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Episodes
Kevin P. Reihle, "The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service" (Georgetown UP, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSince its founding in 1995, the FSB, Russia's Federal Security Service, has regained the majority of the domestic security functions of the Soviet-era KGB. Under Vladimir Putin, who served as FSB director just before becoming president, the agency has grown to be one of the most powerful and favored organizations in Russia. The FSB not only conducts internal security but also has primacy in intelligence operations in former Soviet states. Their activities include anti-dissident operations at ...
William Bain, "Political Theology of International Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIs contemporary international order truly a secular arrangement? Theorists of international relations typically adhere to a narrative that portrays the modern states system as the product of a gradual process of secularization that transcended the religiosity of medieval Christendom. William Bain's Political Theology of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2020) challenges this narrative by arguing that modern theories of international order reflect ideas that originate in medieval t...
Rachel S. Gross, "Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America" (Yale UP, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesRachel S. Gross's Shopping All the Ways to the Woods (Yale University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild spaces supposedly untouched by capitalism first requires shopping. With consumers spending billi...
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640" (U Texas Press, 2024)
March 26, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesAcross the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Sanjay Subrahmanyam presents a history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultu...
Maggie Hennefeld, "Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema" (Columbia UP, 2024)
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesCan you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has...
An Oral History Archive of World War One: A Discussion with Peter Liddle
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesPeter Liddle OBE FRHistS (born 1934) is a British historian and author specialising in the study of the First and Second World Wars. In 1968 Liddle started interviewing people about their lives during and around the First World War, collecting oral history from the era. He founded the Liddle Collection and worked to expand throughout the 1970s and 1980s, placing advertisements and recording many thousands of interviews. The director of Cambridge University Library, considered the collection "...
Denise Kripper, "Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature" (Routledge, 2023)
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesNarratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature (Routledge, 2023) offers unique insights into the role of the translator in today’s globalized world, exploring Latin American literature featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists in which prevailing understandings of the act of translation are challenged and upended. It looks to the fictional turn as a fruitful source of critical inquiry in translation studies, showcasing the potential for recent La...
Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesBrynn Quick speaks with Erin Mulpur about how hospitals can better support patients from linguistic minority backgrounds. The conversation addresses the barriers to both communication and healthcare faced by linguistic minority patients. Drawing on Erin’s 2021 paper “Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance During a Pandemic," the focus is on Houston Methodist Hospital’s innovative use of language assistance technologies during the first waves of Covid-19. For additional resources, show notes...
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesIf we could undergo a procedure that would erase the painful memories from our lives, would we do it? That seems to be the question of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) until we realize that we’re asking the wrong question. The real question this film asks is why wouldn’t such a procedure ever work? Join us for a conversation about Michel Gondry’s mind-bending film that is a completely different experience when you’re 20 versus when you’re 40. Go ahead and give it a listen–then vis...
How Can We Reach International Consensus on AI Regulation?
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesIn this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Gabriele Mazzini, a lawyer and officer of the European Commission and expert in AI regulation. Mazzini discusses the means through which European countries have found agreement on the definition of AI and how to regulate it. Moreover, Mazzini stresses that the fears of an apocalyptic AI revolution taking over humankind are not well-grounded. He also comments on the United States case and how it differs from Europe ...
John Warner on Teaching Writing in the Age of Generative AI
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPeoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with writer and editor John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for more than twenty years. Warner is the author of at least three - or four depending on whether you count a work of parody - books on writing and higher education, and today he is perhaps best known for his Substack, The Biblioracle Recommends. Vinsel and Warner talk about how teaching writing will need to shift after the arrival of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, but on...
Lisa A. Baglione, "Understanding Comparative Politics: An Inclusive Approach" (CQ Press, 2024)
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesResearch in political science shows that collections and textbooks often mention race, gender, ethnicity, and religion – but they don’t consistently use those lenses to understand politics. In Understanding Comparative Politics: An Inclusive Approach (CQ Press, 2024), Dr. Lisa A. Baglione creates a new kind of textbook that puts issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion into context and encourages critical thinking about world regions and individual countries through the lens of current...
On Bloomsbury's "Object Lessons" Series: A Discussion with Christopher Schaberg
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesObject Lessons is a series of concise, collectable, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Each book starts from a specific inspiration: an historical event, a literary passage, a personal narrative, a technological innovation—and from that starting point explores the object of the title, gleaning a singular lesson or multiple lessons along the way. This interview discusses the series with one of the two editors of the series, Dr. Christopher Schaberg. Featuring...
Aaron Clift, "Anticommunism in French Society and Politics, 1945-1953" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAnticommunism in French Society and Politics, 1945-1953 (Oxford UP, 2023) evaluates the prevalence of anticommunism among the French population in 1945 to 1953, and examines its causes, character, and consequences through a series of case studies on different segments of French society. These include the scouting movement; family organisations; agricultural associations; middle-class groups; and trade unions and other working-class organisations. Aaron Clift contends that anticommunism was mo...
Melodrama
March 25, 2024 04:00 - 22 minutesWe often misuse the word melodrama with abandon, especially to characterize other people’s behaviors, but Greg Vargo defines it for us once and for all. Emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the predominant Western theatrical form, it is a genre of crisis. To that end, it employed hyperbolic language, extreme situations, extraordinary coincidences, stark oppositions and so on. Greg talks about his own ongoing work on melodramas about race, their histories of performance, and ...
Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations" (Cornell UP, 2024)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesMissionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to ta...
George S. Takach, "Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America" (Pegasus Book, 2024)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War. So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s mor...
Jehanne Dubrow, "Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity" (U New Mexico Press, 2023)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 24 minutesWhat happens when beauty intersects with horror? In Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity (U New Mexico Press, 2023), Jehanne Dubrow interrogates the ethical questions that arise when we aestheticize atrocity. The daughter of US diplomats, she weaves memories of growing up overseas among narratives centered on art objects created while working under oppressive regimes. Ultimately Exhibitions is a collection concerned with how art both evinces and elicits emotion and memory and how, through ...
Colette Cann and Eric Demeulenaere, "The Activist Academic: Engaged Scholarship for Resistance, Hope and Social Change" (Myers Education Press, 2020)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesHow can traditional academic scholarship be disrupted by activist academics? How can we make space for those who are underrepresented and historically oppressed to come to academia as their authentic selves? How can the platform of academia create space for change in the world? In The Activist Academic: Engaged Scholarship for Resistance, Hope and Social Change (Myers Education Press: 2020), Professor Colette N. Cann and Professor Eric J. DeMeulenarare answer these questions. Their work chall...
Michelle Knudsen, "Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted to Be a Kitten" (Candlewick Press, 2024)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesMichelle Knudsen is the New York Times best-selling author of fifty books for young readers of all ages, including the award-winning picture books (and personal favorites) Library Lion and Marilyn's Monster. In this, our second interview we celebrate the launch of her new picture book, Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted to Be a Kitten (Candlewick, 2024), a poignant story of mistaken identity and revelation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming ...
Tim Lanzendörfer, "Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesTim Lanzendörfer's Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel (Edinburgh UP, 2023) highlights the emergence of a literary mode, speculative historism, over the past two decades in U.S. literature. Discussing in depth novels by writers such as Ken Kalfus, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colson Whitehead, among others, it integrates questions of critical method, genre, form, and literary theory, all of which have some urgency today. Addressing itself to the question of how to read this...
Brent M. Rogers, "Buffalo Bill and the Mormons" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesIn this never-before-told history of Buffalo Bill and the Mormons, Brent M. Rogers presents the intersections in the epic histories of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody and the Latter-day Saints from 1846 through 1917. In Cody's autobiography he claimed to have been a member of the U.S. Army wagon train that was burned by the Saints during the Utah War of 1857-58. Less than twenty years later he began his stage career and gained notoriety by performing anti-Mormon dramas. By early 1900 he active...
Chiara Renzo, "Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy 1943-1951: Politics, Rehabilitation, Identity" (Routledge, 2023)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesChiara Renzo's book Jewish Displaced Persons in Italy 1943-1951: Politics, Rehabilitation, Identity (Routledge, 2023) focuses on the experiences of thousands of Jewish displaced persons (DPs) who lived in refugee camps in Italy between the liberation of the southern regions in 1943 and the early 1950s, waiting for their resettlement outside of Europe. It explores the Jewish DPs' daily life in the refugee camps and what this experience of displacement meant to them. This book sheds light on th...
Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations" (Cornell UP, 2024)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesMissionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to ta...
Cristina Rocha, "Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities" (Oxford UP, 2024)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhen did Christianity become cool? How did an Australian church conquer the world and expand into Brazil, a country with its own crop of powerful megachurches? In her exciting new book, Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities (Oxford UP, 2023), anthropologist Cristina Rocha analyses the creation of a transnational Pentecostal field between Brazil and Australia, two countries that have been peripheral in the history of Pentecostalism but which more recently h...
Maarten Couttenier, "Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922)" (Routledge, 2023)
March 24, 2024 08:00 - 39 minutesMaarten Couttenier's Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922) (Routledge, 2023) examines the history of Belgian physical anthropology in the long nineteenth century and discusses how the notion of 'race' structured Belgian pasts and presents as well as relations between metropole and empire. In a context of competing European nationalisms, Belgian anthropologists mainly used physical characters, like skull form and the color of hair and eyes, to delimitate 'races', which wer...
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson et al., "Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesThere is a growing consensus that environmental narratives can help catalyze the social change necessary to address today's environmental crises; however, surprisingly little is known about their impact and effectiveness. In Empirical Ecocriticism, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder combine an environmental humanities perspective with empirical methods derived from the social sciences to study the influence of environmental stories on our a...
John William Nelson, "Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent" (UNC Press, 2023)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe birchbark canoe is among the most remarkable Indigenous technologies in North America, facilitating mobility throughout the watery world of the Great Lakes region and its borderlands. In Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago's Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023), Texas Tech University historian John William Nelson argues that canoes, and a deep understanding of portages sites where canoes could be carried between waterways, helped secure the region around Chic...
Marie Mutsuki Mockett, "The Tree Doctor" (Graywolf Press, 2024)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesWhen the unnamed narrator of Marie Mutsuki Mockett's stirring second novel returns to Carmel, California, to care for her mother, she finds herself stranded at the outset of the disease. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother steadily declining in a care facility two hours away, she becomes preoccupied with her mother's garden--convinced it contains a kind of visual puzzle--and the dormant cherry tree within it. Caught between tending to an unwell parent and ...
116 Making Sense of Yogacara with William Waldron
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourProfessor William Waldron teaches courses on the South Asian religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, Tibetan religion and history, comparative psychologies and philosophies of mind, and theory and method in the study of religion at Middlebury College. His publications focus on the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism and its dialogue with modern thought. He is the author of Making Sense of Mind Only: Why Yogacara Buddhism Matters (Wisdom Publications, 2023). In this conversation, we look...
Mary K. Bolin, "Refocusing Academic Libraries Through Learning and Discourse: The Idea of a Library" (Chandos, 2022)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesAcademic libraries are changing in the face of information technologies, economic pressures, and globally disruptive events such as the current pandemic. In Refocusing Academic Libraries Through Learning and Discourse: The Idea of a Library (Chandos, 2023), Mary K. Bolin argues for a radical vision of library transformation, offering practical solutions for transforming organizational and workflow structures for the future. This book analyzes existing organizational structures and proposes ne...
Marc-William Palen, "Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourA new economic history which uncovers the forgotten left-wing, anti-imperial, pacifist origins of economic cosmopolitanism and free trade from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The post-1945 international free-trade regime was established to foster a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful world. As US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933-1944), "Father of the United Nations" and one of the regime's principal architects, explained in his memoirs, "unhampered trade dovetaile...
Jeffrey A. Javed, "Righteous Revolutionaries: Morality, Mobilization, and Violence in the Making of the Chinese State" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn an era where states and politicians regularly weaponize moral emotions to foment intergroup conflict and violence, understanding the dynamics of violent mobilization and state authority are more relevant than ever before. In Righteous Revolutionaries: Morality, Mobilization, and Violence in the Making of the Chinese State (U Michigan Press, 2022), Javed illustrates how states appeal to popular morality—shared understandings of right and wrong—to forge new group identities and mobilize vio...
Lillian Guerra, "Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2023)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAuthorities in postrevolutionary Cuba worked to establish a binary society in which citizens were either patriots or traitors. This all-or-nothing approach reflected in the familiar slogan “patria o muerte” (fatherland or death) has recently been challenged in protests that have adopted the theme song “patria y vida” (fatherland and life), a collaboration by exiles that, predictably, has been banned in Cuba itself. In Patriots & Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981 (University of Pittsb...
Communication Is the Selection of What to Say and How to Say It
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesListen to this interview of Miroslaw Staron, Editor-in-Chief of Information and Software Technology and Professor in the Software engineering division, Chalmers | University of Gothenburg. We talk about the collaboration and mentorship which publishing is meant to be. Miroslaw Staron : "The communication through academic publication is of course important to every researcher's CV. But really, it's much more important for science overall. If we cannot communicate our ideas, then we cannot make...
Caste, Music, and Microinequities with Supriya Subramani
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesIn this episode, Pat speaks with Dr Supriya Subramani. Dr Subramani's interest in morality and ethics has led her to explore morality, behaviour, and ethics in healthcare contexts. She has worked on the concepts of belonging, micro-inequities, moral habitus, the idea of the passive patient, the social construction of incompetency, and reflexivity. They discuss caste and contemporary music, resistance and poetry, and autonomy and participatory theatre. Background notes and a transcript of this...
Laura Menin, "Quest for Love in Central Morocco: Young Women and the Dynamics of Intimate Lives" (Syracuse UP, 2024)
March 23, 2024 08:00 - 33 minutesFollowing the 2011 wave of revolutions and protests in North Africa and the Middle East, new discussions of individual freedoms emerged in the Moroccan public sphere and human rights discourse. A segment of the public rallied around the removal of an article in the penal code that punished sexual relationships outside of marriage. As debates about personal and sexual freedom gain momentum, love and intimacy remain complex issues. Moving between public, clandestine, and online interactions, Q...
Kira Sirote, "Haftorah Unrolled: Weekly Insights from the Prophets" (2018)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesHaftorah Unrolled explores the weekly readings from the Prophets (known as the "haftorah") and their connections to the corresponding Torah portions. Sirote offers insights and explanations to help readers appreciate the depth and meaning in these readings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Karl Widerquist, "Universal Basic Income" (MIT Press, 2024)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesKarl Widerquist's Universal Basic Income (MIT Press, 2024) is an accessible introduction to the simple (yet radical) premise that a small cash income, sufficient for basic needs, ought to be provided regularly and unconditionally to every citizen. The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. This volume in the Essential Knowled...
Paul Bew, "Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe story of Charles Stewart Parnell, one of the greatest Irish leaders of the nineteenth century and also one of the most renowned figures of the 1880s on the international stage, and John Dillon, the most celebrated, but also the most neglected, of Parnell's lieutenants. As Paul Bew shows in Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics: Judging Dillon and Parnell (Oxford UP, 2023), the differences between the two men reflect both Ireland's past and its future. Every time the principle of consent for ...
Jennifer Lang, "Places We Left Behind: A Memoir-in-miniature" (Vine Leaves Press, 2023)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesJennifer Lang's Places We Left Behind: A Memoir in Miniature (Vine Leaf Press, 2023) uses short chapterettes and experimental prose to examine he marriage, commitment and compromise, faith and family while moving between prose and poetry, playing with language and form, daring the reader to read between the lines. When American-born Jennifer falls in love with French-born Philippe during the First Intifada in Israel, she understands their relationship isn't perfect. Both 23, both Jewish, they...
Jeffrey Benson, "Hacking School Discipline Together" (Times Ten Publications, 2024)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 56 minutesJeffrey Benson’s Hacking School Discipline Together (Times Ten Publications, 2024) follows in footsteps first hacked out by Weinstein and Maynard in their 2019 bestselling Hacking School Discipline. Benson, informed by his 40 years of teaching, directing, mentoring, and consulting, takes the discussion to the broader school community. This book offers an effective elixir, distilled from experiences and best practices of Benson’s career. The formula is ten hacks in the form ten very readable c...
Patryk I. Labuda, "International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability" (Oxford UP, 2023)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesIn the 1990s, the promise of justice for atrocity crimes was associated with the revival of international criminal tribunals (ICTs). More recently, however, there has been a renewed emphasis on domestic accountability for international crimes across the globe. In identifying a 'complementarity turn', a paradigm shift toward domestic accountability in the field of international criminal justice, this book investigates how the shadow of international criminal tribunals influences the treatment ...
The Georgia Review: A Discussion with Gerald Maa and Maggie Su
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 31 minutesGerald Maa has been The Georgia Review’s director and editor since 2019. During his tenure there, the magazine has won the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction as well as Best New Poets, and the Robert Dau/PEN Prize. Prior to this role, Maa was the editor-in-chief of The Asian American Literary Review with Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis. Maggie Su is the associate prose editor for The Georgia Review and the author of the forthcoming novel Blob (Harper 2025). She holds a PhD in fiction from the U...
David Ostrowsky, "Roberto Alomar: The Complicated Life and Legacy of a Baseball Hall of Famer" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesRoberto Alomar was not just a five-tool Hall of Famer; he was a magician on the diamond, a generational talent whose defensive wizardry left teammates and opponents breathless. Yet, despite his twelve All-Star selections and ten Gold Glove awards, he has remained one of the most contentious and enigmatic characters in baseball’s history. Roberto Alomar: The Complicated Life and Legacy of a Baseball Hall of Famer (Roman & Littlefield, 2024) is the first complete, balanced biography of arguably...
Anelise Hanson Shrout, "Aiding Ireland: The Great Famine and the Rise of Transnational Philanthropy" (NYU Press, 2024)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesFamine brought ruin to the Irish countryside in the nineteenth century. In response, people around the world and from myriad social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds became involved in Irish famine relief. They included enslaved Black people in Virginia, poor tenant farmers in rural New York, and members of the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, as well as plantation owners in the US south, abolitionists in Pennsylvania, and, politicians in England and Ireland. Most of these people had no persona...
Tonia Sutherland, "Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife" (U California Press, 2023)
March 22, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesThe first critical examination of death and remembrance in the digital age—and an invitation to imagine Black digital sovereignty in life and death. In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife (U California Press, 2023), Tonia Sutherland considers the consequences of digitally raising the dead. Attending to the violent deaths of Black Americans—and the records that document them—from slavery through the social media age, Sutherland explores media evidence, digital acts of r...
Heather Akou, "On the Job: A History of American Work Uniforms" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThrough a variety of archival documents, artefacts, illustrations, and references to primary and secondary literature, On the Job: A History of American Work Uniforms (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Heather Akou explores the changing styles, business practices, and lived experiences of the people who make, sell, and wear service-industry uniforms in the United States. It highlights how the uniform business is distinct from the fashion business, including how manufacturing developed outside of the t...
Is Grad School for Me?: Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 50 minutesToday’s book is: Is Grad School for Me? Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students (U California Press, 2024), by Dr. Yvette Martínez-Vu and Dr. Miroslava Chávez-García. It is the first book to provide first-generation, low-income, and nontraditional students of color with insider knowledge on how to consider and navigate graduate school. Is Grad School for Me? is a calling card and a corrective to the lack of clear guidance for historically excluded students navigating...
Noo Saro-Wiwa, "Black Ghosts: A Journey Into the Lives of Africans in China" (Canongate Books, 2024)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 32 minutesJust a decade ago, before COVID upended everything, tens of thousands of migrants from African countries traveled to China in search of economic opportunity. One 2012 estimate put the African population in Guangzhou alone at 100,000. When the British-Nigerian travel writer Noo Saro-Wiwa heard about this community, she decided to travel to Guangzhou and China to learn more. She met traders, drug dealers, surgeons, visa overstayers, former professional athletes, and many more trying to live, wo...