New Books in Photography
127 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with Photographers and Scholars of Photography about their New Books
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Episodes
Molly Thomasy Blasing, "Snapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture" (Cornell UP, 2021)
November 23, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesSnapshots of the Soul: Photo-Poetic Encounters in Modern Russian Culture (Cornell UP, 2021) considers how photography has shaped Russian poetry from the early twentieth century to the present day. Drawing on theories of the lyric and the elegy, the social history of technology, and little-known archival materials, Molly Thomasy Blasing offers close readings of poems by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Bella Akhmadulina, as well as by the late and post-Soviet poets Andrei...
Rebecca L. Stein, "Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2021)
October 20, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bystanders and police. Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (Stanford UP, 2021) studies this phenomenon from the vantage point of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Here, cameras have proliferated as political tools in the hands of a broad range of actors and institutions, including Palestinian activists, I...
Mark Beehre, "A Queer Existence: The Lives of Young Gay Men in Aotearoa New Zealand" (Massey University, 2021)
October 13, 2021 08:00 - 54 minutesToday I talk to Mark Beehre about his new book, A Queer Existence, published by Massey University Press New Zealand 2021. A Queer Existence is a major documentary project that uses photographic portraiture and oral history to record the life experiences of a group of twenty-seven gay men born since the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986. In New Zealand, discrimination in work was outlawed in 1993, same-sex relationships were granted legal recognition in 2005, and marriage equali...
Deborah Willis, "The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship" (NYU Press, 2021)
July 21, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourPhotography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University Press, 2021) contains rarely seen letters and diary notes from Black men and women and photographs of Black soldi...
Nadya Bair, "The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market" (U California Press, 2020)
July 20, 2021 08:00 - 40 minutesThe legendary Magnum photo agency has long been associated with heroic lone wolf male photographers such as Frank Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, roaming the world in search of the “decisive moment” – the perfect shot that captured the essence of a major news story. Nadya Bair’s highly original book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press 2020) argues that this idealized portrayal of Magnum occludes the larger networks within which thes...
Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, "Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
July 20, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIt’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by re...
Lisa Z. Sigel, "The People's Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America" (Reaktion Books, 2020)
June 18, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThe People's Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America (Reaktion Books, 2020) is a beautifully written and groundbreaking historical study of homemade, handmade and amateur pornographic artifacts. Covering everything from erotic scrimshaw to amateur videos on the web, Lisa Sigel offers a fascinating account of what ordinary people thought about sexuality and desire. This hidden chapter of American sexual history is not only a much-needed counterbalance to ahistorical arguments which ...
Jessica Helfand, "Face: A Visual Odyssey" (MIT Press, 2019)
June 17, 2021 08:00 - 35 minutesToday I talked to Jessica Helfand about her new book Face: A Visual Odyssey (MIT Press, 2019) Helfand is a designer, artist, and author. She’s taught at Yale University for more than 20 years, cofounded Design Observer, and has had additional roles at a variety of institutions ranging from the American Academy in Rome to the California Institute of Technology. We’ve always visited churches and museums to gaze at faces. So what’s now changed? Today, about two billion images get uploaded daily ...
Photography and Human Rights in Thailand: A Discussion with Karin Zackari
June 11, 2021 08:00 - 26 minutesWhat do startling photographic images of state violence from events such as the 6 October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University tell us about the nature of human rights in Thailand? In conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo, Karin Zackari of Lund University discusses some of the key themes that emerge from her doctoral thesis, the first study to view egregious episodes of human rights violations in Thailand through a photographic lens. Karin talks about some of the iconic images she s...
Cara A. Finnegan, "Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
June 02, 2021 08:00 - 54 minutesDefining the Chief Executive via flash powder and selfie sticks. In this episode, Dr. Lee M. Pierce (they & she) interviews Dr. Cara A. Finnegan about Photographic Presidents: Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital (University of Illinois Press, 2021). Lincoln's somber portraits. Lyndon Johnson's swearing in. George W. Bush's reaction to learning about the 9/11 attacks. Photography plays an indelible role in how we remember and define American presidents. Throughout history, presidents ...
Philip Ball, "The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science" (MIT Press, 2021)
May 10, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourChemistry is not just about microscopic atoms doing inscrutable things; it is the process that makes flowers and galaxies. We rely on it for bread-baking, vegetable-growing, and producing the materials of daily life. In stunning images and illuminating text, this book captures chemistry as it unfolds. Using such techniques as microphotography, time-lapse photography, and infrared thermal imaging, The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science (MIT Press, 2021) shows us how chemistry underp...
Karlos K. Hill, "The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History" (U Oklahoma Press, 2021)
April 30, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesOn the evening of May 31, 1921, thousands of white Oklahomans assaulted the Greenwood District of the city of Tulsa. In what would come to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, dozens of Black residents were killed and thousands more displaced as armed whites looted their homes and businesses before burning them to the ground. Karlos K. Hill’s The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021) provides a visual record of the attack upon the community and ...
Catherine E. McKinley, "The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Womanhood" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
April 29, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutesWhat does it mean to tie your cloth to that of another person, as in the Ghanaian tradition, or to be in full dress? How is fashion photography in a colonial and decolonial context more than just a "look" but in fact a looking and a looking at? Join author Catherine McKinley (she/her) and host Lee M. Pierce (they) for a discussion of these provocative questions in the context of fashion photography by and about pan-African women from the 1870s to the 1970s. Most of us grew up with images of A...
Richard White, "California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History" (Norton, 2020)
April 13, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourThis book began as a bet between a father and son: could Richard White, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and renowned historian of the American West, tell a complete history of California through photographs taken by his son, the photographer Jesse Amble White? As he tells it, no - Richard White lost that bet to Jesse. But the resulting book they created together, California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History (Norton, 2020), is nonetheless an engrossing read. Taking Jesse's phot...
James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini, "Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines" (Oxford UP, 2020)
April 01, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020), James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini provide a full introduction to the visual world across all the fields that theorize it. In contrast with typical visual culture texts, their book looks beyond the arts, taking a comparative approach that considers a number of fields, including art history and theory but also epistemology, ontology, vision science, neurology, cognitive psychology, law, advertising, medicine, ...
Camille Melissa, "Whoretography" (Apple Books, 2017)
March 18, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourWhen Camille Melissa emigrated to the UK from Australia via Paris and entered the sex industry in 2005, she always knew that photography would play a crucial role as she navigated the complex structures – both visible and invisible – of this misrepresented community. The rhetoric surrounding sex work is often frustratingly one-dimensional in mainstream media; those who enter the industry are somehow ‘damaged’, labourers of the patriarchy, powerless individuals who need saving from themselves....
J. Jay Garfinkel, "Heirlooms : Memory and Cherished Objects" (One Family Foundation, 2020)
March 01, 2021 09:00 - 36 minutesEveryone will lose someone they love at some point in their life; a spouse, a parent, or a child. Having to deal with the clothes or personal effects that remain can be a heartbreaking experience. It is a challenge: what is one to do with all the small and large items that made up the material life of the one who’s gone - store them in the attic? Discard them? Donate them to charity or call the junkman? In his recently released book, Heirlooms: Memory and Cherished Objects, artist and writer ...
Luc Sante, "Maybe the People Would Be the Times" (Verse Chorus Press, 2020)
February 25, 2021 09:00 - 47 minutesMaybe the People Would Be the Times (Verse Chorus Press, 2020) could be described as a memoir in essay form. Collecting pieces from the past two decades, this book covers Luc Sante's childhood as an immigrant from Belgium, his engagement with the downtown arts scene that gave rise to punk, and the eventual downfall of a version of New York that may have been dangerous but certainly allowed space for creative experimentation, even failure. It also includes essays covering sideshow photography,...
Robert L. Stone, "Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community" (U of Mississippi Press, 2020)
February 23, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourFolklorist Robert L. Stone presents a rare collection of high-quality documentary photos of the sacred steel guitar musical tradition and the community that supports it. The introductory text and extended photo captions in Can’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus! Photographs from the Sacred Steel Community (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) offer the reader an intimate view of this unique tradition of passionately played music that is beloved among fans of American roots music and admired by folkl...
Paola Bonifazio, "The Photoromance: A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture" (MIT Press, 2020)
February 19, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesPaola Bonifazio’s The Photoromance. A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture (MIT Press, 2020) is the first feminist reading of photoromances that examines both its industry and its fandom, arguing for their relevance as transmedia narratives in a transnational market. The photoromance, a form of graphic storytelling that uses photographs instead of drawings, reached a readership of millions in the 1960s. Despite its popularity, the photoromance was—and still is—widely scorned as a medium, and i...
William C. Brumfield, "Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky" (Duke UP, 2020)
February 15, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourIn his latest authoritative book, Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky (Duke University Press, 2020) Russian scholar, photographer, and chronicler of Russian architecture William Craft Brumfield frames the life and work of pioneering color photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944), while also putting his own magisterial career into sharp perspective. Brumfield updates and interprets several of Prokudin-Gorsky’s iconic images with his own...
Mark Gerald, "In the Shadow of Freud's Couch: Portraits of Psychoanalysts in Their Offices" (Routledge, 2020)
December 30, 2020 09:00 - 44 minutesPsychotherapy offices are typically thought of as existing in the background of treatment, but they are brought to the foreground in Mark Gerald’s new book In the Shadow of Freud’s Couch: Portraits of Psychoanalysts in Their Office (Routledge, 2020). In this beautifully written book, illustrated with pictures of psychoanalysts in their offices from around the world, psychoanalyst and photographer Mark Gerald explores the stories offices tell about their holders and their role in the transform...
Colleen Plumb, "Thirty Times a Minute" (Radius Books, 2020)
December 08, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourCaptive elephants exhibit what biologists refer to as stereotypy, which includes rhythmic rocking, head bobbing, stepping back and forth, and pacing. Colleen Plumb traveled to over seventy zoos in the US and Europe, and created video featuring dozens of captive elephants in their small enclosures. She has photographed her guerrilla public projections of the video in over 100 locations worldwide. Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020) includes a selection of these photos, along with nine c...
Elizabeth Ferry and Stephen Ferry, "La Batea" (Red Hook, 2017)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourLa Batea is an unconventional book. A collaboration between anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and her photographer brother Stephen, it combines text and images to paint a picture of the lives of small-scale miners in Colombia in a unique and powerful way. Moreover, the book is physically designed to pull the reader into the topic. Cardboard covers, a specially-chosen paper, and carefully designed chosen fonts provide a unique experience which is topped off by the small piece of gold embedded in ...
Erik Gellman, "Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles Through the Lens of Art Shay" (Chicago UP, 2020)
August 13, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesJames West speaks with Erik Gellman, an associate professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about his new book Troublemakers: Chicago Freedom Struggles Through the Lens of Art Shay (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Fusing photography and history to demonstrate how racial and economic inequality gave rise to a decades-long struggle for justice in one of America's most iconic cities, Gellman challenges us to consider: what does democracy look like? And when sho...
Christopher Bonanos, "Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous" (Henry Holt, 2018)
July 10, 2020 08:00 - 42 minutesIn the middle of the twentieth century, a newspaper photographer who went by the name of Weegee took memorable pictures of New York City’s street life that appeared everywhere from tabloid newspapers to seminars on the history of photography. Christopher Bonanos’ book Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous (Henry Holt and Company, 2018), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, tells the story of his life from his childhood as an immigrant street kid on the Lower East Side to his yea...
Anne Godfrey, "Active Landscape Photography: Theoretical Groundwork for Landscape Architecture" (Routledge, 2020)
June 05, 2020 09:00 - 51 minutesPhotographs play a hugely influential but largely unexamined role in the practice of landscape architecture and design. Through a diverse set of essays and case studies, this seminal text unpacks the complex relationship between landscape architecture and photography. It explores the influence of photographic seeing on the design process by presenting theoretical concepts from photography and cultural theory through the lens of landscape architecture practice to create a rigorous, open discus...
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...
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...
Jacki Apple, "Performance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983-2018" (Intellect Books, 2019)
April 23, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourPerformance / Media / Art / Culture: Selected Essays 1983-2018 (Intellect Books, 2019) collects more than thirty years of critical writing by artist and writer Jacki Apple. These essays trace important developments in performance art both in the Los Angeles and New York scenes, discuss artists including Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Meredith Monk, and Lin Hixson, and track cultural shifts such as the culture wars of the 1980s, the emergence of left-wing censorship in the 1990s, and the emer...
Margaret Hillenbrand, "Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China" (Duke UP, 2020)
April 02, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe fact that secrecy and the concealment of information is important in today’s China is hardly a secret in itself, yet the ways that this secrecy is structured and sustained in such a vast society is not especially well understood. A lot more must be at play than simply the PRC state’s vast censorship apparatus when it comes to obscuring everything from the leadership’s private lives to dark chapters of country’s recent history. Margaret Hillenbrand’s Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to...
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...
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...
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...
Alex Lichtenstein, "Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid" (Indiana UP, 2016)
December 27, 2019 09:00 - 38 minutesAlex Lichtenstein, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, discusses his new book with co-author Rick Halpern, Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid (Indiana University Press, 2016) photojournalism, and writing transnational histories of labor and social justice movements. As a photographer for Life and Fortune magazines, Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Russia in the 1930s, photographed the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938, and recorded the liberation of Buche...
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...
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...
Ann Elias, "Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity" (Duke UP, 2019)
October 24, 2019 08:00 - 45 minutesWith the threats of sea water warming and ocean acidification, coral reefs have become both a fire alarm and a barometer for the dangers of human induced climate change. We now face the possibility of a world without coral. In this cogent and timely work, Ann Elias interrogates how we came to know coral reefs in the way we do and the complicity of this knowing with the forms of modernity that now threaten to destroy them. Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (Du...
Catherine Clark, "Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970" (Oxford UP, 2018)
October 18, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourWhat’s the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words “Paris” and “photography”? Is it a famous photo, perhaps an Atget, Brassai, or Doisneau? In her new book, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970 (Oxford UP, 2018), Catherine Clark explores the history of how and why photographic images have been central to understanding and imagining the city’s present and past, figuring profoundly in the representation and documentation of change over time in the F...
Kent Gramm, "Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead" (Southern Illinois UP, 2019)
August 16, 2019 08:00 - 55 minutesUsing a mixture of genres, Kent Gramm captures the voices of those past and present in his book, Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead(Southern Illinois University Press, 2019) Alongside stunning photographs by Chris Heisey, Gramm shares the experiences of the people at Gettysburg—both those historical figures who took part in the battle in some meaningful way and those of us today who return to the battlefield to try and make sense of such a tragic and mournful part of our history. Gramm’s wri...
Amy Lippert, "Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco" (Oxford UP, 2018)
June 25, 2019 08:00 - 1 hourAlong with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford Univers...
Matthew Fox-Amato, "Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America" (Oxford UP, 2019)
April 25, 2019 10:00 - 53 minutesShortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding slavery. Yet, photographs were used in interesting and sometimes surprising ways by a range of actors. Matthew Fox-Amato, an Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho, examines the role of photography in the politics of slavery during the 19th century and the important legacies of those uses o...
Sigrid Lien, "Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration" (U Minnesota Press, 2018)
April 08, 2019 10:00 - 1 hourIn one of history’s largest migrations, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians immigrated to North American during the 1800s and early 1900s. In addition to letters sent home, Norwegian-Americans often included photographs showcasing their new American lives. In her book, Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Dr. Sigrid Lien keenly evaluates the photographs Norwegian immigrants sent home—including one of her own grandfather. ...
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
March 19, 2019 10:00 - 32 minutesIn the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments ...
Benoît Majerus, "From the Middle Ages to Today: Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris" (Parigramme, 2018)
January 16, 2019 11:00 - 35 minutesWith Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris], Benoît Majerus uses an impressively wide range of visual sources, from religious images and architectural photographs to neuroleptic advertisements and administrative maps. These images are integrated into the text and function not only as illustrations, but also as images with the...
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
December 06, 2018 13:04 - 1 hourMcKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the...
Jorge Coronado, “Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950” (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)
September 24, 2018 10:00 - 45 minutesIn Portraits in the Andes: Photography and Agency, 1900-1950 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Jorge Coronado, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, examines photography to further the argument that intellectuals grafted their own notions of indigeneity onto their subjects. He looks specifically at the Cuzco School of Photography (active in the southern Andes) to argue that photography, in its capacity as a visual and technological practice, can be a powerful t...
Erin Edwards, “The Modernist Corpse: Posthumanism and the Posthumous” (U Minnesota Press, 2018)
May 07, 2018 10:00 - 47 minutesAt the beginning of the 20th century, surrealists such as André Breton and Man Ray played a game called “Exquisite Corpse.” You can play it by drawing or by writing, and the rules are very simple. Let’s say you’re writing. You would write the beginning of a story or poem at the top of a piece of paper and, when you finished, fold the paper so that only the last line of the poem or story is visible. Then you’d hand the paper to another player, and this person would add to the story or poem kno...
Jo Farb Hernandez, “Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments” (Raw Vision, 2013)
March 28, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourSingular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments (Raw Vision, 2013) is an audacious tome. A comprehensive survey of 45 art environments on the Spanish mainland, it weighs just over eight and a half pounds and contains over 1300 color photographs (with over 4000 more plus site plans on the accompanying CD). Its author, Jo Farb Hernandez, is the Director of SPACES, a non-profit focused on art environments around the world. She first became interested in place...
Stephen Sheehi, “The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910” (Princeton UP, 2016)
February 15, 2018 11:00 - 50 minutesIn the Arab world, photography is often tied to the modernizing efforts of imperial and colonial powers. However, indigenous photography was itself a major aspect of the cultural and social lives of Middle Eastern societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stephen Sheehi’s The Arab Imago: A Social History of Indigenous Photography 1860-1910 (Princeton University Press, 2016) tells that story, focusing primarily on portraiture and those that took portraits. Sheehi examines...