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17,840 episodes - English - Latest episode: 9 days ago - ★★★★ - 123 ratingsInterviews with Authors about their New Books
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Episodes
Tana Jean Welch, "Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
April 10, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesAdvancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) places contemporary poetics in dialogue with posthumanism and biomedicine in order to create a framework for advancing a posthuman-affirmative ethics within the culture of medical practice. This book makes a case for a posthumanist understanding of the body—one that sees health and illness not as properties possessed by individual bodies, but as processes that connect bodies to their social ...
Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (1951)
April 10, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesA stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, who eventually taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements—the first and most famous of his books—was made into a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest television press conferences. Called a “brilliant and original inquiry” and “a genuine contri...
Matthew Robertson, "Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe concept of the puruṣa, or person, is implicated in a wide range of ancient texts throughout the Indian subcontinent. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press, Matthew I. Robertson traces the development of this concept from 1500 BCE to 400 CE: in the Ṛg Veda, the Brāhmaṇas, the Upaniṣads, Buddhist Pāli suttas, the Caraka and Suśruta Saṃhitā, and the Mahābhārata. Pushing back against the interpretation of personhood as a cosmological microcosm, R...
Benoît Crucifix, "Drawing from the Archives: Comics Memory in the Contemporary Graphic Novel" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourFollowing Art Spiegelman's declaration that 'the future of comics is in the past,' Drawing from the Archives considers comics memory in the contemporary North American graphic novel. Cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Seth, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and others have not only produced some of the most important graphic novels, they have also turned to the history of comics as a common visual heritage to pass on to new readers. This book is a full-length study of contemporary cartoonists when t...
Kelsey Keyes and Ellie Dworak, "Supporting Student Parents in the Academic Library: Designing Spaces, Policies, and Services" (ACRL, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourStudent parents can feel unwelcome and invisible in their institutions. And for every student parent who is struggling to complete an education despite these hurdles, there are many others who have not been able to find a way. Supporting Student Parents in the Academic Library: Designing Spaces, Policies, and Services (ACRL, 2024) by Kelsey Keyes and Ellie Dworak is a guide to engaging with and aiding the student parents in your libraries and leading the charge in making your institutions mor...
James McElvenny, "A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesIngrid Piller speaks with James McElvenny about his new book A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II (Edinburgh UP, 2024). This book offers a concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shapin...
Xiaofei Kang, "Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953" (Oxford UP, 2023)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourChina’s communist revolution has an intricate relationship with gender and religion. In Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953 (Oxford UP, 2023), Xiaofei Kang moves the two themes to the center stage in the Chinese Revolution. It examines the Communist Party’s first anti-superstition campaign in its wartime headquarters of Yan’an, the holy land of the Maoist revolution. The book argues that religion was not a mere adversary for th...
Emily Drumsta, "Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation" (U California Press, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 42 minutesIn Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation (U California Press, 2024), Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islami...
Robert M. Jarvis, "Gambling Under the Swastika: Casinos, Horse Racing, Lotteries, and Other Forms of Betting in Nazi Germany" (Carolina Academic Press, 2019)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAlthough much has been written about the Nazis, one aspect of their rule has been all but overlooked: gambling. While philosophically opposed to gambling, in practice the Nazis relied on gambling to prop up Germany's economy, earn hard currency, and wage war. In Gambling Under the Swastika: Casinos, Horse Racing, Lotteries, and Other Forms of Betting in Nazi Germany (Carolina Academic Press, 2019), Professor Robert M. Jarvis (Nova Southeastern University) presents the first comprehensive look...
D. J. Green, "No More Empty Spaces" (She Writes Press, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 22 minutesNo More Empty Spaces (She Writes Press, 2024) opens with Will Ross, an engineering geologist, who shares custody of his three children with his ex-wife, taking his 1953 Cessna up for a spin. It’s 1973, and he’s decided to take his children to a remote area of Turkey where he’s been hired to analyze the site of a damn. He plans to tell the kids, once they’re across the world, that they won’t be going back to their alcoholic mother. The kids face the trials of learning the language, grappling w...
Shardé M. Davis, "Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education" (UNC Press, 2024)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesWhen Sharde M. Davis turned to social media during the summer of racial reckoning in 2020, she meant only to share how racism against Black people affects her personally. But her hashtag, BlackintheIvory, went viral, fostering a flood of Black scholars sharing similar stories. Soon the posts were being quoted during summer institutes and workshops on social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. And in fall 2020, faculty assigned the tweets as material for course curriculum. Being Black i...
Shiamin Kwa, "Perfect Copies: Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
April 09, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesAnalyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies: Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic (Rutgers UP, 2023) reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed...
Tzafrir Barzilay, "Poisoned Wells: Accusations, Persecution, and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourBetween 1348 and 1350, Jews throughout Europe were accused of having caused the spread of the Black Death by poisoning the wells from which the entire population drank. Hundreds if not thousands were executed from Aragon and southern France into the eastern regions of the German-speaking lands. But if the well-poisoning accusations against the Jews during these plague years are the most frequently cited of such cases, they were not unique. The first major wave of accusations came in France an...
Sumita Pahwa, "Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Muslim Brothers" (Syracuse UP, 2023)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesDespite expectations that the deeply held political and religious organizing principles at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood would prove incompatible and contentious should the organization ever come to power, the Brotherhood succeeded in maintaining a united identity following the 2011 ousting of Hosni Mubarak and the election of a Brotherhood-majority government. To understand how the movement threaded these disparate missions, Politics as Worship: Righteous Activism and the Egyptian Mus...
Sean Vanatta on Credit Cards
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPeoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with historian and standup comedian, Sean Vanatta, lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow and senior fellow at the Wharton Initiative for Financial Policy and Regulation, about Vanatta’s cool new book, Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (Yale UP, 2024). Plastic Capitalism examines the fascinating history of the rise of the credit card business in the United States, uncovering a comple...
Elizabeth Coggeshall, "On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesAlthough we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late mediaeval Christian society friendship raised a number of social and ethical dilemmas that needed to be carefully negotiated. On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2023) analyses these dilemmas and looks at how Dante’s strategic articulations of friendship evolved across the phases of his literary career as he manoeuvred bet...
Eric Calderwood, "On Earth Or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus" (Harvard UP, 2023)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesDuring the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home not to Spain and Portugal but rather to al-Andalus. Ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties, al-Andalus came to be a shorthand for a legendary place where people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace. That reputation is not entirely deserved, yet, as On Earth Or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus (Harvard UP, 2023) shows, it has had an enduring hold on the imagination,...
Steve Mentz, "Sailing without Ahab: Ecopoetic Travels" (Fordham UP, 2024)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesWhen I decided to try my hand at interviewing authors for the New Books Network, one of my dream guests was Steve Mentz. Steve’s work in the environmental humanities marries a rigorous archival work, pathbreaking close readings, and a fluent and innovative approach to scholarly writing. I think he’s charted a course for early modern ecocriticism that has been both impressive and energizing. Steve Mentz is a Professor of English at St. John’s University. He has produced numerous books that hav...
Psychedelics, Mysticism, Aliens, and the Dao (Pierce Salguero and Dominic Steavu)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDr Pierce Salguero sits down with Dominic Steavu, a historian of Chinese religion and healing from UC Santa Barbara. We discuss the central role of the body in medieval Daoist practices, and talk about the Daoist use of psychedelics to facilitate mystical experiences. Along the way, we touch on talismanic tattoos, internal alchemy, and embodied nonduality. Plus, Dominic reveals what he thinks about aliens and the Wu-Tang Clan. Enjoy the conversation! And remember that not all of our episodes ...
Pan’s Labyrinth
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 21 minutesIn 1965, Bob Dylan teased the squares by stating, “Something is happening but you don’t know what it is.” The same could be said for childhood and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is a film that takes childhood seriously—as opposed to the way it is usually portrayed in big-budget, effects-laden films. Join us for a conversation about a film sometimes compared to the work of C. S. Lewis but one we find is more like that work of Miguel de Cervantes and Hayao Miyazaki. If you’re interested in learning mor...
Animals
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 18 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Mackenzie Cooley talks about animals. The animal lies at the center of science and the human, from imperial conquest and Enlightenment thought to the creatures on our dinner plates and beside us at the table. The practices of animal breeding and the politics of making life are, in Mackenzie’s account, key to understanding the history of race as a concept and term that emerged in the Early Modern World. For more animal encounters, check out her book The Perfecti...
Christopher Michael Blakley, "Empire of Brutality: Enslaved People and Animals in the British Atlantic World" (Louisiana State UP, 2023)
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesHistorians of early America, slavery, early African American history, the history of science, and environmental history have interrogated the complex ways in which enslaved people were thought about and treated as human but also dehumanized to be understood as private property or chattel. The comparison of enslaved people to animals, particularly dogs, cattle, or horses, was a common device deployed by enslavers. The letters, memoirs, and philosophical treatises of the enslaved and formerly e...
Enactivism, Embodiment, and the Gorier Stuff with Marilyn Stendera
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesIn this episode Pat speaks with Dr Marilyn Stendera, co-author (with Emily Hughes) of Heidegger’s Alternative History of Time (Routledge, 2024). Dr Stendera’s work focuses mainly on the phenomenological tradition, especially its intersections with philosophy of cognition and mind. She is particularly interested in time, including its role in cognition, its relationship to power, and how it has been conceptualised in different philosophical traditions. She also likes thinking about biology, de...
Anthony Kaldellis, "The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium" (Oxford UP, 2024)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesIn recent decades, the study of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, has been revolutionized by new approaches and more sophisticated models for how its society and state operated. No longer looked upon as a pale facsimile of classical Rome, Byzantium is now considered a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome's features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford UP, 2024) is the first full, single-aut...
Wole Talabi, "Convergence Problems" (Astra Publishing House, 2024)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn his new story collection Convergence Problems (DAW Books, 2024), Wole Talabi investigates the rapidly changing role of technology and belief in our lives as we search for meaning, for knowledge, for justice; constantly converging on our future selves. In “An Arc of Electric Skin,” a roadside mechanic seeking justice volunteers to undergo a procedure that will increase the electrical conductivity of his skin by orders of magnitude. In “Blowout,” a woman races against time and a previously u...
Esra Mirze Santesso, "Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesRecent decades have seen an unprecedented number of comics by and about Muslim people enter the global market. Now, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing (Ohio State UP, 2023) offers the first major study of these works. Esra Mirze Santesso assesses Muslim comics to illustrate the multifaceted nature of seeing and representing daily lives within and outside of the homeland. Focusing on contemporary graphic narratives that are primarily but not exclusively from the Middle East--from blockbuste...
Gustavo Guzmán, "Attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jews: From Acceptable Undesirables to Respected Businessmen" (Brill, 2022)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourGustavo Guzmán's Attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jews: From Acceptable Undesirables to Respected Businessmen (Brill, 2022) is the first book in English to discuss the changing attitudes of the Chilean Right toward Jewish immigrants and the State of Israel from the 1930s onwards. Jewish Chileans have ascended rapidly from the status of undesirable immigrants to middle and upper-middle class, facing less obstacles than their Argentine coreligionists. Particular emphasis is given to the fa...
Annika Schmeding, "Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan" (Stanford UP, 2023)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesAnnika Schmeding’s new book Sufi Civilities: Religious Authority and Political Change in Afghanistan (Stanford UP, 2023) is a deeply sensitive and rich study of a variety of facets of Sufism in contemporary Afghanistan. Focused on the intersection and interaction of Sufism and Afghan civil society, this book simultaneously offers a layered and often moving account of Sufism in Afghanistan, while also presenting an excellent critique of Western NGO driven understandings of civility and civil s...
Jonathan W. Hackett, "Theory of Irregular War" (McFarland, 2024)
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourFrom Afghanistan to Angola, Indonesia to Iran, and Colombia to Congo, violent reactions erupt, states collapse, and militaries relentlessly pursue operations doomed to fail. And yet, no useful theory exists to explain this common tragedy. All over the world, people and states clash violently outside their established political systems, as unfulfilled demands of control and productivity bend the modern state to a breaking point. Jonathan W. Hackett's Theory of Irregular War (McFarland, 2023) l...
40 years of Croatian Studies at Macquarie University
April 07, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesIngrid Piller speaks with Jasna Novak Milić, the director of the Croatian Studies Center at Macquarie University. The Croatian Studies Center at Macquarie University hosts one of a very small number of Croatian Studies programs at university level outside Croatia. We talk about Croatian Studies in the diaspora, small languages in higher education, and why the availability of languages programs in higher education is critical for heritage language maintenance. For additional resources, show no...
Adele Oliver, "Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill" (404 Ink, 2023)
April 07, 2024 04:00 - 48 minutesDeeping It: Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill (404 Ink, 2023) by Adèle Oliver shines a critical light on UK drill and its fraught relationship with the British legal system. Intervening on current discourse steeped in anti-Blackness and moral panic, this Inkling ‘deeps’ how the criminalisation of UK drill cannot be disentangled from histories, technologies, and realities of colonialism, consumerism and more. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcomin...
Claudio Ferlan, "The Jesuits: A Thematic History" (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2023)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesIn The Jesuits: A Thematic History (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2023), Claudio Ferlan provides an exploration of the tradition of the Society of Jesus. Instead of focusing solely on the Society’s historical milestones and changes, Ferlan traces the continuity of key Jesuit themes over time—covering education, mission, social engagement, and more. The book moves between different periods and places, emphasizing how core Jesuit themes have retained their essence despite profound transformation...
Michael LeFebvre, "Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-characterization of Israel's Written Law" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 17 minutesScholars of biblical law widely hold that ancient Israel did not draft law-texts for legislative purposes. Little attention has yet been given to explaining how and when later Judaism did come to regard Torah as legislative. As a result, the current consensus (that Ezra introduced legislative uses of Torah) is based on assumptions which have been never tested. Join us as we speak with Michael LeFebvre about his book, Collections, Codes, and Torah: The Re-characterization of Israel's Written L...
Sandra Fox, "The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America" (Stanford UP, 2023)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesIn the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up a...
Andres Rodriguez, "Frontier Fieldwork: Building a Nation in China's Borderlands, 1919-45" (U British Columbia Press, 2022)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1911, as China was beset with challenges, a new generation of scholars considered a new problem: what to do with former imperial borders? How could China’s frontiers be considered part of the new nation? In Frontier Fieldwork: Building a Nation in China’s Borderlands 1919–45 (UBC Press, 2022), Andres Rodriguez looks at how students, travellers, social scientists, anthropologists, and missionaries contemplated these problems as they took to the Sino-Tibetan frontier to do fieldwork. Focusin...
Joseph M. Thompson, "Cold War Country: How Nashville's Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism" (UNC Press, 2024)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourCountry music maintains a special, decades-long relationship to American military life, but these ties didn't just happen. This readable history reveals how country music's Nashville-based business leaders on Music Row created partnerships with the Pentagon to sell their audiences on military service while selling the music to service members. Beginning in the 1950s, the military flooded armed forces airwaves with the music, hosted tour dates at bases around the world, and drew on artists fro...
Ellie Tomsett, "Stand-up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms: Sexism, Stereotypes and Structural Inequalities" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesHow is comedy hostile to women? In Stand-up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms: Sexism, Stereotypes and Structural Inequalities (Bloomsbury, 2023), Ellie Tomsett, a Senior Lecturer in media and film at Birmingham City University, explores the reality of a comedy industry that, despite many changes, still has a sexism problem. The book draws on a huge range of research materials, illustrating the experience of stand-up comic performers, the views of audiences, the impact of digital and social m...
Rabiat Akande, "Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSet in Colonial Northern Nigeria, this book confronts a paradox: the state insisted on its separation from religion even as it governed its multireligious population through what remained of the precolonial caliphate. Entangled Domains: Empire, Law and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge UP, 2023) grapples with this history to offer a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing religion and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, ...
Marc Edelman, "Peasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change" (Cornell UP, 2024)
April 06, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesPeasant Politics of the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Marc Edelman illuminates the transnational agrarian movements that are remaking rural society and the world's food and agriculture systems. Dr. Edelman explains how peasant movements are staking their claims from farmers' fields to massive protests around the world, shaping heated debates over peasants' rights and the very category of "peasant" within the ag...
John Bond, "The Little Guide to Getting Your Book Published" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
April 06, 2024 04:00 - 33 minutesThe Little Guide to Getting Your Book Published (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) takes prospective authors from idea to draft manuscript to published book in a step-by-step process. The book advises writers on creating a book proposal and then how to find a publisher or agent. Whether a trade non-fiction work, monograph, or textbook, the book is guaranteed to motivate and inspire you to get started on the road to publishing today. Written by a book professional with 30 years of experience on hun...
Collaborate to Research, Collaborate to Partner, Collaborate to Mentor
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesListen to this interview of Rajkumar Buyya, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, University of Melbourne, and Director there too of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems Labs. We talk about collaborating within a discipline, collaborating across multiple disciplines, and also collaborating with industry partners. Rajkumar Buyya : "I consider the research coming from my group not just as the publication of a plain paper, but also as what we call paper++ and by that we mean, a paper alo...
Sarah Horowitz, "The Red Widow: The Scandal That Shook Paris and the Woman Behind It All" (Sourcebooks, 2022)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSex. Lies. Murder. Sarah Horowitz's The Red Widow: The Scandal that Shook Paris and the Woman Behind It All (Sourcebooks, 2022) is a book I literally couldn't put down. Drawing on extensive research into the world and life of its "leading lady," Marguerite ("Meg") Steinheil, Horowitz's account is captivating at every turn. With all of the appeal of the best true crime, the book brings historical depth and nuance to a scandalous and salacious narrative of bourgeois life in the French capital. ...
Translating a Śrī Vidyā Text: The Cidvilāsastava of Amṛtānanda
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesThe Cidvilāsastava is one of the most comprehensive treatments of the esoteric contemplation of ritual found within the Śrīvidyā tradition and Śaiva tantra in general. This short forty-verse hymn offers esoteric knowledge and creative contemplations (bhāvanā) for critical steps in the ritual worship of Tripurasundarī. Although belonging to the Śrīvidyā tradition, the Cidvilāsastava will likely be of great interest to all who perform pūjā as many of the verses deal with topics and procedures t...
Cultural Insights, Historical Perspectives and Business Strategy with Charles Halvorson
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode of "Practical History," I talk with Charles Halvorson, a history PhD, author, and business strategist. With experience that spans work at the boutique cultural consultancy Gemic and the global strategy firm Accenture (where he is currently helping accelerate the energy transition with utilities and other energy ecosystem partners), Charles has much to say about the value of an advanced history degree in the business world. Charles shares his reasons for doing a PhD in history ...
Leah Broad, "Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World" (Faber & Faber, 2023)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 57 minutesThis is a story of four composers whose careers, lives and loves as women working in 20th century Britain have since been largely forgotten. Dr Leah Broad’s 2023 debut Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World (Faber & Faber, 2023), reveals the life and music of some of Britain’s most exciting 20th-century composers. A musicologist who gravitates towards figures at the margins of Western Art Music, the four subjects of Broad’s biography (Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Doreen Carwithen a...
Kieran File, "How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesWhile the topic of relationships in professional sports teams is gaining greater attention from researchers and practitioners, the role that coach and athlete language plays in shaping these relationships remains largely unexplored. How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Kieran File addresses this gap by examining how every day, authentic language patterns used by coaches, captains and...
Mauricio Fernando Castro, "Only a Few Blocks to Cuba: Cold War Refugee Policy, the Cuban Diaspora, and the Transformations of Miami" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Only a Few Blocks to Cuba: Cold War Refugee Policy, the Cuban Diaspora, and the Transformations of Miami (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024), Mauricio Castro shows how the U.S. government came to view Cuban migration to Miami as a strategic asset during the Cold War, in the process investing heavily in the city's development and shaping its future as a global metropolis. When Cuban refugees fleeing Communist revolution began to arrive in Miami in 1959, the city was faced with a humanitarian crisi...
Tina Sikka, "Health Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 18 minutesHealth Apps, Genetic Diets and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury, 2023) critically examines contemporary health and wellness culture through the lens of personalization, genetification and functional foods. These developments have had a significant impact on the intersecting categories of gender, race, and class in light of the increasing adoption of digital health and surveillance technologies like MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, HealthyifyMe, and Fooducate. These three vec...
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market" (Bloomsbury. 2023)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn their bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway revealed the origins of climate change denial. Now, in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (Bloomsbury. 2023), they unfold the truth about another disastrous dogma: the “magic of the marketplace.” In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big gove...
Jane M. Ferguson, "Silver Screens and Golden Dreams: A Social History of Burmese Cinema" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesWithin the social sciences and the humanities, international research in Burma/Myanmar studies tends to lean toward political science and Buddhist studies, or what can be characterized as the “soldiers or monks” approach. The political situation within the country has restricted the access that foreign researchers have had to the country. It has also shaped the type of research that international scholars choose to research and that grant agencies are willing to fund. As a result of this our ...