New Books in Language
412 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★ - 19 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Language about their New Books
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Episodes
Jeffrey Shandler, "Yiddish: Biography of a Language" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 22, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. In Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jeffrey Shandler presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the pre...
Gert-Jan van der Heiden, "The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony" (SUNY Press, 2020)
March 18, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, I interview Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University in Amsterdam, about his book, The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony, recently published by SUNY Press. In the book, van der Heiden takes up the question of testimony, which is popular in philosophical discourses today—from analytic epistemological approaches to those that emerge from critical race and feminist theory. While important advances...
Stephen Pihlaja, "Talk about Faith: How Debate and Conversation Shape Belief" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
March 16, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourReligious people have a range of new media in which they can share their beliefs and reflect on what it means to believe, to act, and to be members of their religious communities. In Talk about Faith: How Debate and Conversation Shape Belief (Cambridge UP, 2021), Stephen Pihlaja investigates how Christians and Muslims interact with each other through debates broadcast online, podcasts, and YouTube videos. He explores the way in which they present themselves and their faiths and how they situa...
Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr, "What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification, and Place-Making in Brooklyn" (Vanderbilt UP, 2020)
March 01, 2021 03:00 - 1 hourTwo stores sit side-by-side. One with signage overflowing with text: a full list of business services (income tax returns, notary public, a variety of insurance) on the storefront, twenty-two words in all. It provides business services (a lot of them). The other showing a single word—james—in small font in the corner of a drab, brown-colored overhanging sign. It’s a restaurant (obviously). Such a juxtaposition has become increasingly common in gentrifying neighborhoods, revealing more than ju...
Writing in Disciplines: A Discussion with Shyam Sharma
February 24, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University. We talk about how mutually appreciative attitudes advance Writing in the Disciplines, about how other languages matter to writing in English, and about how US Presidents have changed the ways we teach writing and learn to write. Interviewer: "Where does language come in to the sort of writing development called Writing Studies or Engl...
I. Stavans and J. Lambert, "How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish" (Restless Books, 2020)
February 23, 2021 04:00 - 48 minutesIs it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, entitled How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (Restless Books, 2020), and edited by Il...
Leon S. Brenner, "The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
February 17, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourLeon Brenner's The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) makes a forceful case for the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the understanding and treatment of autism. Refusing both cognitive and identitarian approaches to the topic, Brenner rigorously theorizes autism as a unique mode of subjectivity and relation to language that sits alongside the classical Freudian structures of psychosis, neurosis, and perversion. In this interview, Brenner dispels mi...
Wesley C. Robertson, "Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese" (Routledge, 2020)
January 29, 2021 09:00 - 56 minutesImagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language variants influence interpretation of language acts/users have focused on variation in speech. But it is important to remember that specific ways of representing a language are also often perceived as linked to specific social actors. Nowhere is this fact more relevant than in written Japanese, where...
Daniel Oberhaus, "Extraterrestrial Languages" (MIT Press, 2019)
January 06, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesIn Extraterrestrial Languages (MIT Press 2020), Daniel Oberhaus tells the history of human efforts to talk to aliens, but in doing so, the book reflects on the relationship between communication and cognition, the metaphysics of mathematics, about whether dolphins have a language, and more. The challenge of communicating with extraterrestrials forces scientists and linguists to consider a range of problems. Would these listeners recognize radio signals as linguistic? How would they decode and...
Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts, "Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging" (MIT Press, 2019)
January 05, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourEveryone ages, and just about everyone uses language, making Changing Minds: How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging (MIT Press, 2019) a book with practically universal relevance. The authors, Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts, show readers what cognitive science can tell us—and what it can’t—about the relationship between aging and language. Through accounts of research written for a general audience, Kreuz and Roberts explain how underlying cognitive functions, such as memor...
Regina Rini, "The Ethics of Microaggression" (Routledge, 2020)
January 04, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourSeemingly fleeting and barely legible insults, slights, and derogations might seem morally insignificant. They’re the byproducts of ordinary thoughtlessness and insensitivity; moreover, insofar as they inflict harm at all, the harm seems miniscule – hurt feelings, disappointment, annoyance, momentary frustration. Aren’t such things as insults and put-downs in the eye of the beholder, anyway? Surely, there are bigger fish to fry. In The Ethics of Microaggression (Routledge 2021), Regina Rini t...
Catharine Abell, "Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis" (Oxford UP, 2020)
December 04, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2020), Catharine Abell draws our attention to the character of Emma Woodhouse. She is handsome, clever, and rich. Or, at least, that's what Jane Austen writes about her in her fictional novel Emma. But why should we consider this a work of fiction, if it says true things about 19th century England? And if it's a fiction, how should we understand and interpret its content? Do we need to know what Austen intended to understand what ...
Leigh Thompson, "Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table" (HarperCollins, 2020)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 37 minutesLeigh Thompson is a Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. An acclaimed researcher, author, and speaker, she has developed several online and in-person courses on negotiation, leading teams, creativity, and virtual collaboration. Leigh is a best-selling author of 10 books including Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table (HarperCollins, 2020). This episode covers why dividing the pie and suppo...
J. S. Sutton and M. L. Mifsud, "A Revolution in Tropes: Alloiostrophic Rhetoric" (Lexington Books, 2015)
November 24, 2020 09:00 - 58 minutesAristotle, the co-called father of rhetoric, supposedly conceptualized his theory of persuasion as a means of bringing meaning to rest. But what if there’s another story, one in which forgotten tropes such as alloiosis turn rhetoric toward the flux and difference? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) Drs. Jane Sutton and Mari Lee Mifsud about how our classical conceptions of stylistic language may be more open opening to otherness than stabilizing meaning. A Revoluti...
Marco Ferrante, "Indian Perspectives on Consciousness, Language and Self" (Routledge, 2020)
November 24, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourFor many Indian philosophers, language is inextricably tied up with conceptualization. In Indian Perspectives on Consciousness, Language and Self (Routledge, 2020), Marco Ferrante shows how a set of tenth century philosophers living in Kashmir argue for the existence of a self on the basis of the interrelationship between linguistic concepts and mental experience, against the criticism of Buddhists. In his examination of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, famous for their membership in the "school...
Rosanne Carlo, "Transforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing" (Utah State UP, 2020)
October 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourTransforming Ethos: Place and the Material in Rhetoric and Writing (Utah State UP, 2020) approaches writing studies from the rhetorical flank, the flank which, for many, is the only flank the discipline has. However, at a time when universities are optimizing structurally and streamlining pedagogically, the book must plead the case for a university where character is formed. Now that writing studies has shouldered up to its other disciplinary and institutional neighbors, composition instructo...
Coulter George, "How Dead Languages Work" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAfter reading How Dead Languages Work (Oxford University Press 2020), Coulter George hopes you might decide to learn a bit of ancient Greek or Sanskrit, or maybe dabble in a bit of Old Germanic. But even if readers of his book aren’t converted into polyglots, they will walk away with an introduction to the (in)famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is responsible for the inaccurate meme claiming that Inuits understand snow more deeply than other cultures because their language has one hundred (...
Gregory Forth, "A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019)
October 23, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesGregory Forth, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Alberta and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has studied the Nage people of the eastern Indonesian island of Flores for more than three decades. In A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019), he focuses on how the Nage understand metaphor and how their knowledge of animals has helped to shape specific expressions. Based on extensive field research,...
Chris Heffer, "All Bullshit and Lies?: Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe implied answer to the titular question of All Bullshit and Lies? (Oxford University Press 2020) is no, it’s not. In this book, subtitled Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness, Chris Heffer argues that to analyze untruthfulness, we need a framework which goes beyond these two kinds of speech acts, bullshitting and lying. With his TRUST framework (Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text), Heffer analyzes untruthfulness which includes irresponsible attitudes...
EQ Spotlight Special: Roundtable on the 2020 Presidential Race
October 02, 2020 08:00 - 51 minutesWhat are we to make of the year’s first presidential debate? Listen in as John R. Hibbing, Jonathan Weiler and I discuss this question and others surrounding the 2020 presidential race. Hibbing is a Foundation Regents University Professor of political history and psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He’s been a Guggenheim Fellow, a NATO Fellow and a Senior Fulbright Fellow. He is the author of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (Routled...
Sarah Shulist, "Transforming Indigenity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon" (U Toronto Press, 2018)
September 22, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesTransforming Indigenity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon (University of Toronto Press) examines the role that language revitalization efforts play in cultural politics in the small city of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, located in the Brazilian Amazon. Sarah Shulist concentrates on how debates, discussions, and practices aimed at providing support for the Indigenous languages of the region shed light on issues of language revitalization and on the meaning of Indige...
Katherine Kinzler, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesWe gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender shape our social identities, and thus who we perceive as "like us" or "not like us". But one overlooked factor can be even more powerful: the way we speak. As the pioneering psychologist Katherine Kinzler reveals in How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the way we talk is central to our social identity because our speech largely reflects the voices we ...
B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, "Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat do all these have in common: Disneyland and the Dreamtime, the shopping mall and the planned economy, Chomsky's Syntactic Structures and Halliday's Functional Grammar, Unicode and door handles? All mean something. The companion volumes Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge University Press) and Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge University Press), by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, are abou...
Marco Puleri, "Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics" (Peter Lang, 2020)
September 02, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesMarco Puleri’s Ukrainian, Russophone, (Other) Russian: Hybrid Identities and Narratives in Post-Soviet Culture and Politics (Peter Lang, 2020) examines a complex process of identity formation in the context of exposure to a diversity of linguistic and cultural influences. Puleri zeroes in on contemporary Ukraine to explore the specificities of cultural overlapping and the power it exercises on the individual’s construction of self. As the title prompts, the emphasis is made on hybrid identiti...
Alessandro Graheli, "The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
September 01, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourhe Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy of Language (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) spans over two thousand years of inquiry into language in the Indian subcontinent. Edited by Alessandro Graheli, project leader in the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia at the Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna, Austria, the volume focuses on speech units, word meanings, sentence meanings, and implicatures and figurative meanings. He chose the anthology’s divisions, inspired...
Beata Stawarska, "Saussure’s Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology: 'The Course in General Linguistics' after a Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
August 20, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Saussure’s Linguistics, Structuralism, and Phenomenology: The Course in General Linguistics after a Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Beata Stawarska guides us to consider Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics anew. By delving into Saussure’s autograph notes, letters, and student lecture notes Stawarska reframes all of the hierarchical pairs promoted as part of his doctrine—the signifier and the signified, la langue and la parole, synchrony and diachrony. The book perform...
Allison L. Rowland, "Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood" (Ohio State UP, 2020)
August 19, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe way that we talk about living beings can raise or lower their perceived value. On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Allison L. Rowland (s) about zoetropes and zoerhetorics or ways of talking about living beings that promote (#blacklivesmatter) or demote (“collateral damage”) lives and groups of lives. Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood (Ohio State University Press, 2020)looks at a variety of these zoerhetorics and the zoetropes or rhetorical d...
Nate Marshall, "Finna: Poems" (One World, 2020)
August 11, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesIn Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confro...
David Tavárez, "Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America" (U Colorado Press, 2017)
August 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourProfessor David Tavárez’s edited volume, Words & Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2017), is a collection of eleven essays from historians and anthropologists grappling with the big questions of the Christianization of Mexico after the Spanish Conquest and using sources in several indigenous languages. The collaborators explore the “quilt” of “vibrant and definitely local Christianities” (in the plural) formed by ...
Linda Goddard, "Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin" (Yale UP, 2019)
July 31, 2020 08:00 - 53 minutesIn Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin (Yale University Press, 2019), Linda Goddard investigates the role that Paul Gauguin’s writings played in his artistic practice and in his negotiation of his colonial identity. As a French artist who lived in Polynesia, Gauguin occupies a crucial position in histories of European primitivism, but this is the first book to be devoted to his wide-ranging literary output, including his journalism, travel writing, art criticism, and essays on aestheti...
Pritipuspa Mishra, "Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1953" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
July 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe province of Odisha, previously “Orissa,” was the first linguistically organized province of India. In Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1953 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Pritipuspa Mishra explores how the idea of the vernacular has a double effect, serving as a means for exclusion and inclusion. She argues that while regional linguistic nationalism enabled nationalism’s growth, it also enabled the exclusion of groups su...
Pritipuspa Mishra, "Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1953" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe province of Odisha, previously “Orissa,” was the first linguistically organized province of India. In Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803-1953 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Pritipuspa Mishra explores how the idea of the vernacular has a double effect, serving as a means for exclusion and inclusion. She argues that while regional linguistic nationalism enabled nationalism’s growth, it also enabled the exclusion of groups su...
Johannes Bronkhorst, "A Śabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought" (Columbia UP, 2019)
July 17, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn A Śabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought (Columbia University Press, 2019), Johannes Bronkhorst, emeritus professor at the University of Lausanne, makes the case through an extensive introduction and select translations of important Indian texts that language has a crucial role in Indian thought. Not only does it form the subject of inquiry for grammarians, philosophers, and aestheticians, but it forms the background for the religious and cultural world which informs these inve...
Brian F. Harrison, "A Change is Gonna Come: How to Have Effective Political Conversations in a Divided America" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 16, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesThe United States takes pride in its democratic model and the idea that citizens deliberate in a process to form political opinions. However, in recent years, division and partisanship have increased while deliberation and the actual discussion of competing ideas have decreased. More and more, citizens are siloed, interacting only with those with whom they agree, and there is more negative animus directed at the opposition. In his new book, A Change is Gonna Come: How to Have Effective Politi...
Melissa K. Merry, "Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
July 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIf gun violence kills so many Americans, why don’t we see more effective solutions? How much does the way we frame an issue impact how we feel about it? How often are hot button issues deeply polarized due to the biased or intentionally manipulated ways they are presented to the public? In Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Melissa K. Merry (Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Louisville) applies these questions...
Gina Anne Tam, "Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860-1960" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
July 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe question of how a state decides what its official language is going to be, or indeed whether it even needs one, is never simple, and this may be particularly true of China which covers a continental landmass encompassing multitude of different language families and groups. Indeed, what is even meant by “Chinese” is unclear when one considers the huge range of related but mutually unintelligible linguistic varieties – from Cantonese to Shanghainese and many other lesser known ones. The sto...
Ruth Leys, "The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique" (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
July 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Ruth Leys (she/hers), Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, on The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2017). In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well. Yet, surprisingly, there is still no consensus on their...
Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, "Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 01, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourCollege courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a decent and stable society possible is that we uphold standards of conduct. We call out bad behavior, blame wrongdoers, and praise those who do the right things. We apologize and forgive in public ways. In short, we hold one another responsible. Again, this is all necessary. However, we are all fam...
D. Conley and J. Eckstein, "Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production" (U Alabama Press, 2020)
June 30, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesOn this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews editors Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein about their new book Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production (University of Alabama Press, 2020), which explores the rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries. Cookery explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The essays in this volum...
David R. Grimes, "The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World" (Simon and Schuster, 2019)
June 11, 2020 08:00 - 42 minutesWhat are some of the prevalent ways in which we lie to ourselves and limit our flexibility? Today I discussed this and other questions with David R. Grimes, the author of The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World (Simon & Schuster, 2019). Grimes is a cancer researcher, physicist, and writer. He contributes to media outlets such as PBS, the BBC, the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the New York Times. This is his first book. Topics co...
Luke Winslow, "American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights, and the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump" (Ohio State UP, 2020)
June 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode of the New Books Network, Lee M Pierce (s/t) interviews Luke Winslow of Baylor University on the book Luke Winslow, American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights, and the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump (Ohio State University Press, 2020), which offers a fresh, provocative, and insightful contribution to our most pressing social challenges by taking an orientation toward catastrophe. On the face of things, argues Winslow, most of us would agree that catastrophe ...
Jay Timothy Dolmage, "Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race" (OSU Press, 2018)
June 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Jay Timothy Dolmage of the University of Waterloo on the new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2018), a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century. In North America, immigration has never been about im...
Shiu-Yin Sharon Yam, "Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship" (Ohio State UP, 2019)
June 03, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t interviews Shiu-Yin Sharon Yam of University of Kentucky on the new book, Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Ohio State University Press, 2019), which explores how intersecting networks of power—particularly race and ethnicity, gender, and social class—marginalize transnational subjects who find themselves outside a dominant citizenship that privileges familiarity and socioeconomic and racia...
Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)
June 02, 2020 08:00 - 2 hoursBrian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until t...
A. M. Ruppel, "Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit" (Cambridge UP, 2017)
May 27, 2020 17:17 - 1 hourIn this podcast, we interview Dr. Antonia Ruppel about Sanskrit Studies. Dr. Ruppel is the author the Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and also teaches online Sanskrit courses at Yogic Studies. Ideal for courses in beginning Sanskrit or self-study, this textbook employs modern, tried-and-tested pedagogical methods and tools, but requires no prior knowledge of ancient languages or linguistics. Devanāgarī script is introduced over several chapters and used i...
Jennifer Mercieca, "Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump" (Texas A&M UP, 2020)
May 27, 2020 08:00 - 54 minutesPolarization, a disaffected and frustrated electorate, and widespread distrust of government, media, and traditional politicians set the stage in 2016 for an unprecedented presidential contest. For many, Donald Trump’s campaign speeches and other rhetoric seemed on the surface to be simplistic, repetitive, and disorganized. In Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump (Texas A&M University Press, 2020), Jennifer Mercieca shows that Trump’s rhetoric was anything but. As a ...
Thomas A. Discenna, "Discourses of Denial: The Rhetoric of American Academic Labor" (Routledge, 2017)
May 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (they/she) interviews Thomas A. Discenna of Oakland University about the myriad ways that the labor of those employed by universities is situated as somehow distinct from ordinary labor. Focusing on a variety of sites where academic labor is discursively constructed in popular consciousness including among the professoriate itself, its critics and detractors, the unionization struggles of graduate students, the invisibility of contingent ac...
Diana Senechal, "Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018)
May 25, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Diana Senechal examines words, concepts, and phrases that demand reappraisal. Targeting a variety of terms, the author contends that a “good fit” may not always be desirable; delivers a takedown of the adjective “toxic”; and argues that “social justice” must take its place among other justices. This book also includes a critique of our modern emphasis on quick answers and immedia...
James M. Jasper, "Public Characters: The Politics of Reputation and Blame" (Oxford UP, 2020)
May 22, 2020 08:00 - 44 minutesDid Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency in 2016 because he was a master of character work – able to sum up opponents in pithy epithets that encourage the public to see them as weak or immoral? What is character work and how do characters with roots in ancient crease help us understand 21st-century politics? While many scholars of politics focus on plots, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young and Elke Zuern encourage us to look at the characters – particularly the simplified packaging of the inte...
E. Michele Ramsey, "Major Decisions: College, Career, and the Case for the Humanities" (U Penn Press, 2019)
May 13, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews E. Michele Ramsey of PennState Berks on Major Decisions: College, Career, and the Case for the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), a robust defense of Communication and the Humanities as disciplines of study. Major Decisions is a breathtaking work of research that proves the values and skills taught in humanities disciplines are exactly those needed in the 21st century. Despite the persistence of the m...