New Books in Language
412 episodes - English - Latest episode: 18 days ago - ★★★★ - 19 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Language about their New Books
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Episodes
Allyson Jule, “Speaking Up: Understanding Language and Gender” (Multilingual Matters, 2018)
September 28, 2018 10:00 - 47 minutesIn a time where concepts such as gender pronouns, sexual assault and harassment, and toxic masculinity are entering and shaping public discourse, knowing the ways in which gender and language interact is key. In her new book, Speaking Up: Understanding Language and Gender (Multilingual Matters, 2018), Dr. Allyson Jule describes the ways in which gender and language intersect in various parts of life. Jule examines gender and language in media and technology, education, the workplace, religio...
J. Lester, C. Lochmiller, and R. Gabriel, “Discursive Perspectives on Education Policy and Implementation” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
September 13, 2018 10:00 - 51 minutesThe study of education policy is a scholarly field that sheds light on important debates and controversies revolving around education policy and its implementation. In this episode, we will be talking with three scholars who have made substantial contributions to this field by introducing an innovative perspective to the studies of educational policy—the discursive perspectives. In their new edited volume, Discursive Perspectives on Education Policy and Implementation (Palgrave Macmillan, 201...
Steven Alvarez, “Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies” (SUNY Press, 2018)
August 14, 2018 10:00 - 28 minutesIn this episode, I speak with Steven Alvarez about his book, Brokering Tareas: Mexican Immigrant Families Translanguaging Homework Literacies (SUNY Press, 2017). This book highlights a grassroots literacy mentorship program that connects emerging bilingual and trilingual K-12 students with college students from similar backgrounds. We discuss how New York immigration has changed over the past quarter century, the attributes of effective mentors and support programs, and alternatives to the de...
John H. McWhorter, “The Creole Debate” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
August 14, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourJohn H. McWhorter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written academic books on creole linguistics, including the book we’ll be talking about today, but also a number of popular books on language (including The Power of Babel), and black identity in the United States. He is a regular columnist for several US broadsheets; he’s a two-time TED talker; and he has a weekly podcast dealing with issues related to language called Lexicon Valley ...
Steven Gimbel, “Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy” (Routledge, 2018)
August 06, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourHumor and its varied manifestations—jesting joking around, goofing, lampooning, and so on—pervade the human experience and are plausibly regarded as necessary features of interpersonal interactions. As one would expect, these pervasive phenomena occasion philosophical questions. What renders some item or event humorous? Are funny jokes objectively so? As humor is a mode of interacting with others, can it be deployed irresponsibly? Can it be harmful and impermissible? What is the relatio...
Andrii Danylenko, “From the Bible to Shakespeare: Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819-1897) and the Formation of Literary Ukrainian” (Academic Studies Press, 2016)
June 27, 2018 10:00 - 51 minutesHow does a language develop? What are the factors and processes that shape a language and reflect the changes it undergoes? These seemingly routine questions entail a conversation that involves not only linguistic phenomena, but historical, sociological, and literary issues as well. Andrii Danylenko’s From the Bible to Shakespeare: Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819-1897) and the Formation of Literary Ukrainian (Academic Studies Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of the development of the Uk...
Steven Alvarez, “Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning From Bilingual After-School Programs” (NCTE, 2017)
June 25, 2018 10:00 - 6 minutesIn this episode, I speak with Steven Alvarez about his book, Community Literacies en Confianza: Learning From Bilingual After-School Programs (National Council of Teachers of English, 2017). This book highlights effective bilingual after-school programs and how their models can be applied to the traditional classroom contexts. We discuss the role of relationships and trust in fostering learning as well as emerging Latinx identities in the South. Alvarez recommends the following books for lis...
Ji-Yeon O. Jo, “Homing: An Affective Topography of Ethnic Korean Return Migration” (U Hawaii Press, 2018)
May 31, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourFor anyone with an interest in Korean studies, the study of diaspora and globalization, and indeed in broader questions around transnational identities and encounters in East Asia and beyond, Homing will prove an invaluable text. In it Ji-Yeon Jo, Associate Professor of Korean language and culture at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, weaves together an array of fascinating and often moving personal accounts from members of the longstanding Korean communities in China, the former-...
Rosina Lozano, “An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States” (U California Press, 2018)
May 28, 2018 10:00 - 49 minutesIn An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (University of California Press, 2018), Rosina Lozano details the entangled relationship between language and notions of individual, community, and national belonging in the U.S. Through an innovative analysis of Spanish-language newspapers, territorial and municipal records, federal officials’ correspondence, Senate hearings, election results, and so much more, Dr. Lozano eloquently explains how the Spanish language moved f...
Roderick P. Hart, “Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
May 24, 2018 10:00 - 40 minutesTo find out what Americans really think about their government, University of Texas-Austin Professor Roderick P. Hart read and analyzed approximately 10,000 letters to the editor, from 12 “ordinary” cities, written between 1948 and the present. In Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Hart argues these letter writers are essential because “[c]reating and sustaining a culture of argument at the grassroots level” is what makes “democracy flo...
Ruth G. Millikan, “Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information” (Oxford UP, 2018)
May 15, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourKant famously asked the question, how is knowledge possible? In her new book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruth Garrett Millikan responds to this question from a naturalistic, and specifically evolutionary, perspective. Millikan, who is distinguished professor emerita at the University of Connecticut, has long been a leading figure in theorizing about language and thought. Her latest work considers the “clumpy” world that organi...
Walter N. Hakala, “Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia” (Columbia UP, 2016)
May 02, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourFor many people language is a central characteristic of their social identity. In modern South Asia, the production of Urdu and Hindi as national languages was intricately tied to the hardening of religious identities. South Asian lexicographers, those folks who were most intimately working with language, were at the center of this political realignment. In Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia (Columbia University Press, 2016), Walter N. Hakala, Associat...
Jeanine Kraybill, “Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017)
April 03, 2018 10:00 - 22 minutesIn Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Jeanine Kraybill, assistant professor of political science at Cal State University, Bakersfield, has edited a timely book on the 2016 election. From all accounts, the 2016 election was unusual, and the role of political communication was no different. Using a variety of methods, the chapter authors examine how rhetoric and p...
Daniel J. Kapust, “Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
March 29, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourDaniel Kapust‘s book, Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is a rich and fascinating exploration of political thought through the complex lens of the question or concept of flattery. The book traces this complicated concept through both many of the “expected” writers and thinkers in the western political theory canon while also integrating some unexpected thinkers. Kapust positions many of these thinkers in encounters with e...
Cynthia Baker, “Jew” (Rutgers UP, 2017)
March 07, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourWhat is the significance of Jew? How has this word come to have such varied and charged meanings? Who has (and has not) used it, and why? Cynthia Baker explores these questions and more in her new book Jew, part of the “Key Words in Jewish Studies” series at Rutgers University Press. In a set of absorbing case studies, Baker tracks the history of the word Jew from antiquity to the present. Among other topics, she writes about the debates concerning the terms Jews, Ioudaioi, and Judeans; the ...
Kathryn Woolard, “Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia” (Oxford UP, 2016)
March 06, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourKathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic situation in Catalonia, including the present book Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia (Oxford University Press, 2016) which won the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize. Bringing together two of her longstanding areas ...
Karen Neander, “A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics” (MIT Press, 2017)
February 15, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourThe two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the problem of how we can have thoughts and perceptions that about other things for example, a thought about a tree, or a perception of a tree. How can mental states be about other things? A naturalistic theory of intentionality is one that explains intentionality using just those resources available from the natural sciences, such as causal relationsh...
Public Debate and Respectful Engagement with John Corvino
January 25, 2018 09:00 - 27 minutesJohn Corvino is Professor of Philosophy at the Wayne State University in Detroit. His academic work focuses on topics in moral, social, and legal philosophy surrounding sexuality, gender, marriage, religious conviction, and discrimination. But John is also an active public philosopher who frequently participates in public debates over these topics. He produces and appears in a popular YouTube series of short videos devoted to the philosophical discussion of controversial topics. He is the aut...
Testimony and Anonymity with Sandy Goldberg
December 28, 2017 09:00 - 28 minutesSandy Goldberg is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He specializes in epistemology and philosophy of language, with particular interest in the social aspects of knowledge and speech; these foci converge in his ongoing work on testimony. Sandy has written several books including Relying on Others (Oxford 2010) and, more recently, Assertion (Oxford 2015); his forthcoming book is titled To the Best of Our Knowledge, and is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. The "Why We A...
Mario Luis Small, “Someone to Talk To” (Oxford UP, 2017)
December 19, 2017 11:00 - 56 minutesWho do people turn to when they want to talk about serious issues in their life? Do they end up confiding in people they list as confidants? In his new book, Someone to Talk To (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mario Luis Small uses in-depth interviews with first-year graduate students to uncover how intimate conversations are executed in real time. This book is interesting in the way that the interviews unfold; readers will find themselves nodding in agreement and thinking about social networ...
Sarah Rivett, “Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation” (Oxford UP, 2017)
November 27, 2017 11:00 - 52 minutesIn Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (Oxford University Press, 2017), Princeton University English Associate Professor Sarah Rivett studies how colonists in North America struggled to understand, translate, and interpret Native American languages, and the significance of these languages for theological and cosmological issues such as the origins of Amerindian populations, their relationship to Eurasian and Biblical peoples, and the origins of langua...
Ian Brodie, “A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy” (UP of Mississippi, 2014).
November 20, 2017 17:09 - 50 minutesIn A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy (The University Press of Mississippi, 2014), Ian Brodie, an associate professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, brings a folkloristic approach to the study of stand-up comedy. By focusing on comedic performance, Brodie shows stand-up comedy to be a collaborative act between comedian and audience similar to folk performance around the world, even as mediatization sees professional comedians transcend the initial performance to reach mas...
Stephanie Brookes, “Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australia’s Identity Anxiety” (Anthem Press, 2017)
November 12, 2017 11:00 - 19 minutesIn her new book, Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australia’s Identity Anxiety (Anthem Press, 2017), Stephanie Brookes, a Lecturer in Journalism at Monash University, explores the power of election campaign language to offer a window into the Australian national mood and national identity. Using a variety of political and media sources, including speeches, interviews, press conferences, and debates, Brookes investigates how campaign communication can help us understand Australia’s ident...
Michael Flier and Andrea Graziosi, eds. “The Battle for Ukrainian: A Comparative Perspective” (Harvard UP, 2017)
November 11, 2017 11:00 - 39 minutesLanguage is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individual’s awareness of self and other. However, language is also a tool for and of ideological battles, shaping states and nations. A multifaceted nature of language is emphasized and explored in an interdisciplinary collection of articles The Battle for Ukrainian: A Comparative Perspective (Harvard University Press/Ukrainian Research Institute, 2017), edited ...
Kristian Petersen, “Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab” (Oxford UP, 2017)
November 10, 2017 17:00 - 41 minutesIn his monumental new book, Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Language, and Scripture in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017), Kristian Petersen, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the layers and complexities of Sino-Muslim intellectual and social history. On the way readers meet the major scholars and texts that played a formative role in the development of the Han Kitab tradit...
Free Speech and Free Thinking with Seana Shiffrin
October 19, 2017 08:00 - 29 minutesSeana Shiffrin is Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at UCLA. She defends the “thinker theory” of freedom of speech, which holds that a central reason for upholding a moral and legal system of free speech is that such a system is necessary for free thought and reflective action. This view is articulated in her book, Speech Matters:On Lying, Morality, and the Law (Princeton 2014). The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at th...
Bruce B. Lawrence, “The Koran in English: A Biography” (Princeton UP, 2017)
October 16, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourAs the basis for a major world religion, the Qur’an is one of the most influential books of all time. But when it first appeared, the Qur’an was in Arabic. Most Muslims today are not native-Arabic speakers. Bruce B. Lawrence deals with this issue of translation and more by specifically focusing on the Qur’an (or the Koran) in English in the aptly titled The Koran in English: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2017). He goes back to the earliest English translations, which he terms the “...
Alessandro Duranti, “The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others” (Cambridge UP, 2015)
September 26, 2017 13:35 - 1 hourAlessandro Duranti is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, where he served as Dean of Social Sciences from 2009-2016. In his book The Anthropology of Intentions: Language in a World of Others (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Duranti explores the relevance of intentions in making sense of what others say reflecting the range of his intellectual curiosity: from analytic and continental philosophical foundations of the concept of intentionality to political discourse in Samoa and ...
Karmen MacKendrick, “The Matter of Voice: Sensual Soundings” (Fordham UP, 2016)
August 19, 2017 14:40 - 49 minutesPhilosophers have long tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. But voices resonate among bodies and texts; they are singular, as unique as fingerprints, but irreducibly collective too. They are material, somatic, and musical. Voices also give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstraction, essential to sense yet in excess of it. They complicate the logos of the beginning and emphasize the enfleshing of all word...
Good & Bad Arguments with Trudy Govier
June 28, 2017 08:00 - 28 minutesTrudy Govier is Emerita Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Her research is focused on the nature of argumentation and questions concerning social trust, forgiveness, and reconciliation. She is also the author of a highly influential informal logic text, A Practical Study of Argument (7th edition, Cengage), as well as Forgiveness and Revenge (Routledge 2002) and Victims and Victimhood (Broadview 2015). The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Huma...
Kees van Deemter, “Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive Science” (MIT Press, 2016)
June 22, 2017 21:46 - 54 minutesSometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities we want to talk about, such as “Mary”, or “that guy over there” – falls into this category, but is no longer just a matter for the philosophers; it’s complicated enough to require highly interdisciplinary explanation. In his book, Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive Science (MI...
Sarah Ruden, “The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible” (Pantheon, 2017)
May 17, 2017 20:51 - 1 hourOn this program, we talk to Sarah Ruden about her new book, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017). Novelist J. M. Coetzee praised the book, saying, “If you seriously want to know what the Bible says but don’t have the time or the courage to master Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek, then Sarah Ruden is the best guide you are likely to find: friendly, informal, yet with a scholarly grasp of just how unrealizable perfect translation is.” Sarah Ruden ho...
Lewis Glinert, “The Story of Hebrew” (Princeton UP, 2017)
April 11, 2017 14:40 - 34 minutesFor this episode, New Books in Jewish Studies interviews Lewis Glinert, Professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth College, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Linguistics. His book, The Story of Hebrew (Princeton University Press, 2017), can be defined as a biography of Hebrew language that spans Millenia. The book includes a chronological description of the use and perception of Hebrew in different communities across the world, addressing questions related to the ways in which He...
Free Speech Matters with Robert George
April 05, 2017 08:00 - 31 minutesThe ‘ideological odd couple’ of Robert George and Cornel West jointly authored a statement defending free speech on campus and elsewhere. Find out why. Robert George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and the founding director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. His research focuses on issues in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Hum...
Audrey Truschke, “Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court” (Columbia UP, 2016)
April 03, 2017 10:00 - 51 minutesContemporary scholarship on the Mughal empire has generally ignored the role Sanskrit played in imperial political and literary projects. However, in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (Columbia University Press, 2016), Audrey Truschke, Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University–Newark, demonstrates that Sanskrit was central to the process of royal self-definition. She documents how Brahman and Jain intellectuals were working closely with Persian-speakin...
Telesphore Ngarambe, “Practical Challenges in Customary Law Translation: The Case of Rwanda’s Gacaca Law” (OSSREA, 2015)
February 06, 2017 15:05 - 1 hourThe unprecedented crime of the 1994 Rwandan genocide demanded an unconventional legal response. After failed attempts by the international legal system to efficiently handle legal cases stemming from the genocide, Rwandans decided to take matters into their own hands and reinstate Gacaca law, which had been the sole legal system in Rwanda prior to colonization. Gacaca, a Kinyarwanda word referring to a type of grass or traditional lawn, is also a metonym for place and mediation. Gacaca law a...
Dovid Katz, “Yiddish and Power” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
January 18, 2017 23:51 - 53 minutesAs described by Dovid Katz, Yiddish is an extraordinarily multifaceted language: a language that is at once acclaimed as sacred and dismissed as deficient, profoundly connected to centuries of religious and cultural history yet marketed superficially, held to be dying out yet booming at an unprecedented rate. Yiddish and Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) charts the fascinating, complex course of the language, and discusses its development, spread, displacement, and how it has been threatened b...
Matthew Pauly, “Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014)
November 15, 2016 11:30 - 1 hourMatthew Pauly’s Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (University of Toronto Press, 2014) offers a detailed investigation of the language policy–officially termed Ukrainization–that was introduced in Ukraine during the formative years of the Soviet Union. Out of a massive amount of archival records and documents, Pauly reconstructs a complex and controversial process that happened to have significant consequences for the subsequent decades. In his r...
Jennifer Glaser, “Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination” (Rutgers UP, 2016)
November 07, 2016 11:10 - 25 minutesIn Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Jennifer Glaser, Associate Professor of English and comparative literature and an affiliate faculty member in Judaic studies and womens, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction. She offers a nuanced analysis of this practice of Jewish writers speaking for or as other...
Sali Tagliamonte, “Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
September 26, 2016 18:39 - 57 minutesTeenagers get a lot of bad press. Whether it’s how they look, how they dress, the things they say, the way they say it – it sometimes seems as if they can’t get anything right. And when it comes to language, it’s clear that teenagers are special. But though anecdotal evidence abounds, just how special, and in what ways, has rarely been the subject of detailed empirical research. Sali Tagliamonte’s book Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first ste...
Ellen Mayock, “Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
September 13, 2016 21:11 - 1 hourRecent controversies surrounding sexual harassment and assault on college campuses have sparked heated discussions surrounding the everyday experiences of women on college campuses. Female students and faculty members have often felt at odds with their institutions and other members of their workplaces when sexual harassment and assault enter the work environment. What is one to do when experiencing gender-based discrimination in the academic workplace? Ellen Mayock in her recent book Gender ...
Ingrid Piller, “Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics” (Oxford UP, 2016)
August 03, 2016 15:35 - 59 minutesAccording to the blurb, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2016) “explores the ways in which linguistic diversity mediates social justice in liberal democracies.” This is true, but tends to understate the force of the arguments being put forward here. Ingrid Piller presents a powerful case for how language is variously overlooked or misunderstood as a factor that entrenches disadvantage and inequality in a globalized ...
Simon Critchley, “ABC of Impossibility” (Univocal Publishing, 2015)
March 07, 2016 14:42 - 1 hourFrom its opening fragment on “Fragments” to its “Possibly dolorous tropical lyrical coda,” Simon Critchley‘s new book is a pleasure to hold in the hand and the mind. ABC of Impossibility (Univocal Publishing, 2015) is a collection of fragments and a catalog of “impossible objects”: poetry, America, emptiness, indirection, money, and more. Thoughts and jokes and quotes and small essays ranging from one line to several pages are arranged in a sequence that plays with unusual juxtapositions and...
Prakash Mondal, “Language, Mind and Computation” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)
February 17, 2016 11:19 - 55 minutesMy instinct as a researcher is usually to shy away from confrontation about foundational issues in the philosophy of language, which is probably why I do what I do (that is to say, from a generative perspective, not linguistics). With a few notable exceptions, it’s my impression that researchers tend either to keep quiet about their skepticism about some foundational matters, or to gravitate towards fields in which those issues are moot. In this respect,Prakash Mondal‘s approach inLanguage, M...
Aviya Kushner, “The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible” (Spiegel and Grau, 2015)
February 16, 2016 13:58 - 58 minutesAviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart–and was later surprised when, while getting her MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class on the Bible and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. From differences in the Ten Commandments to a less ambiguous reading of the creation...
Kenneth L. Marcus, “The Definition of Anti-Semitism” (Oxford UP, 2015)
November 12, 2015 12:44 - 33 minutesIn The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press, 2015), Kenneth L. Marcus, the President and General Counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, explains what it is at stake in how we define anti-Semitism. “Nowadays virtually everyone is opposed to anti-Semitism although no one agrees about what it means to be anti-Semitic,” Marcus writes (p. 11). Marcus discusses the global rise in anti-Semitism; in the United States, Marcus tells us, college campuses are...
Geoffrey Sampson, “Writing Systems” (Equinox, 2015)
November 08, 2015 20:24 - 55 minutesIt’s not always been clear how the study of written language fits into linguistics. As a relatively recent historical development, it’s tempting to see it as a sideshow in terms of questions about the innateness of language. But at the same time, humans’ aptitude for literacy seems remarkable and could be said to merit study in its own right as a window into the mind. It’s easy to enjoy Geoffrey Sampson‘s Writing Systems, 2nd edition (Equinox, 2015) without getting into these questions, beca...
Kate Pahl, “Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited” (Bloomsbury, 2014)
October 06, 2015 13:46 - 37 minutesLiterary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl‘s Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2014) challenges these assumptions by showing the varieties of literary practice in Rotherham, England. The book engages with the locally particular to draw out a variety of general findings, relevant to methodological reflection and material culture debates. The book draws on a wealth of projects fr...
Liora R. Halperin, “Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948” (Yale UP, 2014)
September 10, 2015 13:35 - 32 minutesIn Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale University Press, 2015), Liora R. Halperin, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that multilingualism persisted in Palestine after World War I despite the traditional narrative of the swift victory of Hebrew. Halperin looks at the intertwined nature of language, identity, and nationalism, and how language was...
Chad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind” (MIT Press, 2015)
August 14, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourHow do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015). Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing o...