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18,207 episodes - English - Latest episode: 5 days ago - ★★★★ - 128 ratingsInterviews with Authors about their New Books
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Episodes
Sophie White, "Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2019)
July 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn her prize-winning study Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Colonial Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2019), award-winning historian Sophie White (Professor of American Studies, Africana Studies, History, and Gender Studies, and Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame) beautifully brings to life the lives and experiences of a number of enslaved...
Rebecca E. Karl, "China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History" (Verso, 2020)
July 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourChina’s emergence as a twenty-first-century global economic, cultural, and political power is often presented as a story of what Chinese leader Xi Jinping calls the nation’s “great rejuvenation,” a story narrated as the return of China to its “rightful” place at the center of the world. In China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History (Verso, 2020), historian Rebecca E. Karl argues that China’s contemporary emergence is best seen not as a “return,” but rather as the pr...
Solomon Goldstein-Rose, "The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change" (Melville House, 2020)
July 29, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourAt age 26, Solomon Goldstein-Rose has already spent more time thinking about climate change than most of us will in our lifetimes. He’s been a climate activist since age 11, studied engineering and public policy to understand what physically has to happen to solve climate change, and served in the Massachusetts state legislature on a climate-focused platform. In 2018 he canceled his campaign for re-election so he could work full-time on climate change at the national and global levels. The 10...
Theresa Kaminski, "Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights" (Lyons Press, 2020)
July 28, 2020 08:00 - 51 minutesAmong the tens of thousands of Americans who volunteered their services during the Civil War was Mary Walker, a daring young woman who was one of the handful of female doctors in the nation at that time. Yet despite the often desperate need for medical professionals she spent much of the war struggling to earn the respect she felt she deserved. In Dr. Mary Walker's Civil War: One Woman's Journey to the Medal of Honor and the Fight for Women's Rights (Lyons Press, 2020), Theresa Kaminski descr...
Mary Kathryn Nagle, "Sovereignty" (Northwestern UP, 2020)
July 28, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Sovereignty (Northwestern University Press, 2020) playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle weaves together two stories separated by 170 years but joined by a common dilemma: how can Cherokee people fight for justice under an unjust colonial legal framework? In present-day Oklahoma, Sarah Ridge Polson attempts to bring her abuser to justice using the Violence Against Women Act. In 1835, her ancestors try to defend the inherent jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation against the encroachments of the state ...
Mark A. Nathan, "From the Mountains to the Cities: A History of Buddhist Propagation in Korea" (U Hawaii Press, 2018)
July 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFrom the Mountains to the Cities A History of Buddhist Propagation in Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), written by Mark A. Nathan, is a history of P’ogyo (Buddhist Propagation) on the Korean peninsula from the late 19th century to the beginning of the 21st that switches its focus to South Korea beginning with the Post-Korean War period. Nathan’s history is woven with the themes of geography, law, and media, which serve to elucidate how Buddhism in Korea transformed from a religion tha...
M. C. Stevenson et al. (eds.), "The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 28, 2020 08:00 - 34 minutesWhen children become entangled with the law, their lives can be disrupted irrevocably. When those children are underrepresented minorities, the potential for disruption is even greater. The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy (Oxford University Press) examines issues that arise when minority children's lives are directly or indirectly influenced by law and public policy. Uniquely comprehensive in scope, this trailblazing volume offers cutting-edge chapters on the ...
A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series about Polymath Robert Eisler. Episode 8: A Very Difficult Man to Kill
July 28, 2020 08:00 - 42 minutesFollowing the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in March of 1938, Robert Eisler wrote to Oxford asking about being appointed to the Wilde Readership in Comparative and Natural Religion, thereby gaining a way out of Nazi-controlled Europe. On the day after Hitler held a rally at the Heldenplatz in Vienna attended by 200,000 Austrian supporters, a letter came expressing regret that Oxford was unable to offer any assistance. Desperate to find an escape, Eisler wrote to friends all over Europ...
Junior Tomlin, "Junior Tomlin: Flyer and Cover Art" (Velocity Press, 2020)
July 28, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesJunior Tomlin: Flyer & Cover Art (Velocity Press, 2020) showcases the artwork of Junior Tomlin. Featuring flyers and record covers Tomlin has created for the rave scene starting in the late 1980s, this is the first book which comprehensively and cohesively documents his work in this important UK subculture. Raised in Ladbroke Grove, west London, Tomlin’s Afrofuturism work is influenced by surrealism, science fiction, futurism, and comics. Tomlin has been dubbed “The Salvador Dali of Rave” and...
Jan Doering, "Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods" (Oxford UP, 2020)
July 28, 2020 08:00 - 53 minutesWith such high levels of residential segregation along racial lines in the United States, gentrifying neighborhoods present fascinating opportunities to examine places with varying levels of integration, and how people living in them navigate the thorny politics of race. Among the many conflicts revolving around race under gentrification is crime and its relationship with the displacement and marginalization of a neighborhood’s existing low-income minority groups. Contributing to this convers...
Bill LeFurgy, "Into the Suffering City: A Novel of Baltimore" (High Kicker Books, 2020)
July 28, 2020 08:00 - 38 minutesIn Bill LeFurgy's Into the Suffering City: A Novel of Baltimore (High Kicker Books), Sarah Kennecott is a brilliant young doctor who cares deeply about justice for murder victims after her own family is murdered. She’s not like other people; she doesn’t like noises and smells, she doesn’t understand chit chat, and she cannot interpret inflection or nuance. It’s 1909, and the city of Baltimore is filled with gilded mansions and a seedy corrupt, underworld. Sarah struggles to be accepted as a d...
JoAnna Poblete, "Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Samoa" (U Hawai’i Press, 2020)
July 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Balancing the Tides: Marine Practices in American Samoa (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020), JoAnna Poblete demonstrates how western-style economics, policy-making, and knowledge building imposed by the U.S. federal government have been infused into the daily lives of American Samoans. American colonial efforts to protect natural resources based on western approaches intersect with indigenous insistence on adhering to customary principles of respect, reciprocity, and native rights in compl...
Andrew Kettler, "The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
July 27, 2020 08:00 - 53 minutesIn his new book, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Dr. Andrew Kettler charts the impact that smell had on the making of race and justifications for enslavement in the Atlantic world. Western European defined the African subject as a scented object, appropriated as filthy to create levels of ownership through discourse that marked African peoples as unable to access spaces of Western modernity. So powerful was this process of embo...
Lakshmi Subramanian, "The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral" (Oxford UP, 2016)
July 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourLakshmi Subramanian’s The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India's Western Littoral (Oxford University Press, 2016) offers an amphibious history written around the juncture of the nineteenth century, when the northwestern littoral of India—largely comprising of Gujarat, Kathiawad, Cutch, and Sind—was battered by piratical raids. These attacks disrupted coastal trade in the western Indian Ocean and embarrassed the English East India Company by defying the very boundaries...
Hanne Herland, "New Left Tyranny" (Christian Publishing House, 2020)
July 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn her new book New Left Tyranny (Christian Publishing House, 2020), Hanne Herland argues that the neo-Marxist New Left has turned their back on historical Western principles and became a destructive authoritarian force. According to Herland, it has abandoned the working class. By systematically attacking traditional values and inciting Identity Politics, Herland argues, the New Left has created a dysfunctional society characterized by social anarchy, selfishness, and a lack of personal respo...
Kathleen Bachynski, "No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis" (UNC Press, 2019)
July 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday we are joined by Kathleen Bachynski, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Muhlenberg College, and author of No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the intersection of public health and American football, the difficulty in assessing and quantifying sports injuries, and the way that football organizers were able to mete out responsibility for broken b...
Marika Rose, "A Theology of Failure: Žižek Against Christian Innocence" (Fordham UP, 2019)
July 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourChristian theology has a long and at times contradictory history, riddled with tensions that make it difficult (if not impossible) to develop a single systematic account of what Christianity is. However, rather than see this as a shortcoming, one can instead try and see this as a productive philosophical and spiritual starting point. This is the animating idea of A Theology of Failure: Žižek Against Christian Innocence (Fordham University Press, 2019), which argues that failure should be wel...
Benjamin T. Smith, "The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street" (UNC Press, 2018)
July 27, 2020 08:00 - 51 minutesMexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression. As Benjamin T. Smith demonstrates in his history of the press and civil society, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) the cycle of violent repression and protest over journalism is nothing new. He traces it back to the growth in newspaper ...
Verónica Martínez-Matsuda, "Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
July 27, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesVerónica Martínez-Matsuda about her book Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program (University of Pennsylvania Press). Migrant Citizenship exams the Farm Security Administration’s Migratory Labor Camp Program, and its role in the daily lives of a diverse number of farmworker families. Martínez-Matsuda thoroughly investigates the way public policy was used to intervene in the lives of migrant workers, and how these workers sought to transform their own l...
Sasha Costanza-Chock, "Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need" (MIT Press, 2020)
July 27, 2020 08:00 - 36 minutesIn Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020), Sasha Costanza-Chock, an associate professor of Civic Media at MIT, builds the case for designers and researchers to make the communities they impact co-equal partners in the products, services, and organizations they create. This requires more than eliciting participation from community members, particularly if the goal is extraction. On the contrary, design justice demands a deep understanding of the c...
R. K. Jefferson and H. B. Johnson, "Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court (NYU Press, 2020)
July 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourBefore Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court in 1981, nine highly qualified women were on the shortlist. What do the stories of these women tell us about the judiciary? Gender? Feminism? Race? In Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court (NYU Press, 2020), Renee Knake Jefferson (professor at the University of Houston Law Center) and Hannah Brenner Johnson (Vice Dean and a law professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego) demonstrate how hi...
Iraj Bashiri, "The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan" (Lexington Books, 2016)
July 25, 2020 04:00 - 51 minutesIn The History of the Civil War in Tajikistan (Lexington Books) Iraj Bashiri provides an overview of the Civil War in Tajikistan that emerged amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on personal observations, interviews, and a variety of primary and secondary publications, Bashiri places the conflict in a broader historical context, paying careful attention to longstanding tensions that came to the forefront in the early 1990s. These include ideology, regionalism, and, most importantly,...
A Conversation with Chris Chapple, Part II: Living Landscapes
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourJoin us as we continue discussion with Dr. Christopher Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Layola Marymount University as we dive into his new book Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Five Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas (SUNY Press, 2020). The ancient Indian philosophers conceptualized the universe as comprising 5 elements (Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space), corresponding to the five human senses. This philosophy is encoded in Indian religion at every tu...
Justin Gomer, "White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights" (UNC Press, 2020)
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourJustin Gomer is the author of White Balance: How Hollywood Shaped Colorblind Ideology and Undermined Civil Rights, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. White Balance explores the connection between politics and film from the 1970s to the 1990s. Gomer illustrates the myriad of ways that Hollywood relied on and helped solidify an emerging ideology of colorblindness in the wake of the civil rights movement. From films like Dirty Harry to Rocky, Gomer is able to show just ...
Emily Wallace, "Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South" (U Texas Press, 2019)
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesIn this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Emily Wallace, author and illustrator of the new book Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South (University of Texas Press, 2019). Road Sides pays homage to popular travel guides with its short chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet containing a brief contextualizing essay followed by a feature of a specific location, business, or product. “A” is for Architecture, a tribute to buildings in the shape...
Chelsea Wagenaar, "The Spinning Place" (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2019)
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 38 minutesIn The Spinning Place (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2019), Chelsea Wagenaar explores the power of language—in terms of its possibilities and what it fails to express. As a being with a body in the world, there are so many experiences that are inexpressible. These poems attempt to touch upon those experiences, relating what it means to have a body, one that carries so many things, from children in the womb to the emotional weight of our relationship to others and the world around us. As Wage...
Ari Linden, "Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity" (Northwestern UP, 2020)
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesIn Karl Kraus and The Discourse of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2020), Ari Linden analyzes Karl Kraus’s oeuvre while engaging in the conversation about modernism and modernity, which is shaped and conditioned by the already post-postmodern condition. This perspective opens up the exploration of modernist projects and allows a discussion that goes beyond a specific time-period and invites us to locate the conversation about Kraus, as well as about the modernist discourse, in the c...
Katherine Zien, "Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone" (Rutgers UP, 2017)
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Katherine Zien examines the ways politicians, activists, artists, and residents performed and interpreted sovereignty in the Canal Zone from U.S. control over the zone in 1903 to its withdrawal in 1999. Moving beyond the big ditch and construction of the interoceanic canal, Zien explores how white Zonians, West Indian laborers and their descendants, and Panamanians wrestled ...
Patricia Zavella, "The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism" (NYU Press, 2020)
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesIn The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism (NYU Press, 2020), Pat Zavella shows how reproductive justice organizations' collaborative work across racial lines provides a compelling model for other groups to successfully influence change. In the context of the war on women's reproductive rights and its disproportionate effect on women of color, and increased legal violence toward immigrants, The Movement for Reproductive Justice demonstrates tha...
Telory Arendell, "The Autistic Stage: How Cognitive Disability Changed 20th-Century Performance" (Sense Publishers, 2015)
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesIn The Autistic Stage: How Cognitive Disability Changed 20th-Century Performance (Sense Publishers, 2015) (Sense Publishers, 2015), Telory Arendell creates a revolutionary fusion of disability studies and performance studies. Arendell touches on the work of autistic poet and librettist Christopher Knowles, portrayal of autism in film, and the use of theatre as a therapy for those on the autism spectrum. In so doing she overturns ableist assumptions about autistics’ inability to connect with o...
Shahla Haeri, "The Unforgettable Queens of Islam: Succession, Authority and Gender" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe Unforgettable Queens of Islam: Succession, Authority and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2020) by Shahla Haeri (Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston University) is a captivating book on the biographies of Muslim women rulers and political leaders. Drawing from extensive historical archives as well as from ethnographic research, Haeri reflects on the legacy of the hadith that says, “never will succeed a nation as makes a woman their ruler.” The book includes stories of Muslim ...
Thomas Bishop, "Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter" (UMass Press, 2020)
July 24, 2020 08:00 - 29 minutesIn Every Home a Fortress: Cold War Fatherhood and the Family Fallout Shelter (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Thomas Bishop details the remarkable cultural history and personal stories behind an iconic figure of Cold War masculinity—the fallout shelter father, who, with spade in hand and the canned goods he has amassed, sought to save his family from atomic warfare. Putting policy documents and presidential addresses into conversation with previously unmined personal letters, diarie...
Manuel Betancourt, "Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)
July 23, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), Manuel Betancourt explores what makes Judy Garland’s landmark album great, and why it holds such a central place in queer culture. A hit when released in 1961 (it was the first album by a woman ever to win the Grammy award for Best Album), Judy at Carnegie Hall quickly came to occupy a central place in the gay imaginary. And yet by 1967 characters in the play The Boys in the Band would mock Judy fandom as the height of outda...
Bo Mou, "Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy" (Brill, 2018)
July 23, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourContributors to Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, edited by Bo Mou, professor of philosophy at the San Jose State University, bring together work on the syntax and semantics of the Chinese language with philosophy of language, from the classical Chinese and contemporary analytic Anglophone traditions. The result is an anthology which explores what Mou calls “the constructive-engagement” model for doing philosophy. In this wide-ranging interview, we talk about the b...
Andrew S. Baer, "Beyond the Usual Beating" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
July 23, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys and elected officials looked the other way. In his book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago (University of Chicago Press), Andrew Baer explains how the eponymous detective and others hid their violence, and the arduous struggle to get Burge fired and win reparat...
Elizabeth Shesko, "Conscript Nation: Coercion and Citizenship in the Bolivian Barracks" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
July 23, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourElizabeth Shesko’s Conscript Nation: Coercion and Citizenship in the Bolivian Barracks (University of Pittsburgh Press) is an intimate and rich history of the militarization of Bolivia over the course of the twentieth century through the lives of the men conscripted to serve. Beginning with the Civil War of 1899 and elite fears of Aymara military might and autonomy and ending with the military coup of René Barrientos in 1964, Shesko shows how compulsory male conscription emerged out of desire...
Aliya Hamid Rao, "Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment" (U California Press, 2020)
July 23, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesIn Crunch Time: How Married Couples Confront Unemployment (University of California Press, 2020), Aliya Hamid Rao gets up close and personal with college-educated, unemployed men, women, and spouses to explain how comparable men and women have starkly different experiences of unemployment. Traditionally gendered understandings of work—that it’s a requirement for men and optional for women—loom large in this process, even for marriages that had been not organized in gender-traditional ways. Th...
Laurie M. Wood, "Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire" (Yale UP, 2020)
July 23, 2020 08:00 - 37 minutesHistorians have long treated the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes of early modern French empire separately. But, early modern people understood France as a bi-oceanic empire, connected by vast but strong pathways of commercial, intellectual, and legal exchange. Laurie M. Wood’s Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire (Yale UP, 2020) recasts our view of France’s empire by evaluating the interwoven trajectories of the people, like itinerant ship-workers and colonial magistra...
Nir Bashan, "The Creator Mindset: 92 Tools to Unlock the Secrets to Innovation, Growth, and Sustainability" (McGraw-Hill, 2020)
July 23, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutesWhy is the corporate fallback being “analytical” (as opposed to nurturing creativity)? Today I talked to Nir Bashan about his new book The Creator Mindset: 92 Tools to Unlock the Secrets to Innovation, Growth, and Sustainability (McGraw-Hill, 2020) Bashan is a creativity expert who has spent the past two decades devising a formula for sustained creativity. Besides his blue-chip corporate clients, Bashan has also worked on album, movies and advertisements for people like Rod Stewart and Woody ...
Mayfair Yang, "Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China" (Duke UP, 2020)
July 23, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Re-enchanting Modernity: Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (Duke University Press, 2020), Mayfair Yang examines the resurgence of religious and ritual life after decades of enforced secularization in the coastal area of Wenzhou, China. Drawing on twenty-five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Yang shows how the local practices of popular religion, Daoism, and Buddhism are based in community-oriented grassroots organizations that create spaces for relative ...
John B. Holbein, "Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Action" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
July 23, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesIn the United States, each election cycle reminds us that younger voters vote at much lower rates than their older counterparts. This discrepancy is often chalked up to apathy or lack of interest in politics among younger voters. In their new book, John B. Holbein and D. Sunshine Hillygus analyze this conventional explanation along with the political science literature about voting behavior among different age cohorts. What they find is a more complex picture of contemporary young voters, and...
Edward Alpers, "The Indian Ocean in World History" (Oxford UP, 2014)
July 22, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourEdward Alpers’s The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a concise yet an immensely informative introduction to the Indian Ocean world, which remains the least studied of the world's geographic regions. Yet there have been major cultural exchanges across its waters and around its shores from the third millennium B.C.E. to the present day. Historian Edward Alpers explores the complex issues involved in cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean Rim region over the course...
Laurie Olin, "Be Seated" (ORO Editions, 2017)
July 22, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesToday I talked to Laurie Olin about his book Be Seated (ORO Editions, 2017). Olin’s interest in public outdoor seating in parks and civic spaces revolves around two poles: the first is a concern for aspects of the ordinary in our settings and actions, the apparatus and effects of the quotidian in our individual lives and experience; the other is the utility of public seating in the conduct and potential of our role as citizens and the establishment of place and community. A not inconsiderable...
Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, “Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds” (SUNY Press, 2020)
July 22, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn her fascinating book, Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds (SUNY Press, 2020), Joyce Flueckiger analyzes the agency of materiality, that is, the ability of materials to have effect beyond what was intended. This ethnographic journey across three Indian locales examines the agency of various materials – from ornaments, to female guising, to cement images. This book not only delivers deep insight into the Hindu world, but broadens our understanding of the role of material agency within the...
Daniel Woolf, "A Concise History of History: Global Historiography from Antiquity to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
July 22, 2020 08:00 - 28 minutes‘THOSE THAT DENY THEIR HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!’ So Tweeted the 45th President of the United States to his 80 million followers in June, as American streets once again were transformed into spaces of protest. It turns out that the President prefers one particular route between the American past and present, and has vowed to defend both it and its symbols against all comers. The once unifying power of the national narrative is now one of many of points of sharp and often violent divisi...
Jennifer Domino Rudolph, "Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity" (Ohio State UP, 2020)
July 22, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity (Ohio State University Press, 2020), Jennifer Domino Rudolph analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence. Rudolph examines t...
Sandra Postel, "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity" (Island Press, 2020)
July 22, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesIn Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity (Island Press), Sandra Postel acknowledges society’s past mishaps with managing water and emphasizes our future is contingent upon rehabilitating our science, tech, and political solutions. To understand our past and provide hope for our future Sandra takes readers around the world to explore water projects that work with, rather than against, nature’s rhythms. Sandra discusses her journey to learning about these projects. What’s more...
Roger Moorhouse, "Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II" (Basic Books, 2020)
July 22, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesHistorian and academic Roger Moorhouse, revisits the opening campaign of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939., in his new book Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic Book, 2020). Although the German invasion was the cause of the outbreak of World War II, oddly there has not been much by way of English language treatments of this pivotal historical episode. With this fine and highly readable narrative history, Moorhouse more than makes up for this omission. ...
Raymond Winbush, "The Osiris Papers: Reflections on the Life and Writing of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing" (Black Classics Press, 2019)
July 22, 2020 08:00 - 47 minutesToday’s interview is with Dr. Raymond Winbush a research professor and the Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University. Dr. Winbush and Dr. Denise Wright coedited the book The Osiris Papers: Reflections on the Life and Writing of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing (Black Classic Press, 2019) As a scholar and activist, Dr. Winbush is known for his systems-thinking approaches to understanding the impact of racism/white supremacy on the global African community. His writings, ...
Schneur Zalman Newfield, "Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism" (Temple UP, 2020)
July 22, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThose who exit a religion—particularly one they were born and raised in—often find themselves at sea in their efforts to transition to life beyond their community. In Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple UP, 2020), Schneur Zalman Newfield, who went through this process himself, interviews seventy-four Lubavitch and Satmar ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews who left their communities.He presents their motivations for leaving as well as how they make s...