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Episodes
Jacqueline H. Fewkes, "Locating Maldivian Women's Mosques in Global Discourses" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
May 15, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat is a mosque? What are women's mosques specifically? What historical values do women's mosques offer, and what is the relationship between mosque spaces and women's religious work? How do women leaders themselves identify with and conceptualize their leadership roles? Why are women's mosques around the world, both historical and contemporary, omitted from both popular and scholarly discourses on women's mosques? Jacqueline Fewkes' excellent and theoretically sophisticated book, Locating M...
Paul Harkins, "Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies" (Routledge, 2019)
May 14, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesHow does technology shape music? In Digital Sampling: The Design and Use of Music Technologies (Routledge, 2019), Paul Harkins, a lecturer in music at Edinburgh Napier University, looks at the relationship between the rise of digital sampling, technology, and music. The book draws inspiration from Science and Technology Studies to explore the impact of specific technologies, such as the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, programming languages, and studio practices, on artists and producer...
Chris Fleming, "On Drugs" (Giramondo Publishing, 2019)
May 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hour"After I’d finished my rapid-fire history of self-justification he paused and then said, deadpan and rural-Australian-slow: 'Right. Ok. So how is that all working out for you?'" On Drugs (Giramondo Publishing, 2019) explores Australian philosopher Chris Fleming’s experience of addiction, which begins when he is a student at the University of Sydney and escalates into a life-threatening compulsion. In a memoir by turns insightful and outlandish, Fleming combines meticulous observation with a k...
Tatiana Linkhoeva, "Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism" (Cornell UP, 2020)
May 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourA century ago it wasn’t a virus whose spread was eliciting reactions around the world, but an idea. As Russia’s 1917 October Revolution distended itself across north Asia and reverberated globally, socialism acted – not unlike today’s pandemic – as a Rorschach test revealing divisions in societies and politics, and to some offering cautious hope for a new world which might be constructed in the aftermath. Tatiana Linkhoeva’s meticulously detailed Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Sovie...
Pasha Mahdavi, "Power Grab: Political Survival through Extractive Resource Mobilization" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
May 14, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesWhy did Muammar Qaddafi and Hugo Chavez nationalize the oil industries in Libya and Venezuela? Machiavelli urged princes to attend to both acquiring and sustaining power. In Power Grab: Political Survival through Extractive Resource Mobilization (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Paasha Mahdavi argues that modern leaders nationalize extractive resources (such as petroleum, metals, and minerals) to extend the duration of their power. By taking control of the means of production and establishi...
Jia Lynn Yang, "One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965" (Norton, 2020)
May 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020), Jia Lynn Yang recounts the personalities and debates that brought about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which forms the foundation for modern U.S. immigration policy. Undoing the xenophobic national origins quotas enshrined in the 1924 Immigration Act required an epic, forty-year struggle against nativist concerns about the economy and national security, as wel...
A. M. Barton and W. S. Keeton, "Ecology and Recovery of Eastern Old-Growth Forests" (Island Press, 2018)
May 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOld-growth forests captivate and inspire us. Walking through them can transport us to a time before human domination of the natural world. This is especially the case with old-growth forests in the eastern part of the United States, a region with a long history of profound human disturbances of ecological regimes. Beyond their role as inspiration, old growth serves important ecological functions regionally and globally. These forests also provide several practical services to humans. How do s...
Natasha J. Lightfoot, "Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation" (Duke UP, 2015)
May 14, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Duke University Press, 2015), Natasha J. Lightfoot traces the ways Antiguans and Barbudans experienced freedom in the immediate years before and decades after British emancipation in 1834. With the exception of a handful of places, slavery ended immediately without a period of apprenticeship. However, Lightfoot deftly shows how immediate emancipation did not translate into complete freedom as Antiguan elites enacted new ...
Forrest Stuart, "Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy" (Princeton UP, 2020)
May 13, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourHow do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy (Princeton University Press, 2020), Forrest Stuart uses ethnographic and interview methods to explore the lived experiences of young men on Chicago’s south side. Stuart peels back the layers on what is commonly referred to as the digital divide, or the idea that there is unequal access to and use of technology, to instead find what he refer...
Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette, "Dialogue and Doxography in Indian Philosophy" (Routledge, 2020)
May 13, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThis ground-breaking work on Indian philosophical doxography examines the function of dialectical texts within their intellectual and religious milieu. In Dialogue and Doxography in Indian Philosophy: Points of View in Buddhist, Jaina, and Advaita Vedānta Traditions (Routledge, 2020), Karl-Stéphan Bouthillette examines the Madhyamakahṛdayakārikā of the Buddhist Bhāviveka, the Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya of the Jain Haribhadra, and the Sarvasiddhāntasaṅgraha attributed to the Advaitin Śaṅkara, focusin...
Andrew Monaghan, "Dealing with the Russians" (Polity, 2019)
May 13, 2020 08:00 - 38 minutesAre the generals fighting the last war? In Dealing with the Russians (Polity, 2019), Andrew Monaghan argues that Western policy makers are using an outdated Cold War model of ideology, language and institutions, which is wholly unsuited for understanding, engaging, and countering where necessary Russia in the 21st century. One of England's leading experts on Russia, Monaghan argues Western policy makers need to let go of the past Cold War rhetoric and come up with modern tools to manage the c...
Fulvio Mazzacane, "Contemporary Bionian Theory and Technique in Psychoanalysis" (Routledge, 2018)
May 13, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesPsychoanalytic theory has developed very rapidly in recent years across many schools of thought. One of the most popular builds on the work of Wilfred Bion. Fulvio Mazzacane's new book Contemporary Bionian Theory and Technique in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018) provides a concise and comprehensive introductory overview of the latest thinking in this area, with additional contemporary theoretical influence from Freud, Klein and Winnicottian thought. Covering central psychoanalytic concepts su...
Nancy Mattina, "Uncommon Anthropologist: Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture" (U Oklahoma Press, 2019)
May 13, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourProtégé of Elsie Clews Parsons and Franz Boas, founder and head of Barnard College's anthropology department, and a trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichard (1893–1955) is one of America’s least appreciated anthropologists. Her accomplishments were obscured in her lifetime by differences in intellectual approach and envy, as well as academic politics and the gender realities of her age. Reichard's approach to Native languages put her at odds with Edward Sap...
E. Michele Ramsey, "Major Decisions: College, Career, and the Case for the Humanities" (U Penn Press, 2019)
May 13, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews E. Michele Ramsey of PennState Berks on Major Decisions: College, Career, and the Case for the Humanities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), a robust defense of Communication and the Humanities as disciplines of study. Major Decisions is a breathtaking work of research that proves the values and skills taught in humanities disciplines are exactly those needed in the 21st century. Despite the persistence of the m...
Ana Stevenson, "The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
May 13, 2020 08:00 - 53 minutesIn The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Ana Stevenson explores the ubiquity of what she terms the “woman-slave analogy” in nineteenth-century US feminist discourse. Using examples from the women’s suffrage, abolition, dress-reform, and labor movements, among others, Steveson reconstructs the creation of this theoretical framework that imagined women’s subjugation as similar to, and sometimes even worse than, the plight of enslaved Amer...
David Ambaras, "Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThrough a series of provocative case studies on mobility, transgression, and intimacy, David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) interrogates the spatial and ideological formations of modern Japan in its first seven decades or so as a nation-state and empire, especially vis-à-vis China. The slippage between the individual and collective/national (geo)body is a critical theme as Ambaras highlights the roles of ...
Melissa R. Klapper, "Ballet Class: An American History" (Oxford UP, 2020)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 39 minutesFor much of the last century, ballet class has been a rite of passage for millions of little girls in the United States. Some of these students have gone on to professional careers as dancers, but many more take class for a few years—or many years—before moving on to other pursuits. But the sheer prevalence of the experience has created an educated and appreciative audience that supports dance companies and dance training. It has also created a whole subset of “girl culture”: ballet books and...
Marco Rafalà, "How Fires End" (Little A, 2019)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 28 minutesIn a sad but loving tribute to his Sicilian-Italian heritage, Marco Rafala’s debut novel How Fires End (Little A, 2019) centers on the haunting legacy of WWII on the people of a small Sicilian village. It’s the summer of 1943 and an unexploded mortar shell kills 9-year-old Salvatore’s twin brothers. His faith is destroyed, and his family unravels, fueling fear that the Vassallo name is cursed. Salvatore and his sister, Nella, accept the help of a fascist Italian soldier, Vincenzo, who accompa...
Randy E. Barnett, "An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know" (Wolters Kluwer, 2019)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat do you think about these days when you hear the words, “Supreme Court?” Salacious news coverage of the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh? Gushing profiles of feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg? High school and vaguely recalled lectures about cases the details of which you dutifully read (or didn’t and flunked the test on) like McCulloch v. Maryland or Marbury v. Madison? Or, in this age on the Coronavirus and the sudden need to determine as a citizen what the respective powers of g...
Kenesha N. Grant, "The Great Migration and the Democratic Party" (Temple UP, 2020)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesKenesha N. Grant, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University, at the beginning of her new book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century (Temple University Press, 2020), poses a question to consider in context of trying to understand the realignment of voters within American political parties. This question is about the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern...
Richard McBride II, "Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn" (U Hawaii Press, 2016)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Richard McBride II about Doctrine and Practice in Medieval Korean Buddhism: The Collected Works of Ŭich’ŏn (University of Hawaii Press, 2016). The book is a comprehensive study of the Koryŏ (918-1392) Buddhist exegete, Ŭichŏn, that convey’s his life and work through letters, speeches, memorials, addresses, and poetry, from three epigraphical accounts. During a time of contention between the the doctrinal (敎) and meditation (禪) schools, Ŭich’ŏn traveled to Song (宋), China (96...
Robert Sroufe et al, "The Power of Existing Buildings" (Island Press, 2019)
May 12, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesYour building has the potential to change the world. Existing buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the energy and emit nearly half of the carbon dioxide in the US each year. In recognition of the significant contribution of buildings to climate change, the idea of building green has become increasingly popular. But is it enough? If an energy-efficient building is new construction, it may take 10 to 80 years to overcome the climate change impacts of the building process. New buildings...
John R. Gallagher, "Update Culture and the Afterlife of Writing" (Utah State UP, 2020)
May 11, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they interviews John R. Gallagher of University of Illinois about Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing (Utah State University Press, 2020) a dynamic look at the life of a text in the 21st century. Looking at wealth of case studies among Amazon reviewers, redditors, and established journals, Update Culture is a deep diver into the many factors that contribute to the circulation of a digital text. The key three themes Gallagher explores include ti...
B. Earp and J. Savulescu, "Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships" (Stanford UP, 2020) )
May 11, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourConsider a couple with an infant (or two) whose lives have become so harried and difficult the marriage is falling apart. Would it be ethical for them to take oxytocin to help them renew their emotional bonds, or would this be an unethical evasion of the hard work that keeping a marriage going requires? What if someone has sexual desires that they consider immoral – should they be able to take a drug to suppress those desires, or alternatively can society force them to? Debates about the ethi...
Kevin McGrath, "Vyāsa Redux: Narrative in Epic Mahābhārata" (Anthem Press, 2019)
May 11, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesIn Vyāsa Redux: Narrative in Epic Mahābhārata (Anthem Press, 2019), Kevin McGrath examines the complex and enigmatic Vyāsa, both the primary creative poet of the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata and a key character in the very epic he composes. In doing so McGrath focuses on what he considers the late Bronze Age portions of the epic feature prioritizing the concerns if the warrior class. In his discussion, McGrath distinguishes between plot and story and how this distinction comes to bear on the dif...
Richard Williams "Why Cities Look the Way They Do" (Polity, 2019)
May 11, 2020 08:00 - 36 minutesHow should we understand our cities? In Why Cities Look the Way They Do (Polity, 2019), Richard Williams, Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh explores the processes that shape the city foregrounding images over the idea that cities are designed or planned. The processes include the impact and influence of money, war, gender and sexuality, along with power and work. The book has a wealth of examples from cities across the world, from the m...
Sonali Chakravarti, "Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
May 11, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesSonali Chakravarti, Associate Professor of Political Science at Wesleyan University, has written a thoughtful analysis of the role of the jury in American democracy, with specific attention to the way that the jury experience can provide the structure for more substantive civic engagement. Part of the impetus for this study comes out of the more recent controversial decisions made by juries in a variety of high-profile cases in the United States. The research also evolved out of Chakravarti’s...
Victor Uribe-Urán, "Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic" (Stanford UP, 2016)
May 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn his book Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the Late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Stanford University Press 2016), Victor Uribe-Urán compares the cases of Spain, and the late-colonial societies of Mexico and Colombia, in a historical moment characterized by corporate patriarchy and enlightened punishment. Focusing on crimes of spousal murders, Uribe-Urán asks intriguing questions: who were the men and women that committed these crimes, and what were their reasons for doing s...
Lisa Balabanlilar, "The Emperor Jahangir: Power and Kingship in Mughal India" (I. B. Tauris, 2020)
May 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDespite a reign that lasted for over two decades, the Mughal emperor Jahangir has often been regarded as a weak ruler who was hobbled by his addictions and dominated in his later years by his wife Nur Jahan. As Lisa Balabanlilar reveals in The Emperor Jahangir: Power and Kingship in Mughal India (I. B. Tauris, 2020), this portrayal often exaggerates Jahangir’s defects and glosses over many important aspects of his rule. Much of this this distortion, she notes, originated with his memoir, in w...
Matthew McManus, "The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
May 08, 2020 08:00 - 48 minutesThe election of Donald Trump in 2016 shocked and surprised a number of commentators, especially because his own attitudes seemed to be in conflict with much of what people often associate with conservatism. Matt McManus argues, however, that Trump and other similar figures and movements represent a new form of conservatism, one with a long history of development, and formed as a response to various social dynamics. The goal of his recent book, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism: Neoliberal...
Sheetal Chhabria, "Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay" (U Washington Press, 2019)
May 08, 2020 08:00 - 38 minutesIn the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the city of Bombay on foot in human caravans thousands of people long. Recently, images of a similar scale of deprivation have resurfaced in India as the COVID-19 crisis has once again forced the laboring poor to migrate in duress, this time in the opposite direction from city to country. Making the Modern Slum: The Po...
Maria Rashid, "Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army" (Stanford UP, 2020)
May 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn her spellbindingly brilliant new book, Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army (Stanford University Press, 2020), Maria Rashid conducts an intimate and layered ethnography of militarism and death in Pakistan, with a focus on the lives, aspirations, and tragedies of soldiers and their families in rural Punjab. How does the Pakistani military’s regulation and management of affect and emotions like grief authorize and sustain the practice of sacr...
Alexander Rocklin, "The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad" (UNC Press, 2019)
May 08, 2020 08:00 - 56 minutesThe history of the Caribbean Island of Trinidad bears witness to an important interplay between the religious practices of peoples of South Asian and those of peoples of African descent, and in particular the manner in which colonial religious categories shaped that interplay. In The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Alexander Rocklin draws on colonial archives and ethnographic work in this pioneering examination...
Witold Szabłowski, "How to Feed a Dictator" (Penguin, 2020)
May 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIf you’re a despot, there are two people you can’t lie to, your doctor and your chef. This is one of the nuggets explained to me by Witold Szabłowski, author of How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks (Penguin, 2020), translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. The author, a tireless journalist, used his skills at getting people to talk and his knowledge of cooking to convince those who served some of the ...
Antony Dapiran, "City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong" (Scribe, 2020)
May 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourHong Kong in 2019 was a city on fire. Anti-government protests, sparked by an ill-fated extradition bill sparked seven months of protest and civil unrest. Protestors clashed with police in the streets, in shopping malls, in residential buildings. Driven by Hong Kong’s young people with their ‘Be Water!’ strategy, the pro-democracy movement grew into a massive force, receiving support from all demographics – from the ‘silver-hairs’, to mothers, from healthcare workers, to journalists and banke...
Rebecca J. Kissane and Sarah Winslow, "Whose Game?: Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports" (Temple UP, 2020)
May 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFantasy sports have the opportunity to provide a sporting community in which gendered physical presence plays no role—a space where men and women can compete and interact on a level playing field. Whose Game?: Gender and Power in Fantasy Sports (Temple UP, 2020) shows, however, that while many turn to this space to socialize with friends or participate in a uniquely active and competitive fandom, men who play also depend on fantasy sports to perform a boyhood vision of masculinity otherwise i...
Laura Lam, "Goldilocks" (Orbit, 2020)
May 07, 2020 08:00 - 33 minutesLaura Lam’s new book Goldilocks (Orbit, 2020) takes readers into space with an all-female crew bound for a distant Earth-like planet. The all-female crew isn’t the only twist; there’s also the fact that the five astronauts steal their spaceship. The crew aren’t mere bandits, but the spacecraft’s original crew, who’d been shoved aside by a reactionary patriarchy intent on confining women to home and family. “As a little girl, I thought sexism was on the way out. And in the last few years, I’ve...
Matthew Miller, "The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge" (Northwestern UP, 2018)
May 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn his new book, The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge (Northwestern University Press, 2018), Matthew Miller explores the literary evolution of the modern epic in postwar German literature. Examining works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, it illustrates imaginative artistic responses in German fiction to the physical and ideological division of post–World War II Germany. Miller analyzes three ambitious German-language epics from the se...
Kwasi Konadu, "In Our Own Way In this Part of the World" (Duke UP, 2019)
May 07, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn his new book In Our Own Way In this Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture and Nation (Duke University Press, 2019), Kwasi Konadu tells the story Kofi Donko (1913-1995) and the many communities he served as a blacksmith, healer, farmer, leader and intellectual. The book starts by describing the ontological universe that gave historical and social substance to the work of Kofi Donko, and traces the ways in which this universe remained central to the wellbeing of many ...
Danny Haiphong, "American Exceptionalism and American Innocence" (Skyhorse, 2019)
May 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hour“Fake news existed long before Donald Trump…. What is ironic is that fake news has indeed been the only news disseminated by the rulers of U.S. empire.”—From American Exceptionalism and American Innocence (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019). According to Robert Sirvent and Danny Haiphong, Americans have been exposed to fake news throughout our history—news that slavery is a thing of the past, that we don’t live on stolen land, that wars are fought to spread freedom and democracy, that a rising tide l...
Janice Hadlow, "The Other Bennet Sister" (Henry Holt, 2020)
May 06, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutesIt is well known that the novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817), which enjoyed at best a modest success during her lifetime, have become ever more popular in the last fifty years or so. They support a small industry of remakes, spinoffs, and retellings. As Janice Hadlow notes while discussing The Other Bennet Sister (Henry Holt, 2020), one reason for that interest lies with Austen herself. A genius at characterization, Austen drops tiny pearls of insight into one secondary character or another th...
Alexander Zevin, "Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist" (Verso, 2019)
May 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe Economist is a curious publication. It always takes a point of view (as opposed to the all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print approach). It maintains a uniform voice (editors and writers are typically handpicked from the same elite British universities, and rarely are there author bylines). And it has lasted a long time, originating back in London’s free-trade debates of the 1840s and continuing to be one of the most widely read magazines in the world. The Economist was a guiding hand in debate...
A Conversation with Nicholas Sutton of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
May 06, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesToday I talked to Dr. Nicholas Sutton speaks about his work at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. We discuss his teaching philosophy, his mandate of making the study of Hinduism accessible to public audiences, and the Centre’s exciting collection of online courses. We also talked about two books he's recently published in the Oxford Centre's series on Hinduism: The Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation and Study Guide (Mandala Publishing, 2019) and The Yoga Sutras: A New Translation and Study Gu...
Christian Wright, "Carbon County, USA: Miners for Democracy in Utah and the West" (U Utah Press, 2020)
May 06, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesDuring the early 1970s, a movement of rank-and-file coal miners rose up in Appalachia to challenge mine bosses and stodgy union officials. They sought greater control over the workplace and a broadened vision of industrial power. Calling themselves the “Miners For Democracy,” these reformers gained short-lived control over the union’s top leadership and earned a legacy for militant unionism. But what about coal miners in the expanding coalfields of the American West? In his new book Carbon Co...
J. Packer and E. Stoneman, "A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture" (Penn State UP, 2019)
May 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourOn this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Joe Packer of Central Michigan University about A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture (Penn State UP, 2019), an intriguing book attempting to rescue pessimism from the dustbin of public emotion and philosophical thought. From the work of H.P. Lovecraft to Rick and Morty to True Detective, Packer and Stoneman find the best of pessimistic philosophy reflected back in the weird affects of these cultural to...
Dominik Finkelde, "Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan and the Foundations of Ethics" (Columbia UP, 2017)
May 06, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourHow are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the current order? This is a question that has puzzled philosophers for centuries, and it’s the question that animates Dominik Finkelde’s book Excessive Subjectivity: Kant, Hegel, Lacan, and the Foundation of Ethics (Columbia University Press, 2017). The book looks at these three major thinkers, and the ways they saw subjects as being immersed in a particular set of ethical orientations, but also always with a subtle but pr...
Mallika Kaur, "Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
May 05, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourPunjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of post-colonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This book makes an urgent intervention in the history of the conflict, which to date has been characterized by a fixation on sensational violence—or ignored altogether. In her book Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of three people ...
Ibrahim Fraihat, "Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)
May 05, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIbrahim Fraihat’s latest book, Iran and Saudi Arabia: Taming a Chaotic Conflict (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) is much more than an exploration of the history of animosity between Saudi Arabia and Iran and its debilitating impact on an already volatile Middle East. It is a detailed roadmap for management and resolution of what increasingly looks like an intractable conflict. Based on years of field research, Fraihat builds a framework that initially could help Saudi Arabia and Iran preven...
Mythri Jegathesan, "Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka" (U Washington Press, 2019)
May 05, 2020 08:00 - 55 minutesIn recent years, commodity chain analysis – the scholarly effort to piece together the production and consumption ends of various commodities – has really taken off. For goods ranging from cotton to coffee & tobacco to tea, scholars have brought cultivators and laborers into the same frame as factory workers, retailers, taste-makers, and consumers. At first glance, Mythri Jegathesan’s new book Tea & Solidarity: Tamil Women & Work in Postwar Sri Lanka (University of Washington Press, 2019) app...
Ayala Fader, "Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age" (Princeton UP, 2020)
May 05, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat would you do if you questioned your religious faith, but revealing that would cause you to lose your family and the only way of life you had ever known? Dr. Ayala Fader explores this question in Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in a Digital Age––her new book with Princeton University Press (2020). She tells the fascinating, often heart-wrenching stories of married ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and women in twenty-first-century New York who lead “double lives” in order to protect those they love...