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
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 ...
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...
Frederick Luis Aldama, "Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 51 minutesIn Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia (UP of Mississippi, 2020), Frederick Luis Aldama brings together comics scholars Joshua T. Anderson, Chad A. Barbour, Susan Bernardin, Mike Borkent, Jeremy M. Carnes, Philip Cass, Jordan Clapper, James J. Donahue, Dennin Ellis, Jessica Fontaine, Jonathan Ford, Lee Francis IV, Enrique García, Javier García Liendo, Brenna Clarke Gray, Brian Montes, Arij Ouweneel, Kevin Patrick, Candida Rifkind, Jessica Rutherford, and Jorge Santos t...
S. F. C. Daly, "A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe Republic of Biafra lasted for less than three years, but the war over its secession would contort Nigeria for decades to come. A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020) examines the history of the Nigerian Civil War and its aftermath from an uncommon vantage point – the courtroom. Wartime Biafra was glutted with firearms, wracked by famine, and administered by a government that buckled under the weight of the conflict. I...
Arlene Davila, "Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics" (Duke UP, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (Duke UP, 2020), Arlene Dávila draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. Dávila shows the importance of race, class, and natio...
T. C. F. Stunt, "The Life and Times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles: A Forgotten Scholar" (Springer, 2019)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesFor the sixty years in which he has made a distinguished contribution to the religious history of the nineteenth century, Timothy Stunt has been working on the life and times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, the New Testament textual critic. In his previous books, scholarly articles, and entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Stunt has developed the commitment to prosopography that makes his new book so important and so compelling. The Life and Times of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles...
Jo Mackiewicz, "Writing Center Talk over Time: A Mixed-Method Study" (Routledge, 2018)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, author of Writing Center Talk over Time: A Mixed-Method Study (Routledge 2018). We talk about talk, tutor talk, student talk, spoken written-language, and Wisconsin. interviewer : "Now, this is pretty much something that a writing center is aiming for, isn't it? I mean, you don't want that––just as in the classroom with the teacher––you don't want that the writing tutor is doing all of the talking, do you?" Jo Mackiewicz : "Oh, yeah. One of the bigge...
David Vine, "The United States of War: A Global History of America's Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State" (U California Press, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourSince its founding, the United States has been at peace for only eleven years. Across nearly two-and-a-half centuries, that’s a lot of war. In his new book, The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State (University of California Press, 2020), David Vine tries to figure out why this has been the case. His book is a powerful, broad-sweeping, and, at times, shattering account of the forever wars that the United States continues to ...
Katja M. Guenther, "The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals" (Stanford UP, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourMonster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles. Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals (Stanford UP, 2020) takes us inside one of the country's highest-intake animal shelters. Katja M. Guenther witnesses ...
Ido Hartogsohn, "American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century" (MIT Press, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourAre psychedelics invaluable therapeutic medicines, or dangerously unpredictable drugs that precipitate psychosis? Tools for spiritual communion or cognitive enhancers that spark innovation? Activators for one’s private muse or part of a political movement? In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers studied psychedelics in all these incarnations, often arriving at contradictory results. In American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2020), Ido Hart...
Michel Boivin, "The Sufi Paradigm and the Makings of a Vernacular Knowledge in Colonial India" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe Sufi Paradigm and the Makings of a Vernacular Knowledge in Colonial India: The Case of Sindh (1851-1929) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) by Michel Boivin maps the construction of a vernacular knowledge (as opposed to colonial knowledge) of a complex Sufi paradigm in Sindh by both British Orientalists, such as Richard Burton, but also Sindhi intelligentsia, like Mirza Qalich Beg. Examining the historical period from 1851-1929 during the British colonial control of the Sindh, the book argues tha...
Megan Harlan, "Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays" (U Georgia Press, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 28 minutesHome is the place many of us have spent our days for the last eight months. During the pandemic, our homes have become our workplaces, our classrooms, and our social spaces through apps like Zoom. But no matter what we do in our homes, for many of us, the notion of a home is fixed, tied just as much to a specific place as it is to our identities—both how we understand who we are, and the ways we communicate that self to the world. Whether our country, our region, or our city, when asked where...
Audrey J. Horning, "Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic" (UNC Press, 2017)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Audrey Horning revisits the fraught connections between Ireland and colonial Virginia. Both modern scholars and early modern colonialists themselves viewed English incursions into Ireland and North America as intimately related. But the precise nature of this relationship has been a matter of contention. In the standard narrative, British efforts to establish plantations in Ireland...
Southeast Asian Performance, Ethnic Identity and China’s Soft Power: A Discussion with Dr Josh Stenberg
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 25 minutesFrom glove puppets of Chinese origin and Hakka religious processions, to wartime political theatre and contemporary choirs and dance groups, the diverse performance practices of ethnic Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia highlight the complexity of minority self-representation and sense of identity of a community that is often considered solely in socioeconomic terms. Each performance form is placed in its social and historical context, highlighting how Sino-Southeast Asian groups a...
Christophe Morin, "The Serenity Code: How Brain Plasticity Helps You Live Without Stress, Anxiety, and Depression (SAD)" (Depth Insights, 2020)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 37 minutesIn his book The Serenity Code: How Brain Plasticity Helps You Live Without Stress, Anxiety and Depression (SAD) (Depth Insights, 2020), Christophe Morin explains how you can rewire your brains to escape stress and anxiety. Dr. Christophe Morin is passionate about decoding the relationship between the brain and human behaviors. He’s received multiple speaking, publishing, and research awards during his career. He holds an MBA from BGSU, and both a MA and a PhD in Media Psychology from Field G...
Lindsay Farmer, "Making the Modern Criminal Law: Criminalization and Civil Order" (Oxford UP, 2016)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn his latest book, Professor Lindsay Farmer offers a historical and conceptual analysis of theories of criminalization. The book shows how criminalization is inextricably linked to the making of the modern criminal law. This distinct body of rules and processes is neither fixed nor inevitable in what, who, and how it criminalizes. Instead, it is constructed by the changing functions of criminal law as an instrument of government in the modern state. In this way, the criminal law, and process...
Sujit Sivasundaram, "Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire" (William Collins, 2020)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (William Collins, 2020), Sujit Sivasundaram brings together far-flung archives across the world and the best new academic research. Too often, history is told from the northern hemisphere, with modernity, knowledge, selfhood and politics moving from Europe to influence the rest of the world. This book traces the origins of our times from the perspective of indigenous and non-European people in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Fro...
Kevin O'Leary, "Madison's Sorrow: Today's War on the Founders and America's Liberal Ideal" (Pegasus Books, 2020)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourThe story of America is the struggle between our liberal ideal and illiberal resistance. Donald Trump catalyzed a reactionary revolution by tapping into the dark, shadowy side of American democracy that embraces exclusion and inequality. Throughout American history these alarming impulses have come to the forefront of our culture—during the Civil War, the era of the Robber Barons, and the Civil Rights Movement—but have now come to fruition in the presidency of Donald Trump. Arguing that the ...
Should I Quit My Ph.D. Program?
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 49 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 own mentor networks 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: what happens when graduate school doesn’t go ...
Daniel Deudney, "Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourSpace is again in the headlines. E-billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are planning to colonize Mars. The Trump Administration has created a "Space Force" to achieve "space dominance" with expensive high-tech weapons. The space and nuclear arms control regimes are threadbare and disintegrating. Would-be asteroid collision diverters, space solar energy collectors, asteroid miners, and space geo-engineers insistently promote their Earth-changing mega-projects. Given our many looming planetary...
Anne Gerritsen, "The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWe think of blue and white porcelain as the ultimate global commodity: throughout East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean including the African coasts, the Americas and Europe, consumers desired Chinese porcelains. Many of these were made in the kilns in and surrounding Jingdezhen. Found in almost every part of the world, Jingdezhen's porcelains had a far-reaching impact on global consumption, which in turn shaped the local manufacturing processes. The imperial kilns of Jingdezhen produced ...
Michael M. Knight, "Muhammad's Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage" (UNC Press, 2020)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 48 minutesMuhammad's Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage by Michael Muhammad Knight (UNC Press, 2020) joins the emerging subfield of literature in Islamic Studies exploring embodiment and materiality as concepts for making sense of the spatial and temporal developments of Muslim subjectivities. Knight’s monograph is the first to delve into these themes as it concerns the Prophet Muhammad’s body and its functions, relationships, representations, symbolism, and postmortem contestations wit...
Lucas A. Dietrich, "Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 57 minutesIn Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Lucas A. Dietrich investigates how ethnic literatures took shape in the U.S. context and how writers of color intervened in the “mainstream” writing. Interestingly, this intervention was framed through specific genres and techniques, including satire and parody towards the mainstream narratives. The book brings our attention to the most prominent ethnic ...
Julius Margolin, "Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourJulius Margolin was a Polish Jew caught between the twin 1939 invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He spent the years 1940-1945 in Soviet labor camps, finally returning to his family in Palestine, in 1946. In her book Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back (Oxford UP, 2020), Israeli scholar Stefani Hoffman has provided the English-speaking world with its first full translation of Margolin’s story, which reiterates the importance of individual human dignity, no matter the...
Amy Stanley, "Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World" (Scribner, 2020)
November 12, 2020 09:00 - 41 minutes“To mother, from Tsuneno (confidential). I’m writing with spring greetings. I went to Kanda Minagawa-chō in Edo—quite unexpectedly—and I ended up in so much trouble!” This letter, hidden in an archive in Niigata Prefecture, inspired Professor Amy Stanley to write her latest work: Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner, 2020). She traces Tsuneno’s life, from growing up in a rural community through her escape to the city of Edo, where she lives in the final deca...
Joanne Paul, "Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWhile it has often been recognized that counsel formed an essential part of the political discourse in early modern England, the precise role that it occupied in the development of political thinking has remained obscure. Counsel and Command in Early Modern English Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020) establishes the importance of the relationship between political counsel and the discourse of sovereignty. Tracing the changes and evolution of writings on political counsel during the “mo...
Alfred S. Posamentier, "The Joy of Geometry" (Prometheus, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 57 minutesAlfred S. Posamentier's The Joy of Geometry (Prometheus, 2020) is a book for someone who has taken geometry but wants to go further. This book, as one might expect, is heavy on diagrams and it is sometimes hard to discuss some of the ideas without reference to a diagram. Also, to be fair, this is not a book intended to be read casually. To fully appreciate this book, it is necessary to sit down, preferably in a comfortable chair with a beverage of one’s choosing, and prepare to give the diagr...
Ken Tully and Chad Leahy, "Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade" (Routledge, 2019)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourOn Good Friday, 1626, Franciscus Quaresmius delivered a sermon in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem calling on King Philip IV of Spain to undertake a crusade to 'liberate' the Holy Land. Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-century Crusade (Routledge, 2019) introduces readers to this unique call to arms with the first-ever edition of the work since its publication in 1631. Aside from an annotated English translation of the sermon, this book also includes ...
Laura DeNardis, "The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch" (Yale UP, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourMost people recognize that the internet is growing at an exponential rate. But few have thought as deeply as Laura DeNardis, a Professor and Interim Dean at the School of Communication at American University, about what those changes will mean for privacy, security, human rights, and democracy. In The Internet in Everything: Privacy and Security in a World With No Off Switch (Yale, 2020), Professor DeNardis shows that the policy tools and normative constructs we have built around the internet...
Kevin Mattson, "We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn his new book, We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America (Oxford UP, 2020), Kevin Mattson documents punk rock in the early 1980s through a comprehensive look into the music, zines, films, bands, and punk Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tactics. He shows how widespread the punk movement was in creating a counterculture that challenged the conservative narrative of 1980s America. Mattson places the punk countercultural movement into the wider contex...
Stephen H. Whiteman, "Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe" (U Washington Press, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn 1702, the second emperor of the Qing dynasty ordered construction of a new summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde, Hebei) to support his annual tours north among the court’s Inner Mongolian allies. The Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu Shanzhuang) was strategically located at the node of mountain “veins” through which the Qing empire’s geomantic energy was said to flow. At this site, from late spring through early autumn, the Kangxi emperor presided over rituals of intimacy and exchang...
Ronald Grigor Suny, "Stalin: Passage to Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutesRonald Suny’s recent biography of the young Stalin, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton UP, 2020) covers “Soso” Jughashvili’s life up to the 1917 Revolution. Suny provides a wealth of detail as to the young Stalin’s life, and he embeds that life story in the broader story of Bolshevism. The Stalin that emerges from Suny’s portrait was skilled at navigating Party in-fighting an effective at speaking both to workers and to intellectuals. This biography does much make sense of the later Sta...
V. Nesfield and P. Smith, "The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel's Literary Works" (SUNY Press, 2019)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 49 minutesAn in-depth look at Elie Wiesel’s writings, from his earliest works to his final novels. Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) was one of the most important literary voices to emerge from the Holocaust. The Nazis took the lives of most of his family, destroyed the community in which he was raised, and subjected him to ghettoization, imprisonment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and a death march. It is remarkable not only that Wiesel survived and found a way to write about his experiences, but that he did so w...
S. J. Hartland, "The 19th Bladesman" (Dark Blade, 2018)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 36 minutesA rich and complex world of sword-wielding fighters and seductive sorceresses, written in percussive, lyrical prose. The 19th Bladesman (Dark Blade, 2018) first introduces us to Kaell, the eponymous hero of the novel, when he runs away from the mountain castle where Lord Vraymorg tutors him in swordcraft. We learn the eight-year old Kaell is bonded to the battle god Khir and has been blessed with exceptional strength. In a pattern that’s often to be repeated, Kaell’s defiance of Vraymorg afte...
Mark Glancy, "Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourCary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend (Oxford University Press, 2020) tells the incredible story of how a sad, neglected boy became the suave, glamorous star many know and idolize. The first biography to be based on Grant's own personal papers, this book takes us on a fascinating journey from the actor's difficult childhood through years of struggle in music halls and vaudeville, a hit-and-miss career in Broadway musicals, and three decades of film stardom during Hollywood's golden age...
Richard Muller, "Grace and Freedom: William Perkins and the Early Modern Reformed Understanding of Free Choice and Divine Grace" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 34 minutesNo-one has done more than Richard A. Muller to shape our approach to early modern historical theology. His earlier work, and most especially the four volumes of his Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, initiated fresh interest in reading early modern Reformed sources on their own terms and in their own contexts, and pushed back against reductive accounts of the history of theological ideas. In this important new book, Grace and Freedom: William Perkins and the Early Modern Reformed Understand...
Tobias Harris, "The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan" (Hurst, 2020)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourAbe Shinzō is seen today through many lenses: as the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Japan; as a pragmatic leader with a consistent policy vision and a commitment to the art of statecraft; as a nationalist whose strong historical revisionist beliefs led him to make inflammatory moves that opened old wounds and antagonized Japan’s neighbors. In his new biography, The Iconoclast: Shinzō Abe and the New Japan (Hurst, 2020), Tobias Harris presents a painstakingly researched, enga...
Beth Kurland, "Dancing on the Tightrope: Transcending the Habits of Your Mind and Awakening to Your Fullest Life" (Wellbridge Books, 2018)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIf life can feel at times like a challenging tightrope walk, how do we face life's difficulties yet remain resilient and open-hearted? Rather than seeking "perfect" balance, or tiptoeing on our journey, how do we learn to embrace life and "dance," in order to live most fully? In Dancing on the Tightrope: The Transformative Power of Ten Minutes (Wellbridge Books, 2018), clinical psychologist and award-winning author Dr. Beth Kurland reveals five common obstacles--habits of the mind that get i...
Sarah Wisseman, "The Botticelli Caper" (Wings ePress, 2019)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 25 minutesThe Botticelli Caper (Wings ePress, 2019) is set at the Uffizi Galleries during a period, not long ago, when workmen were constantly coming in and out during massive amounts of reconstruction. Flora, an art conservator, is working to clean Sondro Botticelli’s world-famous Birth of Venus. She realizes that there are no notes from the previous cleaning and begins to get suspicious as she removes the frame and looks at the paint’s sheen. Then she sees a smiley-face. She’d seen it before in a for...
Jeremy M. Glick, "The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution" (NYU Press, 2016)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWhat if the Haitian Revolution, perhaps the only “successful” Black revolution in history, weren’t over? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Jeremy Matthew Glick (h/h) about how and why the Haitian Revolution, which was the only slave rebellion to achieve state sovereignty, remains an inspired site of investigation for artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora. In The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished H...
Jill Massino, "Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania" (Berghahn, 2019)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn this episode, we meet Dr. Jill Massino, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina who is fascinated researching everyday life under dictatorships. We discuss her first book Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania (Berghahn, 2020). This book which is based on more than one hundred oral histories and extensive work with archival material, shows convincingly that people and societies are complex and elude cl...
Kelly Underman, "Feeling Medicine: How the Pelvic Exam Shapes Medical Training" (NYU Press, 2020)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 42 minutesThe pelvic exam is considered a fundamental procedure for medical students to learn; it is also often the one of the first times where medical students are required to touch a real human being in a professional manner. In Feeling Medicine: How the Pelvic Exam Shapes Medical Training (NYU Press, 2020), Kelly Underman gives us a look inside these gynecological teaching programs, showing how they embody the tension between scientific thought and human emotion in medical education. Drawing on int...
Matthew Hart, "Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction" (Columbia UP, 2020)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 53 minutesExtraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores how texts—literary and visual—help us engage with the space that goes beyond the limits of visible geographical borders and legal regulations. By drawing attention to the loci that produce borderline experiences (detention camps, consulates, international waters), Matthew Hart guides his readers through experiences that ask to reconsider the ways in which geographical places and the impl...
Pilar Jennings, "To Heal a Wounded Heart: The Transformative Power of Buddhism and Psychotherapy in Action" (Shambala, 2017)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesEarly on in her clinical practice, psychoanalyst Pilar Jennings was presented with a particularly difficult case: a six-year-old girl who, traumatized by loss, had stopped speaking. Challenged by the limitations of her training to respond effectively to the isolating effect of childhood trauma, Jennings takes the unconventional path of inviting her friend Lama Pema--a kindly Tibetan Buddhist monk who experienced his own life-shaping trauma at a very young age--into their sessions. In the warm...
Kevin Leo Nadal, "Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System" (Lexington Book, 2020)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 35 minutesThroughout US history, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have been pathologized, victimized, and criminalized. Reports of lynching, burning, or murdering of LGBTQ people have been documented for centuries. Prior to the 1970s, LGBTQ people were deemed as having psychological disorders and subsequently subject to electroshock therapy and other ineffective and cruel treatments. LGBTQ people have historically been arrested or imprisoned for crimes like sodomy, cross-dr...
Lisa Adkins, et al., "The Asset Economy" (Polity, 2020)
November 09, 2020 09:00 - 33 minutes“The key element shaping inequality is no longer the employment relationship but rather whether one is able to buy assets that appreciate at a faster rate than both inflation and wages”. So argue Lisa Adkins, Martijn Konings and Melinda Cooper in The Asset Economy (Polity Press, 2020), extending the argument in Thomas Piketty’s 2014 best-seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Inheritance, they claim, is no longer a 19th-century-style transmission of property titles after death but a “str...
The Work and Value of University Presses
November 09, 2020 09:00 - 53 minutesWhat do university presses do? And how do they contributed to public discourse? November 9 is the beginning of University Press Week, and today I had the honor of talking to Niko Pfund, the president of the Association of University Presses and the head of Oxford University Press. In the interview, we discuss the work of university presses and their value to the production of knowledge and a vibrant exchange of ideas. We also talked about the challenges UPs face generally and in the time of C...
Christine Hong, "A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific" (Stanford UP, 2020)
November 09, 2020 09:00 - 59 minutesThe image of the US as leading a good war to establish liberal democracy and move towards racial equality dominate the discourses of the Cold War. In her work, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2020), Christine Hong attempts to debunk the idea of good war and warfare-welfare state that allowed women and racial minorities to participate in national politics by showing how the US government was ab...
R. H. Helmholz, "Natural Law in Court: A History of Legal Theory in Practice" (Harvard UP, 2015)
November 09, 2020 09:00 - 54 minutesR. H. Helmholz's book Natural Law in Court (Harvard UP, 2015) serves as a guide to the uses of natural law in the past. It shows how lawyers, judges and jurists used natural law to reason and argue about all areas of the law, be they procedural or substantive. Far from being a polemic, this book delves into the legal record of multiple countries to compare, contrast and shed light on the role natural law played in actual legal disputes. Due to the renewed interest in natural law today, this b...
Julia S. Charles, "That Middle World: Race, Performance, and the Politics of Passing" (UNC Press, 2020)
November 09, 2020 09:00 - 50 minutesIn this chronologically and thematically ambitious study of racial passing literature, Julia Charles highlights how mixed-race subjects invent cultural spaces for themselves—a place she terms that middle world. Charles, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Auburn University, focuses on the construction and performance of racial identity in works by writers from the antebellum period through Reconstruction, connecting these passing or crossing narratives to more contemporary ...