New Books in Women's History
1,398 episodes - English - Latest episode: 17 days ago - ★★★★★ - 7 ratingsDiscussions with scholars of women's history about their new books
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Episodes
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Vanessa R. Sasson, "The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women" (Equinox, 2023)
November 08, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesVanessa R. Sasson's book The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women (Equinox, 2023) is a retelling of the story of the first Buddhist women's request for ordination. Inspired by the Therigatha and building on years of research and experience in the field, Sasson follows Vimala, Patachara, Bhadda Kundalakesa, and many others as they walk through the forest to request full access to the tradition. The Buddha's response to this request is famously complicated; he eventually accepts wome...
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...
Vanessa R. Sasson, "The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women" (Equinox, 2023)
November 08, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesVanessa R. Sasson's book The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women (Equinox, 2023) is a retelling of the story of the first Buddhist women's request for ordination. Inspired by the Therigatha and building on years of research and experience in the field, Sasson follows Vimala, Patachara, Bhadda Kundalakesa, and many others as they walk through the forest to request full access to the tradition. The Buddha's response to this request is famously complicated; he eventually accepts wome...
Shannon McKenna Schmidt, "The First Lady of World War II: Eleanor Roosevelt's Daring Journey to the Frontlines and Back" (Sourcebooks, 2023)
November 06, 2023 09:00 - 34 minutesShannon McKenna Schmidt's The First Lady of World War II: Eleanor Roosevelt's Daring Journey to the Frontlines and Back (Sourcebooks, 2023) is the first book to tell the full story of Eleanor Roosevelt's unprecedented and courageous trip to the Pacific Theater during World War II. On August 27, 1943, news broke in the United States that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was on the other side of the world. A closely guarded secret, she had left San Francisco aboard a military transport plane headed...
David Alan Parnell, "Belisarius & Antonina: Love and War in the Age of Justinian" (Oxford UP, 2023)
November 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBelisarius and Antonina were titans in the Roman world some 1,500 years ago. Belisarius was the most well-known general of his age, victor over the Persians, conqueror of the Vandals and the Goths, and as if this were not enough, wealthy beyond imagination. His wife, Antonina, was an impressive person in her own right. She made a name for herself by traveling with Belisarius on his military campaigns, deposing a pope, and scheming to disgrace important Roman officials. Together, the pair were...
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, "Why Men?: A Human History of Violence and Inequality" (Hurst, 2023)
November 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourHow did humans, a species that evolved to be cooperative and egalitarian, develop societies of enforced inequality? Why did our ancestors create patriarchal power and warfare? Did it have to be this way? These are some of the key questions that Dr. Nancy Lindisfarne and Dr. Jonathan Neale grapple with in Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality (Hurst, 2023). Elites have always called hierarchy and violence unavoidable facts of human nature. Evolution, they claim, has caused men to...
Jacqueline R. Braitman, "She Damn Near Ran the Studio: The Extraordinary Lives of Ida R. Koverman" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
November 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, I am happy to be interviewing historian and author Dr. Jacqueline R. Braitman about her very engaging biography, She Damn Near Ran the Studio: The Extraordinary Lives of Ida R. Koverman (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). This very detailed and comprehensively researched book tells the story of Ida Koverman, whose life was almost accidentally remarkable. She was not only Louis B. Mayer’s gatekeeper at MGM for over two decades but also a major mover and shaker in the cons...
Sharony Green, "The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
November 01, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourZora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked by tragedy and contradictions. When both she and her writing fell out of favor after the Harlem Renaissance, she struggled not only to regain an audience for her novels but also to simply make ends meet. In The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Sharony Green uncovers an understudied but importa...
Marion Gibson, "Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials" (Scribner, 2023)
October 31, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesWitchfinder General, Salem, Malleus Maleficarum. The world of witch-hunts and witch trials sounds archaic and fanciful, these terms relics of an unenlightened, brutal age. However, we often hear ‘witch-hunt’ in today’s media, and the misogyny that shaped witch trials is all too familiar. Three women were prosecuted under a version of the 1735 Witchcraft Act as recently as 2018. In Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Professor Marion Gibson uses thirteen signific...
Leonie Hannan, "A Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth-Century Home" (Manchester UP, 2023)
October 30, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesLeonie Hannan's book Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth Century Home (Manchester University Press, 2023) explores the practice of scientific enquiry as it took place in the eighteenth-century home. While histories of science have identified the genteel household as an important site for scientific experiment, they have tended to do so via biographies of important men of science. Using a wide range of historical source material, from household accounts and inventories to letters a...
Stuart McHardy, "The Nine Maidens: Priestesses of the Ancient World" (Luath Press, 2023)
October 26, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesWhen King Arthur was conveyed to Avalon they were there. When Odin summoned warriors to Valhalla they were there. When Apollo was worshipped on Greek mountains they were there. When Brendan came to the Island of Women they were there. They are the Nine Maidens – from the mothers of the Norse God Heimdall, Morgan and her sisters on Avalon, to the nine sisters at the heart of the found myth of the Gikuyu of Kenya or witches battling with the Irish St Patrick, these women stand out in history an...
Réka Máté, "Portrayals of Women in Pakistan: An Analysis of Fahmīdah Riyāẓ's Urdu Poetry" (de Gruyter, 2023)
October 26, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesRéka Máté's Portrayals of Women in Pakistan: An Analysis of Fahmīdah Riyāẓ's Urdu Poetry (de Gruyter, 2023) examines the connection between progressivism and feminist movements in the Indian subcontinent, scrutinizing shifting portrayals of women in Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s poetry at the time of her writing from a historical perspective, and the historical, political, social and personal influences reflected in her work and life. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at th...
Margaret K. Nelson, "Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s" (NYU Press, 2022)
October 24, 2023 08:00 - 36 minutesAll families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays A lesbian partnership, a “bastard” son, an aunt who is a prostitute, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unravelled a family at an earlier moment in history. In Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s (NYU Press, 2023), Dr. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise ...
Özge Yaka, "Fighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles" (U California Press, 2023)
October 23, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesFighting for the River: Gender, Body, and Agency in Environmental Struggles (U California Press, 2023) portrays women's intimate, embodied relationships with river waters and explores how those relationships embolden local communities' resistance to private run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Building on extensive ethnographic research, Özge Yaka develops a body-centered, phenomenological approach to women's environmental activism and combines it with a relational ontologic...
Rosie Harte, "The Royal Wardrobe: Peek into the Wardrobes of History's Most Fashionable Royals" (Headline, 2023)
October 22, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesFashion for the royal family has long been one of their most powerful weapons. Every item of their clothing is imbued with meaning, history and majesty, telling a complex tale of the individuals who wore them and the houses they represented. The Royal Wardrobe: Peek Into the Wardrobes of History's Most Fashionable Royals (Headline, 2023) by Rosie Harte introduces readers to this world. From the draping of a fabric to the arrangements of jewels, the clothing worn by royals is anything but coin...
Livia Arndal Woods, "Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 39 minutesIn Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the nineteenth century. In the first book-length study of the topic, Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for "somatic reading," a practice attuned ...
Elena Serrano, "Ladies of Honor and Merit. Gender, Useful Knowledge, and Politics in Enlightened Spain" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2022)
October 18, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesIn this episode I interview Elena Serrano, a research member of the Project Cirgen at the Universitat de València and Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institut d'Història de la Ciència (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona). She trained in the former Centre for the History of Science in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and in the History of Science and Philosophy Department in Cambridge University before taking postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science i...