the state in revolutionary China through the crucial role that social ties—specifically family ties—played in the state's capacity to respond to crisis before and after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. Central to these ties, Kimberley Ens Manning finds, were women as both the subjects and leade...
Heather Smith-Cannoy et al., "Sex Trafficking and Human Rights: The Status of Women and State Responses" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesHuman trafficking for the sex trade is a form of modern-day slavery that ensnares thousands of victims each year, disproportionately affecting women and girls. While the international community has developed an impressive edifice of human rights law, these laws are not equally recognized or enforced by all countries. Sex Trafficking and Human Rights demonstrates that state responsiveness to human trafficking is shaped by the political, social, cultural, and economic rights afforded to women 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...
Beatriz Nascimento, "The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento" (Princeton UP, 2023)
November 15, 2023 05:00 - 48 minutesBeatriz Nascimento (1942-1995) was a poet, historian, artist, and political leader in Brazil's Black movement, an innovative and creative thinker whose work offers a radical reimagining of gender, space, politics, and spirituality around the Atlantic and across the Black diaspora. Her powerful voice still resonates today, reflecting a deep commitment to political organizing, revisionist historiography, and the lived experience of Black women. The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Tho...
Rebecca Hardie, "Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England" (Medieval Institute Publications, 2021)
November 14, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesÆthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-...
Emma R. Jones, "Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
November 13, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesMany scholars have struggled with Irigaray’s focus on sexuate difference, in particular with her claim that it is “ontological,” wondering if this implies a problematically naïve or essentialist account of sexuate difference. As a result, the ethical vision which Irigaray elaborates has not been taken up in a robust way in the fields of philosophy, feminism, or psychoanalysis. By tracing the notion of relation throughout Irigaray’s work, Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray (Palgrave Macmillan,...
Kathleen Mcphillips and Naomi Goldenberg, "The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State" (Routledge, 2020)
November 08, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesFeminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race-based oppression. Kathleen Mcphillips and Naomi Goldenberg edited volume The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State (Routledge, 2020) proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better c...
This Will Change Your Perspective on James Bond
November 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Bond movies have influenced portrayals of masculinity and femininity for decades, but the Daniel Craig-era saw a revolution in depictions of sex, gender, and inclusivity. The UConn PopCast discusses with Professor Susan Burgess, author of LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imagination, and Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2023) The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Learn about our MA Program. Learn more about your a...
Helen Fry, "Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World Wars" (Yale UP, 2023)
November 07, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesFrom the twentieth century onward, women took on an extraordinary range of roles in intelligence, defying the conventions of their time. Across both world wars, far from being a small part of covert operations, women ran spy networks and escape lines, parachuted behind enemy lines, and interrogated prisoners. And, back in Bletchley and Whitehall, women’s vital administrative work in MI offices kept the British war engine running. In this major, panoramic history, Helen Fry looks at the rich a...
B Camminga, "Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesTransgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) tracks the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North—where it originated—along with the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from countries within Africa to South Africa and considers the interrelationships between the two. The term 'transgender' transforms as it travels, taking on meaning in relation to bodies, national h...
Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi, "The Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan" (NIAS, 2022)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesThe Work of Gender: Service, Performance and Fantasy in Contemporary Japan (NIAS Press, 2022) is an edited volume of ethnographic research organized around a cluster of key themes such as affective labor and the commodified performance of gender in contemporary Japan. Refreshingly, the chapters consist exclusively of the work of early-career scholars, tied together with an introductory chapter and epilogue by the book’s editors, Gitte Marianne Hansen and Fabio Gygi. The authors are attentive ...
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, "Why Men?: A Human History of Violence and Inequality" (Hurst, 2023)
November 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHow did humans, a species that evolved to be cooperative and egalitarian, develop societies of enforced inequality? Why did our ancestors create patriarchal power and warfare? Did it have to be this way? These are some of the key questions that Dr. Nancy Lindisfarne and Dr. Jonathan Neale grapple with in Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality (Hurst, 2023). Elites have always called hierarchy and violence unavoidable facts of human nature. Evolution, they claim, has caused men to...
Akiko Takeyama, "Involuntary Consent: The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry" (Stanford UP, 2023)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesIn a world dominated by the notion of autonomy, free choice, and consent, Akiko Takeyama takes us on a thought-provoking journey into the heart of Japan's adult video industry in her groundbreaking book, Involuntary Consent The Illusion of Choice in Japan’s Adult Video Industry. With an ethereal blend of ethnography and critical analysis, Takeyama challenges the pervasive idea that participation in the adult entertainment industry is always a matter of free will. Instead, she introduces us to...
Sharony Green, "The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
November 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourZora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked by tragedy and contradictions. When both she and her writing fell out of favor after the Harlem Renaissance, she struggled not only to regain an audience for her novels but also to simply make ends meet. In The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Sharony Green uncovers an understudied but importa...
Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesWitchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018. In Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen signific...
Leonie Hannan, "A Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth-Century Home" (Manchester UP, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLeonie Hannan's book Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth Century Home (Manchester University Press, 2023) explores the practice of scientific enquiry as it took place in the eighteenth-century home. While histories of science have identified the genteel household as an important site for scientific experiment, they have tended to do so via biographies of important men of science. Using a wide range of historical source material, from household accounts and inventories to letters a...
Lesley Nicole Braun, "Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
October 29, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesToday I spoke with Lesley Nicole Braun to talk about her new book on Congo's dancers. Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, religious, and family lives of the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the various genres popular in the capital city of Kinshasa, Congolese rumba occupies a special place and can be counted as one of the DRC’s most well-known cultural exports. The public image of rumba was historically dominated by male bandleaders, singers, and mus...
Réka Máté, "Portrayals of Women in Pakistan: An Analysis of Fahmīdah Riyāẓ's Urdu Poetry" (de Gruyter, 2023)
October 26, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesRéka Máté's Portrayals of Women in Pakistan: An Analysis of Fahmīdah Riyāẓ's Urdu Poetry (de Gruyter, 2023) examines the connection between progressivism and feminist movements in the Indian subcontinent, scrutinizing shifting portrayals of women in Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s poetry at the time of her writing from a historical perspective, and the historical, political, social and personal influences reflected in her work and life. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at th...
Stuart McHardy, "The Nine Maidens: Priestesses of the Ancient World" (Luath Press, 2023)
October 26, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesWhen King Arthur was conveyed to Avalon they were there. When Odin summoned warriors to Valhalla they were there. When Apollo was worshipped on Greek mountains they were there. When Brendan came to the Island of Women they were there. They are the Nine Maidens – from the mothers of the Norse God Heimdall, Morgan and her sisters on Avalon, to the nine sisters at the heart of the found myth of the Gikuyu of Kenya or witches battling with the Irish St Patrick, these women stand out in history an...
Sebastian Huebel, "Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
October 23, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhen the Nazis came to power, they used various strategies to expel German Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (U Toronto Press, 2022) focuses on the gendered experiences and discrimination that German-Jewish men faced between 1933 and 1941. Sebastian Huebel argues that Jewish men's gender identities, intersecting with categories of ethnicity, race, class, and age, underwent...
Özge Yaka, "Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles" (U California Press, 2023)
October 23, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesFighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles (U California Press, 2023) portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Building on extensive ethnographic research, Özge Yaka develops a body-centered, phenomenological approach to women's environmental activism and combines it with a relational ontologic...
Katherine Mason, "The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health" (NYU Press, 2023)
October 20, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutesCan you run a marathon, drink coffee, eat fish, or fly on a plane while pregnant? Such questions are just the tip of the iceberg for how most pregnant women's bodies are managed, surveilled, and scrutinized during pregnancy. The Reproduction of Inequality: How Class Shapes the Pregnant Body and Infant Health (NYU Press, 2023) examines the intense social pressure that expectant and new mothers face when it comes to their health and body-care choices. Drawing on interviews with dozens of pregna...
Elena Serrano, "Ladies of Honor and Merit. Gender, Useful Knowledge, and Politics in Enlightened Spain" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesIn this episode I interview Elena Serrano, a research member of the Project Cirgen at the Universitat de València and Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institut d'Història de la Ciència (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona). She trained in the former Centre for the History of Science in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and in the History of Science and Philosophy Department in Cambridge University before taking postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science i...
Livia Arndal Woods, "Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIn Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the nineteenth century. In the first book-length study of the topic, Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for "somatic reading," a practice attuned ...
Mukti Lakhi Mangharam, "Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
October 17, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourWhile globalization is often credited with the eradication of 'traditional' constraints tied to gender and caste, in reality the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s has led to a decline in freedom for many female, Dalit, and lower class Indians. This book explores the contraction of what it means to be free in post-liberalization India, examining how global capitalism has exacerbated existing inequalities based on traditional femininities and masculinities, while also creating new h...
Gina A. Zurlo, "Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement" (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023)
October 16, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesGina A. Zurlo's book Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023) is the first textbook to focus on women’s experiences in the founding, spread, and continuation of the Christian faith. Integrating historical, theological, and social scientific approaches to World Christianity, this innovative volume centers women’s perspectives to illustrate their key role in Christianity becoming a world religion, including how they sustain the faith in the ...
Alejandra Dubcovsky, "Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South" (Yale UP, 2023)
October 13, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHistorian Alejandra Dubcovsky tells a story of war, slavery, loss, remembrance, and the women whose resilience and resistance transformed the colonial South. In exploring their lives she rewrites early American history, challenging the established male-centered narrative. In Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South (Yale UP, 2023), Dubcovsky reconstructs the lives of Native women—Timucua, Apalachee, Chacato, and Guale—to show how they made claims to protect their livelihoo...
Rhoda Kanaaneh, "The Right Kind of Suffering: Gender, Sexuality, and Arab Asylum Seekers in America" (U Texas Press, 2023)
October 10, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesFrom the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right" kind of asylum seeker, the asylum system in the United States is an exacting and drawn-out immigration process that itself results in suffering. When anthropologist Rhoda Kanaaneh became a volunteer interpreter for Arab asylum seekers, she discovered how applicants learned to craft a specific narrative to satisfy the system's requirements. Kanaaneh tells the stories of fou...
Gültan Kışanak, "The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison" (Pluto Press, 2022)
October 10, 2023 08:00 - 53 minutesThe Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (Pluto Press, 2022) is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political structures and state offices in which they operated. They discuss what worked and what didn't, a...
Stephanie R. Larson, "What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2021)
October 08, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesWhat it feels like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture (Penn State Press, 2021) by Dr. Stephanie Larson interrogates an underexamined reason for our failure to abolish rape in the United States: the way we communicate about it. Using affective and feminist materialist approaches to rhetorical criticism, Dr. Larson examines how discourses about rape and sexual assault rely on strategies of containment, denying the felt experiences of victims and ultimately stalling broader clai...
Chrissy Yee Lau, "New Women of Empire: Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America" (U Washington Press, 2022)
October 08, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesThis episode, which is co-hosted with Mika Thornburg, features a conversation with Dr. Chrissy Yee Lau, the author of the newly published New Women of Empire: Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America (U Washington Press, 2022). The book centers the compelling life histories of five young women and men in Los Angeles to illuminate how they negotiated overlapping imperialisms through new gender roles. With extensive youth networks and the largest Japanese population in t...
Arunima Datta, "Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)
October 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe expansion of the British Empire facilitated movement across the globe for both the colonizers and the colonized. Waiting on Empire: A History of Indian Travelling Ayahs in Britain (OUP, 2023) focuses on a largely forgotten group in this story of movement and migration: South Asian travelling ayahs (servants and nannies), who travelled between India and Britain and often found themselves destitute in Britain as they struggled to find their way home to South Asia. Delving into the stories o...
Sharon Patricia Holland, "an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life" (Duke UP, 2023)
October 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn an other: a black feminist examination of animal life (Duke UP, 2023), Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. M...
Stephenie Foster and Susan A. Markham, "Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice" (Routledge, 2023)
October 07, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesIn 2014, Sweden announced the world’s first “feminist foreign policy,” an approach more than two dozen other nations have since adopted. But different national approaches and a range of theoretical frameworks complicate definitions of what feminist foreign policy should or could be. With Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and in Practice: An Introduction (Routledge 2023), Stephenie Foster and Susan Markham offer an accessible overview of the main tenets of a feminist foreign policy, and how su...
Charlotte Gray, "Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
October 07, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesBorn into upper-class America in the same year, 1854, Sara Delano (later to become the mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Jennie Jerome (later to become the mother of Winston Churchill) refused to settle into predictable, sheltered lives as little-known wives to prominent men. Instead, both women concentrated much of their energies on enabling their sons to reach the epicentre of political power on two continents. Set against one hundred years of history, Passionate Mothers, Powerful So...
Melissa Estes Blair, "Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women Who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century" (U Georgia Press, 2023)
October 06, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIn Bringing Home the White House: The Hidden History of Women Who Shaped the Presidency in the Twentieth Century (U Georgia Press, 2023), Melissa Estes Blair introduces us to five fascinating yet largely unheralded women who were at the heart of campaigns to elect and reelect some of our most beloved presidents. By examining the roles of these political strategists in affecting the outcome of presidential elections, Blair sheds light on their historical importance and the relevance of their i...
Lee Wind, "No Way, They Were Gay?: Hidden Lives and Secret Loves" (Zest Books, 2021)
October 05, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesWhich stories are left out of the history books? What’s in the documents omitted from the “official” record? And what happens when we go in search of people’s hidden lives? Today’s book is No Way, They Were Gay? Hidden Lives and Secret Loves (Zest Books, 2021), by Lee Wind, in which he reminds us that “history” was crafted by the people who recorded it. And sometimes, those historians were biased against, didn’t see, or couldn’t even imagine anyone different from themselves. That means that ...
Laura Gowing, "Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
October 05, 2023 08:00 - 41 minutesIngenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge University Press, 2021) by Dr. Laura Gowing recovers the intricate stories of the young women who came to London in the late seventeenth century to earn their own living, most often with the needle, and the mistresses who set up shops and supervised their apprenticeships. Through an intensive and creative archival reconstruction, Dr. Gowing recovers the significance of apprenticeship in the lives of girls and women, and ...
James N. Druckman and Elizabeth A. Sharrow, "Equality Unfulfilled: How Title IX's Policy Design Undermines Change to College Sports" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
October 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourThe year 1972 is often hailed as an inflection point in the evolution of women's rights. Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law that outlawed sex-based discrimination in education. Many Americans celebrate Title IX for having ushered in an era of expanded opportunity for women's athletics; yet fifty years after its passage, sex-based inequalities in college athletics remain the reality. James N. Druckman and Elizabeth A. Sharrow's book Equality Unfulfilled: How Ti...