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Episodes
Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, "NeuroScience Fiction" (Benbella Books, 2020)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields. Along the way, he also explores the thorny philosophical problems raised as a result, diving into Minority Report and free will, The Matrix and the illusion of reality, Blade Runner and android emotion, and more. A heady mix of science fiction, neu...
Roundtable Discussion of Jennifer Morgan's "Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery" (UPenn Press, 2004)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWelcome to New Books in African American Studies, a channel on the New Books Network. I am your host Adam McNeil. Today is part 2 of my discussion about Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s 2004 Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Instead of Dr. Morgan, who was featured in part 1 of the discussion, I enlisted a few #Blktwitterstorians to pull up to the pod and discuss the importance of Dr. Morgan’s Laboring Women to the field of slavery studies, gender and sexuality studies, and...
Sana Aiyar, "Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora" (Harvard UP, 2015)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2015), Sana Aiyer investigates how Indian diasporic actors influenced the course of Kenya’s political history, from partnering with Europeans in their colonial mission in East Africa to political solidarity with Africans in their anticolonial struggles. Working as merchants, skilled tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and journalists, Indians formed the economic and administrative middle class in colonial Kenya. In general, they...
Roger Kennedy, "The Power of Music: Psychoanalytic Explorations" (Phoenix House, 2020)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 35 minutesToday I discussed why music so powerful in eliciting emotions with Roger Kennedy, the author of The Power of Music: Psychoanalytic Explorations (Phoenix Publishing House, 2020) Now at The Child and Family Practice in London, Kennedy is a training analyst and past President of the British Psychoanalytical Society. This is his fourteenth book. Topics covered in this episode include: The ability of music to reward close listening because of qualities like movement and the web of interactions in...
B. Heersink and J. A. Jenkins, "Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesPrior to the 1960s, Democrats were seen as having a lock on the South in national and local electoral politics, while Republicans had strengths in other parts of the country. While this was the case for some time, Boris Heersink and Jeffrey A. Jenkins, in their new book,Republican Party Politics and the American South, 1865-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), look a bit more deeply into the role of the Republican Party in the Southern states following the Civil War, and they find some in...
Ann-Sophie Barwich, "Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind" (Harvard UP, 2020)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourSmells repel and attract; they bring emotionally charged memories to mind; they guide behavior and thought nonconsciously; they give food much of its taste; and the loss of sense of smell can help diagnose disease. But what features of the world do smells pick out? What is the olfactory code? In her new book, Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind (Harvard UP, 2020), Ann-Sophie Barwich delves into the mysteries of smell and the difficulties of scientific attempts to explain how it works. T...
David Haig, "From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life" (MIT Press, 2020)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesIn his book, From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life (MIT Press), evolutionary biologist David Haig explains how a physical world of matter in motion gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning. Natural selection is a process without purpose, yet gives rise to purposeful beings who find meaning in the world. Haig proposes that the key to this is the origin of mutable “texts” that preserve a record of what has worked in the world, in other words: g...
Laura Westengard, "Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (University of Nebraska Press), Laura Westengard examines the intersection of queerness and the gothic. Westengard’s scope is broad enough to encompass Lady Gaga’s meat dress, lesbian pulp fiction, Dracula, queer literature, and sadomasochistic performance art. What brings these diverse cultural objects together is the way they re-appropriate tropes of the gothic that have been used to marginalize queer and g...
Glenda Goodman, "Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic" (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesMozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were all working in Europe during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, so perhaps it is no surprise that musicologists have diligently studied these men and their music. Yet, the musical culture of the generation born around the time of the Revolution in the United States has been all but ignored. In Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press), Glenda Goodman begins to remedy this oversight. Through a penet...
Hettie V. Williams, "Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History" (Praeger, 2018)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 38 minutesBlack women intellectuals have traditionally been overlooked in the academic study of American intellectual history. Bury My Heart in a Free Land: Black Women Intellectuals in Modern U.S. History (Praeger) highlights the important contributions of both well- and lesser-known abolitionists, civil rights activists, preachers, writers, and artists to all spheres of American life and culture, arguing that Black women and their ideas were central to some of the most important social and political ...
Albena Azmanova, "Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Utopia or Crisis" (Columbia UP, 2020)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourCapitalism seems to many to be in a sort of constant crisis, leaving many struggling to make ends meet. This desperation was intensified in 2008, and for many never went away in spite of claims of a general economic ‘recovery.’ More recently, the tensions and shortcomings of our current socioeconomic system have been exacerbated by the COVID-crisis, with poorly compensated frontline workers struggling to stay safe in workplaces that have failed to take adequate care of their health and safety...
Joshua Greenberg, "Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 38 minutesWhat is money? No, really, what is money? It turns out the answer is not so simple. During the course of the 20th century, most of us have gotten used to the notion of a single medium of exchange based on Federal Reserve notes which we call dollars. They look the same, feel the same, and have the same use everywhere in the country. We are so comfortable with that medium of exchange that we are now increasingly doing away with the paper and accepting a digital version of said money. The conven...
Alfred Posamentier, "Mathematics Entertainment for the Millions" (World Scientific Publishing, 2020)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesThe book being discussed is Mathematics Entertainment for the Millions (World Scientific Publishing Co.), by Alfred Posamentier. In reading this book, it occurred to me that it might equally well have been entitled Millions of Mathematical Entertainments. There may not be millions of entertainments, but there’s an incredible amount – most of it easily accessible to a middle-school or high-school student, and that’s exactly the audience that we want to show how enticing mathematics can be. An...
Emily Anthes, "The Great Indoors" (Scientific American, 2020)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 30 minutesModern humans are an indoor species. We spend 90 percent of our time inside, shuttling between homes and offices, schools and stores, restaurants and gyms. And yet, in many ways, the indoor world remains unexplored territory. For all the time we spend inside buildings, we rarely stop to consider: How do these spaces affect our mental and physical well-being? Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? Our productivity, performance, and relationships? In this wide-ranging, character-driven book, sc...
Federico R. Waitoller, "Excluded by Choice: Urban Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketplace" (Teachers College Press, 2020)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 43 minutesIn this episode, I speak with Federico R. Waitoller about his book, Excluded by Choice: Urban Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketplace (Teachers College Press). This book highlights the challenges faced by students of color who have special needs and their parents who evaluate their educational options. We discuss the services to which students with disabilities are entitled, how they are manifested in neighborhood and charter schools, and how they may be in tension with practi...
Alexander Kaye, "The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Israel" (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesThe tension between secular politics and religious fundamentalism is a problem shared by many modern states. This is certainly true of the State of Israel, where the religious-secular schism provokes conflict at every level of society. Driving this schism is the idea of the halakhic state, the demand by many religious Jews that Israel should be governed by the law of the Torah as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis. The Invention of Jewish Theocracy: The Struggle for Legal Authority in Modern Isra...
Co-Authored: A Discussion of "The Party Decides"
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 37 minutesThe Party Decides is the most (only?) meme'd book in the history of political science. It's the one MTV called the biggest loser after the South Carolina primary in 2016. It is also a book of deep research, scholarship, and collaboration. This episode of the Co-Authored podcast focuses on the team of Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller. This group came together to write The Party Decides while at UCLA in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The book and other articles by future co...
Muhammed Fraser-Rahim, "America’s Other Muslims" (Lexington Books, 2020)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAmerica's Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam explores the oldest and perhaps the most important Muslim community in America, whose story has received little attention in the contemporary context. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim explores American Muslim Revivalist, Imam W.D. Mohammed (1933–2008) and his contribution to the intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical thought of American Muslims as well as the contribution of Islamic thought by indigenous Am...
Dana M. Malone, "From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses" (Rutgers UP, 2018)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourCollege students hook up and have sex. That is what many students expect to happen during their time at university—it is part of growing up and navigating the relationship scene on most American campuses today. But what do you do when you’re a student at an evangelical university? Students at these schools must negotiate a barrage of religiously imbued undercurrents that impact how they think about relationships, in addition to how they experience and evaluate them. As they work to form succe...
B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, "Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat do all these have in common: Disneyland and the Dreamtime, the shopping mall and the planned economy, Chomsky's Syntactic Structures and Halliday's Functional Grammar, Unicode and door handles? All mean something. The companion volumes Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge University Press) and Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning (Cambridge University Press), by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, are abou...
Jennifer L. Morgan, "Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn 2004, Dr. Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press) was published. Sixteen years later, Morgan’s Laboring Women stands tall as one of the most important historical texts in the history of the academy. Building on Dr. Deborah Gray White’s literal field building and seminal 1985 monograph, Ar’n’t I A Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Laboring Women clearly added to White’s tradition, but also helped blaze...
Steven Heine, "Readings of Dōgen's 'Treasury of the True Dharma Eye'"(Columbia UP, 2020)
September 09, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesThe Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō) is the masterwork of Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist sect in Kamakura-era Japan. It is one of the most important Zen Buddhist collections, composed during a period of remarkable religious diversity and experimentation. The text is complex and compelling, famed for its eloquent yet perplexing manner of expressing the core precepts of Zen teachings and practice. Readings of Dōgen's "Treasury of the True Dharma Eye" (Columbia U...
T. P. Kaplan and W. Gruner, "Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust" (Berghahn, 2020)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn 20 years of studying the Holocaust, it didn’t occurr to me that German officials might, when petitioned by German Jews or by Germans advocating for German Jews, change their minds. But it turns out that, sometimes, they did. And even when they didn’t, petitioning local, regional or national officials (often all at the same time) could delay deportations or punishments or even function as a form of resistance. Resisting Persecution: Jews and Their Petitions during the Holocaust (Berghahn Bo...
Sören Urbansky, "Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border" (Princeton UP, 2020)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe fact that the vast border between China and Russia is often overlooked goes hand-in-hand with a lack of understanding of the ordinary citizens in these much-discussed places, who often lose out to larger-than-life figures like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. A book that combines a look at the history of the Sino-Russian border with a focus on the experiences of everyday borderlanders is thus very valuable, and this is exactly what is offered by Sören Urbansky’s Beyond the Steppe Frontier: ...
Matthew Yglesias, "One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger" (Portfolio, 2020)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat would actually make America great? More people. If the most challenging crisis in living memory has shown us anything, it’s that America has lost the will and the means to lead. From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (Portfolio) is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing. Vox founder Matthew Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really cont...
Catherine Adel West, "Saving Ruby King: A Novel" (Park Row Books, 2020)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 32 minutesTwo south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past. Ruby’s mother, Alice King, has been murdered. Her father, Lebanon King, is an abusive man who endured a terrible childhood. Her best friend, Layla, has always tried to protect Ruby from Lebanon even though her own father and Ruby’s father have been close friends since childhood. And their mothers were friends before them. In this moving debut novel, Saving Ruby King (Park Row Books), Catherine Adel West gives each ...
Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, "Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico" (U California Press, 2020)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesIn her new book In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press), Gema Kloppe-Santamaría examines the history of violence enacted by groups against alleged transgressors who claimed to bring justice while acting beyond the rule of law. Focusing on the 1930s to 1950s, this book explores the roots of a phenomenon often mistakenly assumed to be a result of neoliberalism in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. K...
Joshua B. Freeman, "Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World" (W. W. Norton, 2019)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn an accessible and timely work of scholarship, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman's Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (W. W. Norton) tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the early textile mills that powered the Industrial Revolution to the factory towns of New England to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones i...
Isabella Cosse, "Mafalda: A Social And Political History of a Global Comic" (Duke UP, 2019)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 35 minutesIsabella Cosse’s Mafalda: A Social And Political History of a Global Comic (Duke University Press) is the definitive account of the most famous comic from Latin America, the Argentine strip Mafalda (1964-1973). Mafalda, a four-year-old girl living in a Buenos Aires apartment with her middle-class family, became an international symbol of dissent through her humorous, yet pointed critiques of authoritarianism. Cosse’s work of cultural history carefully situates the comic in the context of soci...
Jeremy Black, "A History of Britain: 1945 to Brexit" (Indiana UP, 2017)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAccording to the influential French commentator and scholar, Raymond Aron, one the great un-answered questions of the post-1945 period is how and why the British went from being ‘Romans to Italians’. In an endeavor to answer this question and much more is Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University Jeremy Black’s book A History of Britain: 1945 to Brexit (Indiana UP, 2017) Spanning the period from Attlee’s surprise victory over Winston Churchill in 1945, to the equally surprising decis...
Jessica Whyte, "Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism" (Verso, 2019)
September 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDrawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, in Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso), Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a...
Kyle DeCoste et al., "Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game" (U Mississippi Press, 2020)
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourCan’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) is a collaboration between musician and ethnomusicologist Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. It is the culmination of five years of interviews, research, and writing. Told with humor and candor, it’s as much a personal account of the Stooges’ careers as it is a story of the city’s musicians and, even more generally, a coming-of-age tale a...
Carolyn J. Dean, "The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide" (Cornell UP, 2019)
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 37 minutesThe Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s―covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentia...
Judith Mair, "The Routledge Handbook of Festivals" (Routledge, 2018)
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesThe Routledge Handbook of Festivals (Routledge, 2018) offers a comprehensive evaluation of the most current research, debates, and controversies surrounding festivals. It covers a wide range of theories, concepts and contexts, such as sustainability, festival marketing and management, the strategic use of festivals, and their futures. The handbook features a variety of disciplinary, cultural, and national perspectives from an international team of authors. The handbook was edited by Dr. Judit...
Helmut Walser Smith, "Germany: A Nation in its Time" (Liveright, 2020)
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn his groundbreaking 500-year history entitled Germany: A Nation in its Time (Liveright, 2020), Helmut Walser Smith challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than many twentieth-century historians have imagined. Smith’s dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. Contrary to...
Assaf Gavron, "The Hilltop" (Scribner, 2015)
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 53 minutesMordantly funny and deeply moving, The Hilltop about life in a West Bank settlement has been hailed as “brilliant” (The New York Times Book Review) and “The Great Israeli Novel [in which] Gavron stakes his claim to be Israel’s Jonathan Franzen” (Tablet). On a rocky hilltop stands Ma’aleh Hermesh C, a fledgling outpost of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. According to government records it doesn’t exist; according to the military it must be defended. On this contested land, Othniel Assis—under...
Jacob Mundy, "Libya" (Polity Press, 2018)
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourJacob Mundy is associate professor of PCON at Colgate University He’s written a great book titled Libya, published in 2018 in Polity Presses' "Hot Spots in Global Politics" series. Jacob’s book is part-history, part-political science to guide readers through the intricate maze of foreign and Libyan actors and institutions that define modern day Libya. Mundy’s book is an accessible account of the complex political, security, and humanitarian crises that have engulfed Libya – Africa’s largest o...
Sandra Young, "The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge" (Routledge, 2015)
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourEarly modern geographers and compilers of travel narratives drew on a lexicon derived from cartography’s seemingly unchanging coordinates to explain human diversity. Sandra Young’s inquiry into the partisan knowledge practices of early modernity brings to light the emergence of the early modern global south. In The Early Modern Global South in Print: Textual Form and the Production of Human Difference as Knowledge (Routledge, 2015), Young proposes a new set of terms with which to understand t...
Postscript: Shirley Chisholm as Principled Political Strategist
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutes“I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America. “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. “I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that.” – Shirley Chisholm, January 25, 1972, Announcement of Run for the Presidency What is the political and intellectual legacy of Shirley Chisholm? Recent coverage of Chisholm – especi...
Stooges Brass Band, "Can’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game" (U Mississippi Press, 2020)
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourCan’t Be Faded: Twenty Years in the New Orleans Brass Band Game (University of Mississippi Press, 2020) is a collaboration between musician and ethnomusicologist Kyle DeCoste and more than a dozen members of the Stooges Brass Band, past and present. It is the culmination of five years of interviews, research, and writing. Told with humor and candor, it’s as much a personal account of the Stooges’ careers as it is a story of the city’s musicians and, even more generally, a coming-of-age tale a...
Wendy Moore, "No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books, 2020)
September 07, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesToday’s guest is journalist and author, Wendy Moore. Her new book, No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain's Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I (Basic Books) explores the WWI British military hospital known as Endell Street. A hospital run by two suffragette doctors, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray. A hospital staffed almost completely by women who treated over 26,000 wounded soldiers. It’s an incredible book published by Atlantic Books in the UK an...
Rachel Mesch, "Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France" (Stanford UP, 2020)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press), Rachel Mesch reads the biographies and work of three writers who did not conform to the gender norms of the period. In different ways, Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912) lived and wrote gender stories that challenged prevailing notions of masculinity and femininity, claiming and writing identities that complicated existing binaries and conventions....
Tamar Herzig, "A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy" (Harvard UP, 2019)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Tamar Herzig, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, the Director of Tel Aviv University’s Morris E Curiel Institute for European Studies, and as the Vice Chairperson of the Historical Society of Israel about her new book, A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press). Dr. Herzig took time out from her extraordinarily busy schedule to discuss her exciting new read, detailin...
Yehoshua November, "Two Worlds Exist" (Orison Books, 2016)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesYehoshua November's second poetry collection, Two Worlds Exist (Orison Books), movingly examines the harmonies and dissonances involved in practicing an ancient religious tradition in contemporary America. November's beautiful and profound meditations on work and family life, and the intersections of the sacred and the secular, invite the reader--regardless of background--to imaginatively inhabit a life of religious devotion in the midst of our society's commotion. Yehoshua November's first p...
C. De Beukelaer and K. M. Spence, "Global Cultural Economy" (Routledge, 2018)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 44 minutesHow should we understand the role of cultural industries in contemporary society? In Global Cultural Economy (Routledge) Christiaan De Beukelaer, a senior lecturer in cultural policy at the University of Melbourne, and Kim-Marie Spence, a postdoctoral researcher at Solent University, explore and explain the interrelationship between culture and economy across the world. The book covers a range of subjects, from inequality and diversity, through government funding and cultural policy, to devel...
Charles Allan McCoy, "Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesOutbreaks of Ebola, SARS, MERS, and pandemic influenza are brutal reminders of the dangers of infectious disease. Comparing the development of disease control in Britain and the United States, from the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia to the H1N1 panics of more recent times, Diseased States: Epidemic Control in Britain and the United States (University of Massachusetts Press) provides a blueprint for managing pandemics in the twenty-first century. To understand why these two nations...
Audrey Truschke, “Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King” (Stanford UP, 2017)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFor many, the history of the Mughal empire looms heavy over contemporary South Asian social imaginaries. The lightning rod figure within modern day myths about the past is the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1618-1707). Some think of him as a violent Muslim fanatic who went out of his way to oppress Hindus and destroy their temples. Others consider his nearly 50-year reign (1658–1707) one of the most consequential for pre-modern South Asian history. Audrey Truschke, Associate Professor of South Asi...
David J. Hand, "Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters" (Princeton UP, 2020)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThere is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (Princeton University Press, 2020) is unique in this genre for its focus on those data that aren't collected or don't get analyzed. More than an introduction to missingness and how to account for it, this book proposes that the whole of data analysis can benefit from a "dark data" perspectiv...
James Zogby, "The Tumultuous Decade: Arab Public Opinion and the Upheavals of 2010-2019" (Steuben Press, 2020)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourJames Zogby’s The Tumultuous Decade: Arab Public Opinion and the Upheavals of 2010–2019 (Steuben Press, 2020) takes the reader on a decade-long tour of the Middle East as the region reverberates from popular revolts that toppled long-standing dictators, civil and proxy wars that sparked some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, foreign interventions and seemingly intractable power struggles. It does so through the eyes of ordinary Arabs, Iranians, and Turks rather than the region’s polit...
J. Herbst and S. Lovegrove, "Brexit And Financial Regulation" (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 04, 2020 08:00 - 34 minutesThe UK’s transition from legally withdrawing from the EU to leaving the union’s single market will come to an end at midnight on December 31 with no successor trade agreement yet in place. For the UK’s financial sector, which accounts for 7% of the country’s economy and a million of its jobs, whether there is such an agreement and what shape it takes really matters. In Brexit and Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-editors Jonathan Herbst and Simon Lovegrove have corralle...