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Episodes
Eleanor Medhurst, "Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion" (Hurst, 2024)
June 03, 2024 08:00 - 44 minutesEleanor Medhurst joins us today to talk about Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion (Hurst & Company, 2024). Clothes are integral to lesbian history. Lesbians, in turn, are integral to the history of fashion. The way that we dress can help us to present who we are to the world, or it can help us to hide ourselves. It can align us with a community or make us stand out from the crowd. For lesbians, fashion can have innumerable meanings - yet "lesbian fashion" is rarely considered, the main a...
Jonathan A. Seitz, "Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology" (U Notre Dame Press, 2024)
June 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWith a focus on Robert Morrison, Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology (U Notre Dame Press, 2024) evaluates the role of nineteenth-century British missionaries in the early development of the cross-cultural relationship between China and the English-speaking world. As one of the first generation of British Protestant missionaries, Robert Morrison went to China in 1807 with the goal of evangelizing the country. His mission pushed him into deeper engagement with C...
AI and the Humanities: Nina Beguš DIscusses "Artificial Humanities"
June 03, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesIn this debut conversation, we speak to Dr. Nina Beguš, a researcher at UC Berkeley and the founder of InterpretAI who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Listen to learn about Nina’s path at the intersection of AI and the humanities, the challenges and rewards of working across disciplines, what questions to ask as an ethical researcher, and practical advice for how to succeed in a multifaceted, multidisciplinary career in today’s fast-changing digital landscape. B...
Jennifer Hart on African Mobility and Infrastructure
June 03, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourPeoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks to Jennifer Hart, Professor and Chair of the History Department at Virginia Tech, about her work on the history and ethnography of mobility and infrastructure in Ghana. Hart’s newest book, Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra (Indiana University Press, 2024), examines how technocrats enforced restrictions around public health, housing, mobility, and other domains in Ghana in the name of moderniz...
Data Streams
June 03, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesOn July 18th this year, Teresa Barrozo‘s question — What might the Future sound like? — will be opened to global participation. We bring news of World Listening Day, and speak with Teresa about her intervention. We also hear of data archival developments in acoustic ecology. And we speak with Leah Barclay, the editor of Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, about her Biosphere Soundscapes project and some of the challenges of developing accessible apps for mobile platforms. Cris grappl...
Linda Hopkins and Steven Kuchuck, eds., "Diary of a Fallen Psychoanalyst: The Work Books of Masud Khan 1967-1972" (Karnac, 2022)
June 03, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesMasud Khan (1924-1989), was an eminent and, ultimately, scandalous British psychoanalyst who trained and practised in London during an important period in the development of psychoanalysis. From August 1967 to March 1980, he wrote his 39 volume Work Books, a diary containing observations and reflections on his own life, the world of psychoanalysis, his evolving theoretical formulations, Western culture, and the turbulent social and political developments of the time. In Diary of a Fallen Psyc...
American Movie
June 03, 2024 08:00 - 25 minutesIf you’ve seen Hearts of Darkness, you can better appreciate what Coppola endured while making Apocalypse Now; if you’ve seen River of Dreams, you can watch in wonder as Herzog talks about the shooting Fitzcaraldo and really moving that boat through the jungle. American Movie (1999) aims to do the same thing for Mark Borchardt’s low-budget independent horror film Coven. How you respond to American Movie depends on how you respond to Borchardt: is he simply a pretentious jerk who thinks he’s t...
Sarah Nooter, "How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality" (Princeton UP, 2024)
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesThe idea of sexual fluidity may seem new, but it is at least as old as the ancient Greeks, who wrote about queer experiences with remarkable frankness, wit, and insight. Sarah Nooter's How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton UP, 2024) is an infatuating collection of these writings about desire, love, and lust between men, between women, and between humans and gods, in lucid and lively new translations. Filled with enthralling stories, this anthology invites readers of all s...
Ramón Espejo, "The Catalonian Journey of American Drama 1909-2000: From Jimmy Valentine to The Vagina Monologues" (Legenda, 2024)
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 31 minutesRamón Espejo's book The Catalonian Journey of American Drama 1909-2000: From Jimmy Valentine to The Vagina Monologues (Legenda, 2024) delves into the fascinating journey of American drama in Catalonia, exploring how the theatrical output of a world superpower has impacted (and transformed) the stages of an allegedly minor actor in the cultural scene of the 20th century. Yet, while Catalonia is the birthplace of such geniuses as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí or Antoni Gaudí, it is also that of play...
Weh Yeoh, "Redundant Charities: Escaping the Cycle of Dependence" (Koan Press, 2023)
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 38 minutesWeh Yeoh's Redundant Charities: Escaping the Cycle of Dependence (Koan Press, 2023) presents a transformative approach to charitable work. Drawing on his extensive experience in the non-profit sector, Yeoh argues that the ultimate goal of a charity should be to render itself unnecessary. He critiques the traditional charity model, which often perpetuates dependency and self-preservation, and instead advocates for organizations to implement clear exit strategies and focus on supporting local c...
Aya Gruber, "The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration" (U California Press, 2020)
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourAya Gruber, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, has written a history of how the women’s movement in America has shaped the law on domestic violence and sexual assault. In The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2020), Professor Gruber contends that the legal reform movement on sexual assault began with feminists in the 19th century, who argued in favor of temperance reform, partly in ...
Claire Weeda, "Ethnicity in Medieval Europe 950-1250: Medicine, Power and Religion" (Boydell and Brewer, 2021)
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesStudents in twelfth-century Paris held slanging matches, branding the English drunkards, the Germans madmen and the French as arrogant. On Crusade, army recruits from different ethnic backgrounds taunted each other’s military skills. Men producing ethnography in monasteries and at court drafted derogatory descriptions of peoples dwelling in territories under colonization, questioning their work ethic, social organization, religious devotion and humanness. Monks listed and ruminated on the all...
Cathal J. Nolan, "The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost" (Oxford UP, 2019)
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourHistory has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars us...
Adam Goodman, "The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants" (Princeton UP, 2020)
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourMany of us know that immigrants have been deported from the United States for well over a century, but has anyone ever asked how? In The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020), author Adam Goodman brings together new archival evidence to write an expansive history of deportation from the United States that threads the late-nineteenth century through to the present. Goodman, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino studies...
Kyle Barnett, "Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz. Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus...
The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourEric Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929. In 1938 he and his family fled to Brooklyn, where he attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush. He studied history and literature at Harvard, and received an MD from NYU. He is a professor of biochemistry at Columbia University, and won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on memory. In addition to his science textbooks, Kandel has written several books for a general readership, including In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (...
Richard E. Ocejo, "Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City" (Princeton UP, 2024)
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourNewburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Like many other similarly sized cities across America, it has been beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents. Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City (Princeton UP, 2024) tells the story of how Newburgh started gentrifying, describing what h...
Methodology of Systematic Literature Studies in Software Engineering
June 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourListen to this interview of Marcos Kalinowski, Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We talk about his coauthored papers; When to update systematic literature reviews in software engineering (JSS 2020); Guidelines for the search strategy to update systematic literature reviews in software engineering (IST 2020); and Successful combination of database search and snowballing for identification of primary studies in system...
Thea Gomelauri, "The Lailashi Codex: The Crown of Georgian Jewry" (Taylor Institution Library, 2023)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourFrom a remote mountain village in the Caucasian mountains of Georgia came the most surprising discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls: a rare, beautiful, and valuable Hebrew Bible known as the Lailashi Codex. In ancient tradition, scribal art possesses supernatural powers. The provenance of this Codex is shrouded in mystery. Questions about the authorship and ownership surround this ancient work of treasure and secrets. The Codex, written as a labor of love by a scribe of rare skill, was hidden...
Stephanie Joy Mawson, "Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines" (Cornell UP, 2023)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 47 minutes"When the Spanish colonization of the Philippines began in 1565, early reports boasted of mass conversions to Christianity and ever-increasing numbers of people paying tribute to the Spanish crown. This suggests an uncomplicated story of an easy imposition of Spanish sovereignty. But as Stephanie Mawson shows in her book, Incomplete Conquests: The Limits of Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth-Century Philippines (Cornell UP, 2023), the Spanish colonization of the Philippines was contested at e...
Matthew Kadane, "The Enlightenment and Original Sin" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesMatthew Kadane, Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, talks about his just new book, The Enlightenment and Original Sin (University of Chicago Press, 2024). An eloquent microhistory that argues for the centrality of the doctrine of original sin to the Enlightenment. What was the Enlightenment? This question has been endlessly debated. In The Enlightenment and Original Sin, historian Matthew Kadane advances the bold claim that the Enlightenment is best defined through what...
Daniel Rachel, "Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation" (Akashic Books, 2024)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesDaniel Rachel's new book Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation (Akashic, 2024) presents the definitive history of 2 Tone Records. In 1979, 2 Tone Records exploded into the consciousness of music lovers in Britain, the US, and beyond, as albums by the Specials, the Selecter, Madness, the English Beat, and the Bodysnatchers burst onto the charts and a youth movement was born. 2 Tone was Black and white: a multiracial force of British...
Gretchen McCulloch, "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" (Riverhead Books, 2020)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 51 minutesBrynn Quick speaks with best-selling author and linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books, 2020). Gretchen has written a Resident Linguist column at The Toast and Wired. She is also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes ...
Ronald R. Sundstrom, "Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction" (Oxford UP, 2024)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIt is widely acknowledged that the United States is in the grip of an enduring housing crisis. It is less frequently recognized that this crisis amounts to more than there being an insufficient supply of adequate shelter. It rather is tied to a range of other forms of social and economic vulnerability – and many of these forms of vulnerability impede a citizen’s capacity to function as a full member of society. What’s more, the familiar terms we deploy in discussing the housing crisis – gentr...
Thersa Matsuura, "The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth" (Adams Media, 2024)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesDiscover everything you’ve ever wondered about the legendary spirits, creatures, and figures of Japanese folklore including how they have found their way into every corner of our pop culture from the creator of the podcast Uncanny Japan. Welcome to The Book of Japanese Folklore: An Encyclopedia of the Spirits, Monsters, and Yokai of Japanese Myth (Adams Media, 2024): a fascinating journey through Japan’s folklore through profiles of the legendary creatures and beings who continue to live on i...
Margot Weiss, "Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures" (Duke UP, 2024)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutesThis field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology. Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (Duke UP, 2024) advances a vision of queer anthropology grounded in decolonial, abolitionist, Black feminist, transnational, postcolonial, I...
Robert Cochran, "Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis" (U Arkansas Press, 2024)
June 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourRobert Cochran’s Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis (U Arkansas Press, 2024) is a pioneering study of the novels and other writings of Arkansan Charles Portis (1933–2020), best known for the novel True Grit and its film adaptations. Hailed by one critic as “the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain” and as America’s “least-known great novelist,” Portis has garnered a devoted fan base with his ear for language, picaresque characters, literary Easter eggs, ...
Ryan White, "Springsteen: Album by Album" (Palazzo Editions, 2024)
May 31, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesThe definitive illustrated book on "The Boss"-- Springsteen: Album by Album (Palazzo Editions, 2024) is now updated to celebrate Bruce Springsteen’s 75th birthday! Renowned for his passionate songwriting, galvanizing live shows, and political activism, Bruce Springsteen stands astride the rock 'n' roll stage like a colossus--and the iconic rocker shows no signs of slowing down. With in-depth reviews of 21 studio albums spanning over 6 decades of music history, Springsteen delves into every as...
Yi-Han Lin, "Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise" (HarperVia, 2024)
May 31, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesIn this episode, Jenna Tang shares with us her translation of Lin Yi-Han's Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise: A Novel (HarperVia, 2024), one of the most iconic works of Taiwan's #MeToo movement. Thirteen-year-old Fang Si-Chi lives with her family in an upscale apartment complex in Taiwan, a tightknit community of strict yet doting parents and privileged children raised to be ambitious, dutiful, and virtuous. She and her neighbor Liu Yi-Ting bond over their love of learning and books, devourin...
Jessica Leigh Kirkness, "The House with All the Lights on: Three Generations, One Roof, a Language of Light" (Allen & Unwin, 2023)
May 31, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesEmily Pacheco speaks with writer and researcher Jessica Kirkness about her memoir, The House with All the Lights on: Three Generations, One Roof, a Language of Light (Allen & Unwin, 2023). Jessica has published in Meanjin and The Conversation, as well as other outlets. Her PhD focused on the ‘hearing line’: the invisible boundary between Deaf and hearing cultures. She is also a teacher of nonfiction writing at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The House With All The Lights On explore...
Aslı Zengin, "Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World" (Duke UP, 2024)
May 31, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesIn Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (Duke UP, 2024), Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biop...
All About Money? Elections, Campaign Spending and the Effects on Democracy
May 31, 2024 08:00 - 26 minutesElection campaigns are becoming ever more expensive, with many parties and candidates spending large sums of money on advertising, campaign materials, and staff. But how does money affect campaign environment and electoral outcomes? Does more money mean better chances of winning? And what role do large businesses play in this? Listen to William Horncastle as he talks to Petra Alderman about his research on campaign spending, the UK and the US campaign finance rules and regulations, and the ef...
Anthony Heath and Yaojun Li, "Social Mobility" (Polity Press, 2024)
May 31, 2024 08:00 - 40 minutesWhat is social mobility? In Social Mobility (Polity Press, 2023), Anthony Heath, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Yaojun Li, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, explore and explain this concept, setting out why the idea matters for both social scientists and the general reader. The book draws on a huge range of research, outlining the history of social mobility research, discussing central theories and approaches in sociology and economi...
Tahir Annour, “Symphony of the South," The Common magazine (2024)
May 31, 2024 08:00 - 25 minutesMayada Ibrahim speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her translation of “Symphony of the South,” a short story by Tahir Annour that appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio of writing in Arabic from Chad, South Sudan, and Eritrea. Mayada talks about the process of translating this piece, including working with the author and TC Arabic Fiction Editor Hisham Bustani. She also discusses gravitating toward translation as a way to reintegrate Arabic into her life, after ye...
Polo B. Moji, "Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives" (Routledge, 2022)
May 31, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesPolo B. Moji's book Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022) approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces. Moji adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, an...
South Africa Goes to the Polls
May 31, 2024 04:00 - 57 minutesOn May 29, South Africans voted in the seventh election since the end of political apartheid in the early 1990s. This is the first election in which the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), is polling below 50 percent, which could force them into a coalition with one or more other parties to govern the country after the election. To learn more, we speak with Carolyn Holmes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is an expert on...
Anne Kim, "Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor" (The New Press, 2024)
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 28 minutesPoverty is big business in America. The federal government spends about $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact poor Americans, including antipoverty programs such as the earned income tax credit, Medicaid, and affordable housing vouchers and subsidies. States and local governments spend tens of billions more. Ironically, these enormous sums fuel the “corporate poverty complex,” a vast web of hidden industries and entrenched private-sector interests that pr...
Nisrin Elamin on the Conflict in Sudan
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourNisrin Elamin is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto whose work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging, and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. Elamin joins the Ufahamu Africa podcast for this episode focused on the conflict in Sudan. Books, Links and Articles “Recent protests in Sudan are much more than bread riots.” Analysis by Nisrin Elamin and Zachariah Mampilly Darfur Diaspora Association Keep Eyes On Sudan Dabanga ...
Peter A. Levine, "An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey" (Park Street Press, 2024)
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesIn An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey (Park Street Press, 2024), renowned developer of Somatic Experiencing Peter A. Levine shares his personal journey to heal his own severe childhood trauma offering profound insights into the evolution of his innovative trauma healing method. Casting himself as a modern-day Chiron, the wounded healer of Greek mythology, Dr. Levine describes, in graphic detail, the violence of his childhood juxtaposed with specific happy and exuberant memories, wh...
Transforming Hispanic-Serving Institutions for Equity and Justice
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourWhat makes Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) uniquely Latinx? And how can university leaders, staff, and faculty transform these institutions into spaces that promote racial equity, social justice, and collective liberation? Today’s book is: Transforming Hispanic-Serving Institutions for Equity and Justice (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), by Dr. Gina Ann Garcia. In it, Dr. Garcia argues that in order to serve Latinx students and other students of color, these institutions must acknowledge how whi...
Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, "Disability Worlds" (Duke UP, 2024)
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIn Disability Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City’s wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children’s lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists in larger struggles for recognition and rights. Disability consciousness, they show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and fricti...
On "Diligence" (zerizut) in Bechukotai
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 37 minutesOn this week's episode, Modya and David switch lenses to the trait of Zerizut, or Diligence, and use that as a lens through which to explore parshat Bechukotai, the final Torah portion in the Book of Leviticus (26:3-27:24). In this portion, God delineates the good that will come of following divine laws and commandments -- and the ills that will befall Israel if they turn away. The hosts explore how diligence in following divine will can keep our selves, our communities, and our world in bala...
Benjamin A. Schupmann, "Democracy Despite Itself: Liberal Constitutionalism and Militant Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 41 minutesSeeking a second term as US president in November, Donald Trump joins a roster of politicians whose declared aim is to use legal means to bend democracy to their will and in their interests. The system withstood his first term. In Venezuela, Ecuador, Turkey, and Hungary, the systems didn’t, and they are undergoing stress tests in Israel, Slovakia, and Georgia. In Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary, elections still happen and parliaments, courts, and media are intact but checks and balances have be...
Sohini Pillai, "Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative" (Oxford UP, 2024)
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 43 minutesBetween 800 and 1700 CE, a plethora of Mahabharatas were created in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, and several other regional South Asian languages. Sohini Pillai's Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative (Oxford UP, 2024) is a comprehensive study of premodern regional Mahabharata retellings. This book argues that Vaishnavas (devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu and his various forms) throughout South Asia...
Robert Phillip Kolker and Marsha Gordon, "Film, Form, and Culture" (Routledge, 2024)
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 58 minutesThis fifth edition of Film, Form, and Culture (Routledge, 2024) offers a lively introduction to both the formal and cultural aspects of film. With extensive analysis of films past and present, this textbook explores how films are constructed from part to whole: from the smallest unit of the shot to the way shots are edited together to create narrative. Robert P. Kolker and Marsha Gordon demystify the technical aspects of filmmaking and demonstrate how fiction and nonfiction films engage with ...
Gary J. Bass, "Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia" (Knopf, 2023)
May 30, 2024 08:00 - 49 minutesIn December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. The sentencing ended the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, an over-two-year-long trial over Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China and its decision to attack the U.S. But unlike the trials at Nuremberg, now seen as one of the touchstones of modern international law, the trials at Tokyo were a messy affair. The ruling ...
Daniel Matt et al., "The Zohar: Pritzker Edition" (Stanford UP, 2004-2017)
May 29, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourSefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance) has amazed readers ever since it emerged in Spain over seven hundred years ago. Written in a lyrical Aramaic, the Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah, features mystical interpretation of the Torah, from Genesis to Deuteronomy. The Zohar: Pritzker Edition (Stanford UP, 2004-2017) volumes present the first translation ever made from a critical Aramaic text of the Zohar, which has been established by Professor Daniel C. Matt (along with Nathan Wolski and Joel...
Aakriti Mandhwani, "Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
May 29, 2024 08:00 - 54 minutesEveryday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India (U Massachusetts Press, 2024) is a timely book on the history of print culture and the creation of publics in postcolonial South Asia. During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines--like Delhi ...
Tom Mueller, "How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine" (Norton, 2023)
May 29, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourDialysis is a medical miracle, a treatment that allows people with kidney failure to live when otherwise they would die. It also provides a captive customer for the dialysis industry, which values the steady revenues that come from critically required long-term care that is guaranteed by the government. Tom Mueller's six year deep dive into the dialysis industry has yielded his latest book, How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death, and Dollars in American Medicine (W. W. Norton, 2023). It's both ...
Sa’ed Atshan, "Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique" (Stanford UP, 2020)
May 29, 2024 08:00 - 55 minutesIn Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020) anthropologist and activist Sa’ed Atshan explores the Palestinian LGBTQ movement and offers a window into the diverse community living both in historic Palestine and in diaspora. His timely and urgent account contends that the movement has been subjected to an “empire of critique,” which has inhibited its growth and undermines the fight against homophobia in the region and beyond. On the one hand, explains Atshan,...