New Books in Geography
498 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 14 ratingsInterviews with Geographers about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/geography
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, "Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present" (UNC Press, 2020)
May 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourLandscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants to Amazonian Bolivia during the twentieth century, exploring how each of these communities forged and contested the landscape of agrarian citizenship in the country. The lowlands around Santa Cruz became a focal point for high modernist development projects in Bolivia, and as Ben Nobbs-Thiesse...
Alexander Bukh, "These Islands Are Ours" (Stanford UP, 2020)
May 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAlexander Bukh’s These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press 2020) provides critical historical perspective on the social construction of territorial disputes between Japan and its neighbors in Northeast Asia. In his analysis of Japan’s rows over the “Northern Territories” (with Russia), the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands (China), and Takeshima/Dokdo (Korea), Bukh reveals in detail how the nonstate actors that he calls “national...
Kory Olson, "The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris" (Liverpool UP, 2018)
May 18, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhen is the last time you looked at/consulted a paper map? Perhaps you have one hanging on a wall at home or work, framed or not. Or maybe you have some old road maps in a stack somewhere, as I do, sitting untouched since various digital forms have made printed map reading and handling something most of us rarely (if ever) do. Reading Kory E. Olson’s The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris (Liverpool University Press, 2018) reminded me how much I used to, and still sort of love...
David Ambaras, "Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThrough a series of provocative case studies on mobility, transgression, and intimacy, David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) interrogates the spatial and ideological formations of modern Japan in its first seven decades or so as a nation-state and empire, especially vis-à-vis China. The slippage between the individual and collective/national (geo)body is a critical theme as Ambaras highlights the roles of ...
Sheetal Chhabria, "Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay" (U Washington Press, 2019)
May 08, 2020 08:00 - 38 minutesIn the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the city of Bombay on foot in human caravans thousands of people long. Recently, images of a similar scale of deprivation have resurfaced in India as the COVID-19 crisis has once again forced the laboring poor to migrate in duress, this time in the opposite direction from city to country. Making the Modern Slum: The Po...
Alex Jeffrey, "The Edge of Law: Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
April 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat happens when a court tries to become a “new” court? What happens to the many artifacts of its history—previous laws and jurisprudence, the building that it inhabits, the people who weave in and out of it? This is the question that grounds Alex Jeffrey’s new book, The Edge of Law: Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which explores the making of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through extensive engagements with the different actors working in an...
Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
April 28, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesSlavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary res...
Jacob Blanc, "Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil" (Duke UP, 2019)
April 22, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesJacob Blanc’s Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil (Duke University Press, 2019) tells the story of the the Itaipu dam, a massive hydroelectric complex built on the Brazil-Paraguay border in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is structurally and conceptually ambitious, but so readable that it will fit well in both graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms. Blanc uses this story of a single megaproject to open up new questions about dictatorship, democracy, and t...
Maura Finkelstein, "The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai" (Duke UP, 2019)
April 13, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourMumbai's textile industry is commonly but incorrectly understood to be an extinct relic of the past. In The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2019), Maura Finkelstein examines what it means for textile mill workers—who are assumed not to exist—to live and work during a period of deindustrialization. Challenging the view that archives are (just) locational, Finkelstein shows how mills are ethnographic archives of the city where documents, artifacts, ...
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
March 30, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesParadox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt C...
Steven Seegel, "Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
March 24, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesSteven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map making which is written through and by individual geographers/cartographers/map men. The book focuses primarily on four countries: Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. When guiding his reader through the entanglements of transnational endeavors of making maps, Seegel zeroes in on personal stories o...
Jessie Labov, "Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture beyond the Nation" (Central European UP, 2019)
March 20, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesWhile there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as a political and intellectual project it has receded from the horizon. Proponents of a distinct cultural profile of these countries―all involved now in the process of Transatlantic integration―used "Central European", as a contestation with the geo-political label of Eastern Europe. In Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and R...
Diane Jones Allen, "Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transit Access, and Suburban Form" (Routledge, 2017)
March 18, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesIncreased redevelopment, the dismantling of public housing, and increasing housing costs are forcing a shift in migration of lower income and transit dependent populations to the suburbs. These suburbs are often missing basic transportation, and strategies to address this are lacking. This absence of public transit creates barriers to viable employment and accessibility to cultural networks, and plays a role in increasing social inequality. In her book Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transi...
Nancy Appelbaum, "Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia" (UNC Press, 2016)
March 13, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesIn the mid-nineteenth century, the Chorographic Commission of Colombia, an ambitious geographical expedition, set out to define and map a nascent and still unstable republic. The commission’s purpose was to survey the land, its resources and people, and portray Colombia as a nation prone to the “wonders” of modernization. In Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Nancy P. Appelbaum reconstructs how...
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, "Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2020)
March 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWaste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) is an ethnography of Palestinian life under occupation that takes waste infrastructures as a starting point for exploring how Palestinians deal with toxicity and uncertainty, how governance happens under conditions of uncertainty, and how everyday goods circulate in and out of multiple moral economies and waste streams. In this episode of New Books in Anthropology, author Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins talks ...
Larry Wolff, "Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe" (Stanford UP, 2020)
March 06, 2020 09:00 - 58 minutesAt the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allied powers met to reenvision the map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's influence on the remapping of borders was profound. But it was his impact on the modern political structuring of Eastern Europe that would be perhaps his most enduring international legacy: neither Czechoslovakia nor Yugoslavia exist today, but their geopolitical presence persisted across the twentieth century from the end of Wo...
Alex Hidalgo, "Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2019)
March 04, 2020 09:00 - 49 minutesThere is far more to a map than meets the eye. Such is the case in historian Alex Hidalgo’s Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2019), which focuses on the complex lives of dozens of Oaxacan maps created by Indigenous mapmakers. Tracing the legal, social, cultural, and political history of these maps, Hidalgo sheds new light on the purpose, production, and preservation of maps as well as the lives of Indigenous peoples and Spania...
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
February 25, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesHow does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identitie...
Phil Christman, "Midwest Futures" (Belt Publishing, 2020)
February 24, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWhat does the future hold for the Midwest? A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for the coming challenges of climate change. But it also sits at the epicenter of a massive economic collapse that many of its citizens are still struggling to overcome. The question of what the Midwest is (and what it will become) is nothing new. As Phil Christman writes in Midwest Futures (Belt Publish...
Julian Bolleter, "Desert Paradises: Surveying the Landscapes of Dubai’s Urban Model" (Routledge, 2019)
February 17, 2020 09:00 - 50 minutesDesert Paradises: Surveying the Landscapes of Dubai’s Urban Model (Routledge, 2019) explores how designed landscapes can play a vital role in constructing a city’s global image and legitimizing its socio-political hierarchy. Using the case study of Dubai, Julian Bolleter explores how Dubai’s rulers employ a paradisiacal image of greening the desert, in part, as a tool for political legitimization. Bolleter also evaluates the designed landscapes of Dubai against the principles of the United Na...
Germaine R. Halegoua, "The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place" (NYU Press, 2019)
February 12, 2020 09:00 - 54 minutesIn her new book, The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place (NYU Press, 2019), Germaine R. Halegoua rethinks everyday interactions that humans have with digital infrastructures, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Dr. Halegoua draws from five case studies from global and mid-sized cities to illustrate the concept of “re-placing." In this book, Dr. Halegoua shows have different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative ...
Michael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006)
February 07, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesRadio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006). The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in 1845 turned the Arctic into an object of fascination. By the end of the century, it had become an ‘Arctic Fever.’ Fox is the host of the radio program Geographical Imaginations for RadioFabrik in Salzburg, which is also ava...
Christian J. Koot, "A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake" (NYU Press, 2017)
February 06, 2020 09:00 - 25 minutesLabels on a map: Surrey. Lower Norfolk. The Isle of Wight. Northumberland. Middlesex. Not a map England, but of the British colonies of Virginia and Maryland published in 1673. This is a map that proclaims empire: from the prominent royal arms, to the ships riding at anchor out in what is labelled the ‘North Sea’. It is both a map of land and of water: rivers open into the interior like great highways; the landscape is thick with English place names. But there are other layers, other presence...
Penny Sinanoglou, "Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
February 03, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesPartitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of the Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partition—that is, a division of territory and sovereignty—in British mandate Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Inverting the spate of narratives that focus on how the idea contributed to, or hindered, the development of future Israeli and Palestinian states, Penny Sinanoglou asks inst...
K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)
January 30, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesIf you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the sam...
Jeremy Black, "Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688-1815" (Indiana UP, 2018)
January 24, 2020 09:00 - 29 minutesToday we talk to Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, UK, about two of his most recent book projects, both of which relate to the ways in which we think about empires, and the British empire in particular. Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688-1815 (Indiana University Press, 2018) and Imperial legacies: The British Empire Around the World (Encounter, 2019) address some very timely themes. A great deal of recent discussion among humanities scholars has f...
Alyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)
January 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourEven in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as Alyssa Park’s book Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) shows, when both peoples and whole political paradigms are on the move simultaneously, we are able to look in very new ways at how governance works and...
Susan Schulten, "A History of American in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press 2018)
January 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn her new book A History of American in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press 2018), historian Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. Schulten’s “visual tour of American history” considers the different purposes for which maps are created—maps as tools of statecraft and diplomacy, maps made to amuse and entertain, and maps made as instruments of social reform. Some of the maps she discusses document j...
Chet Van Duzer, "Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends" (Springer, 2019)
December 06, 2019 09:00 - 59 minutesChet Van Duzer's new book Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends (Springer, 2019), presents the first detailed study of one of the most important masterpieces of Renaissance cartography. By transcribing, translating into English, and detailing the sources of all of the descriptive texts on the map, as well as the sources of many of the images, the book makes the map available to scholars in a wholly unprecedented way. In addition, the book p...
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)
December 03, 2019 09:00 - 57 minutesWe’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short...
Emanuela Grama, "Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania" (Indiana UP, 2019)
December 02, 2019 09:00 - 57 minutesFocusing on Romania from 1945 to 2016, Emanuela Grama's new book Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania (Indiana University Press, 2019) explores the socialist state's attempt to create its own heritage, as well as the legacy of that project. Contrary to arguments that the socialist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe aimed to erase the pre-war history of the socialist cities, Grama shows that the communist state in Romania sought to exploit the past for its own benef...
R. Cervero, E. Guerra, S. Al, "Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places" (Island Press, 2017)
November 15, 2019 09:00 - 49 minutesBeyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places (Island Press, 2017) by Robert Cervero, Erick Guerra and Stefan Al is about prioritizing the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places. This is as important, if not more important, than expediting movement. A stronger focus on accessibility and place creates better communities, environments, and economies. Rethinking how projects are planned and designed in cities and suburbs needs to occur at multiple geographic sc...
Penelope Plaza Azuaje, “Culture as Renewable Oil: How Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture Coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate" (Routledge, 2018)
November 15, 2019 09:00 - 35 minutesHow do states use cultural policy? In Culture as Renewable Oil: How Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture Coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate (Routledge, 2018), Penelope Plaza Azuaje, a lecturer in architecture at the University of Reading explores the case study of Venezuela to think through the relationship between states, territory, and culture. The book develops the idea of culture as a resource, showing the close relationship between oil and culture, and culture and oil, along with...
Margaret E. Schotte, "Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
November 14, 2019 09:00 - 56 minutesThroughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks, and instruments to teach the new mathematical techniques to sailors. As these experts debated the value of theory and practice, memory and mathematics, they created hybrid models that would have a lasting impact on applied science. In Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns H...
Serin D. Houston, "Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)
November 06, 2019 09:00 - 44 minutesIn Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), the geographer Serin Houston complicates Seattle’s liberal and progressive reputation through a close ethnographic study of its urban governance. She sheds light on the institutional classism and racism and market-orientated thinking that pervades the decisions and practices of environmentalism and economic growth in the city. Houston’s finds three major social values--social justice, sustainability,...
Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing
November 03, 2019 09:00 - 40 minutesAs you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestseller...
David Biggs, "Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam" (U Washington Press, 2018)
October 31, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourBy now we all know that Vietnam is a country, not a war. But how have decades, and even centuries, of war impacted the land of this southeast Asian nation? Professor David Biggs of the University of California, Riverside, specializes in Vietnamese environmental history. In Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes of Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2018) he examines the impacts of warfare in the region around Hue in central Vietnam. Using cutting edge methodology drawn from GIS (grap...
J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
October 24, 2019 08:00 - 32 minutesThe things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for ho...
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, "No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement" (Cornell UP, 2018)
October 08, 2019 08:00 - 39 minutesIn No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Cullen Dunn describes in a very on point and straight forward way how displacement has become a chronic condition for more than 60 million people. Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful practice have been blown apart. No Path Home ...
Humphrey Davies and Lesley Lababid, "A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo" (AU in Cairo Press, 2018)
September 25, 2019 08:00 - 58 minutesGuides have been written to the city of Cairo for generations. Whether they’re for foreigners who’ve come to the city or its residents. However, it might be safe to say thatA Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo (American University of Cairo Press, 2018) is a beast unto itself. It takes the names of streets in Central Cairo and uses them as a basis for its telling of Cairo’s urban history. Structured like a dictionary of sorts, it is the kind of book that can be read cover-to-cove...
Bathsheba Demuth, "Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait" (W. W. Norton, 2019)
September 10, 2019 08:00 - 54 minutesWhales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W. W. Norton, 2019) breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fr...
Laura Alice Watt, "The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore" (U California Press, 2016)
July 16, 2019 08:00 - 1 hour“Wilderness,” “nature,” and their “preservation” are concepts basic to how the National Park Service organizes our relationship to American land. They are also contested concepts, geographer and environmental historian Laura Alice Watt shows in The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore (University of California Press, 2016), and when used as administrative categories they can encourage visions of a static, unpeopled, unworked landscape tha...
Lina del Castillo, "Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia" (U Nebraska Press, 2018)
July 09, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourLina del Castillo’s book explores scientific, geographic, and historiographic inventions in nineteenth-century Colombia. In this fascinating book, well-known figures of Colombia’s history (such as Francisco José de Caldas, and José María Samper) are cast under new light, while unexplored institutions such as the Instituto Caldas and the Colegio Militar are analyzed in-depth and with striking clarity. By bring such wide array of historical actors and institutions, del Castillo provides a nuan...
Genevieve Carpio, "Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race" (U California Press, 2019)
July 08, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourIn her new book, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019), Professor Genevieve Carpio considers tensions around mobility and settlement in the 19th- and 20th-century American West, especially California’s Inland Empire. In this wide-ranging study, the first academic work to draw on the Inland Mexican Heritage archives, Carpio examines policies and forces as disparate as bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic ...
Gregory H. Wolf, "Wrigley Field: The Friendly Confines at Clark and Addison" (SABR, 2019)
June 25, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourWrigley Field is one of a handful of sports stadiums to have transcended its athletic purpose to become a true American landmark. Nestled in its neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, the park may be a throwback to a bygone era of baseball, but a recent renovation has positioned it for a long future. Gregory H. Wolf has edited Wrigley Field: The Friendly Confines at Clark and Addison, a new volume from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Wolf is a professor of German studi...
Matthew Edney, "Cartography: The Ideal and Its History" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
June 25, 2019 08:00 - 59 minutesOver the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include. In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated cat...
Chris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019)
June 24, 2019 08:00 - 51 minutesThere's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madness, Harry Anslinger, and race are brought into the conversation. But a big part of the larger marijuana story is missing. In Chris S. Duvall's new book, The African Roots of Marijuana (Duke University Press, 2019), he tells a distinctly non-American story that nevertheless has important lessons for current debates. Duvall helps us understand cann...
Safet HadžiMuhamedović, "Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape" (Berghahn Books, 2018)
June 05, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourSet in the beautiful, sprawling Field of Gacko in southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, Safet HadžiMuhamedović’s book Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (Berghahn Books, 2018) takes readers through intimate encounters and syncretic moments as he and his interlocutors wait for Elijah’s Day. An annual festival that is shared by Muslims and Christians in the area, Elijah’s Day forms the basis for a “grand chrontope” that imbues time with meaning in the Field. Yet, the d...
Jennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr, "The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements" (U Georgia Press, 2017)
May 29, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourFor most people, geopolitics is something that happens out there, in boardrooms and on battlefields. But critical geographers, and feminist political geographers in particular, have in recent years shown how the geopolitical is something that comes into being in the intimate and the everyday. Enter Jennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr's 2017 book, The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements: Intimate Development, Geopolitics, and the Currency of Gender and Grief (University o...
David Bissell, "Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities" (MIT Press, 2018)
May 20, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourWhat kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (MIT Press, 2018), geographer David Bissell contends that to commute is to enter a highly eventful domain, an atmosphere in which new “capsular collectives” form and reform, opening onto new political and ethical possibilities for being in public. With Sydney, Australia, as its setting, Transit Life d...