New Books in Women's History
1,358 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 7 ratingsDiscussions with scholars of women's history about their new books
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Episodes
Matthew Kennedy, "On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide" (Oxford UP, 2024)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the oceans of ink devoted to the monumental movie star/businesswoman/political activist Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (1932-2011), her beauty and not-so-private life frequently overshadowed her movies. While she knew how to generate publicity like no other, her personal life is set aside in this volume in favor of her professional oeuvre and unique screen dynamism. In On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide (Oxford UP, 2024), her marriages, illnesses, media firestorms, perfume empire, violet...
Ayelet Brinn, "A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press" (NYU Press, 2023)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 33 minutesA Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Ayelet Brinn offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers. Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of...
Sara Rahnama, "The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria" (Cornell UP, 2023)
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesWhen Algerians of the 1920s and 30s imagined the future of their country, women’s liberation was foundational to their vision. From the first generation of French-educated schoolteachers, to urban domestic workers who challenged spatial and economic divisions, to nationalist journalists pushing back against French colonial claims, Sara Rahnama describes how a range of Algerian actors conceived of women’s rights and responded to new developments in their own country and across the Middle East....
Women and the Body in Buddhism
January 07, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDr Pierce Salguero sits down with Amy Langenberg, a scholar of South Asian Buddhism, gender, sexuality, and the body. We focus on Amy’s work on misogyny in Buddhist texts, her book on Buddhist embryology, and her current project on sexual abuse in contemporary Buddhist communities. Along the way we discuss miscarriage, menstruation, and the importance of feminist scholarship . . . and also, what does the Buddha have in common with Michael Phelps? Enjoy the conversation! And remember that not ...
Eileen Botting, "The Wollstonecraftian Mind" (Routledge, 2019)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and co-editor with Sandrine Berges and Alan Coffee of the anthology The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019). The collection presents thirty-nine essays from distinguished scholars in philosophy, religion, literature, intellectual history, and other fields who consider the work of the eighteenth-century British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. A political and moral thinker and a forerunner to modern feminism she has not r...
Amy Von Lintel, "Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters" (Texas A&M UP, 2020)
January 06, 2024 09:00 - 42 minutesIn 1912, at age 24, Georgia O’Keeffe boarded a train in Virginia and headed west, to the prairies of the Texas Panhandle, to take a position as art teacher for the newly organized Amarillo Public Schools. Subsequently she would join the faculty at what was then West Texas State Normal College (now West Texas A&M University). Already a thoroughly independent-minded woman, she maintained an active correspondence with her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and other friends back east...
Kate Kirkpatrick, "Becoming Beauvoir: A Life" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
January 05, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesKate Kirkpatrick a lecturer in Religion, Philosophy and Culture at King’s College London and author of Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Kirkpatrick has given us a biography that addresses the puzzle and contradictions of the life of the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir drawn from never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how choices shaped her life. Beauvoir, a writer and feminist icon, won prestigious literary prizes and scandalized many ...
Nilima Chitgopekar, "Shakti: An Exploration of the Divine Feminine" (DK Publishing, 2022)
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutesShe is benevolent and nurturing, yet fierce and terrible, a warrior and a lover. She creates and gives life, is death personified, and the one who grants eternal salvation. She is the ultimate form of reality, the cosmos. As the Saundaryalahiri says, "Only when Shiva joins with you, O Shakti, can he exert his powers as lord, on his own he has not even the power to stir. You are worshipped by Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, and other gods. How dare I, meritless mortal, offer you reverence and praise?" ...
Claire Myers Owens and the Banned Book
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourWhy did the New York Public Library ban a novel about women’s independence? What was the Human Potential Movement? And who was Claire Myers Owens? Today’s book is: Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens (Syracuse University Press,, 2019) by Miriam Kalman Friedman, which is a biography of Owens, who grew up in a conservative, middle-class family in Texas, but sought adventure and freedom. At twenty years old, she left home and quickly found a community of like-minded free spirits and ...
Margaret M. McGuinness, "Katharine Drexel and the Sisters Who Shared Her Vision" (Paulist Press, 2023)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAlthough Katharine Drexel has been the subject of several biographies, they have tended to treat her as a perfect human being whom the Church later transformed into a saint. Katharine Drexel and the Sisters Who Shared Her Vision (Paulist Press, 2023) moves beyond the story of the heiress’s individual life devoted to God and shines a light on the work she did, assisted by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. Drexel could have lived comfortably, wealthy and privileged, as a Philadelphia philan...
Katherine M. Marino, "Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement" (UNC Press, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 55 minutesKatherine M. Marino is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) follows the many Latin American and Caribbean women in the first half of the century who not only championed feminism for the continent but also contributed to defining the meaning of international human rights. They drove a transnational movement for women’s suffrage th...
John Christopoulos, "Abortion in Early Modern Italy" (Harvard UP, 2021)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesToday we have John Christopoulos, Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, to talk about his new book, Abortion in Early Modern Italy (Harvard University Press, 2021) In this authoritative history, John Christopoulos provides a provocative and far-reaching account of abortion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. His poignant portraits of women who terminated or were forced to terminate pregnancies offer a corrective to longstanding views: he finds that Ita...
James Keating, "Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880-1914" (Manchester UP, 2020)
December 31, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women’s electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, James Keating's book Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880-1914 (Manchester UP, 2020) uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Conside...
Vanessa R. Sasson, "The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women" (Equinox, 2023)
December 30, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesAfter the Buddha’s enlightenment, his aunt and adoptive mother, Mahapajapati Gotami, asks him to ordain women and welcome them into his new monastic community. The Buddha declines to fulfill her request. But Mahapajapati Gotami doesn’t give up—accompanied by a large gathering of women, she sets out to ask him again. In her new book, The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women (Equinox, 2023), scholar Vanessa R. Sasson offers an imaginative retelling of the women’s request for ordinatio...
Ralph H. Craig, "Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner" (Eerdmans, 2023)
December 29, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhen Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll in the 1980s, she attributed her comeback to one thing: the wisdom and power she found in Buddhism. Her spiritual transformation is often overshadowed by the rags-to-riches arc of her life story. But in this groundbreaking biography, Ralph H. Craig III traces Tina's journey from the Black Baptist church to Buddhism and situates her at the vanguard of large-scale movements in religion and pop culture. Paying special attention ...
Alice Collett, "Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History" (Oxford UP, 2016)
December 26, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDr. Alice Collett’s monograph Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History (Oxford University Press, 2016) delves into the lives of six of the best-known nuns from the period of early Buddhism: Dhammadinnā, Khemā, Kisāgotamī, Paṭācārā, Bhaddā Kuṇḍalakesā, and Uppalavaṇṇā, all of whom are said to have been direct disciples of the historical Buddha. Collett does the thankless task of sorting through the biographical information scattered throughout the canonical and commentarial literat...
Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki, "Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire" (Routledge, 2023)
December 25, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAnalysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women's active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women e...
Michelle J. Manno, "Denied: Women, Sports, and the Contradictions of Identity" (NYU Press, 2023)
December 23, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesWomen’s college basketball is big business—top teams bring in millions of dollars in revenue for their schools. Women’s NCAA games are broadcast regularly on sports networks, and many of the top players and coaches are household names. Yet these athletes face immense pressure to be more than successful at their sport. They must also conform to expectations about gender, sexuality, and race—expectations that are often in direct contrast to success in the game. They are not supposed to have mus...
Kelly Ricciardi Colvin, "Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
December 22, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn the aftermath of the Second World War, the French government cultivated images of sensual and sophisticated white French women in an attempt to reestablish its global image as a great nation. They promoted the beauty, sexual appeal, and general allure of French women, all while shrinking the boundaries of what was considered beautiful. Charm Offensive: Commodifying Femininity in Postwar France (University of Toronto Press, 2023) by Dr. Kelly Colvin explores how this elevation of French fem...
Helen Louise Cowie, "Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesAnimal products were used extensively in nineteenth-century Britain. A middle-class Victorian woman might wear a dress made of alpaca wool, drape herself in a sealskin jacket, brush her hair with a tortoiseshell comb, and sport feathers in her hat. She might entertain her friends by playing a piano with ivory keys or own a parrot or monkey as a living fashion accessory. In Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dr. Helen Cowie examines ...
Elise Hu, "Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital" (Dutton, 2023)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 35 minutesIn August, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter to complain about how U.S. regulations are holding local sunscreens back compared to the rest of the world. And while she didn’t name any specific country, the video featured headlines that did name one nation: South Korea. On social media, Korean cosmetics are now viewed as the world’s best. But where did this success come from—and, perhaps, what does it say about South Korea? Elise Hu, during her time in South Korea, tried t...
Adrienne E. Strong, "Documenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania" (U California Press, 2020)
December 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDocumenting Death: Maternal Mortality and the Ethics of Care in Tanzania (University of California Press, 2020) is a gripping ethnographic account of the deaths of pregnant women in a hospital in a low-resource setting in Tanzania. Through an exploration of everyday ethics and care practices on a local maternity ward, anthropologist Adrienne E. Strong untangles the reasons Tanzania has achieved so little sustainable success in reducing maternal mortality rates, despite global development supp...
Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, "Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
December 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday we are joined by Dr. Lindsay Krasnoff, who is an historian, specializing in global sport, communications and diplomacy. She is also the Director of FranceandUS, and she lectures on sports diplomacy at New York University Tisch Institute of Global Sport. We met to talk about her most recent book: Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA (Bloomsbury, 2023). In our conversation, we discussed the rise of basketball in France, the differences between French and Ameri...
Sara Chatfield, "In Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage" (Columbia UP, 2023)
December 18, 2023 09:00 - 55 minutesWe often narrate the history of women’s rights in the United States by focusing on the fight for suffrage. Yet starting as early as 1835, states expanded married women’s economic rights. How were these statutes passed at a time when women’s political power was severely constrained, including no right to vote in most states? With limited national coordination? In In Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage (Columbia UP, 2023), Dr. Sara Chatfield argues that married women’s...
Sisterhood
December 16, 2023 09:00 - 20 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Katherine Turk tells us about Sisterhood, a familial metaphor used to evoke gendered solidarity in women’s movement of the mid-sixties and seventies, and a utopian ideal of equality within the human family. It’s a universalizing but aspirational concept that helped feminists build a political coalition. Our conversation is based upon Katherine’s new book about the National Organization of Women: The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transfo...
Caroline J. Smith, "Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women's Food Memoirs" (U Mississippi Press, 2023)
December 14, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesBetween 2000 and 2010, many contemporary US-American women writers were returning to the private space of the kitchen, writing about their experiences in that space and then publishing their memoirs for the larger public to consume. Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs (U Mississippi Press, 2023) explores women’s food memoirs with recipes in order to consider the ways in which these women are rewriting this kitchen space and renegotiating their relatio...
Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez, "An American Icon in Puerto Rico: Barbie, Girlhood, and Colonialism at Play" (Berghahn Books, 2022)
December 08, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesSince her debut in 1959, Barbie has transcended boundaries and transformed into a global symbol of femininity, capturing the imaginations of girls all around the world. An American Icon in Puerto Rico: Barbie, Girlhood, and Colonialism at Play (Berghahn, 2022) offers a captivating study of that iconic influence by focusing on a group of multigenerational Puerto Rican women and girls. Through personal narratives and insights, author Dr. Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez unveils the emotional attachment th...
Susan Blumberg-Kason, "Bernardine's Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China" (Post Hill Press, 2023)
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutesIn 1929, Bernardine Szold Fritz left Paris on a train bound for China. She was on her way to her fourth wedding, and her fourth husband: An American investment banker named Chester Fritz, who’d proposed after a whirlwind meeting earlier in Shanghai. Bernardine is then forced to find herself things to do in interwar China–and her husband isn’t helping much. That’s how Susan Blumberg-Kason’s newest book, Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China (Post Hill Press: 2023)...
Fae Dussart, "In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesDespite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Fae Dussart sheds new light on servants and their masters in the British Empire, and in doing so offers new discourses on the colonial home, imperial society identities and colonial culture. Using a wide range of source material, from private papers to newspaper arti...
Hidden No More: A Conversation with Space Suit Technician Sharon McDougle
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesWho dresses the astronauts for flight? Why are the suits orange? And how are they cared for? Sharon Caples McDougle joins us to talk about her work as a modern day hidden figure, a space suit technician responsible for processing the orange launch and re-entry pressure suit assemblies worn by all NASA space shuttle astronauts. She explains how she became one of only two women CEE Suit Technicians, led the first and only all-female suit tech crew, and how she made history when she suited up Dr...
Self Help
December 07, 2023 09:00 - 20 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Angela Hume tells us about Self Help, not the neoliberal strategy of self-actualization through consumer choices, but the radical political movement of gynecological self-help, that flourished in the late twentieth century and created a set of portable political tactics based in anarchist feminist philosophy. In the episode, she references Alondra Nelson’s book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minnesota UP, 20...
Hannah Carlson, "Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close" (Algonquin Books, 2023)
December 06, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesIt’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? In her captivating book Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close (Hachette, 2023), Dr. Hannah Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, shows us how we tuck gender politics, security, sexuality, and privilege inside our pockets. In mediaeval Europe, the purse was an almost universal dress feature carried by men and women alike. But when...
Linda Eckert, "Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 24 minutesCervical cancer kills almost 350,000 women each year. What's more horrifying, is that millions have died of this disease that's nearly 100% preventable. It's no secret that healthcare is full of inequities, with a severe lack of accessible screening programs. But women's health care is also impeded by cultural, gender, and political barriers, issues that have combined to create devastating consequences. In Enough: Because We Can Stop Cervical Cancer (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dr Linda Eckert take...
Simon Joyce, "LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIt has been decades since Michel Foucault urged us to rethink "the repressive hypothesis" and see new forms of sexual discourse as coming into being in the nineteenth century, yet the term "Victorian" still has largely negative connotations. LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for re-visiting the period's thinking about gender and sexual identity at a time when our queer alliances are fraying. We think of those whose primary self-d...
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, "How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
December 04, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesIn How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), Jonathan D. Fitzgerald examines a mode of journalistic storytelling dating back nearly two centuries. Literary journalism arose in the decades before the U.S. Civil War alongside the era's sentimental literature. Combining fact-based reporting with the sentimentality of popular fiction, literary journalism encouraged readers to empathize with subjects by presenting more nuanced and eng...
Barbara D. Savage, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar" (Yale UP, 2023)
December 03, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesBorn in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world.” Against all odds, the brilliant and hardworking Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford University in 1935 and a doctorate in government from Harvard in 1941. She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of her long life s...
Charlotte Al-Khalili, "Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian Displacement, Time and Subjectivity (UCL Press, 2023)
November 28, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesWaiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian Displacement, Time and Subjectivity (UCL Press, 2023) by Dr. Charlotte Al-Khalili explores the Syrian revolution through the experiences of citizens in exile. Based on more than three years of embedded fieldwork with Syrians displaced in the border city of Gaziantep (southern Turkey), the book places the Syrian revolution and its tragic aftermath under ethnographic scrutiny. It charts the evolution from peaceful uprising (2011) to armed confrontation ...
E. T. Dailey, "Radegund: The Trials and Triumphs of a Merovingian Queen" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 26, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourA princess born to the Thuringian royal house. A captive in war, forced to marry the Frankish king who killed her family. A queen, who renounced her position, received consecration as a deaconess, and took monastic vows. A religious leader, who acquired a fragment of the Cross of the Crucifixion for her convent of Holy Cross in Poitiers. And, lastly, a saint, remembered for her healings, exorcisms, and extreme self-mortification. Such was Radegund, a woman who lived through an era defined by ...
Diane Carol Fujino, "Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake" (U Washington Press, 2020)
November 25, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesThis episode, which is co-hosted with Michael Nishimura, features a conversation with Dr. Diane C. Fujino, the author of Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Reverend Michael Yasutake (University of Washington Press, 2020). The book traces the activism of two siblings who charted their own paths for what it meant to be Nisei. Reverend Mike was an Episcopal minister whose politics changed with the historical contexts and circumstances surround...
Sarah E. Stoller, "Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain" (MIT Press, 2023)
November 24, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesSarah E. Stoller, Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain (MIT Press, 2023) is the first historical examination of working parenthood in the late twentieth century--and how the concepts of "family-friendly" work culture and "work-life balance" came to be. Since the 1980s, families across the developed West have lived through a revolution on a scale unprecedented since industrialization. With more mothers than ever before in paid work and the rise of the ...
Tabitha Stanmore, "Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 24, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesMagic is ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. Yet if witchcraft is acknowledged as a persistent presence in the medieval and early modern eras, practical magic by contrast – performed to a useful end for payment, and actually more common than malign spellcasting – has been overlooked. In Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Tabitha Stanmore brings this world to light. E...
Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine et al., "When Will the Joy Come?: Black Women in the Ivory Tower" (U Massachusetts Press, 2023)
November 23, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesHow do Black women in higher education create, experience, and understand joy? What sustains them? While scholars have long documented sexism, racism, and classism in the academy, one topic has been conspicuously absent from the literature--how Black women academics have found joy in the midst of adversity. Moving beyond questions of resilience, labor for others, and coping, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine, Abena Ampofoa Asare, and Michelle Dionne Thompson's book When Will the Joy Come?: Black Wom...
Amy Harris, "Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 21, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBeing Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Harris is the first book-length exploration of what family life looked like, and how it was experienced, when viewed from the perspective of unmarried and childless family members. Using a microhistorical approach, Dr. Harris covers three generations of the famous musical and abolitionist Sharp family. The abundance of records the Sharps produced and preserved reveals how singl...
Heather Smith-Cannoy et al., "Sex Trafficking and Human Rights: The Status of Women and State Responses" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutesHuman trafficking for the sex trade is a form of modern-day slavery that ensnares thousands of victims each year, disproportionately affecting women and girls. While the international community has developed an impressive edifice of human rights law, these laws are not equally recognized or enforced by all countries. Sex Trafficking and Human Rights demonstrates that state responsiveness to human trafficking is shaped by the political, social, cultural, and economic rights afforded to women i...
Kimberley Ens Manning, "The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China" (Cornell UP, 2023)
November 16, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourKimberley Ens Manning's book The Party Family: Revolutionary Attachments and the Gendered Origins of State Power in China (Cornell UP, 2023) explores the formation and consolidation of the state in revolutionary China through the crucial role that social ties—specifically family ties—played in the state's capacity to respond to crisis before and after the foundation of the People's Republic of China. Central to these ties, Kimberley Ens Manning finds, were women as both the subjects and leade...
Beatriz Nascimento, "The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento" (Princeton UP, 2023)
November 15, 2023 05:00 - 48 minutesBeatriz Nascimento (1942-1995) was a poet, historian, artist, and political leader in Brazil's Black movement, an innovative and creative thinker whose work offers a radical reimagining of gender, space, politics, and spirituality around the Atlantic and across the Black diaspora. Her powerful voice still resonates today, reflecting a deep commitment to political organizing, revisionist historiography, and the lived experience of Black women. The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Tho...
Rebecca Hardie, "Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England" (Medieval Institute Publications, 2021)
November 14, 2023 09:00 - 51 minutesÆthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-...
Shelley Fraser Mickle, "White House Wild Child: How Alice Roosevelt Broke All the Rules and Won the Heart of America" (Imagine, 2023)
November 11, 2023 09:00 - 33 minutes“I can do one of two things, I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.”—Theodore Roosevelt During Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency—from 1901 to 1909, when Mark Twain called him the most popular man in America—his daughter Alice Roosevelt mesmerized the world with her antics and beauty. Alice was known for carrying a gun, a copy of the Constitution, and a green snake in her purse. When her father told her she couldn’t smoke under his roof, she cl...
Ralph H. Craig III, "Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner" (Eerdmans, 2023)
November 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIf you don’t know Tina Turner’s spirituality, you don’t know Tina. When Tina Turner reclaimed her throne as the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll in the 1980s, she attributed her comeback to one thing: the wisdom and power she found in Buddhism. Her spiritual transformation is often overshadowed by the rags-to-riches arc of her life story. But in this groundbreaking biography, Ralph H. Craig III traces Tina’s journey from the Black Baptist church to Buddhism and situates her at the vanguard of large-sca...
Kathleen Mcphillips and Naomi Goldenberg, "The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State" (Routledge, 2020)
November 08, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesFeminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race-based oppression. Kathleen Mcphillips and Naomi Goldenberg edited volume The End of Religion: Feminist Reappraisals of the State (Routledge, 2020) proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better c...