New Books Network
18,660 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 128 ratingsInterviews with Authors about their New Books
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Episodes
Ani Maitra, "Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital" (Northwestern UP, 2020)
November 23, 2020 05:00 - 1 hourThe politics of identity have played center stage in many political debates in the last few years, and is often seen somewhat pejoratively as an epiphenomenal manifestation of the dynamics of capitalism. Some scholars, however, see this as a reductive mistake, not just for any attempt to organize against capitalism, but also as part of a mistaken understanding of what ‘identity’ is. This is one of the animating ideas of Ani Maitra in his new book Identity, Mediation and the Cunning of Capital...
David Chai, "Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness" (SUNY Press, 2018)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourZhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a radical rereading of the Daoist classic Zhuangzi by bringing to light the role of nothingness in grounding the cosmological and metaphysical aspects of its thought. Through a careful analysis of the text and its appended commentaries, David Chai reveals not only how nothingness physically enriches the myriad things of the world, but also why the Zhuangzi prefers nothingness over being as a means to expound the authentic way ...
Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesBehind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks at Indigenous peoples' experiences in the American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Ind...
Mark Gilbert, "European Integration: A Political History" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 41 minutes“Awareness of the EU's undeniable past and present importance can - and has - led to complacency and hubris. There is nothing inevitable about European integration". So writes Mark Gilbert in European Integration: A Political History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), a compact, narrative history of the European Communities and the European Union pitched at both political-science students and the general reader. Sympathetic to the integration process but critical of “Whig” histories of unstoppab...
Antonia Bosanquet, "Minding their Place: Space and Religious Hierarchy in Ibn al-Qayyim’s Aḥkām ahl al-dhimma" (Brill, 2020)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutesHow was the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim communities theologically and spatially imagined in the premodern world? How did religious hierarchies map onto notions of place and spatial distinction and hierarchies? In her dazzling new book Minding their Place: Space and Religious Hierarchy in Ibn al-Qayyim’s Aḥkām ahl al-Dhimma (Brill, 2020), Antonia Bosanquet addresses these questions through a detailed and theoretically charged reading of the famous and crucially important legal t...
George Musgrave, "Can Music Make You Sick?: Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition" (U Westminster Press, 2020)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 53 minutesIt is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, Can Music Make You Sick?: Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition (University of W...
Amit S. Rai, "Jugaad Time: The Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India" (Duke UP, 2019)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn India, the practice of jugaad—finding workarounds or hacks to solve problems—emerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty, discrimination, and violence but is now celebrated in management literature as a disruptive innovation. In Jugaad Time: The Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Duke UP, 2019) Amit S. Rai explores how jugaad operates within contemporary Indian digital media cultures through the use of the mobile phone. Rai shows that despite being co-opted by capitalis...
Michael D. Barr, "Singapore: A Modern History" (Bloomsbury, 2018)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 36 minutesSingapore’s history has generally been represented through a linear, upward trajectory “from Third World to the First,” in the words of the postcolonial state’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew. In his book Singapore: A Modern History (Bloomsbury, 2020), Michael D. Barr synthesizes a story that complicates this progress narrative and critiques the foundational timeline of the state-sponsored history known as the ‘Singapore Story.’ At the center of the Singapore Story is modernization through good...
Nicholas Guyatt, "Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation" (Basic Books, 2016)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWhy did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that “all men are created equal”? Racism is the usual answer. Yet Nicholas Guyatt argues in Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (Basic Books, 2016) that white liberals from the founding to the Civil War were not confident racists, but tortured reformers conscious of the damage that racism would do to the nation. Many tried to build a multiracial America in the early ...
Shyam Sharma, "Writing Support for International Graduate Students" (Routledge, 2020)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, author of Writing Support for International Graduate Students: Enhancing Transition and Success (Routledge, 2020). We talk about international students and rhetoric, international students and confidence, international students and community-based programming, and vision. Interviewer : "Could you give an example for how teachers can foster agency among international students?" Shyam Sharma : "Let's say you walk into a class and you ask, 'How do people...
Paulina O. Espejo, "On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWhen are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then ...
Peter Mandler, "The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain's Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 38 minutesHow did public demand shape education in the 20th century? In The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford UP, 2020), Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge, charts the history of schools, colleges, and universities. The book charts the tension between demands for democracy and the defence of meritocracy within both elite and public discourses, showing how this tension plays out in Britain’...
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, "What's Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You Solve" (HBR Press, 2020)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 34 minutesStop Solving the Wrong Problem! In this episode we discuss Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg's book What's Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You Solve (HBR Press, 2020) and focus on hisRapid Reframing Method for solving in particular people-related problems. Specific topics include: how emotions can either facilitate or hinder the challenging of established mental models, how reframing fits the top 3 skills of importance for the future economy, and why “vagueness” is...
Tatiana Zhurzhenko, "War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 48 minutesWar and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) analyzes the shaping of the commemorative space in the three post-Soviet countries that used to share commemorative practices and memorial space in general. For the reader outside of the Soviet space, “war,” which is mentioned in the title of the book, will most likely not evoke a specific historical event that the book, in fact, refers to—WWII. Moreover, for the contemporary, “non-Soviet” reader, the title will most lik...
Social Media, Grassroots Activism and Disinformation in Southeast Asia: A Discussion with Dr Aim Sinpeng and Dr Ross Tapsell
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 20 minutesSocial media has become a crucial avenue for political discourse in Southeast Asia, given its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democratising and authoritarian states. Yet the growing decline in internet freedom and increasingly repressive and manipulative use of social media tools by governments means that social media is now an essential platform for control. “Disinformation” and “fake news” production is growing rapidly, and national governments are creating laws which attempt...
Andre E. Johnson, "No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner' (UP Mississippi, 2020)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourNo Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner by Andre E. Johnson, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at the University of Memphis, and Director of the Henry McNeal Turner digital humanities project, is a rhetorical history that details the public career of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner with an emphasis on the trajectory of Turner’s thinking as a pessimistic prophetic persona “within the lament tradition of prophecy” (14). Turner’s role as a B...
John K. Roth, "The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities" (Oxford UP, 2018)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn the Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide and Other Mass Atrocities (Oxford University Press, 2018), John K. Roth concentrates on the multiple shortfalls and shortcomings of thought, decision, and action that tempt and incite humans to inflict incalculable harm upon other humans. Absent the overriding of moral sensibilities, if not the collapse or collaboration of ethical traditions, the Holocaust, genocide, and other mass atrocities could not have happened. Roth does not...
Jon D. Schaff, "Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Liberal Democracy" (SIU Press, 2019)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 2 hoursThere are so many Abraham Lincolns. There is the ruthless Lincoln willing to suspend habeas corpus and who, as president, presided over record levels of bloodshed on American soil. There is the political opportunist Lincoln who declined to take the bold stand against the Know Nothings that some of his contemporaries did, Lincoln preferring to let the movement implode without much action on Lincoln’s part. Lincoln also famously hung back from outright abolitionism for decades, believing that t...
Emily J. H. Contois, "Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture" (UNC Press, 2020)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (UNC Press, 2020), Emily Contois argues that the figure of The Dude was invented (or perhaps only capitalized on) by marketing and advertising firms to combat “gender contamination” and sell what may be perceived as “feminine” foods to men. Contois suggests that this figure coalesced in response to the 2008 recession and the “gender crisis” that it created. Not only were job losses higher for men during this “...
Finishing Your Book When Life Is A Disaster
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 47 minutesWelcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter : The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: disaster stories, finishing a book project, poetry...
Michael C. Davis, "Making Hong Kong China: The Rollback of Human Rights and the Rule of Law" (Columbia UP, 2020)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 1 hour“Imagine you live in a freewheeling city like New York or London – one of the world’s leading financial, educational, and cultural centres. Then imagine that one of the world’s most infamous authoritarian regimes makes direct control over your city, introducing secret police, warrant less surveillance and searches, massive repression and the arrest of protestors, and aggressive prosecution… This is what just happened in Hong Kong” --Michael C. Davis It is difficult to understand the pace or e...
Christina Meyer, "Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid" (Ohio State UP, 2019)
November 18, 2020 10:00 - 1 hourThe Yellow Kid was a ubiquitous figure at the end of the nineteenth century. Originally created by Richard F. Outcault, the Kid first appeared as a character in the comic strip Hogan’s Alley. He was an immensely popular figure, and quickly migrated to other comic strips, as well as appearing on merchandise and various consumer products. As one of the first popular serial characters, the Yellow Kid was emblematic of an emerging consumer culture. In Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life...
Luke A. Nichter, "The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War" (Yale UP, 2020)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourFew have ever enjoyed the degree of foreign-policy influence and versatility that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the grand-son of Woodrow Wilson’s senatorial antagonist, did. In the postwar era, perhaps only George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker. Cabot Lodge, however, had the distinction of wielding that influence under presidents of both parties. For three decades, he was at the center of American foreign policy, serving as advisor to five presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald For...
E. Goldberg et al, "Bollywood Horrors: Religion, Violence and Cinematic Fears in India" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 49 minutesBollywood Horrors: Religion, Violence and Cinematic Fears in India (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a multi-faceted and wide-ranging collection that examines cinematic representations of real-life horror, the religious aspects of horror imagery and themes, and the ways in which Hindi films have projected “cinematic fears” onto the screen. Part I, “Atrocity”, deals with Bollywood's representation of the real horrors of communal violence, rape culture, and human trafficking. In Part II (“Religion”) the ro...
M. Wodziński and W. Spallek, "Historical Atlas of Hasidism" (Princeton UP, 2018)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 44 minutesThe Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton UP, 2018) is the first cartographic reference book on one of the modern era’s most vibrant and important mystical movements. Featuring seventy-four large-format maps and a wealth of illustrations, charts, and tables, this one-of-a-kind atlas charts Hasidism’s emergence and expansion; its dynasties, courts, and prayer houses; its spread to the New World; the crisis of the two world wars and the Holocaust; and Hasidism’s remarkable postwar rebirth. Th...
Ara H. Merjian, "Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesOn this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Ara Marjian, Professor of Italian and affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History at New York University about his newest book Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Paosolini, a filmmaker who created art in a variety of media, has something approaching a cult following. Merjian explores, “Pasolini’s fraught relationship t...
A. Kanna et al., "Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula" (Cornell UP, 2020)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 52 minutesOver the nearly two decades that they have each been conducting fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora have regularly encountered exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the region and its people, political systems, and prevalent cultural practices. These persistent encounters became the springboard for this book, a reflection on conducting fieldwork within a "field" that is marked by such representations. The three focus on deconstructing the...
Helen Sword, "Stylish Academic Writing" (Harvard UP, 2012)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of Helen Sword, author of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012). We talk about bad writing, but a lot more about how to make it good. There's even a dog. Interviewer : "What is it that keeps most students and then, too, many early-career academics away from making the effort to write well?" Helen Sword : "Writing is seen as this utilitarian thing. You've got to learn it. It's got lots of rules. If you get things wrong, somebody's going to put red ink on there or...
Daniela Vallega-Neu, "Heidegger's Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to the Event" (Indiana UP, 2018)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourScholarship on the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has traditionally focused on his magnum opus Being and Time and related earlier work, his later essays and lectures often relegated to an ambiguous later period that many consider philosophically insubstantial, or simply too esoteric and obscure to merit any serious engagement. Luckily, that is starting to change, especially with the publication of the Black Notebooks, as well as a number of manuscripts, essays and lectures from this peri...
Benjamin F. Armstrong, "Small Boats and Daring Men: Maritime Raiding, Irregular Warfare, and the Early American Navy" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutesTwo centuries before the daring exploits of Navy SEALs and Marine Raiders captured the public imagination, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were already engaged in similarly perilous missions: raiding pirate camps, attacking enemy ships in the dark of night, and striking enemy facilities and resources on shore. Even John Paul Jones, father of the American navy, saw such irregular operations as critical to naval warfare. With Jones’s own experience as a starting point, in his book Small Boats an...
Sujatha Fernandes, "Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life" (Duke, UP 2020)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesCuban resourcefulness is on full display in Cuban Hustle: Culture, Politics, Everyday Life (Duke 2020), as sociologist Sujatha Fernandes presents an array of strategies not just for survival but for the invention of expressive practices and community-building spaces. Enduring years of Special Period economics and a transition away from Fidel Castro’s leadership as well as shifting political contexts in Latin America, the United States and Europe, Cubans continue to struggle but also find ways...
Vanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood" (Duke UP, 2020)
November 18, 2020 05:00 - 50 minutesWhile Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work of producing celebrity in Los Angeles, CA. Díaz’s ethnography follows reporters and paparazzi to examine their everyday practices of work and labor...
Sharon T. Strocchia, "Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy" (Harvard UP, 2019)
November 17, 2020 09:00 - 31 minutesOn this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History at Emory University. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), and the book we are here to talk about today, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, a 2019 Harvard University Press release. In this book, Professor...
Pip Gordon, "Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond" (UP Mississippi, 2019)
November 17, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe life and works of William Faulkner have generated numerous biographical studies exploring how Faulkner understood southern history, race, his relationship to art, and his place in the canons of American and world literature. However, some details on Faulkner’s life collected by his early biographers never made it into published form or, when they did, appeared in marginalized stories and cryptic references. The biographical record of William Faulkner’s life has yet to come to terms with t...
Saladin Ambar, "Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era" (Oxford UP, 2014)
November 17, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1964, Malcolm X was invited to debate at the Oxford Union Society at Oxford University. The topic of debate that evening was the infamous phrase from Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican Convention speech: "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." His response to this topic stands out as one of the great addresses of the civil rights era. In Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era (Oxford University Press), Saladin ...
L. L. Paterson and I. N. Gregory, "Representations of Poverty and Place: Using Geographical Text Analysis to Understand Discourse" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
November 17, 2020 09:00 - 45 minutesRepresentations of Poverty and Place: Using Geographical Text Analysis to Understand Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) explores a novel methodological approach which combines analytical techniques from linguistics and geography to bring fresh insights to the study of poverty. Using Geographical Text Analysis, the authors - Laura Paterson and Ian N. Gregory - map the discursive construction of poverty in the UK and compares the results to what administrative data reveal. The analysis draws ...
Joshua Gans, "The Pandemic Information Gap and the Brutal Economics of Covid-19" (MIT Press, 2020)
November 17, 2020 09:00 - 38 minutesAs the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in March, a self-isolating and easily distracted economist resolved to take himself in hand. "I decided I would do what I was good at: I would write a book" about the complex interplay between epidemiology and economics and the policy dilemmas it poses. By June, Joshua Gans had published Economics in the Age of COVID-19 and, within days, he had started work on the expanded version - The Pandemic Information Gap: The Brutal Economics of COVID-19 (MIT Press, 2...
Christopher J. Lee, "Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives" (Ohio UP, 2019)
November 17, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Ostensibly representing two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new Cold War world or...
Marisa Anne Bass, "Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt" (Princeton UP, 2019)
November 17, 2020 09:00 - 52 minutesIn Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton UP, 2019) Marissa Anne Bass explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At the book’s center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinera...
Jerome Slater, "Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 17, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe history of modern Israel is a fiercely contested subject. From the Balfour declaration to the Six-Day War to the recent assault on Gaza, ideologically-charged narratives and counter-narratives battle for dominance not just in Israel itself but throughout the world. In the United States and Israel, the Israeli cause is treated as the more righteous one, albeit with important qualifiers and caveats. In Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020 (Oxford...
Douglas Kelbaugh, "The Urban Fix: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change, Heat Islands and Overpopulation" (Routledge, 2019)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesCities are one of the most significant contributors to global climate change. The rapid speed at which urban centers use large amounts of resources adds to the global crisis and can lead to extreme local heat. The Urban Fix: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change, Heat Islands and Overpopulation (Routledge, 2019) addresses how urban design, planning and policies can counter the threats of climate change, urban heat islands and overpopulation, helping cities take full advantage of ...
Eithne Quinn, "A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood" (Columbia UP, 2019)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 48 minutesWhat is the history of equal rights in Hollywood? In A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood (Columbia UP, 2019), Eithne Quinn, a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, explores the transitional years following the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in order to chart the struggle by Black film makers for rights, recognition and representation. The book combines analysis of on-screen representations, with research on both the producti...
Charles L. Leavitt IV, "Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Charles Leavitt steps back from the micro-histories focusing more narrowly on, for example, Italian cinema so as to weave together divers cultural strands (literature, the visual arts, drama, journalism, poetry, essays) into a tapestry of historical practice. Which realisms are being invoked under the category of “Neorealism” as it was plied and applied in the mid-20th Century? What were the aims of these realisms?...
Charlotte Eubanks, "The Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe Art of Persistence: Akamatsu Toshiko and the Visual Cultures of Transwar Japan (U Hawaii Press, 2019) examines the relations between art and politics in transwar Japan, exploring these via a microhistory of the artist, memoirist, and activist Akamatsu Toshiko (also known as Maruki Toshi, 1912–2000). Scaling up from the details of Akamatsu’s lived experience, the book addresses major events in modern Japanese history, including colonization and empire, war, the nuclear bombings, and the tr...
Kat D. Williams, "Isabel 'Lefty' Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 45 minutesFor many of its participants, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) offered them an opportunity to change their lives, yet few were as transformed as that of Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez. As Kat D. Williams details in Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban-American Baseball Star (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), playing in the league gave her the chance for a new start in a different country. Williams highlights the role Lefty’s mother María played in enco...
Gina Rippon, "Gender and our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesThere is a long history of brain research that seems to legitimize widely held beliefs about the men versus women. According to my guest, much of that research is founded on biases and misguided experiments, which raises the questions: Are there any meaningful neurological differences between men and women? And if so, what are they? To find out, you’ll want to listen to my interview with Dr. Gina Rippon, author of the book, Gender and our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the...
Jimena Canales, "Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science" (Princeton UP, 2020)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 44 minutesScience may be known for banishing the demons of superstition from the modern world. Yet just as the demon-haunted world was being exorcized by the enlightening power of reason, a new kind of demon mischievously materialized in the scientific imagination itself. Scientists began to employ hypothetical beings to perform certain roles in thought experiments—experiments that can only be done in the imagination—and these impish assistants helped scientists achieve major breakthroughs that pushed ...
Conspiracy Theories are More Dangerous Than Ever: A Discussion with Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 41 minutesConspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new—conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2019), Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum show how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, why so few officials speak trut...
Nurfadzilah Yahaya, "Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia" (Cornell UP, 2020)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourFluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020) by Prof. Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book that tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. Here, Yahaya looks at colonial legal infrastructure – discussing how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more imp...
R. Muirhead and N. L. Rosenblum, "A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2019)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 41 minutesConspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new—conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2019), Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum show how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, why so few officials speak trut...