The University of Chicago Press Podcast

D. Vance Smith, "Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 02 May 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A major new look at Africa’s influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe.
Virgil. Chaucer. Petrarch. These names resonate with many as cornerstones of European culture. Yet, in Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe (U Chicago Press, 2025), D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ages—its great themes in literature, its sources in political thought, its religious beliefs—originated in the writings of African thinkers like Augustine, Fulgentius, and Martianus Capella, or Europeans who thought extensively about Africa. In fact, a third of Virgil’s Aeneid takes place in Africa. Francis Petrarch believed his most important achievement was his epic Africa; while Geoffrey Chaucer wrote repeatedly about the figures of Scipio Africanus, actually two different men who defeated and destroyed Carthage.
Smith tells the story of how Europe created a false “medieval” version of Africa to acquire resources and power during the era of imperialism and colonialism. The first half of the book, “Reading Africa,” traces Egypt’s, Libya’s, and Carthage’s influence on classical and medieval thinking about Africa, highlighting often ignored literary and legendary traditions, for example, that Alexander the Great named himself the son of an African god. The second part, “Writing Africa,” focuses on how the different cultures of the two great African cities—Carthage and Alexandria—shaped modern literary criticism and political theology and examines the cross-influences of modern anthropology, medieval studies, and colonial law.
Atlas’s Bones firmly re-establishes the significance of Africa in European intellectual history. It will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how much of Africa informs our artistic and cultural world.

D. Vance Smith is professor of English and former director of medieval studies at Princeton University. His many books include Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Abigail Ocobock, "Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

It is no secret that marriage rates in the United States are at an all-time low. Despite this significant decline, the institution of marriage endures in our society amid historic changes to its meaning and practice. How does the continuing strength of marriage impact the relationships of same-sex couples after the legalization of same-sex marriage?

Drawing on over one hundred interviews with LGBTQ+ people, Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships (University of Chicago Press, 2024) reveals the transformative impact marriage equality has had on same-sex relationships. Sociologist Dr. Abigail Ocobock looks to same-sex couples across a wide age range to illuminate the complex ways institutional mechanisms work in tandem to govern the choices and behaviors of individuals with different marriage experiences. Dr. Ocobock examines both the influence of marriage on the dynamics of same-sex relationships and how LGBTQ+ people challenge heteronormative assumptions about marriage, highlighting the complex interplay between institutional constraint and individual agency.

Marriage Material presents a bold challenge to dominant scholarly and popular ideas about the decline of marriage, making clear that gaining access to legal marriage has transformed same-sex relationships, both for better and for worse.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Larry M. Bartels and Katherine J. Cramer, "The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Few time periods have been as defined by waves of monumental social change as the United States during the 1960s. Even today, almost sixty years later, the era is often depicted as a triumph of social progress. Yet, as Dr. Larry M. Bartels and Dr. Katherine J. Cramer show in The Politics of Social Change: From the Sixties to the Present Through the Eyes of a Generation (U Chicago Press, 2026), it was Americans’ diverse reactions to the milestone events of the time—from the welcoming, to the fiercely resistant, to the largely oblivious—that planted the seeds of our current political turmoil.

Their masterful analysis draws on a unique historical resource: the longest-running systematic tracking of individual Americans’ political attitudes and behavior ever attempted. The study began in 1965 when researchers interviewed hundreds of high school students across the country and then periodically reinterviewed them over the next three decades. Bartels and Cramer supplement this historical record with in-depth interviews with dozens of the original students, painting a detailed picture of the generation’s individual and collective political development. By tracing the responses of the Class of ’65 to major events of their political lifetimes—including the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, the Vietnam War, the shifting role of religion, escalating economic inequality, immigration, and the rise of Donald Trump—Dr. Bartels and Dr. Cramer shed new light on the evolution of public opinion and the unsteady progress of American democracy.

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Clifton Crais, "The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

A bracing account of how our current planetary crisis emerged from the worst cataclysmic destruction in human history, which Clifton Crais terms the Mortecene—the killing age.

We are used to speaking of the Anthropocene and the outsized impact humans have had on the planet. But we sometimes lose sight of a fundamental truth at the heart of modern world history: the legacy of human predation, slavery, and imperialism that has devastated the natural world and led us to our present moment. As historian Clifton Crais shows in this magisterial work The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (U Chicago Press, 2025), the period that we most associate with human progress—which gave us the Enlightenment, the rise of democracies, the Industrial Revolution, and more—was at the same time catastrophically destructive.
In this bracing, landmark book, Crais urges us to view the growth of global capitalism between 1750 and the early 1900s not as the Anthropocene, but as the Mortecene: the Killing Age. Killing brought the world together and tore it apart, as profiteering warlords committed mass-scale slaughter of humans and animals across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The newfound ease and profitability of killing created a disturbing network of global connections and economies, eliminating tens of millions of people and sparking an environmental crisis that remains the most urgent catastrophe facing the world today.
Drawing on years of scholarship and marshaling myriad sources across world history, The Killing Age (University of Chicago Press 2025) turns our vision of past and present on its head, illuminating the Mortecene in all its horror—how it shaped who we are, what we value and fear, and the precarious present we inhabit today.

Our guest is Professor Clifton Crais, a Professor of History at Emory University

Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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Alex Diamond, "Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The Colombian village of Briceño might, at first glimpse, look like many communities in the rural Global South. Many of the people living there rely on small-scale farming, even as a newly constructed hydroelectric dam threatens traditional livelihoods. Yet after decades where Briceño suffered from a bloody conflict, the village has more recently become central to the nation’s hopes for peace. In Governing the Excluded, sociologist Alex Diamond shares a closer look at Briceño and offers unique insight not only into the contemporary Colombian state but to how people across the Global South are struggling to maintain rural livelihoods amid economic dispossession.
Governing the Excluded describes a landmark peace process between the Colombian government and the radical FARC guerrillas from the perspective of Colombian farmers, drawing links between economic transformation, drug economies, and armed conflict. Exclusion from global markets for traditional crops like coffee first pushed farmers to grow coca, the raw material for cocaine. This ushered in an era of violent conflict for control of the illicit economy, while farmers continued to be priced out of legal markets. In exchange for peace and state protection, farmers ultimately agreed to sacrifice profitable coca. But with its disappearance, they now find themselves dependent on the state: for machinery to maintain the roads they need to get legal harvests to market, municipal jobs that are the only decent work available, and for public resources to subsidize food crops with razor-thin profit margins. Ongoing economic struggles in the legal sector make the state’s newfound authority tenuous, as some villagers replant coca, abandon the village for uncertain urban futures, or join a rearmed guerrilla group.
Informed by deep ethnographic research and firsthand stories from Briceño residents, Governing the Excluded shows that when it comes to the forces driving dispossession—be they international corporate megaprojects, global food prices, or national initiatives to replace coca cultivation—state authority goes only so far as its ability to sustain local livelihoods.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College.

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Gregory Smits, "The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands' history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region's changes and making them a useful lens through which to view and understand those transformations. In this book, Gregory Smits marshals his expertise to canvass the environmental, political, and social history of this fascinating area, emphasizing the diversity of influences from China, Japan, and Korea that have shaped it. Smits begins by tracing the islands' early history from the time of the oldest extant human remains, through massive inflows of settlers from Japan, until the emergence of a centralized state in the sixteenth century. He then traces the development of the Ryukyu Kingdom from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, examining its major cultural formations and the interplay of local and external influences driving its evolution. Finally, Smits ushers readers to the modern era, from the end of the Ryukyu Kingdom in 1879 through World War II, the era of American military control, and on to the present. He concludes with their present-day status as a tourist destination affected by ongoing geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges. Synthesizing decades of research, this book is an indispensable, comprehensive guide to the islands' history for scholars and nonspecialists alike.

Gregory Smits is professor of history and Asian Studies at Penn State University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Early Ryukyuan History: A New Model.

Ran Zwigenberg is a professor at Pennsylvania State University.

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Mark Hlavacik, "Willing Warriors: A New History of the Education Culture Wars" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

How the rise of the culture wars afflicts the politics of education.

On August 9, 2022, the Denton Independent School District held a meeting to address complaints about its libraries. Like so many districts in Texas and across the country, Denton had been responding to accusations that children had access to inappropriate books at school. During the public comment session, a local man stood up to the podium and read a sexually explicit passage from a book that he wanted removed from Denton’s school libraries. But beguiled by the prospect of securing a political win, he had confused the title of the lurid psychological thriller he read aloud with a young adult fiction series about mermaids. While his attempt to ban a book that was never in Denton’s school libraries in the first place received a few laughs, it also reflects a deeply serious and troubling culture of conflict that has taken over the politics of education and now divides people so completely as to make public education as a shared endeavor seem impossible.

In Willing Warriors, Mark Hlavacik shows how the culture wars have redefined the politics of US schooling from the 1970s to the present through vivid accounts of public controversies featuring Allan Bloom, Oprah Winfrey, Lynne Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Betsy DeVos, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others. Beginning in the 1970s, Hlavacik shows, efforts at innovation in schooling have increasingly been met by attempts to discredit them through exposé. As the culture wars have accelerated and exploded, this cycle of innovation and exposé has embroiled public schools in increasingly heated debates. He explains the dynamics that make curriculum controversies so intractable and confronts the delicate question of whether raucous public arguments are bad for education. With clarity and insight, Hlavacik reveals why bitter contests between educational ideologies not only add another burden for the schools, but also for the people—the willing warriors—who devote their lives to fighting for their betterment.

Mark Hlavacik is assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Assigning Blame: The Rhetoric of Education Reform.

Laura Beth Kelly is an associate professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

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David Bather Woods, "Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods

An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.
A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life’s most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other.
Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today.

David Bather Woods is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is coeditor with Timothy Stoll of The Schopenhauerian Mind. He has contributed chapters to The Proustian Mind, Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, and The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook.

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Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, "Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell Elder examines the long-lasting political legacies of mining-company dominance in the Midwest and Appalachia. While the economic consequences of deindustrialization are well-known, Dr. Elder shifts the focus to a more insidious problem: the political dysfunction that took root long before the mines shut down.

Drawing on historical and administrative data, Dr. Elder shows that the coal industry hindered the growth of local government capacity in the places where it was dominant. Mining companies also engaged in outright corruption to shape local governments, practices which local elites then carried forward. When mining companies withdrew, they left behind not just economic decline, but local governments ill-equipped to govern.

These patterns have had enduring consequences for public life. Dr. Elder shows how these historical experiences have fueled a broader cynicism toward government, in which citizens expect little from public institutions and doubt the usefulness of elections. Company Towns underscores the consequences of corporate dominance for state capacity, public opinion, and democratic accountability today.

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Sunmin Kim, "The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

What happens when theories of racial hierarchies interact with reality? How are they contested, refuted and changed in light of that encounter? What role do experts, most notably social scientists, play here? And, what can these historical encounters tell us about how we should think of race and migration today? These are the questions which animate Sunmin Kim’s The Unruly Facts of Race: The Politics of Knowledge Production in the Early Twentieth-Century Immigration Debate (U Chicago Press, 2026). Taking as his focus the Dillingham Commission, a US government investigation into migrant groups established in 1907, Kim shows how theories of racial essentialism, which increasing were moving across the, at the time blurry, boundary between biology and society were used and contested in a moment when prominent political figures were eager to separate out the valued, long-established migrants from Western and Central Europe from those coming from Eastern and Southern Europe who all, on the face of it, were ‘white’. In doing so ideas such as ethnicity and the possibility of assimilation come to be mobilised. In turn Japanese migrants on the Pacific coast were placed beyond the pale of this possibility of assimilation and continued to be excluded. As Kim shows, not only did the commission report introduce some new vocabulary for thinking of race, but also played a key role in the development of US immigration quotas and a form of racial liberalism. This perspective, while accepting the possibility of a diverse body politic, rested on an assumption of a ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ element, including the possibility that some of the latter simply could never be ‘American’.

In our discussion we discuss the formation and activity of the Dillingham Commission. This includes discussing a number of key figures, such as Franz Boas who measures skulls for the commission and in so doing uses the same tools of the eugenicists and positivists to undercut their racist claims and Yamato Ichihashi who, while vociferously making the case that Japanese migrants such as himself are the ideal ‘Americans’ ends up being an example of the ‘insurmountable difference’ placed in front of such groups. We end by discussing how Zora Neale Hurston, once Boas’s student, provides a different way of conceiving of race and its place in immigration debates.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

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Miriam Ticktin, "Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In this timely and bold book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (U Chicago Press, 2025), Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually ends up creating harm for so many. Claims to innocence protect migrant children, but often at the expense of their parents; claims to the innocence of the fetus work to punish women. Ticktin shows how innocence structures political relationships, focusing on individual victims and saviors, while foreclosing forms of collective responsibility. Ultimately, she wants to understand how the discourse around innocence functions, what gives it such power, and why we are so compelled by it, while showing that alternative political forms already exist. She examines this process across various domains, from migration, science, and environmentalism to racial and reproductive justice.
Throughout the book, Ticktin shows how the concept of innocence intimately shapes why, how, and for whom we should care and whose lives matter—and how this can have devastating consequences when only an exceptional few can qualify as innocent. A politics grounded on innocence justifies a world built on inequality, designating most people—especially the racialized poor—as unworthy, undeserving, and less than human. As an alternative, she explores the aesthetics and politics of “commoning”—a collective regime of living that refuses a liberal politics of individual identity and victimhood.

Miriam Ticktin is professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She is the author of Casualties of Care and the coeditor of In the Name of Humanity.

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Her book, Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

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Michael Bycroft, "Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Michael Bycroft argues that gems were connected to major developments in the “new science” between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As he explains, precious and semiprecious stones were at the center of dramatic shifts in natural knowledge in early modern Europe. They were used to investigate luminescence, electricity, combustion, chemical composition, and more. They were collected by naturalists; measured by mathematicians; and rubbed, burned, and dissolved by experimental philosophers. This led to the demise of the traditional way of classifying gems—which grouped them by transparency, color, and locality—and the turn to density, refraction, chemistry, and crystallography as more reliable guides for sorting these substances.

The science of gems shows that material evaluation was as important as material production in the history of science. It also shows the value of seeing science as the product of the interaction between different material worlds. The book begins by bringing these insights to bear on five themes of the Scientific Revolution. Each of the subsequent chapters deals with a major episode in early modern science, from the expansion of natural history in the sixteenth century to the emergence of applied science early in the nineteenth century. This important work is not only the first book-length history of the science of gems but also a fresh interpretation of the Scientific Revolution and an argument for using a new form of materialism to understand the evolution of science.

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Jacob Stegenga, "Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

In Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2026), philosopher Jacob Stegenga breaks with the most dominant epistemologies of science to argue that in judging scientific activity, we should focus on its justification, not the achievement of truth or knowledge. Yet, Stegenga argues, the aim of science goes far beyond justification and is, instead, a special kind of truth—common knowledge, a broadly shared and mutually justified scientific finding.

Drawing on both historical examples and recent events like the COVID-19 pandemic, Stegenga outlines his approach before delving into its implications for scientific evaluation, testimony, values, progress, and credit, as well as the nature of science during times of crisis. Truth, he shows, may not be easily identified in the short term. However, an evaluation of scientific justification, grounded in shared standards, is possible. This framework helps us appraise—and appreciate—historical theories that ultimately weren’t accurate and offers fresh insights about appropriate science communication and public trust in scientific research. Justification and scientific rigor are not just means to an end, Stegenga writes, but the very heart of good science.
Ambitious, authoritative, and accessible, Heart of Science offers a new vision for the philosophy of science.

Jacob Stegenga is professor of philosophy in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Medical Nihilism and Care and Cure: An Introduction to Philosophy of Medicine

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George Frazier, "Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. George Frazier is currently an assistant professor of Computer Information Sciences at Washburn University, where his research focuses on such topics as artificial intelligence and environmental informatics.

But George is so much more then a computer scientists. As a well known environmental author, Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America (University of Chicago Press, 2025) provides a compendium of engaging stories at the deep intersections of nature, history, and place.

His previous book, The Last Wild Places of Kansas: Journeys into Hidden Landscapes, was widely praised, winning the Ferguson Book Award, Midwest Book Award, Hamlin Garland Prize and designated a Kansas Notable Book.

George now lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife and daughter.

Professor Michael Simpson has been the Director of the Resource Management and Administration graduate program at Antioch University New England, in Keene, NH.

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Sophie Salvo, "Articulating Difference: Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century"(U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistory of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adapters of the notion that gender and language are interrelated. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated “women’s languages” and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined “feminine” sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex-based divisions to be necessary categories of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines.

Articulating Difference: Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century(U Chicago Press, 2024) charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded, highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities.

Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.

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Ilana Gershon, "The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically. In The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office (U Chicago Press, 2024) anthropologist Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during the pandemic. She argues that the unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes about work and to think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. These changes also led us as workers to engage more with the contracts that bind us as we rethought when and how we allow others to tell us what to do. Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon’s book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living—the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens.

Our guest Ilana Gershon is a US focused anthropologist with broad interests in political and legal anthropology, linguistic and media anthropology, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of work She is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair of Anthropology and the Co-Director of the Program in Science and Technology Studies at Rice University.

I am joined in this episode by my co-producer Julie Smith, a Master's student in the Department of Communication at Oakland University.

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Aidan Seale-Feldman, "The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line (U Chicago Press, 2025) is a compelling portrait of post-disaster imaginaries of repair in Nepal. In a world of cascading disasters, what are the consequences of transient care? In 2015, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake and equally powerful aftershock struck the central region of Nepal. The disaster claimed over 9,000 lives and inspired a surge of humanitarian concern for the mental health of Nepali people. In The Work of Disaster, based on extensive fieldwork in the region, anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman examines what disaster generates, and the fraught relationship between crisis and care. Moving between NGO offices, mountain trails, therapeutic interventions, and affected villages, Seale-Feldman tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in the disaster’s wake. She also analyzes how emergency services transform the places they seek to assist; the challenges of psychiatric support provided by international organizations; and the place of mental health counseling in a modern biopolitical reality. The Work of Disaster reveals the contiguous violence and gentleness of humanitarian encounters, engaging with broader debates about worldmaking and the ethics of care.

Aidan Seale-Feldman is a medical and psychological anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame.

Elena Sobrino is an anthropologist and Lecturer in the program in Science, Technology, and Society at Tufts University.

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Kenneth Lowande, "False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age

The University of Chicago Press, 2024

Kenneth Lowande

Political Scientist Kenneth Lowande (University of Michigan) has a new book, False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age, examining the ways in which presidents seem to be using their extraordinary powers (of the office itself) but are often holding back so as to avoid the full implementation of policies and ideas. This is an interesting thesis, since it takes apart the ways in which presidents operate, getting at not only the presentation of presidential power and the rhetoric used by presidents to illuminate their powers, but also where the full capacity of the Executive branch may not be put into action around issues, policies, or ideas. Lowande is assessing what is essentially symbolic, especially for the president, but is not substantive, even if it may seem that way.

This concept, this “false front”, comes out of the polarization within the American political system, and the difficulty that presidents also have in trying to accomplish policy shifts and changes. This is also in context of a Congress that has ceded significant power to the Executive and is generally less productive in terms of passing and implementing policy than it was in the past. This is then combined with the adjustments that presidents and presidential candidates have made in the way they approach the campaign and then their work while in office, since they are compelled to construct their own “brand” as a means to getting elected. Once in office, presidents then need to perform in some way that convinces the public that they are trying to execute what they promised while on the campaign trail. But the political climate makes those outcomes extraordinarily difficult. So, presidents have constructed this path where they publicly lean into policy areas, making public statements, having ceremonies and press releases, taking executive actions, or signing Executive Orders to illustrate their commitment and their activity, but when these policy areas are examined in some depth, it turns out that not much happened after all of this attention and apparent action.

Lowande notes, in our conversation, how once he had zeroed in on this presidential mode of operating it is very difficult not to see it. This becomes a kind of model of presidential behavior and strategic approaches. False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age essentially interrogates the founding basis for the American presidency, where Alexander Hamilton argued that the president is to be held accountable and responsible for the actions taken in the office itself. The media plays a role in this as well, since they report on the actions taken by the president—at least in terms of rhetoric, press releases, signing ceremonies, and executive actions—but there is no follow on analysis, for the most part, of the actual implementation of the policies and the plans. If there is no measurable outcome to distinguish how the policy solved the problem, or satisfied the demand for the policy, then the presidential action or rhetoric is disconnected from any particular policy or public good. This is also at odds with the reason for a democratic republic—where the demands of the voters are to be translated into real outcomes, not imaginary ones.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI.

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Emily Dufton, "Addiction, Inc: Medication-assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

How the war on drugs created the gold standard treatment for addiction--until America's opioid crisis got privatized for profit, to the detriment of patients.

Despite epidemic levels of overdoses in the United States, by 2020, only twenty percent of Americans suffering from opioid use disorder (OUD) received medication-assisted treatment (MAT), the gold standard of addiction treatment, which uses methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to reduce illicit drug use and curb the symptoms of withdrawal. While MAT is the most effective treatment available for OUD, it's also the most controversial, the most expensive, and the most difficult to access. And yet, the medications at the center of this treatment--and the private industries that distribute them--generate roughly sixteen billion dollars each year, on par with national sales of coffee and pet food.

In Addiction, Inc: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America's Forgotten War on Drugs, historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success--and a public health disaster.

Urgent, eye-opening, and deeply human, Addiction, Inc. reveals how, over the past fifty years, the United States built an addiction treatment system that made recovery harder instead of easier, and what it will take to change its course.

In Addiction, Inc., historian Emily Dufton explains how this promising avenue of treatment emerged during President Richard Nixon's war on drugs in 1971 as a radical experiment in public health, when hundreds of federally-funded treatment clinics opened nationwide. Dufton then explores how these nationalized clinics gave way to an immensely profitable private industry that offers poor care at high costs to an insufficient number of people. Drawing on original research and over a hundred interviews with policymakers, medical experts, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and patients and their families, she tells a gripping story of squandered potential and missed opportunities, as MAT transformed from a revolutionary political project launched from the White House itself into a commercial success--and a public health disaster.

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Charles Alistair McCrary, "Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

"Sincerely held religious belief" is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The "sincerity test" of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (U Chicago Press, 2022), Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion.

McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn't entitle a person to receive protections from the state.

This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly "post-truth" era.

Dr. Charles McCrary is a scholar of American religion, focusing on secularism, religious freedom, race, and science. His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, and Religion. He also has written for popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic, many of which are linked in the show notes of this episode. Before coming to ASU, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Kevin Hart, "Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.
Kevin Hart is Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor at the Duke Divinity School.
Nathan H. Phillips is an independent scholar working out of South Bend, Indiana.

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Jens Ludwig, "Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don't, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.
Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig’s immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including “countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald's,” Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab, codirector of the National Bureau of Economic Research's working group on the economics of crime, elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and a member of the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Science.

Alfred Marcus is the Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School, University of Minnesota.

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Toby Green, "The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

The Heretic of Cacheu: Crispina Peres and the Struggle over Life in Seventeenth-Century West Africa (U Chicago Press, 2025) by Professor Toby Green tells the extraordinary story of seventeenth-century West African slave trader Crispina Peres to explore the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived.

In 1665, Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave-trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Portuguese Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers, the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau?

In The Heretic of Cacheu, award-winning historian Dr. Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, immersing us in the atmosphere of an otherwise distant setting. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses; styled their clothes; healed themselves from illness; and worshipped, worked, and played. Green renders the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationships between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas were already old and tangled, with slaving ports, colonies, and military bases having intermingled over many generations. But Cacheu also profoundly troubled this dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women such as Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire.

For the first time, through surviving documents recording Peres’s case, The Heretic of Cacheu lets readers experience the reality of this unique place and time through a remarkable act of historical recovery.

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Michelle Henning, "A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

In A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire (U Chicago Press, 2026), Professor Michelle Henning presents an environmental history of chemical photography through the lens of its deep connections to empire and industry.

Dependent on the extractive practices of fossil-fueled industrial capitalism, chemical photography’s emulsions and films were highly sensitive to polluted atmospheres, and photographic companies had to work hard to control this sensitivity. Drawing on histories of empire, coal, and chemistry and from the archives of British photographic manufacturer Ilford Limited, Professor Henning exposes the ways photography shaped how we see and understand the atmosphere while leaving its toxic residues in the air, soil, and water.

Structured as thirty-six short chapters and with over seventy illustrations, this innovative book begins in interwar London, follows the supply of Ilford products to photographers on the West African coast, and considers photography as a military technology linked to the development of chemical warfare. Combining close readings of photographs with discussions of low-light, tropical, and aerial photography, Professor Henning examines the extraction and development of photographic materials, their role in the current environmental crisis, and how they have shaped experiences of time and the environment.

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Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changing interdisciplinary investments of key mid-century African American writers and thinkers, showing how their investments in sociology and anthropology gave way to a growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory by the 1960s. Thompson analyzes this shift in intellectual focus across the post-war decades, pinpointing its clearest expression in Amiri Baraka's writings on jazz and blues, in which he insisted on philosophy as the critical means by which to grasp African American expressive culture. More sociologically oriented thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, had understood blackness as a singular set of socio-historical characteristics. In contrast, writers such as Baraka, James Baldwin, Angela Y. Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X were variously drawn to notions of an African essence, an ontology of Black being. For them, the work of Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, and German thinkers was a vital resource, allowing for continued cultural-materialist analysis while accommodating the hermeneutical aspects of African American religious thought. Mark Christian Thompson argues that these efforts to reimagine Black singularity led to a phenomenological understanding of blackness--a "Black aesthetic dimension" wherein aspirational models for Black liberation might emerge.

Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com.

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Stephen Skowronek, "The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Has American democracy outstripped its constitutional accommodations? Faith in the resilience and adaptability of the US Constitution rests on a long history of finding new ways to make the system work. In The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (University of Chicago Press, 2025), political scientist Stephen Skowronek examines the rearrangements that regenerated the American government in the past and brings that experience to bear on our current predicament. He shows how a constitution framed in writing some 230 years ago can run into serious difficulties directly related to its long and impressive history of adaptation. Skowronek connects questions about the Constitution’s adaptability to the challenges of democratization. For most of American history, serial rearrangements of constitutional relationships widened the government’s purview as a national democracy without giving either nationalism or democracy free rein. Skowronek argues that the politics of adaptation shifted fundamentally with the “Rights Revolution” of the 1960s and `70s when American national democracy approached the inclusion of all its citizens on equal footing. Since then, power and authority have been reconfigured in ways that have steadily magnified conflicts over the essentials of good order. Conservatives aim to dismantle a Constitution that progressives are intent on building upon, and the consensus necessary for a constitutional democracy to function effectively has all but evaporated. No longer a socially bound framework for national action, the Constitution has become an abstract matrix of possibilities, a disembodied opportunity structure open to starkly different, mutually unacceptable futures. Rather than being liberated by this unbound Constitution, the American people now appear entrapped by it. Is it possible that the development of American democracy has exhausted the adaptive capacities of the Constitution? A timely reminder that constitutional democracies do not survive on faith alone, The Adaptability Paradox is a sober appraisal of the unfamiliar ground on which we now tread.

Professor Stephen Skowronek is Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political Science and Professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. He is the author of many books on American Political Development, the presidency, and the administrative state.

Dr Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

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Alison Bashford, "Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 09:00:00 -0000

Why did Isaac Newton read books on chiromancy, the occult science of hand reading that revealed the secrets of the soul? Why did Charles Darwin claim that the hand gave humans dominion over all other species? Why did psychoanalyst Charlotte Wolff climb into the primate cages of the London Zoo, taking hundreds of delicate palm prints? Why did Francis Galton, the father of fingerprinting, take palm prints too? And why did world-leading geneticists study the geometry of palm lines in their search for the secrets of chromosomal syndromes?

Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic (University of Chicago, 2025) is an astounding history of magic, medicine, and science, of an enduring search for how our bodily surfaces might reveal an inner self—a soul, a character, an identity. From sixteenth-century occult physicians influenced by the Kabbalah to twentieth-century geneticists, and from criminologists to eugenicists, award-winning historian Dr. Alison Bashford takes us on a remarkable journey into the strange world of hand readers, revealing how signs on the hand—its shape, lines, marks, and patterns—have been elaborately decoded over the centuries. Sometimes learned, sometimes outrageously deceptive, sometimes earnest, and, more often than we ever expected, medically and scientifically trained, these palm readers of the past prove to be essential links in the human quest to peer into bodies, souls, minds, and selves. Not only for fortune-telling palmists were the future and the past, health, and character laid bare in the hand, but for other experts in bodies and minds as well: anatomists, psychiatrists, embryologists, primatologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and more.

Drawing telling parallels between the divination promised by palmistry and the appeal to self-knowledge offered by modern genetic testing, Decoding the Hand also makes clear that palm-reading is far from a relic or simple charlatanism. Dr. Bashford’s sagacious history of human hands touching and connecting opens wide the essential human pursuit of what lies within and beyond.

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J. Barton Scott, "Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (U Chicago Press, 2023) invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law (Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code), J. Barton Scott weaves a globe-trotting narrative about secularism, empire, insult, and outrage. Decentering white martyrs to free thought, his story calls for new histories of blasphemy that return these thinkers to their imperial context, dismantle the cultural boundaries of the West, and transgress the borders between the secular and the sacred as well as the public and the private.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Danielle Allen, "Justice by Means of Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, has a new book, Justice by Means of Democracy, that explores the foundational understanding of how humans best flourish, in particular in regard to the governmental system under which they live. Allen, author of many books that focus on questions of democracy and justice, also works on democratic reform and renovation at Partners in Democracy. Thus, Dr. Allen integrates both scholarship and democratic activism into her work as an academic and as an activist. Justice by Means of Democracy examines these different threads as well; what is justice, and how does democracy work towards achieving justice? And what is the role of the citizen in these pursuits?

Allen opens up her discussion weaving together a number of threads, since politics, economics, civic engagement, and citizenship are all part of the whole when we consider both justice and democracy. Growing out of the ideal that democracy is a very good system for individuals to move forward together, and to achieve their full flourishing, complexities arise from issues like inequality, inequity, and how liberty is structured within the governmental system. Part of Allen’s framing comes from John Rawl’s Theory of Justice and his connection of justice and democracy—but she is pushing further in terms of the role of power and thinking about power and power sharing within democracies and democratic institutions. Justice by Means of Democracy also wrestles with the abstract ideas of negative and positive liberty, and what this actually means in practice, particularly in the United States. In fact, the book thinks about what it means to be a citizen in a democracy, and what that requires from each individual. Allen explained in our conversation that while we often discuss “work/life balance” in terms of our personal and professional lives, what we should be discussing and focusing on is our “work-life civic balance” – since being civically involved takes time, takes effort, but is required for democracy to function and to remain intact. We are living through some of the breakages within our democratic systems of government, not just in the United States, but in other democracies as well. And part of the reason for these breakages is the failure of democratic practice by the people themselves. Allen’s own activism is focused on restoring and reinvigorating democratic practice, so that citizens become more used to the “habit” of democracy and civic engagement.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book,Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics

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Arthur Bahr, "Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A unique study of the only physical manuscript containing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as both a material and literary object.
In this book, Arthur Bahr takes a fresh look at the four poems and twelve illustrations of the so-called “Pearl-Manuscript,” the only surviving medieval copy of two of the best-known Middle English poems: Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript, Bahr explores how the physical manuscript itself enhances our perception of the poetry, drawing on recent technological advances (such as spectroscopic analysis) to show the Pearl-Manuscript to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood. By connecting the manuscript’s construction to the intricate language in the texts, Bahr suggests new ways to understand both what poetry is and what poetry can do.

Arthur Bahr is professor of literature and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Matt Sleat, "Post-Liberalism" (Polity, 2025)

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Liberalism may feel as though it has been around forever - as the "dominant ideology of the modern west" - but not even its advocates and detractors can agree what it is. Political sophisticates ask whether it is classical-, social-, ordo- or neo-liberal while American main street associates it with socialism.

Yet a new generation of "post-liberal" thinkers know liberalism well enough to want to give it upi or, in most cases, go back to a time - real or imagined - before it took hold.
In the US, these political philosophers are mostly Catholic conservatives. In the UK, with one prominent exception, they are largely left-wing Anglicans. In both countries, they tend to be religious and yearn for pre-globalisation communitarian, familial and patriotic certainties.

"Where liberals believe political authority is derived from individuals consenting to be ruled, for post-liberals it comes from serving the common good," writes Matt Sleat in Post-Liberalism (Polity, 2025). His book explores the ideas of the likes of Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, Sohrab Ahmari and post-liberalism's two standout thinkers: Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen.
Matt Sleat is Reader in Political Theory at the University of Sheffield.
*The author's book recommendations were Power and Powerlessness: The Liberalism of Fear in the Twenty First Century by Edward Hall (OUP Oxford, 2025) and Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order by Paul Tucker (Princeton University Press, 2022). Click here to see the full reading list.
Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who writes and podcasts at 242.news.

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Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The City and the Hospital (Chicago 2023) focuses on an urban paradox: American hospitals are imagined as sites of healing and care, and yet the people who live and work in nearby neighborhoods have some of the worst health outcomes in the nation. One part urban sociology and one part policy analysis, this book reports insights from a collaborative research team that investigated three sites (Hartford, Cleveland, Aurora, CO) and conducted more than two hundred interviews for this study. The book explores how collective memory operates, how “anchor institutions” connect with the people living in their midst, and the very meaning of “community” itself. Theoretically rich and empirically insightful, the book will be of interest to scholars, scientists, advocates, and administrators in medical setting and in any powerful organization (universities, museums) that may inadvertently cause harm to those nearest to them in their efforts to do good.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and students at Vanderbilt University in the course, “American Medicine & the World.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom.

email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Jon Willis, "The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A thrilling tour of Earth that shows the search for extraterrestrial life starts in our own backyard.
Is there life off Earth? Bound by the limitations of spaceflight, a growing number of astrobiologists investigate the question by studying life on our planet. Astronomer and author Jon Willis shows us how it’s done, allowing readers to envision extraterrestrial landscapes by exploring their closest Earth analogs in The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life (U Chicago Press, 2025). With Willis, we dive into the Pacific Ocean from the submersible-equipped E/V Nautilus to ponder the uncharted seas of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons; search the Australian desert for some of Earth’s oldest fossils and consider the prospects for a Martian fossil hunt; visit mountaintop observatories in Chile to search for the telltale twinkle of extrasolar planets; and eavesdrop on dolphins in the Bahamas to imagine alien minds.
With investigations ranging from meteorite hunting to exoplanet detection, Willis conjures up alien worlds and unthought-of biological possibilities, speculating what life might look like on other planets by extrapolating from what we can see on Earth, our single “pale blue dot”—as Carl Sagan famously called it—or, in Willis’s reframing, scientists’ “pale blue data point.”

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Janice M. McCabe, "Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

We’re all familiar with the sentiment that “college is the best time of your life.” Along with a newfound sense of freedom, students have a unique opportunity to forge lifelong friendships at a point in life when friendship is particularly important. Why is it, then, that so many college students are falling victim to what the US Surgeon General termed an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation”? How do different aspects of college life help or hinder students’ ability to form deep connections?
In Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks (U Chicago Press, 2025), sociologist Janice M. McCabe shows that the way a college is structured—whether students live in dorms or commute, study abroad or stay close to campus, have plentiful common areas for clubs to meet or not—can either encourage or hinder the making of meaningful friendships. Based on interviews with 95 students on three distinct campuses—a small private college (Dartmouth College), a large public university (University of New Hampshire), and a non-residential community college (Manchester Community College)—McCabe captures a wide range of experiences and discovers how features of the campuses make it easier or harder for students to make and keep friends. She shows how and why, across all three institutions, some students thrive in deep and lasting friendships with their peers.
As McCabe’s research reveals, we need to look at the structures of students’ networks, the institutions they attend, and the importance of their identities in these places if we are to truly uncover and address the loneliness epidemic facing today’s young adults.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include ethnographic studies of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, the use of urban aesthetics in rural downtown districts, and the lived experience of belongingness among college and university students. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email.

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Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (U Chicago Press, 2022), the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. When that reform is beneficial, offering major rewards for minor changes, colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile, attacking autonomy or values, they know how to resist it. The result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence.

In the early twentieth century, the “academic engineers,” a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but those efforts fell short, despite the wealth and power of their backers, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians is again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But, as Ris argues, top-down design is not destiny. Drawing on extensive and original archival research, Other People’s Colleges offers an account of higher education that sheds light on today’s reform agenda.

Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Student in Sociology of Education at the New York University.

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Caroline Jack, "Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what Caroline Jack calls “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,”
found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care.

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Lisa Vanhala, "Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:00:00 -0000

A searing account of how the international community is trying—and failing—to address the worst effects of climate change and the differential burdens borne by rich and poor countries.

Climate change is increasingly accepted as a global emergency creating irrevocable losses for the planet. Yet, each country experiences these losses differently, and reaching even inadequate political agreements is fraught with contestation. Governing the End: The Making of Climate Change Loss and Damage (U Chicago Press, 2025) untangles the complex relationship between deteriorating environmental conditions, high politics, and everyday diplomatic practices, focusing on the United Nations’ agreement to address “loss and damage” and subsequent battles over implementation.

Lisa Vanhala looks at the differing assumptions and strategic framings that poor and rich countries bring to bear and asks why some norms emerge and diffuse while others fail to do so. Governing the End is based on ethnographic observation of eight years of UN meetings and negotiations and more than one hundred and fifty interviews with diplomats, policymakers, UN secretariat staff, experts, and activists. It explores explicit political contestation, as well as the more clandestine politics that have stymied implementation and substantially reduced the scope of compensation to poor countries. In doing so, Governing the End elucidates the successes and failures of international climate governance, revealing the importance of how ideas are constructed and then institutionally embodied.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Hannah Pool, a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies. Her research focuses on human mobilities and her new book has just been published (2025, Oxford University Press).

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Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the intersection of defense contracting, intellectual property, and government secrecy in Great Britain and the United States. We talk about her process in researching and writing her latest book Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State and how breaking the law, historically speaking, has been important for the emergence of new technologies.

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Ladelle McWhorter, "Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demise of the Modern Moral Self" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How should one live? What should one do? And what do these questions have to do with being a good person? In Unbecoming Persons: The Rise and Demine of the Modern Moral Self (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Ladelle McWhorter reorients these questions through a genealogy of the concept of personhood. That genealogy is in the service of showing us not only that personhood is historically contingent, but that it is also optional. In unbecoming persons, we can feel relief, vital belonging, and exhilaration. We can also embrace an ethos of active belonging, a mode of living that eschews the trappings of personhood for the possibilities of life together.

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Michelle Wang, "The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

What can a map do, beyond showing us where things are?

Michelle Wang's new book, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China (U Chicago Press, 2023), explores this question through images painted on bronze, wood, and silk that were buried in tombs between the fourth and second centuries BCE. Wang encourages readers to look at these images as terrestrial diagrams — pictures that didn’t just represent the world, but made worlds. These tools helped the living connect with the dead, linked earthly and cosmic orders, and imagined what the afterlife might look like.

Each of the four chapters brings the reader into a different tomb site with different diagrams, including the plan for the grand tomb of King Cuo (who died circa 313 BCE), diagrams in the tomb of a low-level government functionary, and silk drawings from the Mawangdui tombs. Some helped guide descendants through ritual spaces, others recreated bureaucratic systems, and still others laid out auspicious spaces for eternal protection.

Throughout, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams asks questions that reach beyond early China: What makes something a map, or a work of art? When does a picture move from showing the world to shaping it?

This book will appeal to readers interested in art history, archaeology, and early Chinese thought, as well as anyone curious about how images can shape our understanding of the world

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David Singerman, "Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity?

In Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar (U Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar’s value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical object, these forces stripped power from workers and enabled—and obscured—new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly.

Taking us to unexplored spaces in the world of sugar, from laboratories and docks to refineries and the halls of Congress, Dr. Singerman illuminates dark intersections of the histories of corruption, science, and capitalism.

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Kevin M. Schultz, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A bracing, accessible history of white American liberals—and why it’s time to change the conversation about them.
If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that everyone hates white liberals. Conservatives hate them for being culturally tolerant and threatening to usher in communism. Libertarians hate them for believing in the power of the state. Socialists hate them for serving as capitalism’s beard. Even liberals hate liberals—either because they can’t manage to overcome their own prejudices, or precisely because they’re so self-hating.
This is the starting point for Kevin M. Schultz’s lively new history of white liberals in the United States. He efficiently lays out the array of objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian, and more—in a historical frame that shows how protean the concept has been throughout the past hundred years. It turns out, he declares, that how you define a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing your own anxieties.
Sharply assessing how decades of attacks on liberals and liberalism have steadily hollowed out the center of American political life, Schultz also explains precisely what needs to be done to avoid digging ourselves even further into the hole of polarization. The ultimate goal, he argues, is to achieve political fragmentation that will fuel the rise of a true multiparty system, where ideology will matter more, not less.
With a tight command of postwar American history and a spirited voice, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A Critical History (University of Chicago Press, 2025) is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand—and envision a way forward in—the complicated landscape of American politics.

Kevin M. Schultz is professor and chair of history at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). He is the author of Buckley and Mailer and Tri-Faith America.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Allen B. Downey, "Probably Overthinking It: How to Use Data to Answer Questions, Avoid Statistical Traps, and Make Better Decisions" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Statistics are everywhere: in news reports, at the doctor's office, and in every sort of forecast, from the stock market to the weather. Blogger, teacher, and computer scientist Allen B. Downey knows well that people have an innate ability both to understand statistics and to be fooled by them. As he makes clear in this accessible introduction to statistical thinking, the stakes are big. Simple misunderstandings have led to incorrect medical prognoses, underestimated the likelihood of large earthquakes, hindered social justice efforts, and resulted in dubious policy decisions. There are right and wrong ways to look at numbers, and Downey will help you see which are which.

Probably Overthinking It: How to Use Data to Answer Questions, Avoid Statistical Traps, and Make Better Decisions (University of Chicago Press, 2023) uses real data to delve into real examples with real consequences, drawing on cases from health campaigns, political movements, chess rankings, and more. He lays out common pitfalls--like the base rate fallacy, length-biased sampling, and Simpson's paradox--and shines a light on what we learn when we interpret data correctly, and what goes wrong when we don't. Using data visualizations instead of equations, he builds understanding from the basics to help you recognize errors, whether in your own thinking or in media reports. Even if you have never studied statistics--or if you have and forgot everything you learned--this book will offer new insight into the methods and measurements that help us understand the world.

Allen B. Downey is a curriculum designer at the online learning company Brilliant and professor emeritus of computer science at Olin College.

Gregory McNiff is a Managing Director in the New York office of the Blueshirt Group, an IR firm focused on technology. Greg holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an M. Litt. in Shakespeare Studies from the University of St. Andrews and a B.A. in Classical Languages from Columbia University.

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Daniel J. Sherman, "Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, Sarah talks to Daniel J. Sherman about his most recent book, Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940 (U Chicago Press, 2025). Sensations is a history of the early years of professional archaeology in France through two controversies – the first in Carthage in what the French protectorate of Tunisia and the second in the small rural community of Glozel in central France. The book shows how “archaeology as we know it today grew out of a fundamental tension between archaeologist’s scientific ambitions and their continuing need for media attention.” (1) Timely without being presentist, funny without being unserious, the book explores questions of embodiment, performance, photography, fake news, professional quarrels, and the mediatization of scandal.

The conversation explores the two sites of controversy as well as the network of professional archaeologists, amateur “collectors”, journalists, and others who shaped how the public understood and engaged with the ancient past. In addition to discussing the major themes of the book, our conversation delves into considerations of historical empathy, archaeological performance and “the dig”, and the story of a technical report that sparked Sherman’s interest in the relationship between media and archaeology.

Daniel J. Sherman is Lineberger Distinguished Professor of Art History and History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A scholar of museums, monuments, and commemorative practice in modern Europe, Dan has also researched the history of primitivism in the French visual arts as well as memory culture in late 19th and early 20th century France.

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Jacinto Cuvi, "The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil.

With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade; others do not. All of them strive to make it—or stay afloat.
In The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo, (U Chicago Press, 2025) Jacinto Cuvi introduces us to the world of street vendors and teases out the relationship between the construction of legality and the experience of citizenship. As São Paulo’s city government undertakes a large-scale plan to cancel street vending licenses and evict street vendors, Cuvi reveals how the rights of informal workers can be revoked or withheld and how the lines can be redrawn between work that is “legal” and work that takes place under constant fear of law enforcement. Alongside the mechanics of disenfranchisement, Cuvi captures the lived experience of criminalization, dissecting the distribution of (shallow) rights among vendors who continually reinvent strategies to eke out a living while dealing with the constraints and pressures of informal citizenship at the edge of the law.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about: escape rooms, the use of urban design in downtown historical neighborhoods of rural communities, and a study on belongingness in college and university. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social), Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email

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Shakirah E. Hudani, "Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (U of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Shakirah Hudani examines a “material politics of repair” in post-genocide Rwanda, where in a country saturated with deep historical memory, spatial master planning aims to drastically redesign urban spaces. How is the post-conflict city reconstituted through the work of such planning, and with what effects for material repair and social conciliation?

Through extended ethnographic and qualitative research in Rwanda in the decades after the genocide of 1994, this book questions how repair after conflict is realized amidst large-scale urban transformation. Bridging African studies, urban studies, and human geography in its scope, this work ties Rwanda’s transformation to contexts of urban change in other post-conflict spaces, bringing to the fore critical questions about the ethics of planning in such complex geographies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Dan Davies, "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:00:00 -0000

For this episode of Liminal Library, I interviewed Dan Davies about The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind (U Chicago Press, 2025). Davies examines how we've systematically engineered responsibility out of our institutions, creating a world where major decisions happen without clear human accountability.

Davies draws on Stafford Beer's cybernetics to explain how modern organizations function as systems with their own patterns and responses. As he puts it, "the system is not conscious and so does not have incentives, but it has consistent patterns of response to stimuli." This isn't about individual moral failures – it's about the industrialization of decision-making itself. We've moved from Harry Truman's "The Buck Stops Here" to complex processes and standardized criteria that diffuse responsibility across multiple layers. When things go wrong – financial crises, environmental failures, social breakdowns – no single person can be held accountable because no single person actually made the decision.

Davies traces this transformation through three revolutions: the managerial revolution that shifted control from owners to professional administrators, the cybernetic revolution that offered tools to understand these systems but never fully materialized, and the neoliberal revolution that reshaped society while ignoring that increasingly, systems rather than people make the decisions affecting our lives. These accountability machines, as Davies calls them, operate according to their own logic and constraints. Understanding them is essential for grasping why institutional failures seem both inevitable and impossible to prevent within our current frameworks.

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Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book Feminisms: A Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

This outstanding work, available later this year, takes a thematic approach to the topic of global feminist history to provide a unified vision that maintains appropriate nuance. Delap is a gender historian, writ large. Her first book, The Feminist Avant Garde (Cambridge 2007), examined the development of feminism in the Anglo-American context, tracing the ideas as developed in trans-Atlantic discourse. She then directed her gaze back to her homeland in subsequent publications, including Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford 2011) and the 2013 Palgrave release, Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Britain since 1890, Delap explore another expression of gender altogether. The breadth of her scholarship – women and men, intellectual elites and domestic servants, adults and children – prepared her to write this broad but fairly concise work of history. Enjoy our lively discussion!

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Daniel Wortel-London, "The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich. These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable.

In The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981 (U of Chicago Press, 2025), Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politics are shaped by what he terms the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just.

Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) holds an MPhil in intellectual history from the University of Cambridge.

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Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson, "Racial Resentment in the Political Mind" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disagreements, and objections to policies that seek to help racial minorities stem from racial prejudice. They argue that racial resentment arises from just-world beliefs and appraisals of deservingness that help explain the persistence of racial inequality in America in ways more consequential than racism or racial prejudice alone.
The culprits, as many White people see it, are undeserving people of color, who are perceived to benefit unfairly from, and take advantage of, resources that come at Whites’ expense—a worldview in which any attempt at modest change is seen as a challenge to the status quo and privilege. Yet, as Davis and Wilson reveal, many Whites have become racially resentful due to their perceptions that African Americans skirt the “rules of the game” and violate traditional values by taking advantage of unearned resources. Resulting attempts at racial progress lead Whites to respond in ways that retain their social advantage—opposing ameliorative policies, minority candidates, and other advancement on racial progress. Because racial resentment is rooted in beliefs about justice, fairness, and deservingness, ordinary citizens, who may not harbor racist motivations, may wind up in the same political position as racists, but for different reasons.

Professor Davis’ research interests include most areas in public opinion and political behavior. A unifying theme running through much of his research is a concern for identifying the social psychological motivations underlying political attitudes and behavior. This approach has been applied to specific research areas, including political tolerance, implicit racial attitudes, the role of threat and anxiety in political behavior, public reactions to terrorism, social desirability, the measurement of political and social attitudes, racism and racial politics, and the political behavior of African Americans.
Professor Davis is co-author of a forthcoming Cambridge University Press book, Perseverance in the Parish? Religious Attitudes from a Black Catholic Perspective. Based on the first national survey of African American Catholics, this book explores the perceptions of racism and racial experiences in the Catholic Church. His other book, Negative Liberty: Public Opinion and the Terrorist Attacks on America, examines the role of threat perceptions on the tradeoffs between civil liberties and security, political tolerance, and ideas of citizenship.

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Kirin Narayan, "Cave of My Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 09:00:00 -0000

On the podcast today I am joined by Kirin Narayan, emerita professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Kirin is joining me to talk about her new book, Cave of my Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora published by Chicago University Press in 2024, and in 2025 as an Indian edition by HarperCollins India.

As a young girl in Bombay, Kirin Narayan was enthralled by her father’s stories about how their ancestors had made the ancient rock-cut cave temples at Ellora. Recalling those stories as an adult, she was inspired to learn more about the caves, especially the Buddhist worship hall known as the “Vishwakarma cave.” Immersing herself in family history, oral traditions, and works by archaeologists, art historians, scholars of Buddhism, Indologists, and Sanskritists, in Cave of my Ancestors Narayan set out to answer the question of how this cave came to be venerated as the home of Vishwakarma, the god of making in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Part scholarship, part detective story, and memoir, Narayan’s book leads readers through centuries of history, offering a sensitive meditation on devotion, wonder, and all that connects us to place, family, the past, and the divine.

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Federico Marcon, "Fascism: The History of a Word" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The rise and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the term “fascist” and when and whether it is appropriate to use it. The landmark study Fascism: The History of a Word (The University of Chicago Press, 2025) takes this debate further by tackling its most fundamental questions: How did the terms “fascism” and “fascist” come to be in the first place? How and in what circumstances have they been used? How can they be understood today? And what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of using “fascism” to make sense of interwar authoritarianism as well as contemporary politics?
Exploring the writings and deeds of political leaders, activists, artists, authors, and philosophers, Federico Marcon traces the history of the term’s use (and usefulness) in relation to Mussolini’s political regime, antifascist resistance, and the quest of postwar historians to develop a definition of a “fascist minimum.” This investigation of the semiotics of “fascism” also aims to inquire about people’s voluntary renunciation of the modern emancipatory ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity.

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Gavin Williams, "Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0000

With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor, to offer a global portrait of this format.
Spun at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the shellac disc rapidly became an industrial standard even while the gramophone itself remained a novelty. The very basis of this early sound reproduction technology was friction, an elemental materiality of sound shaped through cultural practice. Using friction as a lens, Gavin Williams illuminates the environments plundered, the materials seized, and the ears entangled in the making of a sound format. Bringing together material, political, and music history, Format Friction decenters the story of a beloved medium, and so explores new ways of understanding listening in technological culture more broadly.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

nathan.smith@yale.edu

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Shani Adia Evans, "We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast Portland, also called “Albina,” were a haven for and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina changed dramatically—it became majority White.
In We Belong Here, sociologist Dr. Shani Adia Evans offers an intimate look at gentrification from the inside, documenting the reactions of Albina residents as the racial demographics of their neighborhood shift. As White culture becomes centered in Northeast, Black residents recount their experiences with what Evans refers to as “White watching,” the questioning look on the faces of White people they encounter, which conveys an exclusionary message: “What are you doing here?” This, Evans shows, is a prime example of what she calls “White spacemaking”: the establishment of White space—spaces in which Whiteness is assumed to be the norm and non-Whites are treated with suspicion—in formerly non-White neighborhoods. Evans also documents Black residents’ efforts to create and maintain places for Black belonging in White-dominated Portland. While gentrification typically describes socioeconomic changes that may have racial implications, White spacemaking allows us to understand racism as a primary mechanism of neighborhood change. We Belong Here illuminates why gentrification and White spacemaking should be examined as intersecting, but not interchangeable, processes of neighborhood change.

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Robyn Arianrhod, "Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation" (U of Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A celebration of the seemingly simple idea that allowed us to imagine the world in new dimensions--sparking both controversy and discovery.

The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely celebrities. If you ever took a physics course, the word "vector" might remind you of the mathematics needed to determine forces on an amusement park ride, a turbine, or a projectile. You might also remember that a vector is a quantity that has magnitude and (this is the key) direction. In fact, vectors are examples of tensors, which can represent even more data. It sounds simple enough--and yet, as award-winning science writer Robyn Arianrhod shows in this riveting story, the idea of a single symbol expressing more than one thing at once was millennia in the making. And without that idea, we wouldn't have such a deep understanding of our world.

Vector and tensor calculus offers an elegant language for expressing the way things behave in space and time, and Arianrhod shows how this enabled physicists and mathematicians to think in a brand-new way. These include James Clerk Maxwell when he ushered in the wireless electromagnetic age; Einstein when he predicted the curving of space-time and the existence of gravitational waves; Paul Dirac, when he created quantum field theory; and Emmy Noether, when she connected mathematical symmetry and the conservation of energy. For it turned out that it's not just physical quantities and dimensions that vectors and tensors can represent, but other dimensions and other kinds of information, too. This is why physicists and mathematicians can speak of four-dimensional space-time and other higher-dimensional "spaces," and why you're likely relying on vectors or tensors whenever you use digital applications such as search engines, GPS, or your mobile phone.

In exploring the evolution of vectors and tensors--and introducing the fascinating people who gave them to us--Arianrhod takes readers on an extraordinary, five-thousand-year journey through the human imagination. She shows the genius required to reimagine the world--and how a clever mathematical construct can dramatically change discovery's direction.

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Charlotte Bentley, "New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859" (U of Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Jazz is the music that many people associate with New Orleans. But before there was jazz in New Orleans there was opera. It was the only city in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century with a resident opera company that produced the latest European works. In New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Charlotte Bentley considers the thriving operatic life of New Orleans, drawing out the international connections that animated it. She explores the process of bringing opera to the stage, taking a detailed look at the management of New Orleans’s Francophone theater, the Théâtre d’Orléans, as well as the performers who came to the city and the reception they received. Opera’s role was not confined to the theater, however, and Bentley demonstrates that opera permeated everyday life in New Orleans and examines literary works to understand the genre’s significance to the city. Bentley examines the complicated transatlantic dance that brought operas and performers to New Orleans forever influencing the city, and ultimately, American culture.

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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, "Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Our national conversation about the border has taken a religious turn. When televangelists declare, “Heaven has a wall,” activists shout back, “Jesus was a refugee.” For Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, the standoff makes explicit a longstanding truth: borders are religious as well as political objects. In this book, Hurd argues that Americans share a bipartisan border religion, complete with an array of beliefs and practices, including a reverence for national security, a liturgy for immigration, and an eschatological foreign policy. Through an analysis of the many ways the United States creates, enforces, and ignores borders at home and abroad, Hurd offers a bold new perspective on the ties that bind American religion, politics, and public life.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Religion and Culture track. For more information, visit his website thereluctantamericanist.com

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Ahmad Greene-Hayes, "Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion Making in Jim Crow New Orleans" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orleans. When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space. Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an antiblack world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms--ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more--to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come. In recovering these spiritual innovations, Underworld Work celebrates the resilience and creativity of Africana religions.

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David E. Campbell and Christina Wolbrecht, "See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Notre Dame University Political Scientists Dave Campbell and Christina Wolbrecht have a new book that focuses on the impression that female candidates make on young people, specifically on young people in the United States. This is a fascinating analysis since it fleshes out, with a sizeable study, the idea that candidates running for office, particularly female candidates, leave a lasting impact on younger people, even if they do not win. Studying role models has not been a focus in political science per se, but Campbell and Wolbrecht have brought together work from social psychology, democratic theory, political science, and gender studies to craft an understanding of role models within the context of campaigns and elections.See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People⁠ (U of Chicago Press, 2025) is an important exploration of the connection between those who run for office, particularly those who may look different than the expected “norm”, and how that very action has long-term impacts on younger voters, particularly adolescents and teenagers.

One of the unique perspectives of the research in See Jane Run is the focus on younger people and their engagement with politics. As the authors note, there is not that much political science research that explores the interactions between young people and politics—especially before those young people can vote. The authors also explain that teenagers generally identify with a partisan affiliation, which means that Campbell and Wolbrecht were able to sort the individuals into partisan groups and track the impact of women candidates within these partisan contexts. They found that female candidates clearly influenced two distinct groups within the study: Democratic young women and Republican young men. Young women saw these female candidates (both Republican and Democratic) as reflecting a more inclusive political environment, and the analysis suggests that this has a long-term impact, making these young women more engaged with the political process and democracy over time. The Republican young men responded as well, seeing female candidates as pursuing something—political activity—that they determined they were also qualified to pursue. The outcomes of the research in See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People also had racial dimensions, including exploring the impact on young Black men, who became less engaged in politics when a woman of color was running for office.

See Jane Run: How Women Politicians Matter for Young People explores what has been essentially folklore about the impact of political role models on young people by pulling together data and research to flesh out an understanding of these notions that we all have about candidates for political office, role models, and the impacts on younger people.

Please check out Brain Lair Books (in South Bend, Indiana or online) to purchase a copy of See Jane Run.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Neil Gregor, "The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A new history of how the musical worlds of German towns and cities were transformed during the Nazi era.

In the years after the Nazis came to power in January 1933 and through the war years all aspects of life in Germany changed. However, despite the social and political upheaval, gentile citizens were able to continue leisure activities such as attending concerts. In this book, historian Neil Gregor surveys the classical concert scene in Nazi Germany from the perspective of the audience, rather than institutions or performers. Gregor delves into the cultural lives of ordinary Germans under conditions of dictatorship. Did the ways in which Germans heard music in the period change? Did a Nazi way of listening emerge?

For audiences, Gregor shows, changes to the concert experience were small and often took place around the edges. This, combined with the preserved idea of the concert hall as a space of imagined civility and cultivation, led many concertgoers and music lovers to claim after the war that their field and their practice had been innocent--a place to retreat from the vicious violence and racism of the Nazi regime. Drawing on untapped archival sources, The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany reveals that the true history was one of disruption but also of near effortless adaptation. Through countless small acts, the symphony concert was reframed within the languages of strident nationalism, racism, and militarism to ensure its place inside the cultural cosmos of National Socialist Germany.

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Andrew S. Berish, "Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse" (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Andrew S. Berish. 2025. Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse. (U of Chicago Press, 2025)

Some good words from the inside flap:

“

A deep dive into the meaning behind the hatred of jazz.
A rock guitarist plays four notes in front of one thousand people, while a jazz guitarist plays one thousand notes in front of four people. You might laugh or groan at this jazz joke, but what is it about jazz that makes people want to disparage it in the first place?
Andrew S. Berish’s Hating Jazz listens to the voices who have denounced, disparaged, and mocked the music. By focusing on the rejection of the music, Berish says, we see more holistically jazz’s complicated place in American cultural life. Jazz is a display of Black creativity and genius, an art form that is deeply embedded in African American life. Though the explicit racial tenor of jazz jokes has become muted over time, making fun of jazz, either in a lighthearted or aggressive way, is also an engagement with the place of Blackness in America. An individual’s taste in music may seem personal, but Berish’s analysis of jazz hatred demonstrates that musical preferences and trends are a social phenomenon. Criticism of jazz has become inextricable from the ways we understand race in America, past and present. In addition to this form of criticism, Berish also considers jazz hate as a form of taste discrimination and as a conflict over genre boundaries within different jazz cultures.
Both enlightening and original, Hating Jazz shows that our response to music can be a social act, unique to our historical moment and cultural context—we react to music in certain ways because of who we are, where we are, and when we are.

“

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

nathan.smith@yale.edu

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Andrew Hartman, "Karl Marx in America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman

To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.
In historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.
After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.

Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature.
Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature, (U Chicago Press, 2025) Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?
Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life’s deepest wonderings.

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Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, "Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.
By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.
Incorporating insights from Afshordi’s cutting-edge research and Halper’s original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins (University of Chicago Press, 2025) compares these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory’s strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these notions. Battle of the Big Bang is a tale of rivalries and intrigue, of clashes of ideas that have raged from Greek antiquity to the present day over whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, whether it is unique or one of many. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community—all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past.

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James M. Lang, "Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Teachers are subject matter experts that can distill information into manageable chunks for their students. In Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. James M. Lang insists that the skills teachers use in their classrooms can be transferred to a broader audience. This book provides a step-by-step guide to assist would-be authors in researching and developing a book.

Teachers are familiar with creating a course syllabus and developing learning objectives. Dr. Lang posits that these skills can help create a book for audiences outside one’s subject matter expertise. He provides insight into the technical aspects of writing, including organization, writing style, and revision. By providing writing prompts at the end of each chapter, Dr. Lang provides the prospective author the opportunity to immediately begin his/her/their own writing journey. The book concludes with an appendix that provides a behind the scenes look at the publishing process. This is a must read for anyone interested in enhancing their writing, learning about the many parts of the publishing process, and hoping to provide their expertise to a larger audience.

In addition to Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience, Dr. Lang is the author of Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2020), Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2016) Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Harvard University Press, 2013), and On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching (Harvard UP, 2008). He has written extensively for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Dr. Lang serves as an editor to the Oklahoma University Press, is a highly sought-after speaker, and consultant. He is active on LinkedIn and Instagram and may be contacted directly at jamesmlang7@gmail.com.

Dr. Anne-Marie Verenna is a Professor of Biology and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Faculty Fellow at Delaware County Community College.

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Emily Hauser, "Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It" (Univ of Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Achilles. Agamemnon. Odysseus. Hector. The lives of these and many other men in the greatest epics of ancient Greece have been pored over endlessly in the past three millennia. But these are not just tales about heroic men. There are scores of women as well—complex, fascinating women whose stories have gone unexplored for far too long.

In Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It (University of Chicago Press, 2025), award-winning classicist and historian Dr. Emily Hauser pieces together compelling evidence from archaeological excavations and scientific discoveries to unearth the richly textured lives of women in Bronze Age Greece—the era of Homer’s heroes. Here, for the first time, we come to understand the everyday lives and experiences of the real women who stand behind the legends of Helen, Briseis, Cassandra, Aphrodite, Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso, Penelope, and more. In this captivating journey through Homer’s world, Dr. Hauser explains era-defining discoveries, such as the excavation of Troy and the decipherment of Linear B tablets that reveal thousands of captive women and their children; more recent finds like the tomb of the Griffin Warrior at Pylos, whose tomb contents challenge traditional gender attributes; DNA evidence showing that groups of warriors buried near the Black Sea with their weapons and steeds were, in fact, Amazon-like female fighters; a prehistoric dye workshop on Crete that casts fresh light on “women’s work” of dyeing, spinning, and weaving textiles; and a superbly preserved shipwreck off the coast of Turkey whose contents tell of the economic and diplomatic networks crisscrossing the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

Essential reading for fans of Madeline Miller or Natalie Haynes, this riveting new history brings to life the women of the Bronze Age Aegean as never before, offering a groundbreaking reassessment of the ancient world.

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Brook Ziporyn, "Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A new approach to the theism-scientism divide rooted in a deeper form of atheism.
Western philosophy is stuck in an irresolvable conflict between two approaches to the spiritual malaise of our times: either we need more God (the “turn to religion”) or less religion (the New Atheism). In Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond, (University of Chicago Press, 2024) Brook Ziporyn proposes an alternative that avoids both totalizing theomania and atomizing reductionism. What we need, he argues, is a deeper, more thoroughgoing, even religious rejection of God: an affirmative atheism without either a creator to provide meaning or finite creatures in need of it—a mystical atheism.
In the legacies of Daoism and Buddhism as well as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille, Ziporyn discovers a critique of theism that develops into a new, positive sensibility—at once deeply atheist and richly religious. Experiments in Mystical Atheism argues that these “godless epiphanies” hold the key to renewing philosophy today.You can download the supplementary materials here.

Other works recommended by Brook Ziporyn in this Interview

Mercedes Valmisa, All Things Act, Oxford UP.

Jana S. Rošker, Chinese Philosophy in Transcultural Contexts, Bloomsbury Academics

Gregory Scott Moss, Absolute Dialetheism, forthcoming. But for a taste of a similar argument in a book chapter format, please check here.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Whiat is Intelligence? Penguin Random House

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Andrew Hartman, "Karl Marx in America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

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Maraam A. Dwidar, "Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A vital examination of how social and economic justice organizations overcome resource disadvantages and build political power. Why do some coalitions triumph while others fall short? In Power to the Partners: Organizational Coalitions in Social Justice Advocacy, Maraam A. Dwidar documents the vital role of social and economic justice organizations in American politics and explores the process by which they strategically build partnerships to advance more effective and equitable advocacy. Using original data tracking the collaboration patterns of more than twenty thousand nationally active advocacy organizations, Dwidar evaluates the micro- and macro-level conditions surrounding these groups' successful efforts to collectively shape public policy. Power to the Partners reveals that while organizational advocates for social and economic justice are at a disadvantage in the American lobbying landscape--financially, tactically, and politically--coalition tactics can help ameliorate these disparities. By building and sustaining coalitions with structures and memberships that facilitate clarity, learning, and diverse perspectives, these advocates can successfully--and uniquely--make their mark on American public policy. Dwidar's work offers critical insights for scholars and practitioners alike--from groundbreaking academic findings to evidence-based lessons for political organizers.

Maraam A. Dwidar an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University.

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Carol A. Heimer, "Governing the Global Clinic: HIV and the Legal Transformation of Medicine" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:00:00 -0000

HIV emerged in the world at a time when medicine and healthcare were undergoing two major transformations: globalization and a turn toward legally inflected, rule-based ways of doing things. It accelerated both trends. While pestilence and disease are generally considered the domain of biological sciences and medicine, social arrangements—and law in particular—are also crucial.

Drawing on years of research in HIV clinics in the United States, Thailand, South Africa, and Uganda, Governing the Global Clinic: HIV and the Legal Transformation of Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Carol Heimer examines how growing norms of legalized accountability have altered the work of healthcare systems and how the effects of legalization vary across different national contexts. A key feature of legalism is universalistic language, but, in practice, rules are usually imported from richer countries (especially the United States) to poorer ones that have less adequate infrastructure and fewer resources with which to implement them. Challenging readers to reconsider the impulse to use law to organize and govern social life, Governing the Global Clinic poses difficult questions: When do rules solve problems, and when do they create new problems? When do rules become decoupled from ethics, and when do they lead to deeper moral commitments? When do rules reduce inequality? And when do they reflect, reproduce, and even amplify inequality?

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Matthew Shindell, "Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps and Matter" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 22 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

The first book to combine exquisite cartographical charts of the Moon with a thorough exploration of the Moon’s role in popular culture, science, and myth.

President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed the path of space exploration.
For the first time, each of those beautifully hand-drawn, colorful charts is presented together in one stunning book. In Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps and Matter (U Chicago Press, 2024), National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell’s expert commentary accompanies each chart, along with the key geological characteristics and interpretations that were set out in the original Geologic Atlas of the Moon. Interwoven throughout the book are contributions from scholars devoted to studying the multifaceted significance of the Moon to humankind around the world. Traveling from the Stone Age to the present day, they explore a wide range of topics: the prehistoric lunar calendar; the role of the Moon in creation myths of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the role of the Moon in astrology; the importance of the Moon in establishing an Earth-centered solar system; the association of the Moon with madness and the menstrual cycle; how the Moon governs the tides; and the use of the Moon in surrealist art.
Combining a thoughtful retelling of the Moon’s cultural associations throughout history with the beautifully illustrated and scientifically accurate charting of its surface, Lunar is a stunning celebration of the Moon in all its guises.

Gabriela Radulescu is a Guggenheim Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Gabriela holds a PhD in the history of science from the Technical University of Berlin. Her dissertation “A History of Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI): Astronautics and Radio Astronomy Across the Iron Curtain (1956-1976)” examined the political origins and history of the scientific field known to this day as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

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Nicole C. Nelson, "Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 16 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Mice are used as model organisms across a wide range of fields in science today--but it is far from obvious how studying a mouse in a maze can help us understand human problems like alcoholism or anxiety. How do scientists convince funders, fellow scientists, the general public, and even themselves that animal experiments are a good way of producing knowledge about the genetics of human behavior? In Model Behavior: Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders (U Chicago Press, 2018), Nicole C. Nelson takes us inside an animal behavior genetics laboratory to examine how scientists create and manage the foundational knowledge of their field.

Behavior genetics is a particularly challenging field for making a clear-cut case that mouse experiments work, because researchers believe that both the phenomena they are studying and the animal models they are using are complex. These assumptions of complexity change the nature of what laboratory work produces. Whereas historical and ethnographic studies traditionally portray the laboratory as a place where scientists control, simplify, and stabilize nature in the service of producing durable facts, the laboratory that emerges from Nelson's extensive interviews and fieldwork is a place where stable findings are always just out of reach. The ongoing work of managing precarious experimental systems means that researchers learn as much--if not more--about the impact of the environment on behavior as they do about genetics. Model Behavior offers a compelling portrait of life in a twenty-first-century laboratory, where partial, provisional answers to complex scientific questions are increasingly the norm.

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False Dawn: A Conversation with George Selgin on Recovering from the Great Depression

Wed, 14 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Join us on Madison's Notes as we sit down with George Selgin, senior fellow and director emeritus of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia. In this insightful conversation, Selgin unpacks the myths and realities of FDR’s New Deal through the lens of his book, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 (University of Chicago Press, 2025). While the New Deal is often celebrated as a bold and successful response to the Great Depression, Selgin argues that many of its policies actually prolonged economic suffering—with unemployment remaining staggeringly high years later. Drawing on extensive historical and economic analysis, he separates the New Deal’s successes from its failures, examines the distinct roles of fiscal and monetary policy, and reveals the overlooked factor that truly ended the Great Depression (hint: it wasn’t just WWII).

This episode challenges conventional narratives and offers crucial lessons for navigating future economic crises. Tune in for a nuanced discussion on why we must assess policy decisions carefully—learning from the past to build a more resilient future.

Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.

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Pollyanna Rhee, "Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Tue, 13 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism, helping to inspire the creation of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day. But what role did the history of Santa Barbara itself play in this? In Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970 (U Chicago Press, 2025), Pollyanna Rhee shows, the city’s past and demographics were essential to the portrayal of the oil spill as momentous. Moreover, well-off and influential Santa Barbarans were positioned to “domesticate” the larger environmental movement by embodying the argument that individual homes and families—not society as a whole—needed protection from environmental abuses. This soon would put environmental rhetoric and power to fundamentally conservative—not radical—ends.

Pollyanna Rhee is assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and affiliate faculty in history, sustainable design, and theory and interpretive criticism. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Andrew Griebeler, "Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 12 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past.

Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The author draws on centuries of remarkable and varied documentation from across Europe and the Mediterranean.

Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons marshals ample evidence for a dynamic and critical tradition of botanical inquiry and nature observation in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean. The author reveals that many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations began in premodern manuscript culture. Consequently, he demonstrates that the distinctions between pre- and early modern botanical illustration center more on the advent of print, the expansion of collections and documentation, and the narrowing of the range of accepted forms of illustration than on the invention of critical and observational practices exclusive to modernity.

Griebeler’s emphasis on continuity, intercultural collaboration, and the gradual transformation of Mediterranean traditions of critical botanical illustration persuasively counters previously prevalent narratives of rupture and Western European exceptionalism in the histories of art and science.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review.

Andrew Griebeler is assistant professor in the depart of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. With students and other faculty at Duke, he is also helping to document the legacy of the Duke Herbarium on Instagram (@bluedevil.herbarium) before its closure by the university.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston.

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David Serlin, "Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mon, 12 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (U Chicago Press, 2025) offers a history of how encounters between architects and people with disabilities transformed modern culture.

Window Shopping with Helen Keller recovers a series of influential moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of people with disabilities. David Serlin reveals how people with sensory and physical impairments navigated urban spaces and helped to shape modern culture. Through four case studies--the lives of Joseph Merrick (aka "The Elephant Man") and Helen Keller, the projects of the Works Progress Administration, and the design of the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped--Serlin offers a new history of modernity's entanglements with disability.

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Matthew Daniel Eddy, "Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 01 May 2025 08:00:00 -0000

We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830 (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks were paper machines and that notekeeping was a capability-building exercise that enabled young notekeepers to mobilize everyday handwritten and printed forms of material and visual media in a way that empowered them to judge and enact the enlightened principles they encountered in the classroom.

Covering a rich selection of material ranging from simple scribbles to intricate watercolor diagrams, the book reinterprets John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment, scholars seldom consider why it was so successful for those who used it. Each chapter uses one core notekeeping skill to reveal the fascinating world of material culture that enabled students in the arts, sciences, and humanities to transform the tabula rasa metaphor into a dynamic cognitive model. Starting in the home, moving to schools, and ending with universities, the book reconstructs the relationship between media and the mind from the bottom up. It reveals that the cognitive skills required to make and use notebooks were not simply aids to reason; rather, they were part of reason itself.

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Chloe Ahmann, "Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. In Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (U Chicago Press, 2024), anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on this edge of the city and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Writing from the community of Curtis Bay, where two hundred years of technocratic hubris have carried lethal costs, Ahmann also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors.

Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground for competing political futures whose stakes reverberate beyond its six square miles in a present after progress has lost steam. And yet—as one young resident explains — “that’s not how the story ends.” Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress probes the deep roots of our ecological predicament, offering insight into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.

Futures after Progress is available in Open Access here.Mentioned in this episode:

Ahmann, Chloe and Anand Pandian. 2024. “The Fight Against Incineration is a Chance to Right Historic Wrongs.” Baltimore Beat, June 26.
Ahmann, Chloe. 2024. “Curtis Bay Residents Deserve a Coal-free Future.” Baltimore Sun, February 18.
Boym, Svetlana. 2007. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” Hedgehog Review 9(2).
Butler, Octavia. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Butler, Octavia. 1998. Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
South Baltimore Community Land Trust. https://www.sbclt.org/
Weston, Kath. 2021. “Counterfactual Ethnography: Imagining What It Takes to Live Differently.” AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 16(3): 463–87.

Chloe Ahmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her work explores what efforts to think and enact environmental futures look like from the sedimented space of late industrialism.

Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at The Ohio State University. [please link my name.

Special thanks to Brittany Halley, Nikoo Karimi, Abigail Musch, Kate Roos, and Koray Sackan, who helped prepare this interview in the Comparative Studies Seminar in Technology and Culture.

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Rebecca Zorach, "Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monuments in the United States, in Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America’s Racial Enterprise (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Rebecca Zorach carefully examines the place of art in the occupation of land and the upholding of White power in the US, arguing that it has been central to the design of America’s racial enterprise. Confronting closely held assumptions of art history, Zorach looks to the intersections of art, nature, race, and place, working through a series of symbolic spaces—the museum, the wild, islands, gardens, home, and walls and borders—to open and extend conversations on the political implications of art and design.

Against the backdrop of central moments in American art, from the founding of early museums to the ascendancy of abstract expressionism, Dr. Zorach shows how contemporary artists—including Dawoud Bey, Theaster Gates, Maria Gaspar, Kerry James Marshall, Alan Michelson, Dylan Miner, Postcommodity, Cauleen Smith, and Amanda Williams—have mined the relationship between environment and social justice, creating works that investigate and interrupt White supremacist, carceral, and environmentally toxic worlds. The book also draws on poetry, creative nonfiction, hip-hop videos, and Disney films to illuminate crucial topics in art history, from the racial politics of abstraction to the origins of museums and the formation of canons.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sam Klug, "The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. Sam Klug reveals the central but underappreciated importance of global decolonization to the divergence between mainstream liberalism and the Black freedom movement in postwar America. Dr. Klug reconsiders what has long been seen as a matter of primarily domestic policy in light of a series of debates concerning self-determination, postcolonial economic development, and the meanings of colonialism and decolonization. These debates deeply influenced the discord between Black activists and state policymakers and formed a crucial dividing line in national politics in the 1960s and 1970s.

The result is a history that broadens our understanding of ideological formation—particularly how Americans conceptualized racial power and political economy—by revealing a much wider and more dynamic network of influences. Linking intellectual, political, and social movement history, The Internal Colony illuminates how global decolonization transformed the terms of debate over race and social class in the twentieth-century United States.

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Sinem Arcak Casale, "Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi’ism, it prompted the more established Ottoman Empire to align itself definitively with Sunni legalism. The political, religious, and military conflicts that arose have since been widely studied, but little attention has been paid to their diplomatic relationship.

In Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Sinem Arcak Casale sets out to explore these two major Muslim empires through a surprising lens: gifts. Countless treasures—such as intricate carpets, gilded silver cups, and ivory-tusk knives—flowed from the Safavid to the Ottoman Empire throughout the sixteenth century. While only a handful now survive, records of these gifts exist in court chronicles, treasury records, poems, epistolary documents, ambassadorial reports, and travel narratives.

Tracing this elaborate archive, Dr. Casale treats gifts as representative of the complicated Ottoman-Safavid coexistence, demonstrating how their rivalry was shaped as much by culture and aesthetics as it was by religious or military conflict. Gifts in the Age of Empire explores how gifts were no mere accessories to diplomacy but functioned as a mechanism of competitive interaction between these early modern Muslim courts.

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Rune Nyord, "Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. But, as Dr. Rune Nyord shows in Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2025), even today, our understanding of the Egyptian afterlife has been formulated to a striking extent in Christian terms. Dr. Nyord argues that this is no accident, but rather the result of a long history of Europeans systematically retelling the religion of ancient Egypt to fit the framework of Christianity. The idea of ancient Egyptians believing in postmortem judgment with rewards and punishments in the afterlife was developed during the early modern period through biased interpretations that were construed without any detailed knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, hieroglyphs, and sources.

As a growing number of Egyptian images and texts became available through the nineteenth century, these materials tended to be incorporated into existing narratives rather than being used to question them. Against this historical background, Dr. Nyord argues that we need to return to the indigenous sources and shake off the Christian expectations that continue to shape scholarly and popular thinking about the ancient Egyptian afterlife.

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William Max Nelson, "Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

In Enlightenment Biopolitics (U Chicago Press, 2024), historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals.

In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization.

William Max Nelson is associate professor of history at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One and a coeditor of The French Revolution in Global Perspective.

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Colby Gordon, "Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers a prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds.

In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology.

Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery. In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative acco unt of theology’s value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.

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Maggie M. Cao, "Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Maggie Cao is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the globe in the nineteenth century. In this work, art historian Dr. Cao crafts a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century US painters’ complicity with and resistance to ascendant US imperialism, offering eye-opening readings of canonical works, landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lifes of imported goods, genre paintings, and ethnographic portraiture.

Revealing how the US empire was “hidden in plain sight” in the art of this period, Dr. Cao examines artists including Frederic Edwin Church and Winslow Homer who championed and expressed ambivalence toward the colonial project. She also tackles the legacy of US imperialism, examining Euro-American painters of the past alongside global artists of the present. Pairing each chapter with reflections on works by contemporary anticolonial artists including Tavares Strachan, Nicholas Galanin, and Yuki Kihara, Dr. Cao addresses important contemporary questions around representation, colonialism, and indigeneity. This book foregrounds an underacknowledged topic in the study of nineteenth-century US art and illuminates the ongoing ecological and economic effects of the US empire.

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Selena Wisnom, "The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

When a team of Victorian archaeologists dug into a grassy hill in Iraq, they chanced upon one of the oldest and greatest stores of knowledge ever seen: the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, seventh century BCE ruler of a huge swathe of the ancient Middle East known as Mesopotamia. After his death, vengeful rivals burned Ashurbanipal’s library to the ground - yet the texts, carved on clay tablets, were baked and preserved by the heat. Buried for millennia, the tablets were written in cuneiform: the first written language in the world.

More than half of human history is written in cuneiform, but only a few hundred people on earth can read it. In The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History (U Chicago Press, 2025), Assyriologist Dr. Selena Wisnom takes us on an immersive tour of this extraordinary library, bringing ancient Mesopotamia and its people to life. Through it, we encounter a world of astonishing richness, complexity and sophistication. Mesopotamia, she shows, was home to advanced mathematics, astronomy and banking, law and literature. This was a culture absorbed and developed by the ancient Greeks, and whose myths were precursors to Bible stories - in short, a culture without which our lives today would be unrecognizable.

The Library of Ancient Wisdom unearths a civilization at once strange and strangely familiar: a land of capricious gods, exorcisms and professional lamenters, whose citizens wrote of jealous rivalries, profound friendships and petty grievances. Through these pages we come face to face with humanity’s first civilization: their startling achievements, their daily life, and their struggle to understand our place in the universe.

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Nima Bassiri, "Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0000

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity.

Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state.

Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered.

Nima Bassiri is assistant professor of literature at Duke University, where he is also the codirector of the Institute for Critical Theory.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Jeremy Black, "A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Since their origins in eighteenth-century England, railroads have spread across the globe, changing everything in their path, from where and how people grew and made things to where and how they lived and moved. Railroads rewrote not only world geography but also the history of maps and mapping. Today, the needs of train companies and their users continue to shape the maps we consume and consult.

Featuring full-color maps primarily from the British Library's distinguished collection--many of them never before published--A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps is the first international history of railroads and railroad infrastructure told through maps. Jeremy Black includes examples from six continents, spanning a variety of uses from railroad planning and operations to guides for passengers, shippers, and tourists.

Arranged chronologically, the maps are accompanied by explanatory text that sheds light on the political, military, and urban development histories associated with the spread of railroads. A final chapter considers railroad maps from games, books, and other cultural artifacts. For anyone interested in the history of railroads or maps, A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps (U Chicago Press, 2024) will offer new and unexpected insights into their intertwined global history.

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Arwen P. Mohun, "American Imperialist: Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa" (Chicago UP, 2023)

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped shape the new imperial order in Africa.

Richard Dorsey Mohun spent his career circulating among the eastern United States, the cities and courts of Europe, and the African continent, as he served the US State Department at some points and King Leopold of Belgium at others. A freelance imperialist, he implemented the schemes of American investors and the Congo Free State alike. Without men like him, Africa’s history might have unfolded very differently. How did an ordinary son of a Washington bookseller become the agent of American corporate greed and European imperial ambition? Why did he choose to act in ways that ranged from thoughtless and amoral to criminal and unforgivable?

With unblinking clarity and precision, historian Arwen P. Mohun interrogates the life and actions of her great-grandfather in American Imperialist: Cruelty and Consequence in the Scramble for Africa (Chicago UP, 2023). She seeks not to excuse the man known as Dorsey but to understand how individual ambition and imperial lust fueled each other, to catastrophic ends. Ultimately, she offers a nuanced portrait of how her great-grandfather’s pursuit of career success and financial security for his family came at a tragic cost to countless Africans.

Rounak Bose is a doctoral student in History at the University of Delaware. His research explores the intersections of caste, religiosities, performances, sacred geographies, and the state, as informing/informed by colonial and postcolonial mobilities and circulatory regimes across modern South Asia and Indian Ocean networks. Besides these specific research interests, his disciplinary interests revolve across anthropology, literature, and the digital humanities. When not reading or writing in the university library, Rounak can be found organizing ambitious culinary ventures for friends and family. On Twitter.

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Noam Leshem, "Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0000

“No man’s land” invokes stretches of barren landscape, twisted barbed wire, desolation, and the devastation of war. But this is not always the reality. According to Noam Leshem in Edges of Care: Living and Dying in No Man's Land (U Chicago Press, 2025), the term also reveals radical abandonment by the state. From the Northern Sahara to the Amazon rainforests, people around the world find themselves in places that have been stripped of sovereign care. Leshem is committed to defining these spaces and providing a more intimate understanding of this urgent political reality.

Based on nearly a decade of research in some of the world’s most challenging conflict zones, Edges of Care offers a profound account of abandoned lives and lands, and how they endure and sometimes thrive once left to fend for themselves. Leshem interrogates no man’s land as a site of radical uncaring: abandoned by a sovereign power in a relinquishment of responsibility for the space or anyone inside it. To understand the ramifications of such uncaring, Leshem takes readers through a diverse series of abandoned places, including areas in Palestine, Syria, Colombia, Sudan, and Cyprus. He shows that no man’s land is not empty of life, but almost always inhabited and, in fact, often generative of new modes of being.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

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Adam R. Nelson, "Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America (U Chicago Press, 2023) launches a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. In this volume, Adam R. Nelson focuses on the early republic, explaining how knowledge itself became a commodity, as useful ideas became salable goods and American colleges were drawn into transatlantic commercial relations. American scholars might once have imagined that higher education could sit beyond the sphere of market activity—that intellectual exchange could transcend vulgar consumerism—but already by the end of the eighteenth century, they saw how ideas could be factored into the nation’s balance of trade. Moreover, they concluded that it was the function of colleges to oversee the complex process whereby knowledge could be priced and purchased. The history of capitalism and the history of higher education, Nelson reveals, are intimately intertwined—which raises a host of important and strikingly urgent questions. How do we understand knowledge and education as commercial goods? Who should pay for them? And, fundamentally, what is the optimal system of higher education in a capitalist democracy?

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Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Ada Palmer joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Inventing the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2025) and the ways history is written and used.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save them from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

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Rosemary Wakeman, "The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0000

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and industrialist. He’s the subject of Rosemary Wakeman’s latest book The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941 (U Chicago Press, 2024) which traces Victor’s journey through these three cities—and explores how the world economy changes as he travels.

After all, it’s a period where the world trading system is beginning to unravel, as British dominance in manufacturing is starting to be challenged by cheaper rivals in Germany and Japan, with arguments for economic policies that seem very familiar to us today.

Rosemary Wakeman is professor of history at Fordham University. She is the author of A Modern History of European Cities: 1815 to the Present (Bloomsbury: 2020) as well as The Heroic City: Paris, 1945–1958 (The University of Chicago Press: 2009) and Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (The University of Chicago Press: 2016).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Worlds of Victor Sassoon. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Antonio A. Casilli, "Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenience, see ourselves reflected in them, and treat them as something entirely new. But when we overestimate the automation of these tools, award-winning author Antonio A. Casilli argues, we fail to recognize how our fellow humans are essential to their efficiency. The danger is not that robots will take our jobs, but that humans will have to do theirs.

In this bracing and powerful book, Antonia A. Casilli uses up-to-the-minute research to show how today’s technologies, including AI, continue to exploit human labor—even ours. He connects the diverse activities of today’s tech laborers: platform workers, like Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts; “micro workers,” including those performing atomized tasks like data entry on Amazon Mechanical Turk; and the rest of us, as we evaluate text or images to show we’re not robots, react to Facebook posts, or approve or improve the output of generative AI. As Casilli shows us, algorithms, search engines, and voice assistants wouldn’t function without unpaid or underpaid human contributions. Further, he warns that if we fail to recognize this human work, we risk a dark future for all human labor.

Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation (U Chicago Press, 2025) urges us to move beyond the simplistic notion that machines are intelligent and autonomous. As the proverbial Godot, robots are the bearers of a messianic promise that is always postponed. Instead of bringing prosperity for all, they discipline the workforce, so we don’t dream of a world without drudgery and exploitation. Casilli’s eye-opening book makes clear that most “automation” requires human labor—and likely always will—shedding new light on today’s consequences and tomorrow’s threats of failing to recognize and compensate the “click workers” of today.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is at the intersection of space, behavior, and identity. He is currently conducting research about the negotiation that humans make between oneself, identification of place, and the attachment/s they have to those places. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his personal website, Google Scholar, Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social),Twitter (@ProfessorJohnst), or by email (johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu)

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Melissa B. Reynolds, "Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the information you found — just as ordinary 15th and 16th century English people would have sifted through information in their almanacs, medical recipe collections, and astrological tracts.

As Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (U Chicago Press, 2024) shows, ordinary English readers learned to assess and evaluate information through ordinary, everyday interactions with inexpensive and practical books. By tracing the creation, proliferation, and reading of such 'practical books,' Melissa Reynolds explores changing attitudes towards medicine and science as well as how readers navigated uncertainty and the unknowable. Through its focus on the production of practical books, Reading Practice also charts changing attitudes towards books, first as manuscripts became less expensive and then as print became imbued with authority.

Vivid and precise, Reading Practice should be read by those interested in the history of the book, the history of science, and anyone who has ever consulted Dr. Google (which, let's be honest, is probably everyone). In addition to centering the reading practices of ordinary people, Reading Practice also does a fabulous job explaining exactly what it looks like and takes to work with medieval manuscripts and early printed texts, making it perfect reading for graduate students and those heading into library research.

Listeners should also check out the companion website, which contains bibliographic information about the manuscripts and prints used in the project, network analysis of the relationship between printers and book, and data visualizations.

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Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most forceful when winter turns to spring, the wind knocks over trees, sweeps trains off their tracks, and destroys crops. Yet the mistral turns the sky clear and blue, as it often appears in depictions of Provence. The legendary wind is central to the area’s regional identity and has inspired artists and writers near and far for centuries.

This force of nature is the focus of Dr. Catherine Dunlop’s The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024), a wonderfully written examination of the power of the mistral wind, and in particular, the ways it challenged central tenets of nineteenth-century European society: order, mastery, and predictability. As Dunlop shows, while the modernizing state sought liberation from environmental realities through scientific advances, land modification, and other technological solutions, the wind blew on, literally crushing attempts at control, and becoming increasingly integral to regional feelings of place and community.

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Steven Shapin, "Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds.

Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University.

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Fernando Domínguez Rubio, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters.

Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still.

As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”

Fernando Domínguez Rubio is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California-San Diego.

Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey.

Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century.

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Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in France by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work currently living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at jmull@smith.edu.

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Rachel Louise Moran, "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 09:00:00 -0000

New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative.

In Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Rachel Louise Moran explores the history of the naming and mainstreaming of postpartum depression. Coalitions of maverick psychiatrists, psychologists, and women who themselves had survived substantial postpartum distress fought to legitimize and normalize women’s experiences. They argued that postpartum depression is an objective and real illness and fought to avoid it being politicized alongside other fraught medical and political battles over women’s health.

Based on insightful oral histories and in-depth archival research, Blue reveals a secret history of American motherhood, women’s political activism, and the rise of postpartum depression advocacy amid an often-censorious conservative culture. By breaking new ground with the first book-length history of postpartum mental illness in the twentieth century, Moran brings mothers’ battles with postpartum depression out of the shadows and into the light.

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Nick Yablon, "Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Nick Yablon traces the birth of the time capsule in the United States. Starting with the Gilded Age, Yablon explores the way Americans from diverse backgrounds constructed memories of their present through the creation of time capsules. Examining the ephemera included in the time capsules, including writing texts, photographs, phonographic records, films, and other artifacts, Yablon details the way these capsules not only created records of their time periods, but also how they show the ways in which their creators and contributors imagined the future. Remembrance of Things Present not only allows readers a glimpse into the history of time capsules, but also the ways in which politics, social justice, and American values were all represented in these buried treasures.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Ulises Ali Mejias and Nick Couldry, "Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources--our data--exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact, every time we unthinkingly click "Accept" on a set of Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to be kept indefinitely, repackaged by companies to control and exploit us for their own profit.

In Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (The University of Chicago Press, 2024), Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry explain why postindustrial capitalism cannot be understood without colonialism, and why race is a critical factor in who benefits from data colonialism, just as it was for historic colonialism. In this searing, cutting-edge guide, Mejias and Couldry explore the concept of data colonialism, revealing how history can help us understand the emerging future--and how we can fight back.

Mention in this episode: Tierra Comun (English Version)

Ulises A. Mejias is professor of communication studies at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Nick Couldry is professor of media, communications, and social theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, "Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, partisan politics. Although American political institutions remain federated and fragmented, the ground beneath them has moved, with the national subsuming and transforming the local.

In Partisan Nation: The Dangerous New Logic of American Politics in a Nationalized Era (U Chicago Press, 2024), political scientists Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler bring today's challenges into new perspective. Attentive to the different coalitions, interests, and incentives that define the Democratic and Republican parties, they show how contemporary polarization emerged in a rapidly nationalizing country and how it differs from polarization in past eras. In earlier periods, three key features of the political landscape-state parties, interest groups, and media-varied locally and reinforced the nation's stark regional diversity. They created openings for new policy demands and factional divisions that disrupted party lines. But this began to change in the 1960s as the two parties assumed clearer ideological identities and the power of the national government expanded, raising the stakes of conflict. Together with technological and economic change, these developments have reconfigured state parties, interest groups, and media in self-reinforcing ways. Now thoroughly integrated into a single political order and tightly coupled with partisanship, they no longer militate against polarization. Instead, they accelerate it. Precisely because today's polarization is different, it is self-perpetuating and, indeed, intensifying. With the precision and acuity characteristic of both authors' earlier work, Pierson and Schickler explain what these developments mean for American governance and democracy. They show that America's political system is distinctively, and acutely, vulnerable to an authoritarian movement emerging in the contemporary Republican Party, which has both the motive and the means to exploit America's unusual Constitutional design.

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Katya Motyl, "Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) historian Dr. Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Dr. Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman.

Dr. Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit.

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Ana Lucia Araujo, "Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane conditions. Many of them died on the way, and those who survived had to endure further suffering in the violent conditions that met them onshore. Covering more than three hundred years, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (U Chicago Press, 2024) grapples with this history by foregrounding the lived experience of enslaved people in tracing the long, complex history of slavery in the Americas.

Based on twenty years of research, this book not only serves as a comprehensive history; it also expands that history by providing a truly transnational account that emphasizes the central role of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, it is deeply informed by African history and shows how African practices and traditions survived and persisted in the Americas among communities of enslaved people. Drawing on primary sources including travel accounts, pamphlets, newspaper articles, slave narratives, and visual sources such as artworks and artifacts, Araujo illuminates the social, cultural, and religious lives of enslaved people working in plantations and urban areas, building families and cultivating affective ties, congregating and re-creating their cultures, and organizing rebellions.

Humans in Shackles puts the lived experiences of enslaved peoples at the center of the story and investigates the heavy impact these atrocities have had on the current wealth disparity of the Americas and rampant anti-Black racism.

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Meredith McKittrick, "Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.

Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Meredith McKittrick explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Dr. McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, Dr. McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.

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Shannon Gayk, "Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Middle English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency. When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.

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Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder, "The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The past six years have been marked by a contentious political atmosphere that has touched every arena of public life, including higher education. Though most college campuses are considered ideologically progressive, how can it be that the right has been so successful in mobilizing young people even in these environments?

As Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder show in this surprising analysis of the relationship between political activism on college campuses and the broader US political landscape, while liberal students often outnumber conservatives on college campuses, liberal campus organizing remains removed from national institutions that effectively engage students after graduation. And though they are usually in the minority, conservative student groups have strong ties to national right-leaning organizations, which provide funds and expertise, as well as job opportunities and avenues for involvement after graduation. Though the left is more prominent on campus, the right has built a much more effective system for mobilizing ongoing engagement. What’s more, the conservative college ecosystem has worked to increase the number of political provocations on campus and lower the public’s trust in higher education.

In analyzing collegiate activism from the left, right, and center, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (U Chicago Press, 2022) shows exactly how politically engaged college students are channeled into two distinct forms of mobilization and why that has profound consequences for the future of American politics.

Amy J. Binder is professor of sociology at John Hopkins University. She is the author of Contentious Curricula and coauthor of Becoming Right.

Jeffrey L. Kidder is professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Parkour and the City and Urban Flow

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David Suisman, "Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America's Soldiers" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In his new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of the America's Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024), David Suisman shows that the US military has deep and multilayered investment in music. It employs thousands of musicians, whose music creates communal norms and identities. Music also helps soldiers to grapple with the realities of combat, while serving as a weapon in its own right, at places like Guantánamo Bay. Suisman calls music "a lubricant in the gears of the American war machine," and he ably shows how its elemental qualities have been used and transformed, much as the military itself has, by technology and by changing understandings of the self.

Instrument of War is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers. Although musical activity has been part of war since time immemorial, the significance of the US military as a musical institution has generally gone unnoticed. Historian David Suisman traces how the US military used—and continues to use—music to train soldiers and regulate military life, and how soldiers themselves have turned to music to cope with war’s emotional and psychological realities. Opening our ears to these practices, Suisman reveals how music has enabled more than a century and a half of American war-making. Instrument of War unsettles assumptions about music as a force of uplift and beauty, demonstrating how it has also been entangled in large-scale state violence.

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Katherine C. Epstein, "Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: how to aim the big guns of battleships. These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets, conditions that impeded accurate gunfire. Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrated system for gathering data, calculating predictions, and transmitting the results to the gunners. At the heart of their invention was the most advanced analog computer of the day, a technological breakthrough that anticipated the famous Norden bombsight of World War II, the inertial guidance systems of nuclear missiles, and the networked “smart” systems that dominate combat today. Recognizing the value of Pollen and Isherwood’s invention, the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy pirated it, one after the other. When the inventors sued, both the British and US governments invoked secrecy, citing national security concerns.

Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Katherine C. Epstein analyzes these and related legal battles over naval technology, exploring how national defense tested the two countries’ commitment to individual rights and the free market. Dr. Epstein deftly sets out Pollen’s and Isherwood’s pioneering achievements, the patent questions raised, the geopolitical rivalry between Britain and the United States, and the legal precedents each country developed to control military tools built by private contractors.

Dr. Epstein’s account reveals that long before the US national security state sought to restrict information about atomic energy, it was already embroiled in another contest between innovation and secrecy. The America portrayed in this sweeping and accessible history isn’t yet a global hegemon but a rising superpower ready to acquire foreign technology by fair means or foul—much as it accuses China of doing today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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David Shoemaker, "Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

What good is a good sense of humour especially when the humour may be ethically questionable? Although humour seems a valuable part of a good conversation and indeed a good life, jokes have never seemed more morally problematic than they do now. How can we then evaluate quips, gibes, pranks, teasing, light mockery, sarcasm when they can all too often be mean, deceitful, disrespectful, humiliating, cruel? And how is a moral philosopher to evaluate such dilemmas without taking himself and morality too seriously or too lightly?

In Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2024), David W. Shoemaker considers the interplay between humor and morality. With wit and evident joy, Shoemaker considers how "wisecracks" between family and friends are of ethical value despite how morally suspect they may appear. In arguing for the moral status of a wisecrack or a joke as partly resting on the wisecracker's intentions and motives, Shoemaker goes on to show just how complicated and sometimes unwarranted the moral complaints against humor are, despite what many may think. Wisecracks may remain, at the book's end, far from benign or an unalloyed good, but unlike in Plato's ideal republic, Shoemaker is convinced we need to keep them coming.

Damian Maher is a fellow by examination at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

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Anthony Grasso, "Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime.

In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference such as eugenics to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct.

Even after eugenics was discredited, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Using an impressive array of sources and methods, Dr. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America's legal system.

Dr. Anthony Grasso is an assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University Camden. His research focuses on American political development, law, and inequality.

Mentioned:

Susan’s interview with Dr. Joanna Wuest on Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement
David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (Beard Books, 1989)

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Simeon Koole, "Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 09:00:00 -0000

When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present.

Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain's Cerebral Age (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes us to the bustling railway stations, shady massage parlors, all-night coffee stalls, and other shared spaces where passengers, customers, vagrants, and others came into contact, leading to new understandings of touch. We travel in crammed subway cars, where strangers negotiated the boundaries of personal space. We visit tea shops where waitresses made difficult choices about autonomy and consent. We enter classrooms in which teachers wondered whether blind children could truly grasp the world and labs in which neurologists experimented on themselves and others to unlock the secrets of touch. We tiptoe through London’s ink-black fogs, in which disoriented travelers became newly conscious of their bodies and feared being accosted by criminals. Across myriad forgotten encounters such as these, Koole shows, touch remade what it meant to be embodied—as well as the meanings of disability, personal boundaries, and scientific knowledge.

With imagination and verve, Intimate Subjects offers a new way of theorizing the body and the senses, as well as a new way of thinking about embodiment and vulnerability today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Thomas J. Sojka, Lecturer in History at Southern New Hampshire University. He is currently writing a book about elite social life in interwar Britain. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as the Journal of British Studies, Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Robert A. Schneider, "The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The term “resentment,” often casually paired with words like “hatred,” “rage,” and “fear,” has dominated US news analysis since November 2016. Despite its increased use, this word seems to defy easy categorization. Does “resentment” describe many interlocking sentiments, or is it just another way of saying “anger”? Does it suggest an irrational grievance, as opposed to a legitimate callout of injustice? Does it imply political leanings, or is it nonpartisan by nature?

In The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion (U Chicago Press, 2023), Robert A. Schneider explores these questions and more, moving from eighteenth-century Britain to the aftermath of the French Revolution to social movements throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of writers, thinkers, and historical experiences, Schneider illustrates how resentment has morphed across time, coming to express a collective sentiment felt by people and movements across the political spectrum. In this history, we discover resentment’s modernity and its ambiguity—how it can be used to dismiss legitimate critique and explain away violence, but also convey a moral stance that demands recognition. Schneider anatomizes the many ways resentment has been used to label present-day movements, from followers of Trump and supporters of Brexit to radical Islamicists and proponents of identity politics. Addressing our contemporary political situation in a novel way, The Return of Resentment challenges us to think critically about the roles different emotions play in politics.

Robert A. Schneider is professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of three books, including, most recently, Dignified Retreat: Writers and Intellectuals in the Age of Richelieu.

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Seth Kimmel, "The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (U Chicago Press, 2024) Seth Kimmel explores the material history of libraries to challenge debates about the practice and politics of information management in early modern Europe. Ancient bibliographers and medieval scholastics, Kimmel reminds us, imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but for early modern scholars, the world was likewise a projection of the library. This notion, at first glance, may seem counterintuitive, especially as reports from late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers in the New World slowly refined-but also destabilized-the Old World's cosmographic and historical consensus.

Yet the mapping and ethnographic projects commissioned by early modern rulers, like Spain's Charles V and Philip I, anxious to comprehend and inventory their far-flung territorial possessions in the Americas, nevertheless relied heavily on methods of information management honed in the library. Kimmel focuses on the period that marked the birth of both print and transatlantic exploration. Through close readings of a wide array of materials-library catalogues, marginal glosses, book indexes, biblical commentaries, dictionaries and thesauruses, natural histories, and maps-Kimmel shows how the book-lover's dream of total knowledge in an era of "too much information" helped to shape the early modern period's expanded sense of the world itself. The book should find its audience among scholars of early modern European history, specialists in the early modern cultures of the Mediterranean and Iberia, and a range of students interested in the history of the book and of maps.

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Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, "Sea Level: A History" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

News reports warn of rising sea levels spurred by climate change. Waters inch ever higher, disrupting delicate ecosystems and threatening island and coastal communities. The baseline for these measurements—sea level—may seem unremarkable, a long-familiar zero point for altitude. But as Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveals, the history of defining and measuring sea level is intertwined with national ambitions, commercial concerns, and shifting relationships between people and the ocean.

Sea Level: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Wilko Graf von Hardenberg provides a detailed and innovative account of how mean sea level was first defined, how it became the prime reference point for surveying and cartography, and how it emerged as a powerful mark of humanity’s impact on the earth. With Dr. Hardenberg as our guide, we traverse the muddy spaces of Venice and Amsterdam, the coasts of the Baltic Sea, the Panama and Suez canals, and the Himalayan foothills. Born out of Enlightenment studies of physics and quantification, sea level became key to state-sponsored public works, colonial expansion, Cold War development of satellite technologies, and recognizing the climate crisis. Mean sea level, Hardenberg reveals, is not a natural occurrence—it has always been contingent, the product of people, places, politics, and evolving technologies. As global warming transforms the globe, Hardenberg reminds us that a holistic understanding of the ocean and its changes requires a multiplicity of reference points.

A fascinating story that revises our assumptions about land and ocean alike, Sea Level calls for a more nuanced understanding of this baseline, one that allows for new methods and interpretations as we navigate an era of unstable seas.

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Jennifer Chudy, "Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

There is racial inequality in America, and some people are distressed over it while others are not. Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics of Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity (University of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Jennifer Chudy is a book about white people who feel that distress. For decades, political scientists have studied the effects of white racial prejudice, but Dr. Chudy shows that white racial sympathy for Black Americans’ suffering is also a potent force in modern American politics. Grounded in the history of Black-white relations in America, racial sympathy is unique. It is not equivalent to a low level of racial prejudice or sympathy for other marginalized groups. Some White Folks reveals how racial sympathy shapes a significant number of white Americans’ opinions on policy areas ranging from the social welfare state to the criminal justice system. Under certain circumstances, it can also spur action—although effects on political behavior are weaker and less consistent, for reasons Dr. Chudy examines.

Drawing on diverse quantitative and qualitative evidence and integrating insights from multiple disciplines, Dr. Chudy explores the origins, importance, and complexity of racial sympathy, as well as the practical implications for political and movement leaders. A companion to the rich literature on prejudice, Some White Folks demonstrates the multifaceted role of race in American politics and public opinion.

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Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga, "A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Neighborhoods have the power to form significant parts of our worlds and identities. A neighborhood's reputation, however, doesn't always match up to how residents see themselves or wish to be seen. The distance between residents' desires and their environment can profoundly shape neighborhood life.

In A Good Reputation: How Residents Fight for an American Barrio (U Chicago Press, 2024), sociologists Elizabeth Korver-Glenn and Sarah Mayorga delve into the development and transformation of the reputation of Northside, a predominantly Latinx barrio in Houston. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with residents, developers, and other neighborhood stakeholders, the authors show that people's perceptions of their neighborhoods are essential to understanding urban inequality and poverty. Korver-Glenn and Mayorga's empirically detailed account of disputes over neighborhood reputation helps readers understand the complexity of high-poverty urban neighborhoods, demonstrating that gentrification is a more complicated and irregular process than existing accounts of urban inequality would suggest. Offering insightful theoretical analysis and compelling narrative threads from understudied communities, A Good Reputation will yield insights for scholars of race and ethnicity, urban planning, and beyond.

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Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman, "The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The image of the sheriff is deeply embedded in American culture – from pacifist Jimmy Stewart in Destry Rides Again and gun averse Roy Scheider in Jaws to those more comfortable wielding power like Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, and Gary Cooper in High Noon.

In the United States, more than 3,000 sheriffs occupy a unique position in the political and legal systems. Sheriffs oversee more than a third of law enforcement employees and control almost all local jails. They have the power to both set and administer policies, and sheriffs can imprison, harm, and even kill members of their communities. Although sheriffs are elected by voters, these elections are usually noncompetitive and low-visibility. Sheriffs enjoy a degree of autonomy not seen by other political officeholders.

In The Power of the Badge: Sheriffs and Inequality in the United States (U Chicago Press, 2024), Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman draw on two original surveys of sheriffs taken nearly a decade apart, as well as election data, case studies, and administrative data to argue that the autonomy and authority granted to sheriffs in the United States create an environment where sheriffs rarely change; elections seldom create meaningful accountability; employees, budgets, and jails can be used for political gains; marginalized populations can be punished; and reforms fail.

Drs. Farris and Holman track the increasingly close linkages between sheriffs and right-wing radical groups and demonstrate how sheriffs holding negative views of marginalized groups leads to unequal policing and discriminatory policies that fail to protect marginalized groups – particularly in the areas of intimate partner violence, racial profiling in traffic enforcement, and immigration enforcement. If the sheriff does not like your group, he structures hiring, training, and policy in his office to punish you. Farris and Holman also interrogate the ways in which sheriffs extract resources to maintain and profit from the carceral state. The book contributes to scholarship on local politics, American political development, federalism, political behavior, sociology, criminal justice, public administration and policy, and political extremism.

Dr. Emily M. Farris is an associate professor in Political Science and core faculty in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on urban and racial and ethnic politics.

Dr. Mirya R. Holman is an associate professor at the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. She is an expert on gender and politics, urban politics, and political behavior and has published widely in these areas.

Both Emily and Mirya have been cited widely in outlets like the New York Times, The Atlantic, and other important public facing venues.

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Andrew W. Kahrl, "The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Andrew W. Kahrl uncovers the history of inequitable and predatory tax laws in the United States. He examines the structural traps within America’s tax system that have forced Black Americans to pay more for less despite being taxpayers with fewer resources compared to white taxpayers. Kahrl exposes these practices, From Reconstruction up to the present, Kahrl exposes these practices to describe how discrimination continues to take new forms, even as people continue to fight for their rights, their assets, and their power.

Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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Jason A. Josephson Storm, "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.

By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (U Chicago Press, 2017) dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

Professor Storm is a historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He has three primary research foci: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly. At the heart of his work, lies an attempt to challenge conventional narratives in the study of religion and science.

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Amir Alexander, "Liberty's Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 21 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. In evidence throughout the country, but especially the West, the pattern is a hallmark of American life. One might consider it an administrative convenience—an easy way to divide land and lay down streets—but it is not. The colossal grid carved into the North American continent, argues historian and writer Dr. Amir Alexander, is a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning.

In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it.

From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America (University of Chicago Press, 2024) tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson’s plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country’s founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite’s cliffs and suburbia’s cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty’s Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.

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Zrinka Stahuljak, "Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both mediaeval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the mediaeval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Dr. Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Dr. Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles mediaeval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures—insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer.

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Kevin J. McMahon, "A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Many scholars and members of the press have argued that John Roberts’ Supreme Court is exceptional. While some emphasize the approach to interpreting the Constitution or the justices conservative ideology, Dr. Kevin J. McMahon suggests that the key issue is democratic legitimacy. Historically, the Supreme Court has always had some “democracy gap” – democratically elected presidents appoint justices that serve for life. As presidents select justices, they attempt to move the Supreme Court in their desired ideological direction while “simultaneously advancing their electoral interests and managing their governing coalition.” Despite these forces, Dr. McMahon argues that past Supreme Courts were still closer to democratic principles. Today’s court is exceptional because the “democracy gap” is severe.

A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other: The Deepening Divide Between the Justices and the People (U Chicago Press, 2024) draws on historical and contemporary data to reveal how the long arc of court battles (from FDR to Donald Trump) created this democracy gap. McMahon highlights changes to the politics of nominating and confirming justices, the changes in who is even considered to be in the pool to be a Supreme Court justice, and the increased salience of the Court in elections.

Dr. Kevin J. McMahon (he/him) is the John R. Reitemeyer [RightMeyer]Professor of Political Science at Trinity College, and the author of two award-winning books, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race and Nixon’s Court, both published by The University of Chicago Press. Together with A Supreme Court Unlike Any Other, the three books form a trilogy that interrogates whether 100 years of presidential efforts to shape the high court affect the supreme court’s democratic legitimacy.

Dr. McMahon also writes public facing essays in outlets such as US News & World Report and The Conversation. For example, The Presidential Immunity Case & American Democracy, President Biden & the Courage it Takes to Call it Quits, Conservative Justices Polarized on the State of American Politics, and Calls for a Supreme Court Justice to Retire.

Susan mentioned a stark New York Times graphic of how 6 senators (CA, NY, TX) represent the same number of voters as 62 senators. 2022 data (but less dramatically presented) is here.

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Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why do people go to college? In Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility (U Chicago Press, 2024), Melissa Osborne, an associate professor at Western Washington University, explores the experiences of students from low income and first-generation backgrounds who attend elite universities in the USA. The book offers a vital intervention for our understanding of the role of higher education and its connection to a range of social inequalities. It captures the sometimes difficult and ambivalent experiences of students from outside the traditional demographics for elite institutions. The analysis offers a nuanced understanding of the process of social mobility, showing the struggles of students and institutions, and the limits of individually-focused approaches to social change. Rich with ethnographic and qualitative data, as well as a powerful set of ideas for elite institutional change, the book is essential reading for educators everywhere.

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Morgane Cadieu, "On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

An analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes.

Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu's study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation.

Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks: Social Mobility in Contemporary French Literature (U Chicago Press, 2024) speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem.

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Sharon M. Quinsaat, "Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

When people migrate and settle in other countries, do they automatically form a diaspora? In Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (U Chicago Press, 2024), Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically constructed. Quinsaat looks to Filipinos in the United States and the Netherlands—examining their resistance against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, their mobilization for migrants’ rights, and the construction of a collective memory of the Marcos regime—to argue that diasporas emerge through political activism. Social movements provide an essential space for addressing migrants’ diverse experiences and relationships with their homeland and its history. A significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of migration and social movements studies, Insurgent Communities illuminates how people develop collective identities in times of social upheaval.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research on the relationship between identity and place in the construction of neighborhood development. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Mariana Craciun, "From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers an examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind - and the nature of medical expertise - as they are trained in psychotherapy. While many medical professionals can physically examine the body to identify and understand its troubles - a cardiologist can take a scan of the heart, an endocrinologist can measure hormone levels, an oncologist can locate a tumor - psychiatrists have a much harder time unlocking the inner workings of the brain or its metaphysical counterpart, the mind.

In From Skepticism to Competence, sociologist Mariana Craciun delves into the radical uncertainty of psychiatric work by following medical residents in the field as they learn about psychotherapeutic methods. Most are skeptical at the start. While they are well equipped to treat brain diseases through prescription drugs, they must set their expectations aside and learn how to navigate their patients’ minds. Their instructors, experienced psychotherapists, help the budding psychiatrists navigate this new professional terrain by revealing the inner workings of talk and behavioral interventions and stressing their utility in a world dominated by pharmaceutical treatments. In the process, the residents examine their own doctoring assumptions and develop new competencies in psychotherapy. Exploring the world of contemporary psychiatric training, Craciun illustrates novice physicians’ struggles to understand the nature and meaning of mental illness and, with it, their own growing medical expertise.

Mariana Craciun is Associate Professor in Sociology at Tulane University. As a cultural sociologist, she is interested in the issues of expertise, professions, science, and technology. Her writings on psychotherapeutic expertise and authority and was published in top peer reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, and the Sociology of Health and Illness.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental anthropology, the anthropology of time, hope studies, and post-structuralist philosophy. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science.

Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself.

Elizabeth A. Williams is professor emerita of history at Oklahoma State University.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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Susan Greenhalgh, "Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mould research to meet industry needs. The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.

Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives. Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally.

By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today. Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.

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Regina G. Kunzel, "In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In the mid-twentieth century, American psychiatrists proclaimed homosexuality a mental disorder, one that was treatable and amenable to cure. Drawing on a collection of previously unexamined case files from St. Elizabeths Hospital, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (U Chicago Press, 2024) explores the encounter between psychiatry and queer and gender-variant people in the mid- to late-twentieth-century United States. It examines psychiatrists’ investments in understanding homosexuality as a dire psychiatric condition, a judgment that garnered them tremendous power and authority at a time that historians have characterized as psychiatry’s “golden age.” That stigmatizing diagnosis made a deep and lasting impact, too, on queer people, shaping gay life and politics in indelible ways. In the Shadow of Diagnosis helps us understand the adhesive and ongoing connection between queerness and sickness.

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Le Lin, "The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry.

Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China’s supplemental education industry is now the world’s largest and most vibrant for-profit education market, and we can see its influence on the US higher education system: more than 70% of Chinese students studying in American universities have taken test preparation classes for overseas standardized tests. The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China's Supplemental Education Industry (U Chicago Press, 2022) offers a much-needed thorough investigation into this industry. This book examines how opportunistic organizations thrived in an ambiguous policy environment and how they catalyzed organizational and institutional changes in this industry.

A former insider in China’s Education Industry, sociologist Le Lin shows how and why this industry evolved to become a for-profit one dominated by private, formal, nationally operating, and globally financed corporations, despite restrictions the Chinese state placed on the industry. Looking closely at the opportunistic organizations that were founded by marginal entrepreneurs and quickly came to dominate the market, Lin finds that as their non-compliant practices spread across the industry, these opportunistic organizations pushed privatization and marketization from below. The case of China’s Education Industry laid out in The Fruits of Opportunism illustrates that while opportunism leaves destruction in its wake, it can also drive the formation and evolution of a market.

Professor Le Lin’s research centers on organizations, political economy, economic sociology and social stratification, especially where these areas intersect with education and healthcare in China, the U.S. and in a transnational context. His most recent book The Fruits of Opportunism: Noncompliance and the Evolution of China’s Supplemental Education Industry, was published by the University of Chicago Press won the Honorable Mention of the Asia/Transnational Book Award, American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2023. His articles and research have also appeared in journals such as Socio-Economic Review, Higher Education and Global Perspectives, and has won awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.

Gene-George Earle is currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

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Stuart Elden, "The Birth of Territory" (U Chicago Press, 2013)

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth’s surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition?

The Birth of Territory (U Chicago Press, 2013) provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players—historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists—and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth’s surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University.

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The Dissertation-To-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

How do you turn a dissertation into a book?

Today’s book is: The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript (U Chicago Press, 2023), by Dr. Katelyn E. Knox and Dr. Allison Van Deventer, which offers a series of manageable, concrete steps and exercises to help you revise your academic manuscript into a book. The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook offers clear examples, as well as targeted exercises, checklists and prompts to take all the guesswork out of writing a book. You will learn how to clarify your book’s core priorities, pinpoint your organizing principle, polish your narrative arc, evaluate your evidence, and much more. Using what this workbook calls “book questions and chapter answers,” you will learn how to thread your book’s main ideas through its chapters, assemble an argument, and revise the manuscript. By the time you complete the workbook, you will have confidence that your book is a cohesive, focused manuscript that tells the story you want to tell.

Our guest is: Dr. Katelyn Knox, who is an associate professor of French at the University of Central Arkansas. She is the author of Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France.

Our co-guest is: Dr. Allison Van Deventer, who is a freelance developmental editor for academic authors in the humanities and qualitative social sciences.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also enjoy:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us here again to learn from even more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s book is: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), by Dr. Robin Bernstein, which tells the story of a teenager named William Freeman. Convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s new prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the facility included industrial factories where prisoners worked as “slaves of the state.” They earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, William Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom. Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Dr. Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.

Our guest is: Dr. Robin Bernstein, who is an award-winning cultural historian specializing in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Playlist for listeners who wish to learn more:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here.

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Toby Green, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

All too often, the history of early modern Africa is told from the perspective of outsiders. In his book A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Toby Green draws upon a range of underutilized sources to describe the evolution of West Africa over a period of four transformative centuries. With these sources Green demonstrates that the region was integrated into the developing transcontinental trade networks far earlier than is often portrayed in more Western-centric accounts, and in ways that influenced the development of local communities long before European ships arrived off of their coast. The arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century, however, shifted the dynamics of this trade in dramatic ways, changing kingdoms and reshaping economic priorities. While West Africa was an equal partner for the first two and a half centuries of this period, Green shows how the growing demand for slaves and the very different nature of slavery in the West during this period combined increasingly disadvantaged the region, while simultaneously changing the internal political dynamics of kingdoms and the societies within them.

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Carl Öhman, "The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die.

These days, so much of our lives takes place online—but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to “interact” with the departed. Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook. In this thought-provoking book, Carl Öhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our own—and if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data.

The stakes could hardly be higher. In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die. Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanity—the first digital citizens. Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences. The fate of our digital remains should be of concern to everyone—past, present, and future. Rising to these challenges, Öhman explains, will require a collective reshaping of our economic and technical systems to reflect more than just the monetary value of digital remains.

As we stand before a period of deep civilizational change, The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care (U Chicago Press, 2024) will be an essential guide to understanding why and how we as a human race must gain control of our collective digital past—before it is too late.

Jake Chanenson is a computer science Ph.D. student and law student at the University of Chicago. Broadly, Jake is interested in topics relating to HCI, privacy, and tech policy. Jake’s work has been published in top venues such as ACM’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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Jonathan Connolly, "Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Initially viewed as a covert revival of slavery, indenture caused a scandal in Britain and India. But over time, economic conflict in the colonies altered public perceptions of indenture, now increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labor and a means of preserving the promise of abolition. Connolly explains how the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of Indian subjects to work on sugar plantations across Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad transformed both the notion of post-slavery free labor and the political economy of emancipation. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of “freedom” in a post-abolition world.

Jonathan Connolly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago. Connolly is a historian of the British empire with transnational interests in migration, the history of emancipation, and legal history. His research primarily concerns abolition and emancipation, imperial political and legal culture, and the category of free labor in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.

Your host for this episode is Mahishan Gnanaseharan, a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University. Mahishan studies the social, political, and intellectual histories of South Asian migrants across the Indian Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries.

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Viren Murthy, "Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Recent proposals to revive the ancient Silk Road for the contemporary era and ongoing Western interest in China’s growth and development have led to increased attention to the concept of pan-Asianism. Most of that discussion, however, lacks any historical grounding in the thought of influential twentieth-century pan-Asianists. In Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2023), Viren Murthy offers an intellectual history of the writings of theorists, intellectuals, and activists—spanning leftist, conservative, and right-wing thinkers—who proposed new ways of thinking about Asia in their own historical and political contexts.

Tracing pan-Asianist discourse across the twentieth century, Murthy reveals a stronger tradition of resistance and alternative visions than the contemporary discourse on pan-Asianism would suggest. At the heart of pan-Asianist thinking, Murthy shows, were the notions of a unity of Asian nations, of weak nations becoming powerful, and of the Third World confronting the “advanced world” on equal terms—an idea that grew to include non-Asian countries into the global community of Asian nations. But pan-Asianists also had larger aims, imagining a future beyond both imperialism and capitalism. The fact that the resurgence of pan-Asianist discourse has emerged alongside the dominance of capitalism, Murthy argues, signals a profound misunderstanding of its roots, history, and potential.

Viren Murthy is a Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His previous book include Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness and The Politics of Time in China and Japan: Back to the Future. His current project concerns how East Asian intellectuals drew on G.W.F Hegel to uncover logics to Chinese and Japanese history, which culminate in a new world order inspired by their respective cultures.

Nick Zeller is a senior program associate for The Carter Center's China Focus initiative and managing editor of the English-language U.S.-China Perception Monitor. Prior to joining China Focus, Nick was a Visiting Assistant Professor of World History in Kennesaw State University’s Department of History and Philosophy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian History in the University of South Carolina’s Department of History, and an NSEP Boren Fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Theresa McCulla, "Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A history of food in the Crescent City that explores race, power, social status, and labor.

In Insatiable City: Food and Race in New Orleans (U Chicago Press, 2024), Theresa McCulla probes the overt and covert ways that the production of food and the discourse about it both created and reinforced many strains of inequality in New Orleans, a city significantly defined by its foodways. Tracking the city’s economy from nineteenth-century chattel slavery to twentieth-century tourism, McCulla uses menus, cookbooks, newspapers, postcards, photography, and other material culture to limn the interplay among the production and reception of food, the inscription and reiteration of racial hierarchies, and the constant diminishment and exploitation of working-class people. The consumption of food and people, she shows, was mutually reinforced and deeply intertwined. Yet she also details how enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans used food and drink to carve paths of mobility, stability, autonomy, freedom, profit, and joy. A story of pain and pleasure, labor and leisure, Insatiable City goes far beyond the task of tracing New Orleans’s culinary history to focus on how food suffuses culture and our understandings and constructions of race and power.

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Monika Krause, "Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Dr. Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities.

Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Dr. Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns.

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Neil J. Young, "Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (U Chicago Press, 2024) is a fascinating and engaging historical tour of those who were gay and active in Republican and conservative politics over the course of the last 80 years. Neil J. Young has written an accessible and deeply sources book that brings forward stories about those in the closet, those out of the closet, and in some cases, the move to come out as gay in Republican politics and in conservative activism. Young explains early on that part of the impetus for the book is the contemporary question: why would anyone be a gay Republican? But the discussion is far from simple, and the book traces more than eight decades of history focusing on the evolution and changing ideology of the Republican Party while also exploring different factions within the party, in a variety of places and regions in the United States. All of this is woven together to provide a lively history. Young himself is part of this history, as he explains his own political evolution and his personal story.

One of the points that becomes clear in Coming Out Republican is that there are distinctions between conservativism and Republican politics. It is also undeniable from the research and the history that the individuals who are gay Republicans, either in the 1950s or in the 1980s or in the 2020s, are generally middle- or upper-class white men. The book starts in the 1950s in Washington, D.C., where a number of closeted gay men were instrumental in fundraising and political activism for both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Young also notes that Washington, D.C. at this time had a lively gay community. What is fascinating with this starting point is that these gay men were adamantly anti-Communist, as Young explains it, they were essentially creating a kind of closet for themselves that protected them from many of the homophobic attacks that were made during the McCarthy era. Moving through historical periods and back and forth across the country, Young traces the different kinds of activists and the causes within the Republican party that animated them—personal freedom and liberty, bodily autonomy, fiscal conservativism, anti-statism, etc.—alongside the evolution of the Republican Party itself, which integrates white Evangelical voters, especially from the South, during this same time period.

Coming Out Republican provides the reader with essentially two historical accounts, focusing on the role and place of gay Republicans and conservatives within the party and the conservative movement as a whole, while also delineating the shifts in the conversative movement towards the New Right, and a Republican Party that highlights socially conservative policy, which tends to be more limiting of individual freedom and bodily autonomy. Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right also outlines the other side of the LGBTQ movement, teasing out how those on the left were or were not engaged in the quest for equal rights and full citizenship for LGBTQ individuals. This is a really interesting assessment, since it pulls out competing approaches to rights advocacy and political advocacy, and also spotlights the places and times when advocacy was absent.

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David Alff, "The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. Dr. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (University of Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how freight trains, commuter rail, and Amtrak influenced—and in turn were shaped by—centuries of American industrial expansion, metropolitan growth, downtown decline, and revitalization.

Paying as much attention to Aberdeen, Trenton, New Rochelle, and Providence as to New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Dr. David Alff provides narrative thrills for history buffs, train enthusiasts, and adventurers alike. What’s more, he offers a glimpse into the future of the corridor. New infrastructural plans—supported by President Joe Biden, famously Amtrak’s biggest fan—envision ever-faster trains zipping along technologically advanced rails. Yet those tracks will literally sit atop a history that links the life of Frederick Douglass, who fled to freedom by boarding a train in Baltimore, to the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is expected to be the newest link in the corridor by 2032.

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Ellen Gough, "Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation.

But in Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation (U Chicago Press, 2021), historian of religions Ellen Gough refines and challenges our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over two millennia of a Jain incantation, or mantra, that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text into a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day.

Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform "tantric" rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation.

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Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston, "The Political Development of American Debt Relief" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A political history of the rise and fall of American debt relief. Americans have a long history with debt. They also have a long history of mobilizing for debt relief. Throughout the nineteenth century, indebted citizens demanded government protection from their financial burdens, challenging readings of the Constitution that exalted property rights at the expense of the vulnerable. Their appeals shaped the country’s periodic experiments with state debt relief and federal bankruptcy law, constituting a pre-industrial safety net. Yet, the twentieth century saw the erosion of debtor politics and the eventual retrenchment of bankruptcy protections. The Political Development of American Debt Relief (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces how geographic, sectoral, and racial politics shaped debtor activism over time, enhancing our understanding of state-building, constitutionalism, and social policy.

Emily Zackin is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book was Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights (Princeton UP, 2013).

Chloe Thurston is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. Her first book was At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination and the American State (Cambridge UP, 2018).

Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her first book was America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge UP, 2020).

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Aziz Rana, "The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In a pathbreaking retelling of the American experience, Aziz Rana shows that today’s reverential constitutional culture is a distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon. Rana connects this widespread idolization to another relatively recent development: the rise of US global dominance. Ultimately, such veneration has had far-reaching consequences: despite offering a unifying language of reform, it has also unleashed an interventionist national security state abroad while undermining the possibility of deeper change at home.

Revealing how the current constitutional order was forged over the twentieth century, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (U Chicago Press, 2024) also sheds light on an array of movement activists—in Black, Indigenous, feminist, labor, and immigrant politics—who struggled to imagine different constitutional horizons. As time passed, these voices of opposition were excised from memory. Today, they offer essential insights that Rana reconstructs to forward an ambitious and comprehensive vision for moving past the constitutional bind.

Aziz Rana is a Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Boston College Law School and the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government (beginning 2024).

Vatsal Naresh is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University. He is the editor of Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism (OUP 2021) and Constituent Assemblies (CUP 2018).

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Financial Institutions and Enslavement

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

In this special episode, we talk to two authors about the role of financial institutions in enslavement. Sharon Ann Murphy, associate professor of history, argues in Banking on Slavery Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023) that Southern banks’ willingness to use enslaved people as loan collateral led to the exponential growth of Southern enslavement during the 1820-30s. In filmmaker, producer, and author David Montero’s book, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations (Hatchette Book Group, 2024), he follows Wall Street bankers and large Northern banks were critical to the financing of slavery and, in turn, who massed incredible wealth from enslavement.

Dr. N’Kosi Oates is a curator and assistant professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Africana Studies at Brown University. Find him on Twitter at DrNKosiOates.

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Matthew Kadane, "The Enlightenment and Original Sin" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Matthew 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 it set out to accomplish, which was nothing short of rethinking the meaning of human nature. Kadane argues that this project centered around the doctrine of original sin and, ultimately, its rejection, signaling the radical notion that an inherently flawed nature can be overcome by human means. Kadane explores these ambitious, wide-ranging themes through the story of the largely unknown Pentecost Barker, an eighteenth-century "purser" and wine merchant. Examining Barker's diary and correspondence with a Unitarian minister, Kadane tracks the transformation of Barker's consciousness from a Puritan to an Enlightenment outlook, revealing in one man's transformation large-scale shifts in self-understanding whose philosophical reverberations would (and have continued to) shape debates on human nature for centuries.

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Carola Binder, "Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Mon, 27 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, in Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Carola Binder reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures.

Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.

Carola Binder is Associate Professor and Chair of Economics at Haverford College. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Jesse McCarthy, "The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 26 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

‘The result is that, at the present time, the world is at an impasse.’

In 1956, Aimé Césaire pronounced the world to be at an impasse while renouncing his allegiance to the French Communist Party. In Jesse McCarthy’s The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (U Chicago Press, 2024), this foreclosure of ideological avenues, this loss of belief in the prevailing modes of political praxis restricts and overdetermines the scope of writing and possibilities of culture during the Cold War. Although this story of Cold War disillusionment may sound familiar to readers of Mark Grief’s The Age of the Crisis of Man (2015) and Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism (2016), McCarthy argues that black writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, Paule Marshall, and Gwendolyn Brooks variously dissented from these delimitations in the name of alternate, unappeasable, quiet and disquieting bids for freedom. Across detailed chapters spanning from 1945 to 1965, the year in which Malcom X was assassinated and Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School by Amiri Baraka, McCarthy unfurls these writers’ efforts to work through negative experiences—alienation, dehiscence, dissolution, disaffiliation, disidentification—in order to, in Baldwin’s words, find ‘the power that will free us from ourselves.’

Jesse McCarthy is an essayist, novelist, editor at Point Magazine, and an assistant professor in English and African-American Studies at Harvard University.

Damian Maher is a fellow by examination at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

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Karen Sullivan, "Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Karen Sullivan of Bard College talks to Jana Byars about her recent book, Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen (U Chicago Press, 2023). A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor--gossip often qualified by the curious phrase "It was said" or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired.

While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveal about this queen and about life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. This book paints a fresh portrait of a singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world. The conversation gets into the idea of how we know what we know, and what we can possibly know about a woman this famous.

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Kevin Woodson, "The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 13 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer promotions than their White counterparts, hitting a "Black ceiling."

Sociologist and law professor Kevin Woodson knows firsthand what life at a top law firm feels like as a Black man. Examining the experiences of more than one hundred Black professionals at prestigious firms, Woodson discovers that their biggest obstacle in the workplace isn't explicit bias but racial discomfort, or the unease Black employees feel in workplaces that are steeped in Whiteness. He identifies two types of racial discomfort: social alienation, the isolation stemming from the cultural exclusion Black professionals experience in White spaces, and stigma anxiety, the trepidation they feel over the risk of discriminatory treatment. While racial discomfort is caused by America's segregated social structures, it can exist even in the absence of racial discrimination, which highlights the inadequacy of the unconscious bias training now prevalent in corporate workplaces. Firms must do more than prevent discrimination, Woodson explains, outlining the steps that firms and Black professionals can take to ease racial discomfort.

Offering a new perspective on a pressing social issue, The Black Ceiling: How Race Still Matters in the Elite Workplace (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a vital resource for leaders at preeminent firms, Black professionals and students, managers within mostly White organizations, and anyone committed to cultivating diverse workplaces.

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Richard M. Jaffe, "Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Sun, 05 May 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth century. In the richly illustrated Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (U Chicago Press, 2019), Richard M. Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowledge beginning in 1873. Analyzing the impact of these voyages on Japanese conceptions of Buddhism, he argues that South Asia developed into a pivotal nexus for the development of twentieth-century Japanese Buddhism. Jaffe shows that Japan’s growing economic ties to the subcontinent following World War I fostered even more Japanese pilgrimage and study at Buddhism’s foundational sites. Tracking the Japanese travelers who returned home, as well as South Asians who visited Japan, Jaffe describes how the resulting flows of knowledge, personal connections, linguistic expertise, and material artifacts of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism instantiated the growing popular consciousness of Buddhism as a pan-Asian tradition—in the heart of Japan.

Dr. Richard M Jaffe is a Religious Studies Professor at Duke University focusing on Japanese Buddhism. He is also the director of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke.

Samee Siddiqui is a former journalist who is currently a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation explores discussions relating to religion, race, and empire between South Asian and Japanese figures in Tokyo from 1905 until 1945. You can find him on twitter @ssiddiqui83

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Nicholas Popper, "The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

We are used to thinking of ourselves as living in a time when more information is more available than ever before. In The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Nicholas Popper shows that earlier eras had to grapple with the same problem—how to deal with too much information at their fingertips.

Popper reveals that early modern Britain was a society newly drowning in paper, a light and durable technology whose spread allowed statesmen to record drafts, memoranda, and other ephemera that might otherwise have been lost, and also made it possible for ordinary people to collect political texts. As original paperwork and copies alike flooded the government, information management became the core of politics.

Focusing on two of the primary political archives of early modern England, the Tower of London Record Office and the State Paper Office, Popper traces the circulation of their materials through the government and the broader public sphere. In this early media-saturated society, we find the origins of many issues we face today: Who shapes the archive? Can we trust the pictures of the past and the present that it shows us? And, in a more politically urgent vein: Does a huge volume of widely available information (not all of it accurate) risk contributing to polarization and extremism?

Listen to Nick Popper speak with New Books Network about Walter Ralegh's "History of the World" and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) on New Books Network here.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Alexander Statman, "A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Alexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science.

The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement.

A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science.

Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.

Alexander Statman is a Distinguished Scholar and JD candidate at the UCLA School of Law and a former A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King, "America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect Versus Repair" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sun, 21 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

What is happening to the politics of race in America?

In America’s New Racial Battle Lines: Protect Versus Repair (U Chicago Press, 2024), Rogers Smith and Desmond King argue that the nation has entered a new, more severely polarized era of racial policy disputes, displacing older debates over color-blind versus race-targeted measures. Drawing on primary sources, interviews, and studies of federal, state, and local initiatives linked to global developments, the authors map the memberships and the goals of two rival racial policy alliances, comprised of grassroots activists, NGOs, government agencies, and wealthy funders on both sides. Today's conservatives promise to "protect" traditionalist Americans against assaults from what they see as a radical American Left. Today's progressives seek to "repair" all American institutions and practices that embody systemic racism. Though these sides have some common ground, they advance sharply opposed visions of America that threaten to make profound racial policy conflicts, sometimes erupting into violence, all too pervasive in the nation's present and future.

Professor Rogers Smith is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Desmond King is Andrew W. Mellon professor of American Government at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Host Dr Ursula Hackett is a Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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Edward Dusinberre, "Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The first violinist of the Takács Quartet weaves scholarship on Edward Elgar, Antonin Dvořák, Bela Bartók and Benjamin Britten with a deeply personal evocation of belonging, national identity and the private life of a string quartet.

Edward Dusinberre’s Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home (Faber, The University of Chicago Press 2022) alternates traditional musicology with personal reminiscence, situating details of Dusinberre’s English upbringing and current life in Colorado, alongside Dvořák’s tenure as director of the National Conservatory of Music of America and Bartók’s bleak final years of illness and longing as a Hungarian refugee. He gives behind-the-scenes access to quartet life, an esoteric and often guarded profession. Dusinberre explains the rehearsal process, reveals the complexity of auditioning new members and evokes the struggles performing musicians faced during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The evolution of sound and style is an important topic for a quartet formed almost 50 years ago in 1970’s Budapest. Now based in Boulder, Colorado, with cellist András Fejér the only remaining founding member, Dusinberre considers the subject of music and nationalism as it relates to the shifting identity of the Takács and their repertoire. This exploration of change and exchange speaks to our fluctuating relationships with self-identity and difficulties in defining home.

Joseph Edwards is a writer and violinist based in London. His current research looks at the importance of sound in chronic illness experience. Contact him via email at joseph8edwards@gmail.com or through Twitter @joseph8edwards.

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Diane Winston, "Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0000

After two years in the White House, an aging and increasingly unpopular Ronald Reagan looked like a one-term president, but in 1983 something changed. Reagan spoke of his embattled agenda as a spiritual rather than a political project and cast his vision for limited government and market economics as the natural outworking of religious conviction. The news media broadcast this message with enthusiasm, and white evangelicals rallied to the president’s cause. With their support, Reagan won reelection and continued to dismantle the welfare state, unravelling a political consensus that stood for half a century.

In Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan’s Evangelical Vision (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Diane Winston reveals how support for Reagan emerged from a new religious vision of American identity circulating in the popular press. Through four key events—the “evil empire” speech, AIDS outbreak, invasion of Grenada, and rise in American poverty rates—Dr. Winston shows that many journalists uncritically adopted Reagan’s religious rhetoric and ultimately mainstreamed otherwise unpopular evangelical ideas about individual responsibility. The result is a provocative new account of how Reagan together with the press turned America to the right and initiated a social revolution that continues today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Teresa Ghilarducci, "Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

The issue of the future of Social Security, on which millions of Americans depend, produced great political theater at the State of the Union address. That highlighted a bigger problem of financing retirement as baby boomers seek to retire, often with limited resources. Many argue that the solution to the problem is for people to work longer.

In Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy (U Chicago Press, 2024), Teresa Ghilarducci, a noted expert on retirement, argues that the "working longer" idea is wrong, unnecessary, and discriminates against people who work in lower wage occupations. Ghilarducci pushes for a national plan to finance retirement that would draw on contributions by both employers and employees to replace our privatized and ramshackle personal retirement system and make changes in the tax system that supports Social Security to give people a real choice whether to retire or continue to work in their later years.

This book tells the stories of people locked into jobs later in life not because they love to work but because they must work. She demonstrates how relatively low-cost changes in the way we manage, and finance retirement will enable people in their so-called "golden years" to choose how to spend their time. Ghilarducci has a good public platform, writes for Bloomberg and other outlets, and is passionate about her ideas and reaching as broad a public as possible. The book is for the growing number of people in the public and policy community who are worried about their retirement and engaged in the renewed debate about Social Security and Medicare.

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Neil Gong, "Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0000

Sociologist Neil M. Gong explains why mental health treatment in Los Angeles rarely succeeds, for the rich, the poor, and everyone in between.

In 2022, Los Angeles became the US county with the largest population of unhoused people, drawing a stark contrast with the wealth on display in its opulent neighborhoods. In Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (U Chicago Press, 2024), sociologist Neil M. Gong traces the divide between the haves and have-nots in the psychiatric treatment systems that shape the life trajectories of people living with serious mental illness. In the decades since the United States closed its mental hospitals in favor of non-institutional treatment, two drastically different forms of community psychiatric services have developed: public safety-net clinics focused on keeping patients housed and out of jail, and elite private care trying to push clients toward respectable futures.

In Downtown Los Angeles, many people in psychiatric crisis only receive help after experiencing homelessness or arrests. Public providers engage in guerrilla social work to secure them housing and safety, but these programs are rarely able to deliver true rehabilitation for psychological distress and addiction. Patients are free to refuse treatment or use illegal drugs—so long as they do so away from public view.

Across town in West LA or Malibu, wealthy people diagnosed with serious mental illness attend luxurious treatment centers. Programs may offer yoga and organic meals alongside personalized therapeutic treatments, but patients can feel trapped, as their families pay exorbitantly to surveil and “fix” them. Meanwhile, middle-class families—stymied by private insurers, unable to afford elite providers, and yet not poor enough to qualify for social services—struggle to find care at all.

Gong’s findings raise uncomfortable questions about urban policy, family dynamics, and what it means to respect individual freedom. His comparative approach reminds us that every “sidewalk psychotic” is also a beloved relative and that the kinds of policies we support likely depend on whether we see those with mental illness as a public social problem or as somebody’s kin. At a time when many voters merely want streets cleared of “problem people,” Gong’s book helps us imagine a fundamentally different psychiatric system—one that will meet the needs of patients, families, and society at large.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Laurie L. Patton, "Who Owns Religion?: Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In Who Owns Religion?: Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century (U Chicago Press, 2019), scholar and noted university administrator Laurie Patton looks at the cultural work of religious studies through scholars' clashes with religious communities, especially in the late 1980s and 90s. "Others" about whom scholars wrote to their colleagues were now also readers who could agree or condemn in public forums. These controversies were also fundamentally about something new: the very rights of secular, Western hermeneutics to interpret religions at all. Patton's book holds out hope that scholars can find a space for their work between the university and the communities they study. Their role, she suggests, is similar to that of the wise fool in many classical dramas and indeed in many religious traditions. Scholars of religion have multiple masters and must move between them while speaking a truth that not everyone may be interested in hearing.

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Alvita Akiboh, "Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 09:00:00 -0000

This is an ambitious history of flags, stamps, and currency—and the role they played in US imperialism over the 20th century. In Imperial Material: National Symbols in the US Colonial Empire (U Chicago Press, 2023), Alvita Akiboh, Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, reveals how US national identity has been created, challenged, and transformed through embodiments of empire found in US territories, from the US dollar bill to the fifty-star flag. Akiboh argues that these symbolic objects encode the relationships between territories—including the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam—and the American empire with which they have been entangled. Akiboh shows how such items became objects of power, and how their original intent was changed. For even if imperial territories were not always front and center for federal lawmakers and administrators, their inhabitants remained continuously aware of the United States, whose presence announced itself through localized fights over the predominant currency, stamps, and flags.

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Daniel Skinner et al., "The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

An enduring paradox of urban public health is that many communities around hospitals are economically distressed and, counterintuitively, medically underserved. In The City and the Hospital two sociologists, Jonathan R. Wynn and Berkeley Franz, and a political scientist, Daniel Skinner, track the multiple causes of this problem and offer policy solutions.

Focusing on three urban hospitals—Connecticut’s Hartford Hospital, the flagship of the Hartford Healthcare system; the Cleveland Clinic, which coordinates with other providers for routine care while its main campus provides specialty care; and the University of Colorado Hospital, a rare example of an urban institution that relocated to a new community—the authors analyze the complicated relationship between a hospital and its neighborhoods. On the one hand, hospitals anchor the communities that surround them, often staying in a neighborhood for decades. Hospitals also craft strategies to engage with the surrounding community, many of those focused on buying locally and hiring staff from their surrounding area. On the other hand, hospitals will often only provide care to the neighboring community through emergency departments, reserving advanced medical care and long-term treatment for those who can pay a premium for it. In addition, the authors show, hospitals frequently buy neighborhood real estate and advocate for development programs that drive gentrification and displacement.

To understand how urban healthcare institutions work with their communities, the authors address power, history, race, and urbanity as much as the workings of the medical industry. These varied initiatives and effects mean that understanding urban hospitals requires seeing them in a new light—not only as medical centers but as complicated urban forces.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is about the construction of identity and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by bouncers at bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Tim Keogh, "In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb (U Chicago Press, 2023) tells us there's more to this story, offering an eye-opening account of diverse, poor residents living and working in those same neighborhoods. Tim Keogh shows how public policies produced both suburban plenty and deprivation--and why ignoring suburban poverty doomed efforts to reduce inequality.

Keogh focuses on the suburbs of Long Island, home to Levittown, often considered the archetypal suburb. Here military contracts subsidized well-paid employment welding airplanes or filing paperwork, while weak labor laws impoverished suburbanites who mowed lawns, built houses, scrubbed kitchen floors, and stocked supermarket shelves. Federal mortgage programs helped some families buy orderly single-family homes and enter the middle class but also underwrote landlord efforts to cram poor families into suburban attics, basements, and sheds. Keogh explores how policymakers ignored suburban inequality, addressing housing segregation between cities and suburbs rather than suburbanites' demands for decent jobs, housing, and schools.

By turning our attention to the suburban poor, Keogh reveals poverty wasn't just an urban problem but a suburban one, too. In Levittown's Shadow deepens our understanding of suburbia's history--and points us toward more effective ways to combat poverty today.

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Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg, "Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

An indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds.

The internet brings information to our fingertips almost instantly. The result is that we often jump to thinking too fast, without taking a few moments to verify the source before engaging with a claim or viral piece of media. Information literacy expert Mike Caulfield and educational researcher Sam Wineburg are here to enable us to take a moment for due diligence with this informative, approachable guide to the internet.

In Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (U Chicago Press, 2023), you will learn to identify red flags, get quick context, and make better use of common websites like Google and Wikipedia that can help and hinder in equal measure.

This how-to guide will teach you how to use the web to verify the web, quickly and efficiently, including how to

• Verify news stories and other events in as little as thirty seconds (seriously)

• Determine if the article you’re citing is by a reputable scholar or a quack

• Detect the slippery tactics scammers use to make their sites look credible

• Decide in a minute if that shocking video is truly shocking

• Deduce who’s behind a site—even when its ownership is cleverly disguised

• Uncover if that feature story is actually a piece planted by a foreign government

• Use Wikipedia wisely to gain a foothold on new topics and leads for digging deeper

And so much more. Building on techniques like SIFT and lateral reading, Verified will help students and anyone else looking to get a handle on the internet’s endless flood of information through quick, practical, and accessible steps.

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Jake Berman, "The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Every driver in North America shares one miserable, soul-sucking universal experience—being stuck in traffic. But things weren’t always like this. Why is it that the mass transit systems of most cities in the United States and Canada are now utterly inadequate?

The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Jake Berman offers a new way to consider this eternal question, with a strikingly visual—and fun—journey through past, present, and unbuilt urban transit. Using meticulous archival research, cartographer and artist Jake Berman has successfully plotted maps of old train networks covering twenty-three North American metropolises, ranging from New York City’s Civil War–era plan for a steam-powered subway under Fifth Avenue to the ultramodern automated Vancouver SkyTrain and the thousand-mile electric railway system of pre–World War II Los Angeles. He takes us through colourful maps of old, often forgotten streetcar lines, lost ideas for never-built transit, and modern rail systems—drawing us into the captivating transit histories of US and Canadian cities.

Berman combines vintage styling with modern printing technology to create a sweeping visual history of North American public transit and urban development. With more than one hundred original maps, accompanied by essays on each city’s urban development, this book presents a fascinating look at North American rapid transit systems.

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Mark Guarino, "Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The untold story of Chicago's pivotal role as a country and folk music capital.

Chicago is revered as a musical breeding ground, having launched major figures like blues legend Muddy Waters, gospel soul icon Mavis Staples, hip-hop firebrand Kanye West, and the jazz-rock band that shares its name with the city. Far less known, however, is the vital role Chicago played in the rise of prewar country music, the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporary offspring of those scenes.

In Country and Midwestern: Chicago in the History of Country Music and the Folk Revival (U Chicago Press, 2023), veteran journalist Mark Guarino tells the epic century-long story of Chicago's influence on sounds typically associated with regions further south. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and deep archival research, Guarino tells a forgotten story of music, migration, and the ways that rural culture infiltrated urban communities through the radio, the automobile, and the railroad. The Midwest's biggest city was the place where rural transplants could reinvent themselves and shape their music for the new commercial possibilities the city offered. Years before Nashville emerged as the commercial and spiritual center of country music, major record labels made Chicago their home and recorded legendary figures like Bill Monroe, The Carter Family, and Gene Autry. The National Barn Dance--broadcast from the city's South Loop starting in 1924--flourished for two decades as the premier country radio show before the Grand Ole Opry. Guarino chronicles the makeshift niche scenes like "Hillbilly Heaven" in Uptown, where thousands of relocated Southerners created their own hardscrabble honky-tonk subculture, as well as the 1960s rise of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which eventually brought national attention to local luminaries like John Prine and Steve Goodman. The story continues through the end of the twentieth century and into the present day, where artists like Jon Langford, The Handsome Family, and Wilco meld contemporary experimentation with country traditions.

Featuring a foreword from Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Robbie Fulks and casting a cross-genre net that stretches from Bob Dylan to punk rock, Country and Midwestern rediscovers a history as sprawling as the Windy City--celebrating the creative spirit that modernized American folk idioms, the colorful characters who took them into new terrain, and the music itself, which is still kicking down doors even today.

Mark Guarino covers national news and culture from Chicago for the Washington Post, ABC News, the New York Times, and other outlets. He was the Midwest bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor for seven years. Mark on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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Michael O'Malley, "The Beat Cop: Chicago's Chief O'Neill and the Creation of Irish Music" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Francis O’Neill (1848–1936) was a Chicago police officer and a folk music collector. Michael O’Malley connects these two seemingly unrelated activities in his biography of O’Neill, The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Born in Ireland in 1848, O’Neill emigrated to the United States soon after the Civil War was over and eventually joined the Chicago Police Department. He rose through the ranks and became Chief of Police in 1901. But in his spare time and after his retirement in 1905, O’Neill devoted himself to collecting Irish traditional music, ultimately publishing several important large collections of the repertory as well as a book that documents Ireland’s musical landscape at the turn of the twentieth century. O’Malley tells O’Neill’s story within multiple, interwoven contexts including British colonialism, Irish nationalism in the United States, American race relations, the standardization in American institutions, and the internal politics of the Chicago Police Department and the city it protected. O’Malley also reveals fascinating connections between O’Neill’s policework and his approach to Irish music.

Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Sandro Galea, "Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

A provocative chronicle of how US public health has strayed from its liberal roots.

The Covid-19 response was a crucible of politics and public health—a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As scientific expertise became entangled with political motivations, the public-health establishment found itself mired in political encampment.

It was, as Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the principles of free speech, open debate, and the pursuit of knowledge through reasoned inquiry that should inform the work of public health.

Across fifty essays, Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time (U Chicago Press, 2023) chronicles how public health became enmeshed in the insidious social trends that accelerated under Covid-19. Galea challenges this intellectual drift towards intolerance and absolutism while showing how similar regressions from reason undermined social progress during earlier eras. Within Reason builds an incisive case for a return to critical, open inquiry as a guiding principle for the future public health we want—and a future we must work to protect.

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Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Professor of History at The New School, and author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession (University of Chicago Press, 2023). In our conversation, we discussed the beginnings of fitness in the United States, how fitness both offered the state a way to shape bodies and liberatory possibilities for counter-cultural communities, and the future of exercise in a post-covid world.

In Fit Nation, Petrzela investigates the long history of fitness in the United States to better understand how fitness became such an important part of American life. She notes that the number of people who think fitness is essential for a full life has expanded dramatically since the 1890s and fitness shape our understandings of national community, industry, security, wealth, and wellness.

Her comprehensive and readable account begins with the immigration of European fitness fanatics to the United States in the 19th century and illustrates how fitness became one of the most proto-typically American pursuits. The book is divided into seven sections; the first, “When Sweating Was Strange,” shows how American entrepreneurs translated European practices to a sceptical audience. Muscle Beach in Venice, California played a special role in promoting bodybuilding but it also alarmed ordinary Americans who worried about the time participants spent on what many thought were narcissistic and vain habits.

One of the major themes of Petrzela’s work is the role of the government in promoting physical fitness and in the Cold War world the state opened the door to mass fitness. In the second section, “Slimming the Soft American,” she demonstrates how presidents starting with Eisenhower put fitness at the centre of their Cold War educational programs. The most notable example of government interventions into fitness was the President’s Council on Youth Fitness (now the President’s Council on Sport, Fitness, and Nutrition.)

The third and fourth sections – “From the Margins to the Mainstream” and Movement Culture, Redefined” illustrate how fitness became a central part of the American experience and the limits to that experience in the 1960s and 1970s. Television brought fitness into American houses but gyms remained largely male spaces (although often associated with latent homosexuality.) Yoga and jogging made fitness accessible and linked fitness culture with counter-culture. Women were both the targets of most fitness programs – although not necessarily for liberatory reasons - and excluded from large sections of it.

In the 1980s and 1990s, fitness changed further, moving away from the state-led efforts and counter-cultural currents of the 1950s and 1960s. Fitness became big business. In her fifth part, “Feel the Burn,” Petrzela shows how a new gospel of fitness emerged that made gyms, workout classes, and sweating accessible and desirable to growing numbers of Americans. In her sixth section, “Hard Bodies and Soulful Selves”, Petrzela shows how fitness shifted from an obligation imposed by the state for geo-political reasons to a more intrinsic requirement of people living in the neo-liberal era, but not everyone always fulfilled those obligations and many people resisted them.

In the final section, “It’s Not Working Out,” Petrzela looks at the present and the future of the Fit Nation. Americans are by some measures less fit than ever before, but Petrzela raises real questions about the potential of any narrow definition of fitness to fix persistent health problems. 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, and Covid-19 changed the way people worked out – cross-fit, home gyms, and Peloton became more popular than ever but fitness was also politicized into the left/right dynamic that dominates American cultural life.

Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history.

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Karen C. Pinto, "Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The history of Islamic mapping is one of the new frontiers in the history of cartography. Medieval Islamic Maps: An Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers the first in-depth analysis of a distinct tradition of medieval Islamic maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS). Created from the mid-tenth through the nineteenth century, these maps offered Islamic rulers, scholars, and armchair explorers a view of the physical and human geography of the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, Spain and North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, the Iranian provinces, present-day Pakistan, and Transoxiana. Historian Karen C. Pinto examines around 100 examples of these maps retrieved from archives across the world from three points of view: iconography, context, and patronage. By unraveling their many symbols, she guides us through new ways of viewing the Muslim cartographic imagination.

Dr. Karen Pinto is an Associate Scholar in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Karen is working on a forthcoming book that explores the Islamic conception of the Mediterranean and mapping.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Alexandra Filindra, "Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

The United States has more guns than people and more gun violence than any Western democracy. Scholars in diverse fields interrogate why 21st century Americans support gun ownership and valorize vigilantism even as they fear gun violence. Many question how the NRA – National Rifle Association – has successfully lobbied for radical gun laws that most Americans don’t support.

In Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Alexandra Filindra highlights political culture. She argues that the NRA depends upon political narratives that can be traced back to the American Revolution. Rather than focus on the constitution, Lockean liberalism, rule of law, or individual rights, she argues that the American Revolution depended upon classical republican ideals – especially the martial virtue of the citizen-soldier – that became foundational to American democracy. American gun culture fuses the republican citizen-soldier with White male supremacy to create what Filindra calls ascriptive martial republicanism. Her book demonstrates how the militarized understandings of political membership prominent in NRA narratives and embraced by many White Americans fit within this broader revolutionary ideology.

Even as contemporary NRA narratives embrace 18th and 19th century versions of ascriptive martial republicanism, the NRA radically decouples political virtue and military service by associating virtue with the consumer act of purchasing a firearm. Rather than emphasizing military service or preparedness, consumer choice defines the politically virtuous citizen.

White Amerians embrace this combination of civic republicanism and White male supremacy but Filindra’s research shows that they also hold a competing form of republicanism (inclusive republicanism) that includes a commitment to peaceful political engagement, civic forms of voluntarism and participation, and a strong belief in multiculturalism.

In the podcast, Susan mentions previous podcasts on Katherine Franke’s Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition and Drew McKevitt’s Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America.

Dr. Alexandra Filindra is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. She specializes in American gun politics, immigration policy, race and ethnic politics, public opinion, and political psychology.

George Lobis served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Thomas DeGloma, "Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

In recent years, anonymity has rocked the political and social landscape. There are countless examples: An anonymous whistleblower was at the heart of President Trump’s first impeachment, an anonymous group of hackers compromised more than 77 million Sony accounts, and best-selling author Elena Ferrante resolutely continued to hide her real name and identity. In his book Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Thomas DeGloma investigates contemporary and historical cases to build a sociological theory that accounts for the many faces of anonymity.

Thomas DeGloma is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Steven Rogers, "Accountability in State Legislatures" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist Steven Rogers’ new book focuses on the deceptively complex question of how it is that voters do or don’t/can and can’t hold their elected state representatives accountable. Rogers takes his jumping off point from the basic understanding of the relationship between the voter and their elected representatives: namely that the election process will, in some way, act as a means of making the elected official in state government accountable to the voters, who cast their ballots for or in opposition to that elected representative. State house elected officials across the United States are, indeed, closer in proximity to the people they are elected to represent and govern; and the legislation and regulations passed by state legislators generally impact us more directly and more frequently than do national-level laws, regulations, or decisions. And while there is a of literature focusing on state and local politics, the unique approach of Rogers’ research focuses specifically on the state legislatures, how the elites and voters act in elections, and if we can actually see accountability demonstrated in these interactions and connections.

Accountability in State Legislatures (U Chicago Press, 2023) is guided by the foundational question of representative democracy—and the connection between voters and their immediate representatives, as opposed to those in Washington, D.C. Rogers has compiled an extensive data set that pulls in general election results across the states, as well as primary election results. The data also includes legislative performance by elected state house representatives and integrates partisanship as well as the roll call votes by elected officials. Rogers also tries to evaluate the effectiveness of elected officials, examining how successful each individual is in getting something through the legislative process. Accountability in State Legislatures ultimately finds that accountability is more absent than it is present, given that state legislators often lack challengers in either the primary or the general elections, their seats tend to be fairly safe, and the decline in media reporting at state houses across the country has made it more difficult for voters to keep an eye on their elected representatives. Federalism has always been a complex and multi-layered form of government, and Rogers work reflects the difficulty that voters have in being able to pay close attention to the action in state houses. But this is not a story about the voters lack of engagement—though there is some of that—it is more that the modes for accountability in state legislatures or the “threats of accountability can create a false sense of security and be dangerous both to everyday life and representative government” (264).

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Meredith Oda, "The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Meredith Oda shows how city leaders and local residents in San Francisco fashioned a postwar municipal identity through their promotion of what Oda calls transpacific urbanism. Though the Japanese American presence in prewar San Francisco had been minor, it boomed as Japan came into vogue during the early Cold War. The Japanese Cultural and Trade Center was the apotheosis of urban redevelopment to attract Japanese capital and sell Japanese culture. Oda traces the conflicts and collaborations between a diverse set of stakeholders, including municipal planning officials, local merchant-planners, Japanese American professionals, Japanese-Hawaiian bankers, and African American neighborhood organizers. San Francisco’s rise as a major business and cultural hub in the postwar Pacific World benefited the Japanese Americans who called the city home even as it reinscribed their status as perpetual foreigners in American life.

Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan.

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Jenny Trinitapoli, "An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

A decade-long study of young adulthood in Malawi demonstrates the impact of widespread HIV status uncertainty, laying bare the sociological implications of what is not known.

An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi (U Chicago Press, 2023) advances a new framework for studying social life by emphasizing something social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures–what people know they don’t know. Taking Malawi’s ongoing AIDS epidemic as an entry point, Jenny Trinitapoli shows that despite admirable declines in new HIV infections and AIDS-related mortality, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, fully half of Malawian young adults don’t know their HIV status. Reckoning with the impact of this uncertainty within the bustling trading town of Balaka, Trinitapoli argues that HIV-related uncertainty is measurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions, with consequences that expand into multiple domains of life, including relationship stability, fertility, and health.

Throughout a groundbreaking decade-long longitudinal study, rich survey data and poignant ethnographic vignettes vividly depict how individual lives and population patterns unfold against the backdrop of an ever-evolving epidemic. Even as HIV is transformed from a progressive, fatal disease to a chronic and manageable condition, the accompanying epidemic of uncertainty remains fundamental to understanding social life in this part of the world. Insisting that known unknowns can and should be integrated into social-scientific models of human behaviour, An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi treats uncertainty as an enduring aspect, a central feature, and a powerful force in everyday life.

Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.

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Jonathan Kramnick, "Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Today’s guest is Jonathan Kramnick, the author of a new book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Criticism and Truth offers a formal analysis of the particular practices and habits of academic literary criticism, within the context of the transformations brought on by the Great Recession of 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic. In this book, Jonathan describes close reading as a “creative, immersive, and transformative writing practice that fosters a unique kind of engagement with the world.” The case for literary study is made not through an appeal to contemporary relevance or intellectual abstraction—but in the material specificity of how literary criticism is done. Though it may share its objects of study with linguistics or history, as a scholarly discipline, literary criticism gains insight from an intimacy with and even mimicry of its object of study.

Jonathan Kramnick is Professor of English at Yale University. Previously, he has published the monographs Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge, 1999).

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Paul Crosthwaite et al., "Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening.

Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds (U Chicago Press, 2022) tells the story of how the genre of investment advice developed and grew in the United Kingdom and the United States, from its origins in the eighteenth century through today, as it saturates our world. The authors analyze centuries of books, TV shows, blogs, and more, all promising techniques for amateur investors to master the ways of the market: from Thomas Mortimer’s pathbreaking 1761 work, Every Man His Own Broker, through the Gilded Age explosion of sensationalist investment manuals, the early twentieth-century emergence of a vernacular financial science, and the more recent convergence of self-help and personal finance. Invested asks why, in the absence of evidence that such advice reliably works, guides to the stock market have remained perennially popular. The authors argue that the appeal of popular investment advice lies in its promise to level the playing field, giving outsiders the privileged information of insiders. As Invested persuasively shows, the fantasies sold by these writings are damaging and deceptive, peddling unrealistic visions of easy profits and the certainty of success, while trying to hide the fact that there is no formula for avoiding life’s economic uncertainties and calamities.

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Guy Miron, "Space and Time Under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The rapid and radical transformations of the Nazi Era challenged the ways German Jews experienced space and time, two of the most fundamental characteristics of human existence.

In Space and Time Under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich (U Chicago Press, 2023), Guy Miron documents how German Jews came to terms with the harsh challenges of persecution-from social exclusion, economic decline, and relocation to confiscation of their homes, forced labor, and deportation to death in the east-by rethinking their experiences in spatial and temporal terms. Miron first explores the strategies and practices German Jews used to accommodate their shrinking access to public space, in turn reinventing traditional Jewish space and ideas of home. He then turns to how German Jews redesigned the annual calendar, came to terms with the ever-growing need to wait for nearly everything, and developed new interpretations of the past. Miron's insightful analysis reveals how these tactics expressed both the continuous attachment of Jews to key elements of German bourgeois life as well as their struggle to maintain Jewish agency and express Jewish defiance under Nazi persecution.

Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner.

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Emma K. Sutton, "William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Emma K. Sutton's William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician (U Chicago Press, 2023) is the first book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the breadth of his work.

William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known is how his interest in medicine influenced his life and work, driving his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and soul. William James, MD offers an account of the development and cultural significance of James's ideas and works, and establishes, for the first time, the relevance of medical themes to his major lines of thought.

James lived at a time when old assumptions about faith and the moral and religious possibilities for human worth and redemption were increasingly displaced by a concern with the medically "normal" and the perfectibility of the body. Woven into treatises that warned against humanity's decline, these ideas were part of the eugenics movement and reflected a growing social stigma attached to illness and invalidism, a disturbing intellectual current in which James felt personally implicated. Most chronicles of James's life have portrayed a distressed young man, who then endured a psychological or spiritual crisis to emerge as a mature thinker who threw off his pallor of mental sickness for good. In contrast, Emma K. Sutton draws on his personal correspondence, unpublished notebooks, and diaries to show that James considered himself a genuine invalid to the end of his days. Sutton makes the compelling case that his philosophizing was not an abstract occupation but an impassioned response to his own life experiences and challenges. To ignore the medical James is to misread James altogether.

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Ran Zwigenberg, "Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Ran Zwigenberg’s Nuclear Minds: Cold War Psychological Science and the Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (U Chicago Press, 2023) explores early efforts by the American military, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social scientists to understand the effects of the atomic bombings on the minds of those who had survived. In positioning the book as “a prehistory of PTSD,” Zwigenberg draws attention to the historicity of the idea of psychological “trauma” before the concept was institutionalized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980.

Nuclear Minds shows that the ideological temperament of Cold War science and the gendered nature of scientific knowledge production versus psychological care were among the factors that led scientists and researchers to minimize, deny, or simply not register as meaningful the suffering of survivors, but also that without the concept of “trauma” as we use it now (or even the category of “survivor”) the experience of the affected did not always cleanly conform to our contemporary expectations.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Jessi Streib, "The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Are jobs fair? In The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay after College (U Chicago Press, 2023), Jessi Streib, an associate Professor of Sociology at Duke University, uncovers the remarkable story of the way luck shapes the hiring process for a key strata of business jobs in America. Offering a thesis that is initially counterintuitive but clearly argued, empirically grounded, and ultimately compelling, the book introduces the idea of ‘luckocracy’. ‘Luckocracy’ underpins the functioning of important parts of the graduate labour market, and equalises what would otherwise be significant class differences between college graduates. Rich with details, as well as offering a broad new perspective on education and the labour market, the book is essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding work, fairness, and the importance of luck.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester.

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Charisse Burden-Stelly, "Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (U Chicago Press, 2023), Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.

Beginning her account in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: US Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism, the violent processes by which businesses and the US government structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism, the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.

Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy.

@amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies.

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Brigid Cohen, "Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The heart of Brigid Cohen’s Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2022) are the connections forged and broken amid the dislocations caused by war and imperialist ambitions. Rather than telling a simple chronological narrative, Cohen circles loosely around a single year, 1960, and crosses time and place to examine how a group of artists mediated ideas of displacement, race, gender, imperialism, and Cold War Orientalism in their work. Cohen begins with an examination of the complex musical and personal interactions during the 1957 Greenwich House sessions organized by Edgard Varèse, and then turns to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, the early work of Yoko Ono, and finally the early years of Fluxus. She considers a disparate collection of crossed paths in New York City, a place she calls a “capital of Empire.” While she focuses on figures, institutions, and groups that are well known among scholars who work on music and Cold War politics, she looks under and around these familiar topics to center people, art, and events that have been overlooked or even dismissed in other scholarship.

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David Myer Temin, "Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies in North America and Australasia, yet Native communities have made unique contributions to anticolonial thought and activism. David Myer Temin's book Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought (U Chicago Press, 2023) examines how twentieth-century Indigenous activists in North America debated questions of decolonization and self-determination, developing distinctive conceptual approaches that both resonate with and reformulate key strands in other civil rights and global decolonization movements. In contrast to decolonization projects that envisioned liberation through national independence, Indigenous theorists emphasized the self-determination of peoples against sovereign states and articulated a visionary politics of decolonization as care for the earth. Temin traces the interplay between anticolonial thought and practice across key indigenous thinkers. He shows how these insights broaden the political and intellectual horizons open to us today with respect to climate justice.

Lachlan McNamee is a Lecturer of Politics at Monash University. His area of expertise is the comparative politics of settler colonialism, empire, and political violence with a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific.

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Eric M. Patashnik, "Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The most successful policies not only solve problems. They also build supportive coalitions. Yet, sometimes, policies trigger backlash and mobilize opposition. Although backlash is not a new phenomenon, today's political landscape is distinguished by the frequency and pervasiveness of backlash in nearly every area of US policymaking, from abortion rights to the Affordable Care Act. Eric M. Patashnik develops a policy-centered theory of backlash that illuminates how policies stimulate backlashes by imposing losses, overreaching, or challenging existing arrangements to which people are strongly attached.

Drawing on case studies of issues from immigration and trade to healthcare and gun control, Countermobilization: Policy Feedback and Backlash in a Polarized Age (U Chicago Press, 2023) shows that backlash politics is fueled by polarization, cultural shifts, and negative feedback from the activist government itself. It also offers crucial insights to help identify and navigate backlash risks.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Tamson Pietsch, "The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0000

A globe-trotting and scandal-ridden story of American empire and higher education, The Floating University: Experience, Empire, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2023) tells the story of one of the first ‘semesters at sea’. Led by the New York University Professor of Experimental Psychology James E. Lough, the SS Ryndam departed from Hoboken, New Jersey in 1926, bringing over 500 American students to nearly fifty global ports and meetings with Benito Mussolini, Mahatma Gandhi, and Pope Pius XI. Along the way, the students came to terms with the contours of American empire and, through direct experience, learned subjects ranging from botany to painting and journalism, all the while leaving a vital imprint on the communities and people they intersected with. Looking behind the ribald headlines of jazz, drugs, and alcohol, The Floating University mines a diverse historical archive to reveal how the Ryndam’s voyage—for all its eventual failure—sheds a unique light on the footprint of American empire, the societal role of higher education, and the intellectual grounding of the generation of Americans that came to dominate international politics following World War Two.

Tamson Pietsch is an Associate Professor of Social and Political Sciences and Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research focuses on the history of ideas and the global politics of knowledge, particularly within universities and other institutions of knowledge. Professor Pietsch received her DPhil from the University of Oxford and worked at the Universities of Oxford, Sydney, and Brunel University London before taking up her present role.

Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student in American History at University College London, where he studies race, nationhood, and memory through the life, scholarship, and activism of the historian John Hope Franklin.

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Daniele Lorenzini, "The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 08:00:00 -0000

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault’s history of truth.

Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today.

Dr. Richard Grijalva is an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Dara Z. Strolovitch, "When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0000

A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States.

From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do?

In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.

Dara Z. Strolovitch is Professor of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Political Science at Yale University, where her research and teaching focus on political representation, social movements, and the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Host Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association.

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Allison M. Prasch, "The World Is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Allison M. Prasch, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new book that focuses on the way that presidents used words, speeches, and international visits to communicate more than simple policy prescriptions during the Cold War period. This is a fascinating analysis and takes the reader through particular presidential visits to a variety of places—where the president’s symbolic quality as well as the words spoken communicate not only to the country or place visited, but also are communicating to American citizens back home as well as our antagonists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The World Is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War (U Chicago Press, 2023) examines the ways in which the office of the American president—along with the individual inhabiting it—combines with the presentation of policy and rhetorical engagement to impact thinking about U.S. power abroad as well as at home. This is an important thesis and Prasch delineates a clear analysis of how this looked and operated during the Cold War, with five case studies that provide evidence and examples of how this actually worked.

The five case studies include President Harry S. Truman at Potsdam, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Good Will Tours, particularly in South America, President John F. Kennedy in West Berlin, President Richard M. Nixon’s trip/opening to China, and finally President Ronald W. Reagan in Normandy. Prasch weaves together historical, political, cultural, and rhetorical dimensions of each of these presidential events to understand the impacts and the reverberations for the United States, for the Soviet Union, for U.S. allies and enemies. She documents the ways in which some of these moves were responses to similar kinds of trips and events taken by Soviet leaders at the same time. Prasch has included deep archival research at presidential libraries and the like in order to flesh out the Oval Office discussions about these events—going through memos and interviews with presidential staff who were in charge of the planning and orchestration of the trips, the particular speeches, and the choices as to the venue and audiences.

The World is Our Stage: The Global Rhetorical Presidency and the Cold War is a crucial addition to the scholarship on rhetoric and the American presidency, moving beyond the words themselves and examining the multiple dimensions of presidentiality on display on the world stage when a president takes the opportunity to give a speech at a certain global venue. This analysis is particularly vital given the symbolic, performative, and policy import of these kinds of events.

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Katherine Jensen, "The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In 2013, as Syrians desperate to escape a brutal war fled the country, Brazil took the remarkable step of instituting an open-door policy for all Syrian refugees. Why did Brazil—in contrast to much of the international community—offer asylum to any Syrian who would come? And how do Syrians differ from other refugee populations seeking status in Brazil?

In The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil (U Chicago Press, 2023), Katherine Jensen offers an ethnographic look at the process of asylum seeking in Brazil, uncovering the different ways asylum seekers are treated and the racial logic behind their treatment. She focuses on two of the largest and most successful groups of asylum seekers: Syrian and Congolese refugees. While the groups obtain asylum status in Brazil at roughly equivalent rates, their journey to that status could not be more different, with Congolese refugees enduring significantly greater difficulties at each stage, from arrival through to their treatment by Brazilian officials. As Jensen shows, Syrians, meanwhile, receive better treatment because the Brazilian state recognizes them as white, in a nation that has historically privileged white immigration. Ultimately, however, Jensen reaches an unexpected conclusion: Regardless of their country of origin, even migrants who do secure asylum status find their lives remain extremely difficult, marked by struggle and discrimination.

Katherine Jensen is assistant professor of sociology and international studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican.

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E. Summerson Carr, "Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a professional practice, a behavioral therapy, and a self-professed conversation style that encourages clients to talk themselves into change. Originally developed to treat alcoholics, MI quickly spread into a variety of professional fields including corrections, medicine, and sanitation.

In Working the Difference: Science, Spirit, and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (U Chicago Press, 2023), E. Summerson Carr focuses on the training and dissemination of MI to explore how cultural forms—and particularly forms of expertise—emerge and spread. The result is a compelling analysis of the American preoccupations at MI’s core, from democratic autonomy and freedom of speech to Protestant ethics and American pragmatism.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Michelle Karnes, "Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Marvels like enchanted rings and sorcerers’ stones were topics of fascination in the Middle Ages, not only in romance and travel literature but also in the period’s philosophical writing. Rather than constructions of belief accepted only by simple-minded people, Michelle Karnes shows that these spectacular wonders were near impossibilities that demanded scrutiny and investigation.

Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World (U Chicago Press, 2022) is the first book to analyze a diverse set of writings on such wonders, comparing texts from the Latin West—including those written in English, French, Italian, and Castilian Spanish —with those written in Arabic as it works toward a unifying theory of marvels across different disciplines and cultures. Karnes tells a story about the parallels between Arabic and Latin thought, reminding us that experiences of the strange and the unfamiliar travel across a range of genres, spanning geographical and conceptual space and offering an ideal vantage point from which to understand intercultural exchange. Karnes traverses this diverse archive, showing how imagination imbues marvels with their character and power, making them at once enigmatic, creative, and resonant. Skirting the distinction between the real and unreal, these marvels challenge readers to discover the highest capabilities of both nature and the human intellect. Karnes offers a rare comparative perspective and a new methodology to study a topic long recognized as central to medieval culture.

Michelle Karnes is professor of English and the history of philosophy and science at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages and the coeditor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer.

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Edgar Garcia, "Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s guest is Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s new book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Emergency takes nine words—“birds,” “wealth,” “caves,” “television,” “demons,” “migrations,” “love,” “the sun,” and “Mormons”—and weaves a rich transhistorical narrative about the Popul Vuh sacred narrative. In these pages, Garcia explores how this text emerged in conditions of historical violence and persisted through over three hundred years, becoming a touchstone for Mesoamerican religious studies, decolonial activism, and literary adaptation.

Edgar Garcia is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His previous books are Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019). He has also served as the guest editor of Fence, a literary magazine. Written during the COVID pandemic, Emergency was published in 2022.

John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Neil Tarrant, "Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (U Chicago Press, 2022) engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history of science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.

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Dong Li, "The Orange Tree" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Dong Li’s The Orange Tree (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a collection of narrative poems that braids forgotten legends, personal sorrows, and political upheavals into a cinematic account of Chinese history as experienced by one family. Amid chaos and catastrophe, the child narrator examines a yellowed family photo to find resemblances and learns a new language, inventing compound words to conjure and connect family stories. These invented words and the calligraphy of untranslated Chinese characters appear in lists separating the book’s narrative sections. This lyrical and experimental collection transcends the individual, placing generations of family members and anonymous others together in a single moment that surpasses chronological time and offering intimate perspectives on times that resonate with our own. The result is an unflinching meditation on family history, collective trauma, and imaginative recovery.

In this conversation, Dong and Anna discuss landscape and memory, family and history, and poetry as a medium for storytelling and as a language all its own.

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. His poems have been published by Conjunctions, Fence, Kenyon Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. He has served as the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in creative writing at Colgate University and is a recipient of fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo and Humboldt Foundations, MacDowell, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, Yaddo, and others. His debut poetry collection, The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press, March 2023), was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

Anna Zumbahlen lives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press.

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Ryan Tucker Jones, "Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many whale species to near extinction by the 1970s, and the impacts of this loss of life still ripple through today’s oceans.

In this new account, based on formerly secret Soviet archives and interviews with ex-whalers, environmental historian Ryan Tucker Jones offers a complete history of the role the Soviet Union played in the whales’ destruction. As other countries—especially the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Norway—expanded their pursuit of whales to all corners of the globe, Stalin determined that the Soviet Union needed to join the hunt. What followed was a spectacularly prodigious, and often wasteful, destruction of humpback, fin, sei, right, and sperm whales in the Antarctic and the North Pacific, done in knowing violation of the International Whaling Commission’s rules. Cold War intrigue encouraged this destruction, but, as Jones shows, there is a more complex history behind this tragic Soviet experiment. Jones compellingly describes the ultimate scientific irony: today’s cetacean studies benefited from Soviet whaling, as Russian scientists on whaling vessels made key breakthroughs in understanding whale natural history and behavior.

And in a final twist, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals how the Soviet public began turning against their own country’s whaling industry, working in parallel with Western environmental organizations like Greenpeace to help end industrial whaling—not long before the world’s whales might have disappeared altogether.

Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow.

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Shai M. Dromi and Samuel D. Stabler, "Moral Minefields: How Sociologists Debate Good Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Where does morality fit into contemporary social science? In Moral Minefields: How Sociologists Debate Good Science (U Chicago Press, 2023), Shai Dromi, an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at Harvard University and Samuel Stabler Associate Teaching Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University, draw on pragmatist theory to offer insights as to how sociology can avoid moral myopia and be value pluralistic. The book offers rich case studies of key fields and debates, including sociology of religion, race and inequality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and fertility and work, all showing how values and morals shape the practice of research. The book makes a significant contribution to both sociology and the social sciences more generally, and will be essential reading for both academics and anyone interested in the values of contemporary research.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Manchester.

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Gennifer Weisenfeld, "Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Airplanes, gas masks, and bombs were common images in wartime Japan. Yet amid these emblems of anxiety, tasty caramels were offered to children with paper gas masks as promotional giveaways, and magazines featured everything from attractive models in the latest civil defense fashion to futuristic weapons.

Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (U Chicago Press, 2023) explores the multilayered construction of an anxious yet perversely pleasurable visual culture of Japanese civil air defense--or bōkū--through a diverse range of artworks, photographs, films and newsreels, magazine illustrations, postcards, cartoons, advertising, fashion, everyday goods, government posters, and state propaganda. Gennifer Weisenfeld reveals the immersive aspects of this culture, in which Japan's imperial subjects were mobilized to regularly perform highly orchestrated civil air defense drills throughout the country.

The war years in Japan are often portrayed as a landscape of privation and suppression under the censorship of the war machine. But alongside the horrors, pleasure, desire, wonder, creativity, and humor were all still abundantly present in a period before air raids went from being a fearful specter to a deadly reality.

Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University.

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Bonnie Gordon, "Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training, castrati inhabited human bodies that had been “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers, with their unique timbre, range, and strength, contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood.

Connecting sometimes bizarre snippets of history, this multi-disciplinary book moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like “technology” and “human.” Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds (U Chicago Press, 2023) attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions—including settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews, the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope—participated in making castrati. In Bonnie Gordon’s revealing study, castrati serve as a critical provocation to ask questions about the voice, the limits of the body, and the stories historians tell.

Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University. Email: nathan.smith@yale.edu

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Erica O. Turner, "Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

For the past five years, American public schools have enrolled more students identified as Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Asian than white. At the same time, more than half of US school children now qualify for federally subsidized meals, a marker of poverty. The makeup of schools is rapidly changing, and many districts and school boards are at a loss as to how they can effectively and equitably handle these shifts.

Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality (U Chicago Press, 2020) is an ethnographic account of two school districts in the Midwest responding to rapidly changing demographics at their schools. It is based on observations and in-depth interviews with school board members and superintendents, as well as staff, community members, and other stakeholders in each district: one serving “Lakeside,” a predominately working class, conservative community and the other serving “Fairview,” a more affluent, liberal community. Erica O. Turner looks at district leaders’ adoption of business-inspired policy tools and the ultimate successes and failures of such responses. Turner’s findings demonstrate that, despite their intentions to promote “diversity” or eliminate “achievement gaps,” district leaders adopted policies and practices that ultimately perpetuated existing inequalities and advanced new forms of racism.

While suggesting some ways forward, Suddenly Diverse shows that, without changes to these managerial policies and practices and larger transformations to the whole system, even district leaders’ best efforts will continue to undermine the promise of educational equity and the realization of more robust public schools.

Joao Souto-Maior is a postdoc at the New York University’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change.

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Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove, "Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students’ fascination to create unique learning opportunities. Some teachers engage with their students’ ideas in ways that make learning collaborative--but not all students have access to these kinds of learning environments.

In Segregation by Experience: Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early Grades (U Chicago Press, 2021), the authors filmed and studied a a first-grade classroom led by a Black immigrant teacher who encouraged her diverse group of students to exercise their agency. When the researchers showed the film to other schools, everyone struggled. Educators admired the teacher but didn’t think her practices would work with their own Black and brown students. Parents of color—many of them immigrants—liked many of the practices, but worried that they would compromise their children. And the young children who viewed the film thought that the kids in the film were terrible, loud, and badly behaved; they told the authors that learning was supposed to be quiet, still, and obedient. In Segregation by Experience Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove show us just how much our expectations of children of color affect what and how they learn at school, and they ask us to consider which children get to have sophisticated, dynamic learning experiences at school and which children are denied such experiences because of our continued racist assumptions about them.

Laura Beth Kelly is an assistant professor of Educational Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

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Sarah Muir, "Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Argentina, once heralded as the future of capitalist progress, has a long history of economic volatility. In 2001–2002, a financial crisis led to its worst economic collapse, precipitating a dramatic currency devaluation, the largest sovereign default in world history, and the flight of foreign capital. Protests and street blockades punctuated a moment of profound political uncertainty, epitomized by the rapid succession of five presidents in four months. Since then, Argentina has fought economic fires on every front, from inflation to the cost of utilities and depressed industrial output. When things clearly aren’t working, when the constant churning of booms and busts makes life almost unlivable, how does our deeply compromised order come to seem so inescapable? How does critique come to seem so blunt, even as crisis after crisis appears on the horizon? What are the lived effects of that sense of inescapability?

Anthropologist Sarah Muir offers a cogent meditation on the limits of critique at this historical moment, drawing on deep experience in Argentina but reflecting on a truly global condition. If we feel things are being upended in a manner that is ongoing, tumultuous, and harmful, what would we need to do—and what would we need to give up—to usher in a revitalized critique for today’s world? Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an original provocation and a challenge to think beyond the limits of exhaustion and reimagine a form of criticism for the twenty-first century.

Sarah Muir is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The City College of New York and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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Wendy A. Woloson, "Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Why are our lives filled with so much stuff? In Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (U Chicago Press, 2023), Wendy Woloson, Professor and Chair in the Department of History at Rutgers University, tells the history of these objects and things, from the early years of peddlers through to modern gadgets, and everything in between. In telling this story the book tells a history of America itself, looking at the rise of consumerism, advertising, television, and corporate life, as well as tracking changes in morals, sentiments, humour, and personal habits. Packed with brilliant details, and sweeping in scope, the book will be widely read across the humanities and social sciences, as well as by anyone seeking to understand the modern world.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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Jonathan R. Topham, "Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

When Charles Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books of the day were the Bridgewater Treatises. This series of eight works was funded by a bequest of the last Earl of Bridgewater and written by leading men of science appointed by the president of the Royal Society to explore “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” Securing public attention beyond all expectations, the series offered Darwin’s generation a range of approaches to one of the great questions of the age: how to incorporate the newly emerging disciplinary sciences into Britain’s overwhelmingly Christian culture.

In Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age (U Chicago Press, 2022), Jonathan R. Topham examines how and to what extent the series contributed to a sense of congruence between Christianity and the sciences in the generation before the fabled Victorian conflict between science and religion. Building on the distinctive insights of book history and paying close attention to the production, circulation, and use of the books, Topham offers new perspectives on early Victorian science and the subject of science and religion as a whole.

Jonathan R. Topham is professor of history of science at the University of Leeds, UK.

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Toril Moi, "Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Today’s guest is Toril Moi, whose book Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell (University of Chicago Press, 2017) returns to three twentieth-century figures in ordinary language philosophy to renew how we think about style and argumentation. Revolution of the Ordinary brings together a diverse archive of primary sources, from the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar to the 1970s TV show All in the Family.

I am excited to welcome Toril to the podcast today. Toril is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy, and Theatre Studies at Duke University. Toril’s previous books include Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory and Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. She has served as Research Professor at Norway’s National Library for the last five years.

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Nick Witham, "Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In this lively and far-reaching text, Nick Witham (University College London) tells the stories of five postwar historians who changed the way ordinary Americans thought about their nation’s history.

For decades, critics of the discipline have argued that the historical profession is dominated by scholars unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to write for the public. In Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Witham challenges this interpretation by telling the stories of Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner - writers who, in the decades after World War II, published widely read books of national history.

Witham compellingly argues that we should understand historians’ efforts to engage with the reading public as a vital part of their postwar identity and mission. Not just a matter of writing style, popular accessibility was also a product of an author's frame of mind, the editor's skill, and the publisher's marketing acumen, among other factors. Rooted in extensive archival work, Popularizing the Past persuasively demonstrates the cross-influences of popular history writing and American popular culture.

James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022).

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Victoria Lee, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Victoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an in-depth exploration of the social history of microbial science in modern Japan. Lee shows that Japanese scientists and artisans in food, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries harnessed a combination of premodern and modern understandings of the microbial world to create a productive approach positing microbes “as living workers” in important industries.

With case studies that include sake and soy sauce, antibiotics, and biotechnology, Arts of the Microbial World weaves a historical narrative integrated with both the development of modern Japanese science and industry on the one hand and imperialism, expansion, and defeat and rebuilding on the other. Additionally, Lee couches her analysis of Japan’s microbial industries in the context of our contemporary microbiotic moment of antibiotic resistance, the microbiome, green chemistry, and lab-grown foods and pharmaceuticals. In this sense, Arts of the Microbial World will be of interest to scholars and students of Japan, the history of science, food, pharmaceuticals, and industry, but also to readers concerned about the possibilities of mobilizing non-Western technological breakthroughs in the quest for global sustainability.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Robert Mills, "Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual dimension to these discussions in what amounts to the first large-scale comparative analysis of sodomitical themes in medieval literary and visual art, built around an impressive range of texts and artworks from high and late medieval England, France, and Italy.

As Mills shows, sodomy does enter the field of vision in certain contexts, despite being associated with a rhetoric of unmentionability. He shows why sodomy appears when it does and in which media and genres (e.g., commentaries on the Bible and Ovid s Metamorphoses, in manuscript illuminations and sculpture); how it shifts categories as a means of becoming visible (e.g., appearing in narratives involving age difference or gender transformation); and how, as readers/viewers, the process of translating the medieval category of sodomy into the languages of the present is at once a necessity and an impossibility. In a single stroke, Mills revises the way we think about well known medieval literary and visual materials in the light of twenty-first century thinking and the interaction between the visual and the textual, bringing both literary and art historical discourse on the subject to a new level of maturity."

Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.

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Apostolos Andrikopoulos, "Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in obtaining such documentation through kinship networks, and marriages that provide access to citizenship, new assemblages of kinship are continually made and remade to navigate the shifting demands of European states. These new kinship relations, however, often prove unreliable, taking on new, unexpected dynamics in the face of codependency; they become more difficult to control than those who enter into such relations can imagine.

Through unusually close ethnographic work in West African migrant communities in Amsterdam, Apostolos Andrikopoulos reveals the unseen dynamics of kinship through shared papers, the tensions of race and gender that develop in mutually beneficial marriages, and the vast, informal networks of people, information, and documentation on which migrants rely. Throughout Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe (U Chicago Press, 2023), Andrikopoulos demonstrates how inequality, exclusionary practices, and the changing policies of an often-violent state demand innovative ways of doing kinship to successfully navigate complex migration routes.

Apostolos Andrikopoulos is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Harvard University and at the University of Amsterdam.

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican.

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Katie Kadue, "Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Many early modern humanists would balk at the proposition that what they did amounted to housework. They were far more likely to reach for the heroic image of a farmer striving in the fields, as immortalized in the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics. But, as shown in Katie Kadue’s book Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (University of Chicago, 2021), the domestic practice of preservation offered a powerful metaphor for the often-menial, often-overlooked labor. These labors from pickling to correcting to tempering were largely imperceptible but were essential to ward off disorder.

Domestic Georgic offers fresh close readings of Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” Montaigne’s Essays, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Through these readings, this study provides a compelling new framework for our understanding of early modern poetics, gender, and labor.

Katie Kadue is an incoming professor at SUNY Binghamton and a former Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the University of Chicago Society of Fellows. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Modern Philology, Montaigne Studies, and Studies in Philology, and public-facing work can be found at The Philosopher and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Kevin J. Elliott, "Democracy for Busy People" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0000

John Dewey and Jane Addams are both credited with the claim that the cure for democracy’s ills is more democracy. The sentiment is popular to this day among democratic theorists and practitioners. The thought is that a democratic deficit lies at the root of any political and social problem that a democracy might confront. Accordingly, a good deal of work in democratic theory aims at designing new practices and institutions that can erase the deficit. But this raises a problem: The civic task of democratic citizenship must be manageable for ordinary citizens. And ordinary citizens are differentially busy with other pursuits, many of which are independently valuable and socially beneficial. Thus, proposals for “more democracy” tend to be exclusionary.

In Democracy for Busy People (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin J. Elliott addresses this difficulty head on. He devises a conception of the civic responsibilities of citizenship that is authentically democratic without being overly demanding.

Robert Talisse is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

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Danielle Allen, "Justice by Means of Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

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Nicholas Dagen Bloom, "The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century. But as Nicholas Dagen Bloom shows in The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (U Chicago Press, 2023), our transit networks are so bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way.

Focusing on Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and San Francisco, Bloom provides overwhelming evidence that transit disinvestment was a choice rather than destiny. He pinpoints three major factors that led to the decline of public transit in the United States: municipal austerity policies that denied most transit agencies the funding to sustain high-quality service; the encouragement of auto-centric planning; and white flight from dense city centers to far-flung suburbs. As Bloom makes clear, these local public policy decisions were not the product of a nefarious auto industry or any other grand conspiracy--all were widely supported by voters, who effectively shut out options for transit-friendly futures. With this book, Bloom seeks not only to dispel our accepted transit myths but hopefully to lay new tracks for today's conversations about public transportation funding.

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Rebecca Whiteley, "Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Rebecca Whiteley's book Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body (University of Chicago Press, 2023) is first full study of “birth figures” and their place in early modern knowledge-making.

Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term and here offers the first systematic analysis of the images’ creation, use, and impact. Whiteley reveals their origins in ancient medicine and explores their inclusion in many medieval gynecological manuscripts, focusing on their explosion in printed midwifery and surgical books in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. During this period, birth figures formed a key part of the visual culture of medicine and midwifery and were widely produced. They reflected and shaped how the pregnant body was known and treated. And by providing crucial bodily knowledge to midwives and surgeons, birth figures were also deeply entangled with wider cultural preoccupations with generation and creativity, female power and agency, knowledge and its dissemination, and even the condition of the human in the universe.

Birth Figures studies how different kinds of people understood childbirth and engaged with midwifery manuals, from learned physicians to midwives to illiterate listeners. Rich and detailed, this vital history reveals the importance of birth figures in how midwifery was practiced and in how people, both medical professionals and lay readers, envisioned and understood the mysterious state of pregnancy.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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J. Barton Scott, "Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Lisabeth During, "The Chastity Plot" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In The Chastity Plot (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lisabeth During tells the story of the rise, fall, and transformation of the ideal of chastity. From its role in the practice of asceticism to its associations with sovereignty, violence, and the purity of nature, it has been loved, honored, and despised. Obsession with chastity has played a powerful and disturbing role in our moral imagination. It has enforced patriarchy’s double standards, complicated sexual relations, and imbedded in Western culture a myth of gender that has been long contested by feminists. Still not yet fully understood, the chastity plot remains with us, and the metaphysics of purity continue to haunt literature, religion, and philosophy. Idealized and unattainable, sexual renunciation has shaped social institutions, political power, ethical norms, and clerical abuses. It has led to destruction and passion, to seductive fantasies that inspired saints and provoked libertines. As During shows, it should not be underestimated.

Examining literature, religion, psychoanalysis, and cultural history from antiquity through the middle ages and into modernity, During provides a sweeping history of chastity and insight into its subversive potential. Instead of simply asking what chastity is, During considers what chastity can do, why we should care, and how it might provide a productive disruption, generating new ways of thinking about sex, integrity, and freedom.

Keep your eyes out for Lisabeth's next book, She Did It In Her Sleep, which focuses on the horrifying phenomenon that is comatose rape.

Frances Sacks is a graduate of Wesleyan University where she studied in the Science and Society Program.

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Rachel E. Walker, "Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Between the 1770s and 1860s, people across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. Physiognomy refers to using facial features as an indication of an individual's character, while phrenology is a term for the study of the shape and size of the cranium as a measure of intelligence.

Today, many dismiss these ideas as pseudoscience but Dr. Rachel E. Walker argues these scientific approaches significantly shaped American society as “pervasive social practices and intellectual philosophies that people used to better understand their own brains, bodies, and behaviors.” Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America (U Chicago Press, 2022) explores how these areas of study were once embraced by people of different backgrounds and political leanings. On the one hand, they were deployed to preserve social and political hierarchies – science functioned as a tool of oppression. But physiognomy and phrenology were also creatively deployed by activists (e.g., Frederick Douglas, Lucretia Mott, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Margaret Fuller) to fight for racial justice and gender equality. In her in depth study of a largely ignored part of American history, Dr. Walker demonstrates how physiognomy and phrenology have shaped both science and our political landscape.

Dr. Rachel E. Walker is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Hartford. She teaches courses on race, gender, science, and sexuality. Beauty and the Brain is her first book and was a finalist for the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Prize.

John Sebastiani served as the editorial assistant for this podcast.

Susan Liebell is Dirk Warren '50 Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

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Francis Cody, "The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a "news event" is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself.

In The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization (U Chicago Press, 2023), Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news, and subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports.

Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist based in Bangalore, India. She tweets at @twitatreyee.

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Scott R. Stroud, "The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Scott R. Stroud's The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a philosophical engagement with Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s life and works through his intellectual engagement with Deweyan Pragmatism. His exploratory research has engaged with significant moments of Dr. Ambedkar’s life and it has analyzed how they were reconstitutive and reconstructive of John Dewey’s pragmatist tradition.

While many of the biographical accounts have explored different facets of Ambedkar’s life, this work has uniquely positioned Ambedkar’s life journey through a philosophical and intellectual lens. The book has a rich archival linkage, as well as it brings analytical appendage to think over what guided Ambedkar’s thoughts and his anti-caste discourse.While the work gives significant philosophical insights, it also opens up questions as to what extent can Ambedkar’s pragmatism be considered unique and exclusive. Or was Ambedkar’s “Rhetorical Pragmatism”, was merely an extended thought of Dewey’s philosophy itself?

The book is important in developing Ambedkar as a philosopher and thinker besides being an anti-caste leader.Today when Ambedkar is misappropriated and misread to fit into a pre-fixed agenda it is important to look back into his intellectual biography and what were the intellectual paradigm through which his thoughts actually evolved.The book through a dense philosophical argument has actually tried to do that. It is an enriched discursive conversation about the significant life moments of Ambedkar and how it connects with Deweyan Pragmatism.

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Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, "Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sat, 20 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Split & Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, investigates the “underworld” of experimentation and suggests new avenues for telling the history of experimental sciences.

Divided in two parts, respectively titled “Infra-Experimentality” and “Supra-Experimentality,” Split & Splice is an attempt at defining the phenomenological and historical contours of “experimentation as a knowledge-generating procedure.” The first part explores how researchers mix and match a variety of mediums, technological tools, and visualization techniques to produce new opportunities of knowledge-making. From nucleic acid sequence gels to structural models and experiment sheets, the reader is introduced to the contingency of the experimentation process and the series of fragmentation and mediation it requires. It is this realization that motivates the author’s historiographical considerations in the second part of the book. If the experimental process consists in a complex and changing interplay between various mediums, trace-generating techniques, and modes of visualization, then the narratives of the history of experimental sciences ought to be built around more or less extensive ensembles of experimental apparatus, rather than around retrospectively or abstractly-defined “objects” and “fields.”

In this new book, Rheinberger describes and makes visible the different layers and moving parts of the experimentation process in order to provide historians with new threads to follow and new ways of weaving their stories together.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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Kathryn J. McGarr, "City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 19 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Kathryn McGarr’s City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (U Chicago Press, 2022) explores foreign policy journalism in Washington during and after World War II—a time supposedly defined by the press’s blind patriotism and groupthink. McGarr reveals, though, that D.C. reporters then were deeply cynical about government sources and their motives, but kept their doubts to themselves for professional, social, and ideological reasons. The alliance and rivalries among these reporters constituted a world of debts and loyalties: shared memories of wartime experiences, shared frustrations with government censorship and information programs, shared antagonisms, and shared mentors.

McGarr shows how this small, tight-knit elite of white male reporters suppressed their skepticism to help the United States build a permanent national security apparatus and a shared, constructed reality on the meaning of the Cold War. Utilizing archival sources, she demonstrates how self-aware these reporters were as they negotiated for access, prominence, and, yes, the truth—even as they denied those things to their readers.

James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications.

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Mark Paul, "The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 18 May 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life's necessities, those basic conditions for the "pursuit of happiness." For others, freedom meant the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights and unfettered access to the marketplace--nothing more. As Mark Paul explains, the latter interpretation--thanks in large part to a particularly influential cadre of economists--has all but won out among policymakers, with dire repercussions for American society: rampant inequality, endemic poverty, and an economy built to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

In The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Paul shows how economic rights--rights to necessities like housing, employment, and health care--have been a part of the American conversation since the Revolutionary War and were a cornerstone of both the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. Their recuperation, he argues, would at long last make good on the promise of America's founding documents. By drawing on FDR's proposed Economic Bill of Rights, Paul outlines a comprehensive policy program to achieve a more capacious and enduring version of American freedom. Among the rights he enumerates are the right to a good job, the right to an education, the right to banking and financial services, and the right to a healthy environment.

Replete with discussions of some of today's most influential policy ideas--from Medicare for All to a federal job guarantee to the Green New Deal--The Ends of Freedom is a timely and urgent call to reclaim the idea of freedom from its captors on the political right--to ground America's next era in the country's progressive history and carve a path toward a more economically dynamic and equitable nation.

Mark Paul is an assistant professor of economics at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

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Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

How can we stop infrastructure from damaging the planet? In Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond (U Chicago Press, 2023), Christina Dunbar-Hester, an associate professor in the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, explores the history of the San Pedro Bay area to tell the story of oil’s impact on LA. The book offers a rich and detailed engagement with a variety of case study examples, including wildlife, international trading, conservation, the military, the local and national governments, and the ports of LA and Long Beach. Offering a radical call for transspecies supply chain justice and creaturely sovereignty, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in how to rethink our polluted places and warming world.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

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Gwen Burnyeat, "The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy Amid Disinformation in Colombia" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas sought to end fifty years of war and won President Juan Manuel Santos the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet Colombian society rejected it in a polarizing referendum, amid an emotive disinformation campaign. Gwen Burnyeat joined the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, the government institution responsible for peace negotiations, to observe and participate in an innovative “peace pedagogy” strategy to explain the agreement to Colombian society. Burnyeat’s multi-scale ethnography reveals the challenges government officials experienced communicating with skeptical audiences and translating the peace process for public opinion. She argues that the fatal flaw in the peace process lay in government-society relations, enmeshed in culturally liberal logics and shaped by the politics of international donors. The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy Amid Disinformation in Colombia (U Chicago Press, 2022) offers the Colombian case as a mirror to the global crisis of liberalism, shattering the fantasy of rationality that haunts liberal responses to “post-truth” politics.

Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin.

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Dror Goldberg, "Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems--coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention.

Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed.

Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency (U Chicago Press, 2023) illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods--such as silver--to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.

Dror Goldberg is a senior faculty member in the Department of Management and Economics at the Open University of Israel. He holds a Ph.D in economics from the University of Rochester and a law degree from Tel Aviv University. Dror studies the theory, history, and law of money, especially of legal tender currency. His work was published in the Journal of Economic History, Journal of Monetary Economics, Economic Theory, and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, among others. He is the author of Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency, published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2023, which just reached no. 1 on Amazon for new books in monetary economics. Other reviews include the Wall Street Journal´s "Bookshelf" here.

You can follow Dr Golberg in Twitter as @DrorGoldberg

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

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Joseph Giacomelli, "Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

Even people who still refuse to accept the reality of human-induced climate change would have to agree that the topic has become inescapable in the United States in recent decades. But as Joseph Giacomelli shows in Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2023), this is actually nothing new: as far back as Gilded Age America, climate uncertainty has infused major debates on economic growth and national development.

In this ambitious examination of late-nineteenth-century understandings of climate, Giacomelli draws on the work of scientists, foresters, surveyors, and settlers to demonstrate how central the subject was to the emergence of American modernity. Amid constant concerns about volatile weather patterns and the use of natural resources, nineteenth-century Americans developed a multilayered discourse on climate and what it might mean for the nation’s future. Although climate science was still in its nascent stages during the Gilded Age, fears and hopes about climate change animated the overarching political struggles of the time, including expansion into the American West. Giacomelli makes clear that uncertainty was the common theme linking concerns about human-induced climate change with cultural worries about the sustainability of capitalist expansionism in an era remarkably similar to the United States’ unsettled present.

Joseph Giacomelli is Assistant Professor of Environmental History at Duke Kunshan University.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the History and Social Science Department at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Natilee Harren, "Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0000

In Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (U Chicago Press, 2020), Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. Reacting against an elitist art world enthralled by modernist aesthetics, Fluxus encouraged playfulness, chance, irreverence, and viewer participation. The diverse collective—including George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, and Robert Watts—embraced humble objects and everyday gestures as critical means of finding freedom and excitement beyond traditional forms of art-making. While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works—including event scores and Fluxbox multiples—that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.

Holiday Powers (@holidaypowers) is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies.

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Dominique A. Tobbell, "Dr. Nurse: Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 08:00:00 -0000

An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after World War II. Nurses represent the largest segment of the US health care workforce and spend significantly more time with patients than any other member of the health care team.

Dominique A. Tobbell's book Dr. Nurse: Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing (U Chicago Press, 2022) probes their history to examine major changes that have taken place in American health care in the second half of the twentieth century. The book examines the major changes in nursing education and the place of nursing in the post-war research university, revealing how federal and state health and higher education policies shaped education within health professions after World War II. Starting in the 1950s, academic nurses sought to construct a science of nursing--distinct from that of the related biomedical or behavioral sciences--that would provide the basis of nursing practice. Facing broad changes in patient care driven by the introduction of new medical innovations, they worked both to develop science-based nursing practice and to secure their roles within the post-war research university. By their efforts, academic nurses transformed nursing's labor into a valuable site of knowledge production and demonstrated how the application of this knowledge was integral to improving patient outcomes and healthcare delivery. Exploring the knowledge claims, strategies, and politics involved as academic nurses negotiated their roles and nursing's future, Dr. Nurse reveals how state-supported health centers have profoundly shaped nursing education and health care delivery.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Claudio E. Benzecry, "The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (The University of Chicago Press, 2022) shows us how globalization works through the many people and places involved in making women’s shoes.

We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation.

Benzecry looks at the decisions and constraints behind how shoes are designed and developed, from initial inspiration to the mundane work of making sure a size seven stays constant. In doing so, he also fosters an original understanding of how globalization works from the ground up. Drawing on five years of research in New York, China, and Brazil, The Perfect Fit reveals how creative decisions are made, the kinds of expertise involved, and the almost impossible task of keeping the global supply chain humming.

Claudio E. Benzecry is Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (courtesy) at Northwestern University.

Jun (Philip) Fang is an incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colby College.

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Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0000

We are in the midst of a new space race that pairs billionaire space barons with governments in an effort to exploit the cosmos for human gain. While Elon Musk and SpaceX work to establish a human presence on Mars, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin work toward mining operations on the moon, missions to asteroids to extract resources, and millions of people living in rotating near-Earth satellite dwellings. Despite the differences in their visions, these two billionaires share a core utopian project: the salvation of humanity though the colonization of space. But we have already seen the destructive effects of this frontier spirit in the centuries-long history of European colonialism.

Philosopher of religion and space enthusiast Mary-Jane Rubenstein wants to pull back the curtain on the not-so-new myths these space barons are peddling. In Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (U Chicago Press, 2022), she explains why these myths are so problematic and offers a vision for how we might approach the exploration of space in ways that don't reproduce the atrocities of humanity's previous colonial endeavors.

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Gary Alan Fine, "Fair Share: Senior Activism, Tiny Publics, and the Culture of Resistance" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

If you’ve ever been to a protest or been involved in a movement for social change, you have likely experienced a local culture, one with slogans, jargon, and shared commitments. Though one might think of a cohort of youthful organizers when imagining protest culture, this powerful ethnography from esteemed sociologist Gary Alan Fine explores the world of senior citizens on the front lines of progressive protests. While seniors are a notoriously important—and historically conservative—political cohort, the group Fine calls “Chicago Seniors Together” is a decidedly leftist organization, inspired by the model of Saul Alinsky. The group advocates for social issues, such as affordable housing and healthcare, that affect all sectors of society but take on a particular urgency in the lives of seniors. Seniors connect and mobilize around their distinct experiences but do so in service of concerns that extend beyond themselves. Not only do these seniors experience social issues as seniors—but they use their age as a dramatic visual in advocating for political change.

In Fair Share, Fine brings readers into the vital world of an overlooked political group, describing how a “tiny public” mobilizes its demands for broad social change. In investigating this process, he shows that senior citizen activists are particularly savvy about using age to their advantage in social movements. After all, what could be more attention-grabbing than a group of passionate older people determinedly shuffling through snowy streets with canes, in wheelchairs, and holding walkers to demand healthcare equity, risking their own health in the process?

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at johnstonmo@wmpenn.edu.

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Azzan Yadin-Israel, "Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Azzan Yadin-Israel presents a journey into the mystery behind why the forbidden fruit became an apple, upending an explanation that stood for centuries.

Dr. Yadin-Israel reveals that Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in twelfth-century French art. He then traces this image back to its source in medieval storytelling. Though scholars often blame theologians for the apple, accounts of the Fall written in commonly spoken languages—French, German, and English—influenced a broader audience than cloistered Latin commentators. Dr. Yadin-Israel shows that, over time, the words for “fruit” in these languages narrowed until an apple in the Garden became self-evident. A wide-ranging study of early Christian thought, Renaissance art, and medieval languages, Temptation Transformed offers an eye-opening revisionist history of a central religious icon.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Among all the world’s most storied and legend-filled regions, the place known to some over time as ‘Manchuria’ has had an especially wide range of ideas projected onto it. Everyone from Manchu emperors to Chinese exiles, European missionaries, Korean poets, indigenous shamans, Russian botanists, Japanese colonists and socialist planners have sought to know and understand this region, framing its vast forests, mountains, plains and earth according their own political, spiritual or scientific priorities over the past 400 years.

Ruth Rogaski’s extraordinary new book Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (U Chicago Press, 2022) shows how these acts of knowing have brought multiple Manchurias into existence as people, culture, nature and ecology have been entangled in diverse ways at different points in time. Today, perhaps befitting its status as a contested and layered borderland space, ‘Manchuria’ itself is a contested term, but this only makes Rogaski’s beautifully written multi-perspectival and multilingually-sourced history of this fascinating region all the more valuable.

Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia.

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Bruce Kuklick, "Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

From the time Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, Americans have been obsessed with and brooded over the meaning of fascism and how it might migrate to the United States. Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture (U Chicago Press, 2022) examines how we have viewed fascism overseas and its implications for our own country. Bruce Kuklick explores the rhetoric of politicians, who have used the language of fascism to smear opponents, and he looks at the discussions of pundits, the analyses of academics, and the displays of fascism in popular culture, including fiction, radio, TV, theater, and film. Kuklick argues that fascism has little informational meaning in the United States, but instead, it is used to denigrate or insult. For example, every political position has been besmirched as fascist. As a result, the term does not describe a phenomenon so much as it denounces what one does not like. Finally, in displaying fascism for most Americans, entertainment--and most importantly film--has been crucial in conveying to citizens what fascism is about. Fascism Comes to America has been enhanced by many illustrations that exhibit how fascism was absorbed into the US public consciousness.

Bruce Kuklick is the Nichols Professor of American History, Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is most recently the author of Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba written with Emmanuel Gerard, and The Fighting Sullivans.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Susan Stewart, "The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms.

Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (U Chicago Press, 2020) ultimately asks what can resist ruination--and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.

John Yargo holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published in Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies.

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Nick Seaver, "Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. But for their critics, recommender systems seem to embody all the potential harms of algorithms: they flatten culture into numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologist Nick Seaver describes how the makers of music recommendation navigate these tensions: how product managers understand their relationship with the users they want to help and to capture; how scientists conceive of listening itself as a kind of data processing; and how engineers imagine the geography of the world of music as a space they care for and control.

Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (U Chicago Press, 2022) rehumanizes the algorithmic systems that shape our world, drawing attention to the people who build and maintain them. In this vividly theorized book, Seaver brings the thinking of programmers into conversation with the discipline of anthropology, opening up the cultural world of computation in a wide-ranging exploration that travels from cosmology to calculation, myth to machine learning, and captivation to care.

Nick Seaver is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the director of the Science, Technology, and Society program at Tufts University.

Mathew Gagné is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University.

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David Newheiser, "The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2022), edited by Professor David Newheiser reveals the diverse nonreligious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. In fact, contributors contend that narrowly defining atheism as the belief that there is no god misunderstands religious and nonreligious persons altogether. The essays gathered here show that, just as religion exceeds doctrine, atheism also encompasses every dimension of human life: from imagination and feeling to community and ethics. Contributors offer new, expansive perspectives on atheism’s diverse history and possible futures. By recovering lines of affinity and tension between particular atheists and particular religious traditions, this book paves the way for fruitful conversation between religious and non-religious people in our secular age.

David Newheiser is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, with research that explores the role of religious traditions in debates over ethics, politics, and culture. He received a PhD in Religion from the University of Chicago and an MPhil in early Christian thought from Oxford. He was on New Books in Secularism in September of 2020 to discuss his book Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland.

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Robin Bartram, "Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The building inspectors of Chicago are at the heart of sociologist Robin Bartram’s analysis of how individuals impact—or attempt to impact—housing inequality. In Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality (U Chicago Press, 2022), she reveals surprising patterns in the judgment calls inspectors make when deciding whom to cite for building code violations. These predominantly white, male inspectors largely recognize that they work within an unequal housing landscape that systematically disadvantages poor people and people of color through redlining, property taxes, and city spending that favor wealthy neighborhoods. Stacked Decks illustrates the uphill battle inspectors face when trying to change a housing system that works against those with the fewest resources.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University.

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Marlene Schäfers, "Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, and inclusion for marginalized subjects. Marlene Schäfers’s Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals where such assumptions fall short, demonstrating that “raising one’s voice” is no straightforward path to emancipation but fraught with anxieties, dilemmas, and contradictions. In its attention to the voice as form, this book examines not only what voices say but also how they do so, focusing on Kurdish contexts where oral genres have a long, rich legacy. Examining the social labor that voices carry out as they sound, speak, and resonate, Schäfers shows that where new vocal practices arise, they produce new selves and practices of social relations. In Turkey, recent decades have seen Kurdish voices gain increasing moral and political value as metaphors of representation and resistance. Women’s voices, in particular, are understood as potent means to withstand patriarchal restrictions and political oppression. By ethnographically tracing the transformations in how Kurdish women relate to and employ their voices as a result of these shifts, Schäfers illustrates how contemporary politics foster not only new hopes and desires but also create novel vulnerabilities as they valorize, elicit, and discipline voice in the name of empowerment and liberation.

Marlene Schäfers is assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. You may find some of the songs mentioned in the book and the episode here.

Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor.

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Vincent Phillip Muñoz, "Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

What is religious liberty, anyway? What are its origins? What are religious exemptions? What would a jurisprudence of religious liberty based on the idea of natural rights look like? What is distinctive about such an approach and what are some of its pluses and minuses?

These are some of the questions addressed in Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses (U Chicago Press, 2022) by Vincent Phillip Muñoz.

The book explores the fraught legal and philosophical terrain of religious freedom. It is a meticulous study of the Founders’ common concern for the protection for our inalienable right of religious free exercise and their surprisingly divergent views on how to navigate the relationships of privilege and control between church and state.

Muñoz examines the attitudes of the Founding Generation on these topics as reflected in the understudied area of constitution making between 1776 and 1791 in America at the state level. He argues that we have to go beyond the First Amendment’s text to elaborate its meanings. We must, he contends, understand the intellectual and theological milieu of the time.

Muñoz provides the historical context of the creation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment and the intellectual underpinnings of their original meanings. He explicates in a thorough but reader-friendly manner what we can and cannot determine about the original meaning of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses.

The book is a mixture of legal, intellectual, and political history in which we learn that the Bill of Rights was in many ways an afterthought, designed by the Federalists to counter opposition to the Constitution by Anti-Federalists. Indeed, Muñoz shows that many, if not most, of the individuals who drafted the First Amendment did not even think it was necessary. His detailed examination of the drafting records illuminates the Federalists’ lack of enthusiasm for amendments and says, “the aim of many in the First Congress was to get amendments drafted, not to draft precise amendments.”

He concludes the book with a discussion of the impact of natural rights constructions of those clauses. Muñoz contrasts fascinatingly, for example, his approach with those taken by recent Supreme Court justices (notably Samuel Alito) and argues that his novel church-state jurisprudence offers a way forward that could adjudicate First Amendment church-state issues in a legal, fair, coherent and, importantly, more democratic fashion.

This book is an outstanding guide to the many schools of thought on religious liberty in the United States and in his argument for an inalienable natural rights understanding as the Founders’ most authoritative view, Muñoz convincingly shows that competing accounts—(e.g., “neutrality,” “accommodation,” “separation,” “non-endorsement,” “minimizing political division,” and “tradition”) do not capture the deepest understanding of the Founders’ thought.

Muñoz notes that his constructions correspond to no existing approach. They do not fall into what are usually considered either the “conservative” or “liberal” positions on church-state matters. The aim of the book is to spur more robust conversations about whether we are interpreting the Founders correctly and what evidence is most relevant to develop the First Amendment Religion Clauses consistently with their original design.

Let’s hear from Professor Muñoz himself.

Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher.

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Siv B. Lie, "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (U Chicago Press, 2021) shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France.

Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France’s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known, often pejoratively, as “Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France’s assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.

In Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (U Chicago Press, 2021), Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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Samantha Muka, "Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

In Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Samantha Muka, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Stevens Institute of Technology, dives into the unexpected world of tank crafting. Throughout the book, Muka tells the stories behind the development of various kinds of aquariums, such as photography tanks and reef tanks. She explains how the knowledge and ingenuity of a variety of actors have been contributing to furthering our knowledge of oceanic environments. The myriad of technical and technological challenges that arise when attempting to maintain aquatic species in artificial environments has been the source of at least as many experiments in tank tinkering.

Focusing on aquariums as complex, situated, and constantly evolving technological devices, Muka shows how the production of knowledge about the ocean depends on interactions between communities holding different knowledge, expertise, and interests: public aquarists, academic researchers, and hobbyists. Analyzing the “craft circulation” between these three groups, the author provides us with a dynamic picture that challenges a series of assumptions on how scientific knowledge is and can be produced.

More than a history and sociology of tank craft, Oceans under Glass offers a meditation on the necessity of aquariums and their artificiality not only to learn about the ocean, but also to preserve some of their biodiversity. “Imagined worlds”, as Muka puts it, aquariums should also be understood as critical places where our future relationship to the oceans, for better and for worst, is being shaped.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is teaching the Humanities and French language to undergraduates.

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John P. Gluck, "Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0000

The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place them in sanctuaries. This significant decision comes after a lengthy process of examination and debate about the ethics of animal research. For decades, proponents of such research have argued that the discoveries and benefits for humans far outweigh the costs of the traumatic effects on the animals; but today, even the researchers themselves have come to question the practice. John P. Gluck has been one of the scientists at the forefront of the movement to end research on primates, and in Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey (U Chicago Press, 2016) he tells a vivid, heart-rending, personal story of how he became a vocal activist for animal protection.

Gluck begins by taking us inside the laboratory of Harry F. Harlow at the University of Wisconsin, where Gluck worked as a graduate student in the 1960s. Harlow’s primate lab became famous for his behavioral experiments in maternal deprivation and social isolation of rhesus macaques. Though trained as a behavioral scientist, Gluck finds himself unable to overlook the intense psychological and physical damage these experiments wrought on the macaques. Gluck’s sobering and moving account reveals how in this and other labs, including his own, he came to grapple with the uncomfortable justifications that many researchers were offering for their work. As his sense of conflict grows, we’re right alongside him, developing a deep empathy for the often smart and always vulnerable animals used for these experiments.

At a time of unprecedented recognition of the intellectual cognition and emotional intelligence of animals, Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals is a powerful appeal for our respect and compassion for those creatures who have unwillingly dedicated their lives to science. Through the words of someone who has inflicted pain in the name of science and come to abhor it, it’s important to know what has led this far to progress and where further inroads in animal research ethics are needed.

John P. Gluck is professor emeritus of psychology and a senior advisor to the president on animal research ethics and welfare at the University of New Mexico. He is also research professor of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and coauthor of The Human Use of Animals.

Callie Smith is a poet and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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Pamela H. Smith, "From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

How and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge. In From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (U Chicago Press, 2022), Pamela H. Smith considers how and why, beginning in 1400 CE, European craftspeople began to write down their making practices. Rather than simply passing along knowledge in the workshop, these literate artisans chose to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books, sparking early technical writing and laying the groundwork for how we think about scientific knowledge today. Focusing on metalworking from 1400-1800 CE, Smith looks at the nature of craft knowledge and skill, studying present-day and historical practices, objects, recipes, and artisanal manuals. From these sources, she considers how we can reconstruct centuries of largely lost knowledge. In doing so, she aims not only to unearth the techniques, material processes, and embodied experience of the past but also to gain insight into the lifeworld of artisans and their understandings of matter. Please visit MS FR 640 at The Making and Knowing Project.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Clara E. Mattei, "The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they’ve had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal?

In The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, 2022), political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below. Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies “succeeded,” relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign-trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary political power.

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David Newheiser, "The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

David Newheiser is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith.

The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the diverse nonreligious experiences obscured by the combative intellectualism of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. In fact, contributors contend that narrowly defining atheism as the belief that there is no god misunderstands religious and nonreligious persons altogether. The essays show that, just as religion exceeds doctrine, atheism also encompasses every dimension of human life: from imagination and feeling to community and ethics. Contributors offer new, expansive perspectives on atheism’s diverse history and possible futures. By recovering lines of affinity and tension between particular atheists and particular religious traditions, this book paves the way for fruitful conversation between religious and non-religious people in our secular age.

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Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism.

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (U Chicago Press, 2021) works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.

Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.

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Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), addresses scholars and readers interested in literary studies, visual culture, and transformative justice in modern America. The book also transcends these areas to speak to readers in science & technology studies, in history of technology, or broadly interested in science justice.

The premise of the book is that America was living through two collective experiments as it suffered the aftermath of the failed Reconstruction following the US Civil War. The first was the experiment of Black freedom and the second was the experiment of new technologies to document (Black) life at a time when standards for how to use and to read their outputs were excitingly wide-open. In the hands of Black cultural producers, the yield of these technologies was “undisciplined data,” which pointed to the possibility of true freedom not mere social reform as defined by White progressives.

Readers follow writer Zora Neale Hurston working with anthropological film, WEB Dubois working with the social survey as a foundation for his urban sociology as well as for his literary novels, and other historical actors who were using documentary technologies to demonstrate the impossibility of capturing the fullness of Black sociality with those very technologies. Producing “undisciplined data,” Womack suggests, is not only a practice of the past, but the hope for greater justice in the present day.

This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Science & Technology Studies.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu.

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Robert L. Hetzel, "The Federal Reserve: A New History" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

In The Federal Reserve: A New History (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Robert Hetzel draws on a 43-year career as an economist in the central bank to trace the influence of the Fed on the American economy. Hetzel compares periods in which the Fed stabilized the economy and periods in which it destabilized the economy. He draws lessons about what monetary rule is stabilizing. Recast through this lens and enriched with archival materials, Hetzel's sweeping history offers a new understanding of the bank's watershed moments since 1913. They include critical accounts of the Great Depression, the Great Inflation, and the Great Recession. The Federal Reserve: A New History arrives as a critical history for a critical moment. It promises to recast our understanding of the central bank in its second century.

Robert L. Hetzel is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and a senior affiliated scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:00:00 -0000

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Gregory Nobles, "The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The life of Betsey Stockton (ca. 1798–1865) is a remarkable story of a Black woman’s journey from slavery to emancipation, from antebellum New Jersey to the Hawai‘ian Islands, and from her own self-education to a lifetime of teaching others—all told against the backdrop of the early United States’ pervasive racism. It’s a compelling chronicle of a critical time in American history and a testament to the courage and commitment of a woman whose persistence grew into a potent form of resistance.

When Betsey Stockton was a child, she was “given, as a slave” to the household of Rev. Ashbel Green, a prominent pastor and later the president of what is now Princeton University. Although she never went to school, she devoured the books in Green’s library. After being emancipated, she used that education to benefit other people of color, first in Hawai‘i as a missionary, then Philadelphia, and, for the last three decades of her life, Princeton—a college town with a genteel veneer that never fully hid its racial hostility. Betsey Stockton became a revered figure in Princeton’s sizeable Black population, a founder of religious and educational institutions, and a leader engaged in the day-to-day business of building communities.

In The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (U Chicago Press, 2022), Gregory Nobles illuminates both a woman and her world, following her around the globe, and showing how a determined individual could challenge her society’s racial obstacles from the ground up. It’s at once a revealing lesson on the struggles of Stockton’s times and a fresh inspiration for our own.

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Michael A. Verney, "A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Michael A. Verney illuminates the unexplored early decades of the United States’ imperialist naval aspirations.

Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage, with an international presence rooted in commerce rather than military might. Michael A. Verney’s A Great and Rising Nation flips this notion on its head, arguing that early US naval expeditions, often characterized as merely scientific, were in fact deeply imperialist. Circling the globe from the Mediterranean to South America and the Arctic, these voyages reflected the diverse imperial aspirations of the new republic, including commercial dominance in the Pacific World, religious empire in the Holy Land, proslavery expansion in South America, and diplomatic prestige in Europe. As Dr. Verney makes clear, the United States had global imperial aspirations far earlier than is commonly thought.

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Meredith Schweig, "Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party ended. As members of a multicultural, multilingual society with a complex history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people entered this moment of political transformation eager to tell their stories and grapple with their identities. In Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan (U Chicago Press, 2022), ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful tool in the post-authoritarian period for both exploring and producing new knowledge about the ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan.

Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, taking readers to concert venues, music video sets, scenes of protest, and more to show how early MCs from marginalized ethnic groups infused rap with important aspects of their own local languages, music, and narrative traditions. Aiming their critiques at the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the art form to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present.

Meredith Schweig is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Emory. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular musics of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on narrative, gender, and cultural politics in post-authoritarian Taiwan.

Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

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Mackenzie Cooley, "The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world.

Tracing early modern artisanal practice, Mackenzie Cooley shows how the idea of race and theories of inheritance developed through animal breeding in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. “Race,” Cooley explains, first referred to animal stock honed through breeding. To those who invented the concept, race was not inflexible, but the fragile result of reproductive work. As the Spanish empire expanded, the concept of race moved from nonhuman to human animals. Cooley reveals how, as the dangerous idea of controlled reproduction was brought to life again and again, a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding was born.

Adding nuance and historical context to discussions of race and human and animal relations, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (U Chicago Press, 2022) provides a close reading of undertheorized notions of generation and its discontents in the more-than-human world.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. Before moving to the UK in 2021 she was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego.

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Kenyon Gradert, "Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists in the nineteenth century, especially in New England, understood their Puritan heritage as one with radical political and spiritual responsibilities. Kenyon Gradert's new book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) tells the surprising story of unexpected connections between the English Civil Wars and the literary drumbeats for a holy war in late antebellum America.

Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Robin Waterfield, trans. and ed., "The Complete Works of Epictetus: Handbook, Discourses, and Fragments" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Epictetus was born into slavery around the year 50 CE, and, upon being granted his freedom, he set himself up as a philosophy teacher. After being expelled from Rome, he spent the rest of his life living and teaching in Greece. He is now considered the most important exponent of Stoicism, and his surviving work comprises a series of impassioned discourses, delivered live and recorded by his student Arrian, and the Handbook, Arrian’s own take on the heart of Epictetus’s teaching.

In Discourses, Epictetus argues that happiness depends on knowing what is in our power to affect and what is not. Our internal states and our responses to events are up to us, but the events themselves are assigned to us by the benevolent deity, and we should treat them—along with our bodies, possessions, and families—as matters of indifference, simply making the best use of them we can. Together, the Discourses and Handbook constitute a practical guide to moral self-improvement, as Epictetus explains the work and exercises aspirants need to do to enrich and deepen their lives. Edited and translated by renowned scholar Robin Waterfield, The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, and Fragments (U Chicago Press, 2022) collects the complete works of Epictetus, bringing to modern readers his insights on how to cope with death, exile, the people around us, the whims of the emperor, fear, illness, and much more.

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Evan Haefeli, "Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Origin stories of the United States often highlight religious freedom as a foundational pillar of the earliest English settlers. But Evan Haefeli tells a more complex story in Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497–1662 (University of Chicago Press, 2021). In this ambitious contribution to the origins of American religious tolerance, Haefeli argues that religious diversity was rarely the hoped-for goal of English expansion in the Atlantic. Rather, toleration arose of necessity from the collapse of political control over the English state church in the highly contested landscape of early modern religious conflict.

Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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Peter Coviello, "Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

rom the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, sexually, even racially––by the extravagances of belief they called “religion.” Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (U Chicago Press, 2019), by Dr. Peter Coviello offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end.

Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism—an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.

Peter Coviello is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in American literature and queer theory. His research considers the entangled histories of intimacy and empire in nineteenth-century America, with particular attention to questions of secularism, biopolitics, and sex. His books include Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (Columbia UP 2013) and Long Players (Penguin 2018, a memoir selected as one of ARTFORUM’s Ten Best Books of 2018. His work has appeared in a range of academic journals as well as magazines and reviews.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. @carrielynnland carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca

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NBN Classic: Paul Musselwhite, "Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.

Early American colonialism is often distinguished by an urban and rural divide. Urban development was a sign of imperial progress. British writers frequently boasted about the size of early Boston and Philadelphia while mocking the scattered settlements of the French. Colonial founders characterized their social experiment as a ‘City on a Hill’, and texts that promoted colonization listed the size and location of a growing number of principal towns and cities. Outside the confines of cities lay different places: the backcountry of settlement and Indian war; an unmapped landscape of forests and rivers. If the town stood out as a site of ordered settlement, the ‘wilderness’ remained a place of mystery and danger.

Paul Musselwhite is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake (University of Chicago Press, 2019), he challenges the conventional view of the Chesapeake as a rural society of tobacco and slavery that prevented the development of towns and cities. He argues that contemporaries argued about urban development in ways that intersected with wider discussions of the political and commercial order of the Chesapeake, and its place in theories of commerce and the state in Britain between the early seventeenth century and the American Revolution.

Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull (UK), who has written on the politics of religion in early modern Britain, and whose work has recently expanded to the intersection of colonial, indigenous, and imperial politics in early America. He co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster.

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Kermit Roosevelt III, "The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

There's a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn't working for us anymore--what's more, it's not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders. Instead, they were stated in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and were the hope of Reconstruction, when it was possible to envision the emergence of the nation committed to liberty and equality.

We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story (U Chicago Press, 2022), Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we're not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order. This alternate understanding of American identity opens the door to a new understanding of ourselves and our story, and ultimately to a better America.

America today is not the Founders' America, but it can be Lincoln's America. Roosevelt offers a powerful and inspirational rethinking of our country's history and uncovers a shared past that we can be proud to claim and use as a foundation to work toward a country that fully embodies equality for all.

William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association.

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Lewis Raven Wallace, “The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity” (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 19:00:00 -0000

From the New York Times to NPR, many major news organizations have strict policies about how reporters can conduct themselves in relation to the stories they cover. Journalists are discouraged from going to political events, advocating for causes related to the topics they cover, and publicly supporting candidates — all in the name of impartiality and presenting the news as an unbiased observer.

Journalist Lewis Raven Wallace argues that this thinking is flawed, and even dangerous to democracy, in his book The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Wallace traces the history of how objectivity became the gold standard in journalism, and looks at examples of people who have bucked the trend along the way.

Wallace advocates for a style of journalism that frees reporters to tell stories without the veil of impartiality while still uncovering the truth and holding those in power accountable. As you’ll hear, this approach is starting to take root in journalism schools and online news outlets created by voices largely excluded from mainstream media.

Wallace is an independent journalist, a co-founder of Press On, a southern movement journalism collective, and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast. He previously worked in public radio and is a longtime activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. He is a white transgender person from the Midwest and is now based in North Carolina.

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State, host of the Democracy Works podcast, produced by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy.

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Thomas Dodman, "What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 19:00:00 -0000

Feelings have a history and nostalgia has its own. In What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion(University of Chicago Press, 2018) Thomas Dodman explores the history of nostalgia from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Beginning with the coining of the term by a young Swiss medical student in 1688, the book tracks the development of nostalgia as a diagnosis with a specific military medical history. Never exclusive to the French context, the disease garnered more attention there than elsewhere in Europe for various reasons, including the existence of a powerful military force through the period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and the specificities of French political, cultural, and medical fields during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rooted at first in the experiences, displacements, and alienation of soldiers far from home, the diagnosis morphed eventually from an illness to a broader set of cultural phenomena and “feels,” acquiring the character of the temporal, memorial sentimentality we think of today.

Bringing together intellectual, military, and medical history with the history of emotions, What Nostalgia Was stays close throughout to the lived experience of those whose pained and/or pleasurable longings for spaces/times distant or lost preoccupied the expert observers and practitioners who sought to help and understand them. Dodman’s examination of historical shifts in understandings of nostalgia is compelling as it builds on both the author’s commitment to archival evidence and sources, and his openness to the insights and approaches of political and cultural theory, philosophy and literary studies. His carefully researched analysis of what nostalgia was and became between Algeria and France is particularly fascinating. The book will give readers (and listeners!) much to think on in terms of why and how nostalgia has moved and affected individuals and cultures for centuries up to and including the present.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.

*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/.

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Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea, "Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World)" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Thu, 15 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The hardest part of research isn't answering a question. It's knowing what to do before you know what your question is. Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World) (University of Chicago Press, 2022) tackles the two challenges every researcher faces with every new project: How do I find a compelling problem to investigate--one that truly matters to me, deeply and personally? How do I then design my research project so that the results will matter to anyone else?

This book will help you start your new research project the right way for you with a series of simple yet ingenious exercises. Written in a conversational style and packed with real-world examples, this easy-to-follow workbook offers an engaging guide to finding research inspiration within yourself, and in the broader world of ideas.

Read this book if you (or your students):

have difficulty choosing a research topic
know your topic, but are unsure how to turn it into a research project
feel intimidated by or unqualified to do research
worry that you're asking the wrong questions about your research topic
have plenty of good ideas, but aren't sure which one to commit to
feel like your research topic was imposed by someone else
want to learn new ways to think about how to do research.

Thomas S. Mullaney is professor of history at Stanford University and a Guggenheim fellow. His books include The Chinese Typewriter: A History and Your Computer is on Fire.

Christopher Rea is professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. His books include Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 and The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

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Ugo Corte, "Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Straight from the beaches of Hawaii comes an exciting new ethnography of a community of big-wave surfers. Oahu’s Waimea Bay attracts the world’s best big wave surfers—men and women who come to test their physical strength, courage, style, knowledge of the water, and love of the ocean. Sociologist Ugo Corte sees their fun as the outcome of social interaction within a community. Both as participant and observer, he examines how mentors, novices, and peers interact to create episodes of collective fun in a dangerous setting; how they push one another’s limits, nourish a lifestyle, advance the sport and, in some cases, make a living based on their passion for the sport.

In Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers (U Chicago Press, 2022), Corte traces how surfers earn and maintain a reputation within the field, and how, as innovations are introduced, and as they progress, establish themselves and age, they modify their strategies for maximizing performance and limiting chances of failure.

Corte argues that fun is a social phenomenon, a pathway to solidarity rooted in the delight in actualizing the self within a social world. It is a form of group cohesion achieved through shared participation in risky interactions with uncertain outcomes. Ultimately, Corte provides an understanding of collective effervescence, emotional energy, and the interaction rituals leading to fateful moments—moments of decision that, once made, transform one’s self-concept irrevocably.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University.

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Phillip B. Levine, "A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students—and Universities" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 08:00:00 -0000

According to A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students—and Universities (U Chicago Press, 2022) a college education doesn't come with a sticker price and perhaps, he argues, it should. Millions of Americans miss out on the economic benefits of a college education because of concerns around the costs. Financial aid systems offer limited help and produce uneven distributions. In the United States today, the systems meant to improve access to education have in fact added a new layer of deterrence. In A Problem of Fit Levine examines the role of financial aid systems in facilitating (and discouraging) access to college. If markets require prices in order to function optimally, then the American higher-education system--rife as it is with hidden and variable costs--amounts to a market failure. It's a problem of price transparency, not just affordability. Ensuring that students understand exactly what college will cost, including financial aid, could lift the lid on not only college attendance for more people, but for greater representation across demographics and institutions. As he illustrates, our conversations around affordability and free tuition miss a larger truth: that the opacity of our current college-financing systems is a primary driver of inequities in education and society. A Problem of Fit offers a bold, trenchant new argument for an educational reform that is well within rea

Phillip B. Levine is the Katharine Coman and A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of five books devoted to statistics, the analysis of social policy, and its effect on individual behavior.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Sandra Eder, "How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history. Today, a world without "gender" is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea (U Chicago Press, 2022) tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering.

Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

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Cassidy Puckett, "Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Picture a typical computer geek. Likely white, male, and someone you’d say has a “natural instinct” for technology. Yet, after six years teaching technology classes to first-generation, low-income middle school students in Oakland, California, Cassidy Puckett has seen firsthand that being good with technology is not something people are born with—it’s something they learn. In Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens (U Chicago Press, 2022), she overturns the stereotypes around the digitally savvy and identifies the habits that can help everyone cultivate their inner geek.

Drawing on observations and interviews with a diverse group of students around the country, Puckett zeroes in on five technology learning habits that enable tech-savvy teens to learn new technologies: a willingness to try and fail, management of frustration and boredom, use of models, and the abilities to use design logic and identify efficiencies. In Redefining Geek, she shows how to measure and build these habits, and she demonstrates how many teens historically marginalized in STEM are already using these habits and would benefit from recognition for their talent, access to further learning opportunities, and support in career pathways. She argues that if we can develop, recognize, and reward these technological learning habits in all kids—especially girls and historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups—we can address many educational inequities and disparities in STEM.

Revealing how being good with technology is not about natural ability but habit and persistence, Redefining Geek speaks to the ongoing conversation on equity in technology education and argues for a more inclusive technology learning experience for all students.

Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Candidate in Sociology of Education at the New York University.

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Elena Aronova, "Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Increasingly, scholars in the humanities are calling for a reengagement with the natural sciences. Taking their cues from recent breakthroughs in genetics and the neurosciences, advocates of “big history” are reassessing long-held assumptions about the very definition of history, its methods, and its evidentiary base. In Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War (U Chicago Press, 2021), Elena Aronova maps out historians’ continuous engagement with the methods, tools, values, and scale of the natural sciences by examining several waves of their experimentation that surged highest at perceived times of trouble, from the crisis-ridden decades of the early twentieth century to the ruptures of the Cold War.

The book explores the intertwined trajectories of six intellectuals and the larger programs they set in motion: Henri Berr (1863–1954), Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938), Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943), Julian Huxley (1887–1975), and John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971). Though they held different political views, spoke different languages, and pursued different goals, these thinkers are representative of a larger motley crew who joined the techniques, approaches, and values of science with the writing of history, and who created powerful institutions and networks to support their projects.

In tracing these submerged stories, Aronova reveals encounters that profoundly shaped our knowledge of the past, reminding us that it is often the forgotten parts of history that are the most revealing.

Lea Greenberg is a scholar of German studies with a particular focus on German Jewish and Yiddish literature and culture; critical gender studies; multilingualism; and literature of the post-Yugoslav diaspora.

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Johanna Drucker, "Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Johanna Drucker provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Dr. Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understanding of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history.

Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Dr. Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography.

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Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Joao Souto-Maior is PhD Student in Sociology of Education at the New York University.

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Erica Gies, "Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Trouble with water – increasingly frequent, extreme floods and droughts – is one of the first obvious signs of climate change. Meanwhile, urban sprawl, industrial agriculture and engineered water infrastructure are making things worse. As our control attempts fail, we are forced to recognize an eternal truth: sooner or later, water always wins.

In Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge (U Chicago Press, 2022), award-winning science journalist Erica Gies follows water 'detectives' as they search for clues to water's past and present. Their tools: cutting-edge science and research into historical ecology, animal life, and earlier human practices. Their discoveries: a deeper understanding of what water wants and how accommodating nature can protect us and other species.

Modern civilizations tend to speed water away. We have forgotten that it must flex with the rhythms of the earth, and that only collaboration with nature will allow us to forge a more resilient future.

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Ghassan Hage, "The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Bridging the gap between migration studies and the anthropological tradition, Ghassan Hage illustrates that transnationality and its attendant cultural consequences are not necessarily at odds with classic theory.

In The Diasporic Condition, Ghassan Hage engages with the diasporic Lebanese community as a shared lifeworld, defining a common cultural milieu that transcends spatial and temporal distance—a collective mode of being here termed the “diasporic condition.” Encompassing a complicated transnational terrain, Hage’s long-term ethnography takes us from Mehj and Jalleh in Lebanon to Europe, Australia, South America, and North America, analyzing how Lebanese migrants and their families have established themselves in their new homes while remaining socially, economically, and politically related to Lebanon and to each other.

At the heart of The Diasporic Condition lies a critical anthropological question: How does the study of a particular sociocultural phenomenon expand our knowledge of modes of existing in the world? As Hage establishes what he terms the “lenticular condition,” he breaks down the boundaries between “us” and “them,” “here” and “there,” showing that this convergent mode of existence increasingly defines everyone’s everyday life.

Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of several books, including White Nation, Against Paranoid Nationalism, Alter-Politics, and Is Racism an Environmental Threat?

Alize Arıcan is an anthropologist whose research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

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Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson, "The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy reform have gone mostly unanswered. As the discord surrounding the modern immigration debate has intensified, border enforcement has tightened. Crossing harsher, less porous borders makes unauthorized entry to the United States a permanent, costly undertaking. And the challenges don't end on the other side.

At once enlightening and devastating, The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear (U Chicago Press, 2021) examines the costs and ends of America's interior enforcement--the policies and agencies, including ICE, aimed at removing immigrants already living in the country. Economist Tara Watson and journalist Kalee Thompson pair rigorous analysis with deeply personal stories from immigrants and their families to assess immigration's effects on every aspect of American life, from the labor force to social welfare programs to tax revenue. What emerges is a critical, utterly complete examination of what non-native Americans bring to the country, including immigration's tendency to elevate the wages and skills of those who are native-born.d

News coverage has prompted many to question the humanity of American immigration policies; The Border Within opens a conversation of whether it is effective. The United States spends billions each year on detention and deportation, all without economic gain and at a great human cost. With depth and discipline, the authors dissect the shock-and-awe policies that make up a broken, often cruel system, while illuminating the lives caught in the chaos. It is an essential work with far-reaching implications for immigrants and non-immigrants alike.

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Victoria W. Wolcott, "Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement.

Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical-in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States' bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven't yet been fully understood or appreciated.

Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, all shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was both specifically utopian and deeply engaged in changing the current conditions of the existing world. Living in the Future recasts the various strains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in a utopian light, revealing the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today.

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Jonna Perrillo, "Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands (U Chicago Press, 2022) begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists who moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1946 as part of the military program called Operation Paperclip. These German children were bused daily from a military outpost to four El Paso public schools. Though born into a fascist enemy nation, the German children were quickly integrated into the schools and, by proxy, American society. Their rapid assimilation offered evidence that American public schools played a vital role in ensuring the victory of democracy over fascism.

Jonna Perrillo not only tells this fascinating story of Cold War educational policy, but she draws an important contrast with another, much more numerous population of children in the El Paso public schools: Mexican Americans. Like everywhere else in the Southwest, Mexican American children in El Paso were segregated into "Mexican" schools, where the children received a vastly different educational experience. Not only were they penalized for speaking Spanish--the only language all but a few spoke due to segregation--they were tracked for low-wage and low-prestige careers, with limited opportunities for economic success. Educating the Enemy charts what two groups of children--one that might have been considered the enemy, the other that was treated as such--reveal about the ways political assimilation has been treated by schools as an easier, more viable project than racial or ethnic assimilation.

Listen to an interview with the author here and read an interview in Time and a piece based on the book in the Boston Review.

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Jeannie N. Shinozuka, "Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (U Chicago Press, 2022), Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today.

Shinozuka provides an eye-opening look at biotic exchanges that not only altered the lives of Japanese in America but transformed American society more broadly. She shows how the modern fixation on panic about foreign species created a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia inspired concerns about biodiversity, prompting new categories of "native" and "invasive" species that defined groups as bio-invasions to be regulated--or annihilated. By highlighting these connections, Shinozuka shows us that this story cannot be told about humans alone--the plants and animals that crossed with them were central to Japanese American and Asian American history. The rise of economic entomology and plant pathology in concert with public health and anti-immigration movements demonstrate these entangled histories of xenophobia, racism, and species invasions.

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Drew Daniel, "Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Advisory: this episode discusses the literary representation of self-harm and suicide, in particular, how writers such as Shakespeare and Milton often treated the subject in unserious or trivializing ways.

In 1643, the writer Thomas Browne introduced the word “suicide” into the English language. Eventually, “suicide” would become a monolith in how we think about self-harm and self-killing. “Suicide” has come to represent an individualizing, pathologizing way of looking at people who contemplate ending their lives. But, when Thomas Browne’s new word was first used, it was entering a discursive space that was wider and more open to campy humor, slapstick, and misogynistic trolling. This is the argument of an exciting and nuanced book from today’s guest, Drew Daniel. The title of the book is Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022.

Daniel is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, and teaches early modern literature, critical theory, and aesthetics. Joy of the Worm is a fresh, elegantly written exploration of scenes of self-murder (or the contemplation of self-murder) in Antony and Cleopatra, Paradise Lost, and Joseph Addison’s Cato, a Tragedy. He is the author of the previous monograph, The Melancholy Assemblage (from Fordham UP), and the 33 1/3 book on Throbbing Gristle’s Twenty Jazz Funk Greats. He is also one-half of the electronic band Matmos.

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Claire L. Wendland, "Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

A close look at stories of maternal death in Malawi that considers their implications in the broader arena of medical knowledge.

By the early twenty-first century, about one woman in twelve could expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication in Malawi. Specific deaths became object lessons. Explanatory stories circulated through hospitals and villages, proliferating among a range of practitioners: nurse-midwives, traditional birth attendants, doctors, epidemiologists, herbalists. Was biology to blame? Economic underdevelopment? Immoral behavior? Tradition? Were the dead themselves at fault?

In Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles (U Chicago Press, 2022), Claire L. Wendland considers these explanations for maternal death, showing how they reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. Drawing on extended fieldwork, Wendland reveals how efforts to legitimate a single story as the authoritative version can render care more dangerous than it might otherwise be. Historical, biological, technological, ethical, statistical, and political perspectives on death usually circulate in different expert communities and different bodies of literature. Here, Wendland considers them together, illuminating dilemmas of maternity care in contexts of acute change, chronic scarcity, and endemic inequity within Malawi and beyond.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021.

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Victor Seow, "Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy: Energy regimes in Modern East Asia (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an account of the modern “world that carbon made” through the case study of the Fushun colliery in Manchuria. “Carbon technocracy” is a system dedicated to the optimal exploitation of fossil fuel resources. It is, as Seow shows, a system of consistent waste, environmental degradation, and labor exploitation, built on a fantasy of inexhaustible energy reserves mobilized toward endless and accelerating development. Fushun exemplifies the violence, contradictions, and, as we discuss in this interview, failures of imagination of successive Japanese, Chinese Nationalist, and Chinese Communist regimes. Carbon Technocracy balances macro-level questions about the mutual constitution of nation and global energy regimes with a sensitivity to individual laborers caught up in these machinations.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Deirdre N. McCloskey and Art Carden, "Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment. Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith's puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity. The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism.

For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey's magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (U Chicago Press, 2020) is what you've been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy's key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent. The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and "innovism" made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement.

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey's influential explanation of how we got rich. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought.

You can read Joel Moykr's review of Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich here.

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The Future of Philanthropy: A Conversation with Emma Saunders-Hastings

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Philanthropists are praise for their generosity but does their desire to keep control of what happens to their donations mean they exercise power in ways that clash with democratic principles? Approval of philanthropists’ good intentions can mask some important moral considerations about what philanthropy means for the donor and the recipient. Generosity, influence, reputation and paternalism: democracy and philanthropy with Owen Bennett Jones and Emma Saunders Hastings. Hasting is author of Private Virtues, Public Vices: Philanthropy and Democratic Equality (U Chicago Press, 2022).

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Slobodan Perovic, "From Data to Quanta: Niels Bohr’s Vision of Physics" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 22 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Niels Bohr was a central figure in quantum physics, well known for his work on atomic structure and his contributions to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. In From Data to Quanta: Niels Bohr’s Vision of Physics (U Chicago Press, 2021), philosopher of science Slobodan Perović explores the way Bohr practiced and understood physics, and analyzes its implications for our understanding of modern science. Perović develops a novel approach to Bohr’s understanding of physics and his method of inquiry, presenting an exploratory symbiosis of historical and philosophical analysis that uncovers the key aspects of Bohr’s philosophical vision of physics within a given historical context.

Ana Georgescu studied astrophysics and physics at Harvard University and is now a science consultant and writer based in New York City.

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Aaron Hiltner, "Taking Leave, Taking Liberties: American Troops on the World War II Home Front" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

During the Second World War, locals in Australia and Britain described American GIs as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But this conflict between civilians and the military didn’t only take place abroad. Civil-military tensions could be seen at ‘home’ too. Nearly three-quarters of servicemen in the months leading up to D-Day were stationed domestically, while one in four never went abroad at all. In other words, a lot of GIs spent a lot of time in the continental United States. Their presence, combined with the anti-civilian culture that the US military cultivated during the war, made places like Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard, and Coney Island look like occupation zones.

A new book tells this important yet overlooked history of the Second World War. In Taking Leave, Taking Liberties: American Troops on the World War II Home Front (U Chicago Press, 2020), Aaron Hiltner follows GIs as they traveled through transport hubs, trained at domestic military bases, and took leave in ‘liberty ports,” such as Boston and San Francisco. By doing so, Hiltner, a lecturer at University College London, shows how theft, assault, catcalling, murder, rape, drunkenness, harassment, rackets, and fist fights were a part of the everyday domestic wartime experience. The book, therefore, challenges our tendency to isolate the home front from the war and makes us rethink where US foreign relations take place.

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Alison F. Richard, "Sloth Lemur's Song: Madagascar from the Deep Past to the Uncertain Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Madagascar is a place of change. A biodiversity hotspot and the fourth largest island on the planet, it has been home to a spectacular parade of animals, from giant flightless birds and giant tortoises on the ground to agile lemurs leaping through the treetops. Some species live on; many have vanished in the distant or recent past. Over vast stretches of time, Madagascar's forests have expanded and contracted in response to shifting climates, and the hand of people is clear in changes during the last thousand years or so. Today, Madagascar is a microcosm of global trends. What happens there in the decades ahead can, perhaps, suggest ways to help turn the tide on the environmental crisis now sweeping the world.

Sloth Lemur's Song: Madagascar from the Deep Past to the Uncertain Present (U Chicago Press, 2022) is a far-reaching account of Madagascar's past and present, led by an expert guide who has immersed herself in research and conservation activities with village communities on the island for nearly fifty years. Alison Richard accompanies the reader on a journey through space and time--from Madagascar's ancient origins as a landlocked region of Gondwana and its emergence as an island to the modern-day developments that make the survival of its array of plants and animals increasingly uncertain. Weaving together scientific evidence with Richard's own experiences and exploring the power of stories to shape our understanding of events, this book captures the magic as well as the tensions that swirl around this island nation.

For more information visit this website.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Moises Lino e Silva, "Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is a mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favela in Rio, where residents articulate their own politics of freedom against the backdrop of multiple forms of oppression. Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights--usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois--at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ folks, and slum dwellers. In this visceral ethnography of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Moisés Lino e Silva explores what happens when liberalism is inflected by people whose lives are impaired by normative understandings of liberty. He calls these marginalized visions of freedom "minoritarian liberalism," a concept that stands in for overlapping, alternative modes of freedom--be they queer, favela, or peasant. Lino e Silva introduces readers to a broad collective of favela residents, most intimately accompanying Natasha Kellem, a charismatic self-declared travesti (a term used in Latin America to indicate a specific form of female gender construction opposite to the sex assigned at birth). Many of those the author meets consider themselves "queer," while some are treated as "abnormal" simply because they live in favelas. Through these interconnected experiences, Lino e Silva not only pushes at the boundaries of anthropological inquiry, but also offers ethnographic evidence of non-normative routes to freedom for those seeking liberties against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation, transphobia, racism, and other patterns of domination.

Moisés Lino e Silva is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Brazil.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Moises Lino e Silva, "Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Moisés Lino e Silva is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Brazil.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Judith Lochhead et al., "Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (U Chicago Press, 2021) maps a new territory for inquiry at the intersection of music, philosophy, affect theory, and sound studies. The essays in this volume consider objects and experiences marked by the correlation of sound and affect, in music and beyond: the voice, as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or machine-made; and our sonic environments, whether natural or artificial, and how they provoke responses in us. Far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced and even determined by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars, including both established and new voices. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersections with affect and the emotions.

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Andy Hines, "Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America.

In Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (U Chicago Press, 2022), Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.

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Mario Daniels and John Krige, "Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is the first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge.

In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Mario Daniels and Dr. John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state.

They argue that every single day beginning in the 1940s, US export controls have intervened in the global sharing of scientific-technological knowledge. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only—and not even the most important—regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era.

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Charlie Eaton, "Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Tue, 31 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (U Chicago Press, 2022), finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.

With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America's unequal system of higher education.

Charlie Eaton is an economic sociologist and Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Merced. He studies the role of social ties, organizations, and politics in the interplay between financiers, other elites, and subordinate social groups. His work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Politics & Society, The Review of Financial Studies, Socius, Sociology Compass, and PS: Political Science and Politics.

Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly.

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Jack Ashby, "Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Think of a platypus: they lay eggs (that hatch into so-called platypups), they produce milk without nipples and venom without fangs and they can detect electricity. Or a wombat: their teeth never stop growing, they poo cubes and they defend themselves with reinforced rears. Platypuses, possums, wombats, echidnas, devils, kangaroos, quolls, dibblers, dunnarts, kowaris: Australia has some truly astonishing mammals with incredible, unfamiliar features. But how does the world regard these creatures? And what does that mean for their conservation?

In Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals (U Chicago Press, 2022), naturalist Jack Ashby shares his love for these often-misunderstood animals. Informed by his own experiences meeting living marsupials and egg-laying mammals on fieldwork in Tasmania and mainland Australia, as well as his work with thousands of zoological specimens collected for museums over the last 200-plus years, Ashby's tale not only explains the extraordinary lives of these animals, but the historical mysteries surrounding them and the myths that persist (especially about the platypus). He also reveals the toll these myths can take.

Ashby makes it clear that calling these animals ‘weird’ or ‘primitive’ – or incorrectly implying that Australia is an ‘evolutionary backwater’ – a perception that can be traced back to the country's colonial history – has undermined conservation: Australia now has the worst mammal extinction rate of anywhere on Earth. Important, timely and written with humour and wisdom by a scientist and self-described platypus nerd, this celebration of Australian wildlife will open eyes and change minds about how we contemplate and interact with the natural world – everywhere.

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Steven G. Epstein, "The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 30 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Since the 1970s, health professionals, researchers, governments, advocacy groups, and commercial interests have invested in the pursuit of something called “sexual health.” Under this expansive banner, a wide array of programs have been launched, organizations founded, initiatives funded, products sold—and yet, no book before this one asks: What does it mean to be sexually healthy? When did people conceive of a form of health called sexual health? And how did it become the gateway to addressing a host of social harms and the reimagining of private desires and public dreams?

Conjoining “sexual” with “health” changes both terms: it alters how we conceive of sexuality and transforms what it means to be healthy, prompting new expectations of what medicine can provide. Yet the ideal of achieving sexual health remains elusive and open-ended, and the benefits and costs of promoting it are unevenly distributed across genders, races, and sexual identities. Rather than a thing apart, sexual health is intertwined with nearly every conceivable topical debate—from sexual dysfunction to sexual violence, from reproductive freedom to the practicalities of sexual contact in a pandemic.

In The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life (U Chicago Press, 2022), Steven Epstein analyzes the rise, proliferation, uptake, and sprawling consequences of sexual health activities, offering critical tools to assess those consequences, expand capacities for collective decision making, and identify pathways that promote social justice.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021.

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Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, "The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 26 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) is an excavation of a discipline through the work of its teachers, the traces of the tremendous and varied labour that went into preparing for and practicing literary study in classrooms from the first decades of the twentieth century to the 1970s. Exploring the teaching papers of scholars and instructors at institutions private and public--prestigious and privileged universities, extension schools, and HBCUs--the authors revisit the work of some of the scholars frequently identified as "founders" of the discipline, including T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, Cleanth Brooks. They also show how the work of women and other scholars/teachers neglected as shapers of literary critical methods before the 1960s and 1970s was indeed essential to the development of the ideas and practices at the heart of the discipline.

At once an intellectual and a labor history, the book emphasizes practices, complicating the stories literary study has told about itself about innovation, canon, and more while making a meaningful and moving contribution to urgent contemporary discussions of higher education more broadly. It is a book for anyone interested in what happens inside classrooms, how their content and form has changed over time, and how what takes place there is always already imbricated with research, with lives and contexts "outside." It is also just a wonderful read, written truly collaboratively from start to finish by two scholars and teachers deeply committed to an inclusive history of their field, to their work in the present, and to a better future for all of us.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Stephen Vider, "The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 25 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Stephen Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States. From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (U Chicago Press, 2021), Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life.

Beginning in the 1940s, LGBTQ activists looked increasingly to the home as a site of connection, care, and cultural inclusion. They struggled against the conventions of marriage, challenged the gendered codes of everyday labor, reimagined domestic architecture, and contested the racial and class boundaries of kinship and belonging. Retelling LGBTQ history from the inside out, Vider reveals the surprising ways that the home became, and remains, a charged space in battles for social and economic justice, making it clear that LGBTQ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves—they remade the possibilities of home life for everyone.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College.

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Alejandro Nava, "Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 25 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today I speak with Alejandro Nava about his new book, Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop (U Chicago Press, 2022). This book explores an important aspect of hip-hop that is rarely considered: its deep entanglement with spiritual life.

The world of hip-hop is saturated with religion, but rarely is that element given serious consideration. In Street Scriptures, Alejandro Nava focuses our attention on this aspect of the music and culture in a fresh way, combining his profound love of hip-hop, his passion for racial and social justice, and his deep theological knowledge. Street Scriptures offers a refreshingly earnest and beautifully written journey through hip-hop’s deep entanglement with the sacred.

Nava reveals a largely unheard religious heartbeat in hip-hop, exploring crosscurrents of the sacred and profane in rap, reggaeton, and Latinx hip-hop today. Ranging from Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Lauryn Hill, Cardi B, and Bad Bunny to St. Augustine and William James, Nava examines the ethical-political, mystical-prophetic, and theological qualities in hip-hop, probing the pure sonic and aesthetic signatures of music, while also diving deep into the voices that invoke the spirit of protest. The result is nothing short of a new liberation theology for our time, what Nava calls a “street theology.”

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Ellen Schrecker, "The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 23 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students.

The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened.

Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day.

Ellen Schrecker is a retired professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author of numerous books, including No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, and The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University.

Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security, subjectivity and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter.

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John Lardas Modern, "Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 23 May 2022 04:00:00 -0000

In Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (U Chicago Press, 2021), religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a sprawling examination of the history of the cognitive revolution and current attempts to locate all that is human in the brain, including spirituality itself. Neuromatic is a wildly original take on the entangled histories of science and religion that lie behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century; from cyberneticians, Scientologists, and parapsychologists in the twentieth century to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion.

What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the religion it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. In foregrounding the myths, ritual schemes, and cosmic concerns that have accompanied idealizations of neural networks and inquiries into their structure, Neuromatic takes the reader on a dazzling and disturbing ride through the history of our strange subservience to the brain.

This interview was conduced by Alison Renna, a PhD candidate studying the history of ideas at Yale University.

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Annabella Pitkin, "Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 20 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on cold porridge and water. Yet this elusive wandering renunciant became a revered teacher of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. At Khunu Lama’s death in 1977, he was mourned by Himalayan nuns, Tibetan lamas, and American meditators alike. The many surviving stories about him reveal significant dimensions of Tibetan Buddhism, shedding new light on questions of religious affect and memory to reimagine cultural continuity beyond the binary of traditional and modern.

In Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint (U Chicago Press, 2022), Annabella Pitkin explores intersecting imaginaries of devotion, renunciation, and the teacher-student lineage relationship. By examining narrative accounts of the life of a remarkable twentieth-century Himalayan Buddhist and focusing on his remembered identity as a renunciant bodhisattva, Pitkin illuminates Tibetan and Himalayan practices of memory, affective connection, and mourning. Refuting long-standing caricatures of Tibetan Buddhist communities as unable to be modern because of their religious commitments, Pitkin shows instead how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhist narrators have used themes of renunciation, devotion, and lineage as touchstones for negotiating loss and vitalizing continuity.

Jue Liang is scholar of Buddhism in general, and Tibetan Buddhism in particular. My research examines women in Tibetan Buddhist communities past and present using a combination of textual and ethnographical studies.

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Dana W. Logan, "Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 13 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America (U Chicago Press, 2022), Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America's Revolution.

Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.

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Aaron Cohen, "Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Wed, 04 May 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Curtis Mayfield. The Chi-Lites. Chaka Khan. Chicago’s place in the history of soul music is rock solid. But for Chicagoans, soul music in its heyday from the 1960s to the 1980s was more than just a series of hits: it was a marker and a source of black empowerment.

In Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power (U Chicago Press, 2019), Aaron Cohen tells the remarkable story of the explosion of soul music in Chicago. Together, soul music and black-owned businesses thrived. Record producers and song-writers broadcast optimism for black America’s future through their sophisticated, jazz-inspired productions for the Dells and many others. Curtis Mayfield boldly sang of uplift with unmistakable grooves like “We’re a Winner” and “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Musicians like Phil Cohran and the Pharaohs used their music to voice Afrocentric philosophies that challenged racism and segregation, while Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Chaka Khan created music that inspired black consciousness. Soul music also accompanied the rise of African American advertisers and the campaign of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983. This empowerment was set in stark relief by the social unrest roiling in Chicago and across the nation: as Chicago’s homegrown record labels produced rising stars singing songs of progress and freedom, Chicago’s black middle class faced limited economic opportunities and deep-seated segregation, all against a backdrop of nationwide deindustrialization.

Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil. Aaron Cohen covers the arts for numerous publications and teaches English, journalism, and humanities at City Colleges of Chicago. He is the author of Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace."

Aaron Cohen on Twitter.

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Charles Alistair McCrary, "Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Michael Graziano, "Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fittingly, Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA (U Chicago Press, 2021) investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. By braiding the development of the modern intelligence agency with the story of postwar American religion, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors delivers a provocative new look at a secret driver of one of the major engines of American power.

Allison Isidore is the Assistant Director for the American Catholic Historical Association and is an Instructor of Record for the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama. Her research interest is focused on the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and the Catholic Church’s response to racism and the participation of Catholic clergy, nuns, and laypeople in marches, sit-ins, and kneel-ins during the 1950s and 1960s. Allison is also a Video Editor for The Religious Studies Project, producing videos for the podcast and marketing team. She tweets from @AllisonIsidore1.

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Sam Lebovic, "A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Dr. Sam Lebovic’s A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is an examination of how the postwar United States twisted its ideal of “the free flow of information” into a one-sided export of values and a tool with global consequences.

When the dust settled after World War II, the United States stood as the world’s unquestionably pre-eminent military and economic power. In the decades that followed, the country exerted its dominant force in less visible but equally powerful ways, too, spreading its trade protocols, its media, and—perhaps most importantly—its alleged values. In A Righteous Smokescreen, Dr. Lebovic homes in on one of the most prominent, yet ethereal, of those professed values: the free flow of information. This trope was seen as capturing what was most liberal about America’s self-declared leadership of the free world. But as Dr. Lebovic makes clear, even though diplomats and public figures trumpeted the importance of widespread cultural exchange, these transmissions flowed in only one direction: outward from the United States.

Whereas most scholars focus on grand problems of geopolitics and international finance to explore what sort of international order the US constructed after World War II, this book focuses instead on visa and passport regulations, the funding for educational exchange and school construction, the purchase of land for embassies, civil aviation agreements, the rights of international correspondents, and other equally pragmatic and practical problems of international relations…Detailing how cultural globalization was meant to work in practice therefore reveals a great deal about how the postwar order was actually supposed to operate.

Though other countries did try to promote their own cultural visions, Dr. Lebovic shows that the US moved to marginalize or block those visions outright, highlighting the shallowness of American commitments to multilateral institutions, the depth of its unstated devotion to cultural and economic supremacy, and its surprising hostility to importing foreign cultures. His book uncovers the unexpectedly profound global consequences buried in such ostensibly mundane matters as visa and passport policy, international educational funding, and land purchases for embassies. Even more crucially, A Righteous Smokescreen does nothing less than reveal that globalization was not the inevitable consequence of cultural convergence or the natural outcome of putatively free flows of information—it was always political to its core.

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Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, "Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

With this book, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century modernism, transforming our understanding of the era’s canonical works. Butterfield-Rosen analyzes a hitherto unexamined formal phenomenon in European art: how artists departed from conventions for posing the human figure that had long been standard. In the decades around 1900, artists working in different countries and across different media began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures. The effect, both archaic and modern, broke with the centuries-old tradition of rendering bodies in torsion, with poses designed to simulate the human being’s physical volume and capacity for autonomous thought and movement. This formal departure destabilized prevailing visual codes for signifying the existence of the inner life of the human subject.

Exploring major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky— replete with new archival discoveries—Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition (U Chicago Press, 2021) combines intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the history of psychology and evolutionary biology. In doing so, it shows how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research explores masculinity in European and Russian art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

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Paul R. Deslandes, "The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Spanning the decades from the rise of photography to the age of the selfie, The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the complex visual and consumer cultures that shaped masculine beauty in Britain, examining the realms of advertising, health, pornography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. Paul R. Deslandes chronicles the shifting standards of male beauty in British culture—from the rising cult of the athlete to changing views on hairlessness—while connecting discussions of youth, fitness, and beauty to growing concerns about race, empire, and degeneracy. From earlier beauty show contestants and youth-obsessed artists, the book moves through the decades into considerations of disfigured soldiers, physique models, body-conscious gay men, and celebrities such as David Beckham and David Gandy who populate the worlds of television and social media. Deslandes calls on historians to take beauty and gendered aesthetics seriously while recasting how we think about the place of physical appearance in historical study, the intersection of different forms of high and popular culture, and what has been at stake for men in “looking good.”

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Rebecca Cypess, "Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Today we speak to Rebecca Cypess, Associate Professor at Rutgers University, about her new book: Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (University of Chicago, 2022). Interest in music sociability during the eighteenth century, including domestic and semi-domestic music-making, has been steadily growing. As scholars have noted, musical salons were crucial in providing a space where women could perform in public, which was otherwise impossible, for the most part. In this book, music scholar and performer Rebecca Cypess focuses on the figure of the salonnière, the female host at the center of most musical salons in Europe and America in the second half of the eighteenth century. Through case studies include the salons of Anne-Louise Brillon in Paris, Marianna Martines in Vienna, Sara Levy in Berlin, Elizabeth Graeme in Philadelphia, and the painter Angelika Kauffman in Rome, Cypess addresses several far-reaching issues in Enlightenment musical culture. Among them are questions having to do with collaboration and improvisation vs. authorship, sensual vs. intellectual experiences, the role of women in 'governing' the salons and collecting musical scores and instruments, and how these collections can function as texts that illuminate the lived experiences of eighteenth-century music. In this richly written book, Cypess draws on letters, diaries, and other written documents, as well as iconography, to make connections with non-musical practices, including games, and to recreate the salon as an immersive musical and creative environment.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy, "Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy: India 1947 and Beyond" (UChicago Press, 2022)

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

In Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy: India 1947 and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Dr. Tirthankar Roy and Dr. Anand Swamy present an essential history of India’s economic growth since 1947, including the legal reforms that have shaped the country in the shadow of colonial rule. They argue that “colonial rule left India a highly unequal society with a complicated structure of land rights, a slow and dysfunctional legal system, and a state that was all powerful in some areas.”

Economists have long lamented how the inefficiency of India’s legal system undermines the country’s economic capacity. How has this come to be? The prevailing explanation is that the postcolonial legal system is understaffed and under-resourced, making adjudication and contract enforcement slow and costly.

Taking this as given, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy examines the contents and historical antecedents of these laws, including how they have stifled economic development. Dr. Roy and Dr. Swamy argue that legal evolution in independent India has been shaped by three factors: the desire to reduce inequality and poverty; the suspicion that market activity, both domestic and international, can be detrimental to these goals; and the strengthening of Indian democracy over time, giving voice to a growing fraction of society, including the poor. They conclude that “the weaknesses of the legal framework were probably not the binding constraint on growth” and that “at least in the short-term, the Indian economy will have to develop in spite of its legal system.”

Weaving the story of India’s heralded economic transformation with its social and political history, Dr. Roy and Dr. Swamy show how inadequate legal infrastructure has been a key impediment to the country’s economic growth during the last century. A stirring and authoritative history of a nation rife with contradictions, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand India’s current crossroads—and the factors that may keep its dreams unrealized.

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Elayne Oliphant, "The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris" (UChicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than “heritage.” In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of Catholicism actually be a kind of hidden power?

Exploring the violent histories and alternate trajectories effaced through this banal backgrounding of a crucial aspect of French history and culture, this richly textured ethnography lays bare the profound nostalgia that undergirds Catholicism’s circulation in nonreligious sites such as museums, corporate spaces, and political debates. Oliphant’s aim is to unravel the contradictions of religion and secularism and, in the process, show how aesthetics and politics come together in contemporary France to foster the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on another person’s experience of the world. A creative meditation on the power of the taken-for-granted, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a landmark study of religion, aesthetics, and public space.

Elayne Oliphant is an assistant professor of anthropology and religious studies at New York University.

Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He can be found on Twitter @arman_c.

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Emily J. Levine, "Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University" (UChicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

During the nineteenth century, nearly ten thousand Americans traveled to Germany to study in universities renowned for their research and teaching. By the mid-twentieth century, American institutions led the world. How did America become the center of excellence in higher education? And what does that story reveal about who will lead in the twenty-first century?

In Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Emily Levine presents the first history of the ascent of American higher education seen through the lens of German-American exchange. “This book treats transatlantic culture exchange and competition as its topic, methodology, and causal historical mechanism. It uncovers the origins of the research university by pulling apart the strands of parallel, comparative, and intertwined stories that unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapters pair individuals and institutions from Germany and America to reveal side-by-side stories about how idealists made compromises to create universities they hoped would bring tangible benefits to their respective communities.”

In a series of compelling portraits of such leaders as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martha Carey Thomas, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Dr. Levine shows how academic innovators on both sides of the Atlantic competed and collaborated to shape the research university. Even as nations sought world dominance through scholarship, universities retained values apart from politics and economics. Open borders enabled Americans to unite the English college and German PhD to create the modern research university, a hybrid now replicated the world over.

Dr. Levine argues that “the university did not emerge in isolation nor was it ever a finished project. Rather, the compromises were constantly renegotiated by these innovators and other social actors amid changing contexts. As the society that the university served evolved, the university coevolved into such forms as the central state university in Berlin, the land grant in California, and the privately funded urban university in Baltimore, and each time the academic social contract was reconstituted.”

In a captivating narrative spanning one hundred years, Dr. Levine upends notions of the university as a timeless ideal, restoring the contemporary university to its rightful place in history. In so doing she reveals that innovation in the twentieth century was rooted in international cooperation—a crucial lesson that bears remembering today.

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Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

Ian Tyrrell's American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea (UChicago Press, 2021) is a powerful dissection of a core American myth. The idea that the United States is unlike every other country in world history is a surprisingly resilient one. Throughout his distinguished career, Ian Tyrrell has been one of the most influential historians of the idea of American exceptionalism, but he has never written a book focused solely on it until now. The notion that American identity might be exceptional emerged, Tyrrell shows, from the belief that the nascent early republic was not simply a postcolonial state but a genuinely new experiment in an imperialist world dominated by Britain. Prior to the Civil War, American exceptionalism fostered declarations of cultural, economic, and spatial independence. As the country grew in population and size, becoming a major player in the global order, its exceptionalist beliefs came more and more into focus—and into question. Over time, a political divide emerged: those who believed that America’s exceptionalism was the basis of its virtue and those who saw America as either a long way from perfect or actually fully unexceptional, and thus subject to universal demands for justice. Tyrrell masterfully articulates the many forces that made American exceptionalism such a divisive and definitional concept. Today, he notes, the demands that people acknowledge America’s exceptionalism have grown ever more strident, even as the material and moral evidence for that exceptionalism—to the extent that there ever was any—has withered away.

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

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Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, "Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern.

China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere.

In Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise (U Chicago Press, 2020), Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike.

Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with agricultural policy, the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition.

Rozelle's papers have been published in top academic journals, including Science, Nature, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature. He is fluent in Chinese and has established a research program in which he has close working ties with several Chinese collaborators and policymakers. For the past 20 years, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy; a co-director of the University of California's Agricultural Issues Center; and a member of Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focuses on China’s political economy and governance.

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Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, "Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 08:00:00 -0000

The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis, at the mercy of modernizing and technological forces that are driving universities towards academic pursuits that pull in grant money and direct students to lucrative careers. But as Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show in Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (U Chicago Press, 2021), this crisis isn’t new—in fact, it’s as old as the humanities themselves.

Today’s humanities scholars experience and react to basic pressures in ways that are strikingly similar to their nineteenth-century German counterparts. The humanities came into their own as scholars framed their work as a unique resource for resolving crises of meaning and value that threatened other cultural or social goods. The self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of its project. Through this critical, historical perspective, Permanent Crisis can take scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities beyond the usual scolding, exhorting, and hand-wringing into clearer, more effective thinking about the fate of the humanities. Building on ideas from Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to Helen Small and Danielle Allen, Reitter and Wellmon dig into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world.

Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures at the Ohio State University. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe.

Chad Wellmon is professor of German studies and history at the University of Virginia. He is the author and editor of many books, The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook and Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 09:00:00 -0000

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William Sites, "Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Poet and jazz band musician Sun Ra, born in 1914, is one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his band “Arkestra” appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, this keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology and that the planet Saturn was his true home. In his book, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. William Sites contextualizes this visionary musician in his home on earth—specifically in Chicago’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 Sun Ra lived and relaunched his career.

The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then still known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—all this to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.

Dr. William Sites is Associate Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago. His fields of interest include urban and community studies, political economy, social movements, immigration, race, culture, social theory, and historical methods.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca

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Bruce Iglauer and Patrick A. Roberts, "Bitten by the Blues: The Alligator Records Story" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

It’s time for The Blues! In Bitten by the Blues: The Alligator Records Story (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Alligator Records president and founder Bruce Iglauer and his co-author, Patrick Roberts of Northern Illinois University, tell the tale of fifty years of Chicago Blues. From Delta-born guitar expressionists like Hound Dog Taylor to modern vocalists like Shemekia Copeland, from the South Side to the Norway fjords, Alligator Records has seen it all.

David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

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Lisa Jane Disch, "Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The common-sense way of thinking about what representatives should do in democracies tends to revolve around the concept of responsiveness: representatives should respond to the interests and demands of their constituents. However, this account of representation does not tell us much about how citizens form preferences. If political representatives and other actors have the ability to shape the interests and preferences of actors, this raises the specters of manipulation, voter incompetence, and false consciousness. All of these concepts question whether citizens have the capacity to form accurate beliefs about their own interests and to judge whether or not politicians are serving them.

In her new book Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2021), my guest Lisa Disch argues that concerns about manipulation and voter competence are overwrought because they are grounded in a mistaken understanding of how representation works in democracies. Building on the “constructivist turn” in representation, Disch argues that the starting point of theorizing about how representation should work in democracies should be on the processes through which representatives of all kinds – from elected politicians to media outlets and social movements – constitute the very groups that they claim to speak for. Rather than asking how we can make politicians respond to the interests of voters, Disch argues that we should be asking how political actors, parties, and movements can mobilize constituencies for projects of social change.

Lisa Disch is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan.

Geoffrey Gordon is a PhD candidate in comparative politics at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter: @geofflgordon.

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Lina Zeldovich, "The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0000

The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap!

Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our waste, but the long line of engineering marvels we've created to do so--from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today--has also done considerable damage to the earth's ecology. Now scientists tell us: we've been wasting our waste. When recycled correctly, this resource, cheap and widely available, can be converted into a sustainable energy source, act as an organic fertilizer, provide effective medicinal therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection, and much more.

In The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lina Zeldovich documents the massive redistribution of nutrients and sanitation inequities across the globe. She profiles the pioneers of poop upcycling, from startups in African villages to innovators in American cities that convert sewage into fertilizer, biogas, crude oil, and even life-saving medicine. She breaks taboos surrounding sewage disposal and shows how hygienic waste repurposing can help battle climate change, reduce acid rain, and eliminate toxic algal blooms. Ultimately, she implores us to use our innate organic power for the greater good. Don't just sit there and let it go to waste.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

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Keith Wailoo, "Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era — because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking — are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation.

In Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (U Chicago Press, 2021), Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers.

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Aleksandra Prica, "Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0000

Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900 (U Chicago Press, 2022) pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.

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Brenna Moore, "Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 11:00:00 -0000

In Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Brenna Moore takes us inside a global network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. With meticulous attention to the complexity of real lives, Brenna Moore explores how this group sought a middle way anchored in “spiritual friendship”—religiously meaningful friendship understood as uniquely capable of facing social and political challenges. Some of the figures are still well-known—philosopher Jacques Maritain, Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral, influential Islamicist Louis Massignon, poet of the Harlem renaissance Claude McKay—while others have unjustly faded from memory. Friendship, they believed, was a key to both divine and human realms, a means of accessing the transcendent while also engaging with our social and political existence.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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Melinda Baldwin, "Making 'Nature': The History of a Scientific Journal" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Listen to this interview of Melinda Baldwin about her book Making 'Nature': The History of a Scientific Journal (U Chicago Press, 2015). Melinda is AIP Endowed Professor in History of Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland. We talk about Nature, naturally.

Melinda Baldwin : "Yes, I think it will be surprising to many scientists today that Nature has really been thoroughly shaped by the journal's contributors and readership, and certainly to the people who view Nature's editorial staff as these all-powerful gatekeepers of scientific success. But, I love the list you just gave of all the people who are involved in making a journal — the referees, the editors, the authors, the readers, the publishing executives — because that can really be one of the things that we lose sight of when discussing modern scholarly communication: The professional advancement of scientists is so heavily dependent on being published in these peer-reviewed journals, and according to where a scientist works, things like tenure, promotion, and even just getting hired can depend heavily on getting into a particular type of journal, a prestigious journal that rejects many submissions. And so it can seem like the power to shape scholarly communication is only in the hands of the editors and in the hands of the anonymous referees who review papers. But looking at the history of scientific publication, you really see a story where a lot more figures are influential in shaping the way that the scientific journal has developed. And you see that, of course, with Nature, where it was definitely contributors' needs and interests that drove some significant changes in the format and the audience of the journal."

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Sarah S. Richardson, "The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother--except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury--could alter her offspring's traits. Consensus asserted that a child's fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing.

Over the last fifty years, however, this consensus was dismantled, and today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Collectively, these sciences argue that a woman's experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development.

Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, Sarah S. Richardson's The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects (U Chicago Press, 2021) offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues--in particular, the staggering implications for maternal well-being and reproductive autonomy--provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today.

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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Sarah S. Richardson, "The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Student in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.

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David Herzberg, "White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The contemporary opioid crisis is widely seen as new and unprecedented. Not so. It is merely the latest in a long series of drug crises stretching back over a century. In White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America (U Chicago Press, 2020), David Herzberg explores these crises and the drugs that fueled them, from Bayer's Heroin to Purdue's OxyContin and all the drugs in between: barbiturate "goof balls," amphetamine "thrill pills," the "love drug" Quaalude, and more. As Herzberg argues, the vast majority of American experiences with drugs and addiction have taken place within what he calls "white markets," where legal drugs called medicines are sold to a largely white clientele.

These markets are widely acknowledged but no one has explained how they became so central to the medical system in a nation famous for its "drug wars"--until now. Drawing from federal, state, industry, and medical archives alongside a wealth of published sources, Herzberg re-connects America's divided drug history, telling the whole story for the first time. He reveals that the driving question for policymakers has never been how to prohibit the use of addictive drugs, but how to ensure their availability in medical contexts, where profitability often outweighs public safety. Access to white markets was thus a double-edged sword for socially privileged consumers, even as communities of color faced exclusion and punitive drug prohibition. To counter this no-win setup, Herzberg advocates for a consumer protection approach that robustly regulates all drug markets to minimize risks while maintaining safe, reliable access (and treatment) for people with addiction.

Accomplishing this requires rethinking a drug/medicine divide born a century ago that, unlike most policies of that racially segregated era, has somehow survived relatively unscathed into the twenty-first century.

By showing how the twenty-first-century opioid crisis is only the most recent in a long history of similar crises of addiction to pharmaceuticals, Herzberg forces us to rethink our most basic ideas about drug policy and addiction itself--ideas that have been failing us catastrophically for over a century.

David Herzberg is an associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo is also the author of Happy Pills in America from Milltown to Prozac. David is also the co-editor of the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs.

Jay Shifman is a vulnerable storyteller, a stigma-destroying speaker, and the founder of Choose Your Struggle podcast. A guy in long-term recovery, Jay is dedicated to ending stigma and promoting fact-based education around Mental Health, Substance Misuse & Recovery, and Drug Use & Policy. You can learn more about Jay at his links here.

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Efrén O. Pérez, "Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist Efrén Pérez’s new book, Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (U Chicago Press, 2021), explores the term and category “people of color” and how this grouping has been used within politics, but also how it is has been used by those who are classified as people of color. Pérez examines group identity, language and public opinion, and implicit cognition to explain how marginalization of non-white groups can form a collective group identity that is interchangeable for the individual. Diversity’s Child fills in a rather substantial gap in research about racial and ethnic identity in the United States by surveying people of color about how they think and feel about racial disparities that impact them as well as other groups that are often categorized as people of color. Part of what Pérez finds in the multi-method approach is that politics can be seen as a solution to the inequality that many of those within this broad umbrella category experience and understand. Pérez’s training and research in both political science and political psychology allows him to bring together these connected social science threads and frameworks in exploring the understanding of broad group identity as well as intergroup identity.

Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of identity both conceptualizes and analyzes the identity of people of color by developing meaningful measurements and using Social Identity Theory to examine connections to differing identities. Pérez’s work also thinks through the evolving demographic shifts in the United States, exploring the projection that white Americans will become the minority population by 2050, and what the political ramifications are for the new majority minority. Although the term “people of color” has been used to identify Black, Latino, and other races for some time, Pérez research examines how these groups that are often pulled together under this common identity actually share in this broader category, and whether there are commonalities and concerns across ethnic, racial, and national identities. He does this by gathering data through opinion surveys, experiments, content analysis of newspapers and congressional archives, and in-depth interviews. Pérez’s research indicates that a person’s “color” identity exists and can be measured, and that identifying as a person of color shapes how minorities view themselves and their position within the political system. Diversity’s Child introduces a new perspective into the ongoing conversation about shifting political demographics, and elaborates on how the people of color identity has the capacity to mobilize groups and shape American politics. Pérez’s research also indicates how and where this umbrella category can essentially come undone—how the unifying qualities can be undermined by intergroup antagonisms. As he notes in our discussion, the research that highlights the capacity to bring together African Americans, LatinX Americans, and Asian Americans under the title of “people of color” also has within it the fissures and factions that can disconnect these groups from each other and from shared political pursuits.

Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj.

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John A. Dearborn, "Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Political Scientist John Dearborn’s new book, Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation (U Chicago Press, 2021), weaves together three connected threads in the course of his analysis: the role and capacity of ideas to make political change, the evolution of the position and understanding of the President of the United States as a representative of the citizens of the United States, and the way in which congressional legislation also works to shift the constitutional or institutional relationship between Congress and the President. This is a propulsive book, which is not necessarily the norm for academic publications, and Dearborn keeps the reader engaged through fascinating details about legislation that Congress passes in the midst of the 20th century that not only sets up policy outcomes but also provides the president with the power to create those outcomes. Dearborn then traces the ways, in the latter part of the 20th century, in which Congress attempts to wrangle some of that power back from the president, or to develop its own power to rival or parallel the president’s power.

Power Shifts focuses on this concept of the president as a national representative, which was not necessarily the idea that the Founders had for the president at the time of the Constitutional Convention. Some thought was given to how this national office would operate, but because of the way that the president is elected, at a remove from the people, the idea that the president was the voice or tribune of the people was not the key concept in the design of the presidency. Dearborn takes the reader through the evolution of this concept during the 19th and 20th century, highlighting how the presidents made claim to this particular role, while noting that it became clear that the veto power was not sufficient to reflect the voice of the people. During a number of decades in the midst of the 20th century, Congress builds up the presidency as an institution, formalizing presidential agenda-setting capacities and giving the presidency the organizational capacity to function as the center of the governmental structure and as the representative of all of the people. In examining several congressional acts, including the Budget Act of 1921, the Reorganization Act of 1939, and other particular constructions by Congress, Power Shifts examines how these creations centered presidential representation as the key to the design for these legislative moves. In the second part of the book, Dearborn explores the period of congressional resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s, and how Congress created connected legislation that sought to pull some of these powers away from the president, or at least provide Congress with sufficient capacity to challenge the president in a number of different arenas. And again, the arguments around the legislation dive into the question of whether the president is operating as a national representative, with a focus on the best interests of the people and the country.

Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.

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Scott Sumner, "The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It's happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of this century.

Foregoing the usual relitigating of the problems of housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argues that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet.

The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, written by its leading voice in economics. Based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, this highly accessible text lays a groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.

Scott Sumner is the Ralph G. Hawtrey Chair of Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also Professor Emeritus at Bentley University and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.

Kirk Meighoo is Public Relations Officer for the United National Congress, the Official Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago. His career has spanned media, academia, and politics for three decades.

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Sam Wineburg, "Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious.

With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (U Chicago Press, 2018), Sam Wineburg offers answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades!

If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we must explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.

It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way.

The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il

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Rachel M. Blum, "How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The discussion of factions in American politics is as old as the republic itself. But there is more to consider, particularly in terms of the way that contemporary factions operate within our current political landscape. Political Scientist Rachel Blum, in her new book, How The

How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics (U Chicago Press, 2020), focuses on the Tea Party’s rise, as a new faction within a long line of factions, and how the Tea Party infiltrated the Republican Party—impacting the disposition of the party itself and how it now operates. Blum’s personal background and political interests contributed to her capacity to analyze and evaluate the strategies and approaches used by the Tea Party, helping her to understand the structure and the sometimes-confusing tactics that these activists used to pursue their goals. Blum’s book also examines the Republican Party as an organization that, at its core, is aimed at getting Republicans elected to office, and how the Tea Party was able to take advantage of the structure and organization of the GOP at the most local levels, as well as at state and national levels, to aid in the drive to activate the Tea Party agenda within the Republican Party itself. Ultimately, the Tea Party would push against the GOP like a party within a party.

How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics is a multi-method investigation into the Tea Party and the Republican Party, constructed out of an elaborate collection of evidence including network analysis, the use of text-as-data, and long-form interviews with Tea Party activists. Blum started her research as a result of a conversation with a Tea Party activist in 2012 where, rather than discussing President Obama’s re-election, Obamacare, or government spending, Blum was surprised to find the activist preferred to discuss their distrust of the Republican Party. Why would this lifelong Republican choose to be upset with his own party, rather than with the Democrats? This is the question that drove Blum’s investigation of political polarization within the Republican party itself, and this led to a complex matrix of approaches to weave together the analysis of what was going on between the Tea Party and the Republican Party. Blum’s understanding of factions within factions presents a new way to understand the Tea Party’s political strategies, but it also helps us to understand the more expansive polarization across the political spectrum in the United States. Blum’s work also outlines how candidate Donald Trump picked up on the topics and the rhetoric of the Tea Party, and how the Trump/MAGA faction has also been able to take over the current Republican Party. How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics is an elegant and articulate exploration of the Tea Party, including an analysis of the Tea Party strategies, message, and its insurgent approach to politics. How the Tea Party Captured the GOP also formulates a lesson that guides the reader to better understand party dynamics, both inside the parties themselves and in competition with each other.

Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast.

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Helena de Bres, "Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

What is a memoir? What makes a memoir both nonfictional and literary? What are the memoirist’s moral obligations to the people they write about besides themselves, and to their potential readers? And is the writing of a memoir just indulging in narcissism, or revenge?

In Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Helena De Bres examines the philosophical issues that the memoir genre raises, given the doubts we may have about whether people can write the truth about themselves, whether the demands of literature overwhelm the demands of truth-telling, and even whether there is such a thing as a unified, persisting self to write about. De Bres, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, defends the nonfiction status of memoir while acknowledging that memories fail, we often engage in self-justification, and it can be difficult to draw a line between the “experiential truth” the memoirist tries to capture and falsity. De Bres deftly navigates issues in metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics in this highly readable examination of an evolving literary form.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee, "The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

To many observers, Congress has become a deeply partisan institution where ideologically-distinct political parties do little more than engage in legislative trench warfare. A zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to congressional politics has replaced the bipartisan comity ofpast eras. If the parties cannot get everything they want in national policymaking, then they prefer gridlock and stalemate to compromise. Or, at least, that is the conventional wisdom.

In The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (U Chicago Press, 2020), James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee challenge this conventional wisdom. By constructing legislative histories of congressional majority parties’attempts to enact their policy agendas in every congress since the 1980s and by drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, the authors analyze the successes and failures of congressional parties to enact their legislative agendas. Their conclusions will surprise many congressional observers: Even in our time of intense party polarization, bipartisanship remains the key to legislative success on Capitol Hill.

Frances E. Lee is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. James Curry is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. Their book, The Limits of Party, won the American Political Science Association's Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book in the field of US national policy.

Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett.

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Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.

Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India

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Michael Moore, "We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The image most of us have of whalers includes harpoons and intentional trauma. Yet eating commercially caught seafood leads to whales' entanglement and slow death in rope and nets, and the global shipping routes that bring us readily available goods often lead to death by collision. We--all of us--are whalers, marine scientist and veterinarian Michael J. Moore contends. But we do not have to be.

Drawing on over forty years of fieldwork with humpback, pilot, fin, and in particular, North Atlantic right whales--a species whose population has declined more than twenty percent since 2017--Moore takes us with him as he performs whale necropsies on animals stranded on beaches, in his independent research alongside whalers using explosive harpoons, and as he tracks injured whales to deliver sedatives. The whales' plight is a complex, confounding, and disturbing one. We learn of existing but poorly enforced conservation laws and of perennial (and often failed) efforts to balance the push for fisheries profit versus the protection of endangered species caught by accident.

But despite these challenges, Moore's We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an optimistic one. He shows us how technologies for rope-less fishing and the acoustic tracking of whale migrations make a dramatic difference. And he looks ahead with hope as our growing understanding of these extraordinary creatures fuels an ever-stronger drive for change.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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Pamela J. Prickett, "Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by Pamela J. Prickett is an ethnographic study of an African American Muslim community in South Central Los Angeles. The accessible study follows the believers of Masjid al-Quran (MAQ) as they live their Islam in and around the mosque community, such as during prayers or Ramadan, but also while conducting business or interacting with one another. Masjid al-Quran’s institutional history dates back to the Nation of Islam, which then later transitioned to Sunni Islam through the leadership of W. D. Mohammad. MAQ is also located in South Central, a community that has changed demographically and socio-economically overtime. Embedded in this complex urban geography, Prickett's study masterfully illuminates the deep entanglements of class, race, and gender in the defining of faith and ritual for members of MAQ. The study interrogates tenuous realities of giving and receiving charity, the intricate agentic Muslim expressions of African American femininity and womanhood, and the positionality of African American Muslims and diasporic Muslim Americans. This book is also a stunning ethnography. It is attentive to many methodological concerns of positionality, access, and immersive fieldwork, but it is also a story of friendship, love, and loss. This book will be of interest to those who think and reflect on Islam in America, African American Islam, and race, gender, class, and lived religion, but it will also be a productive text to incorporate into methods courses, especially on ethnography.

Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier.

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Gregory Jones-Katz, "Deconstruction: An American Institution" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities. Deconstruction: An American Institution (The University of Chicago Press, 20121) begins well before Jacques Derrida’s initial American presentation of his deconstructive work in a famed lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult. While much of the subsequent story remains focused, inevitably, on Yale University and the personalities and curriculum that came to be lumped under the “Yale school” umbrella, Deconstruction makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory, and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. Ultimately, Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in the United States—so often caricatured as a French infection—was truly an American phenomenon, rooted in our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, that eventually came to influence unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.

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Caley Horan, "Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. In Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America (The University of Chicago Press, 2021), Caley Horan charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life.

Through a careful analysis of insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them.

Caley Horan is Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ashton Merck is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Interdisciplinary Risk Sciences at NC State University. She can be found on Twitter @awmerck.

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Alexander Wragge-Morley, "Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project.

To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720 (U Chicago Press, 2020) explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.

Alexander Wragge-Morley is a lecturer in the history of science and medicine at the University of Lancaster. His research seeks to understand how people in the past obtained knowledge through sensory experience. In doing so, he brings together histories of science, medicine, the body, the neurosciences, art, literature, and religion.

Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie.

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Nayanika Mathur, "Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Big cats—tigers, leopards, and lions—that make prey of humans are commonly known as “man-eaters.” Anthropologist Nayanika Mathur reconceptualizes them as cats that have gone off the straight path to become “crooked.” Building upon fifteen years of research in India, this groundbreaking work moves beyond both colonial and conservationist accounts to place crooked cats at the center of the question of how we are to comprehend a planet in crisis. There are many theories on why and how a big cat comes to prey on humans, with the ecological collapse emerging as a central explanatory factor. Yet, uncertainty over the precise cause of crookedness persists.

Nayanika Mathur's book Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores in vivid detail the many lived complexities that arise from this absence of certain knowledge to offer startling new insights into both the governance of nonhuman animals and their intimate entanglements with humans. Through creative ethnographic storytelling, Crooked Cats illuminates the Anthropocene in three critical ways: as method, as a way of reframing human-nonhuman relations on the planet, and as a political tool indicating the urgency of academic engagement. Weaving together “beastly tales” spun from encounters with big cats, Mathur deepens our understanding of the causes, consequences, and conceptualization of the climate crisis.

Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com

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Nicholas Harkness, "Glossolalia and the Problem of Language" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, has long been a subject of curiosity as well as vigorous theological debate. A worldwide phenomenon that spans multiple Christian traditions, glossolalia is both celebrated as a supernatural gift and condemned as semiotic alchemy. For some it is mystical speech that exceeds what words can do, and for others it is mere gibberish, empty of meaning. At the heart of these differences is glossolalia’s puzzling relationship to language.

Glossolalia and the Problem of Language (U Chicago Press, 2021) investigates speaking in tongues in South Korea, where it is practiced widely across denominations and congregations. Nicholas Harkness shows how the popularity of glossolalia in Korea lies at the intersection of numerous, often competing social forces, interwoven religious legacies, and spiritual desires that have been amplified by Christianity’s massive institutionalization. As evangelicalism continues to spread worldwide, Glossolalia and the Problem of Language analyzes one of its most enigmatic practices while marking a major advancement in our understanding of the power of language and its limits.

Amir Lehman is an MA student in linguistics at UCL.

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Christopher M. Elias, "Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

If information is power, then so too is gossip. In Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation (U Chicago Press, 2021), historian Christopher Elias shows how three men who sat at the center of the mid-century surveillance state—FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the bellicose anticommunist Senator Joe McCarthy, and the gold-collar lawyer from New York, Roy Cohn—understood that power and used it to their advantage, elevating themselves and intimidating others. The trio investigated the private lives of their enemies, and mastered the tools of implication, sensationalism, photographic manipulation. By putting “the politics of insinuation” at the center of American culture, Elias, an assistant professor at the American University in Cairo, provides an innovative and entertaining reading of celebrity, and masculinity, and the mid-century surveillance state.

More than anything, Gossip Men illustrates that many seemingly disparate historical processes in the middle decades of the twentieth century were not coincidental but intertwined. The fact that “the golden age of American gossip magazines” preceded and overlapped with the McCarthyist witch-hunts turns out to be historically significant. (Or that Roy Cohn was one of the two funders of the National Enquirer throughout the fifties.) Gossip Men should interest a wide variety of readers, from historians of the Cold War to scholars of politics and popular culture.

Dexter Fergie is a doctoral student in US and global history at Northwestern University. His research examines the history of ideas, infrastructure, and international organizations.

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Samantha Barbas, "The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Over the course of a long and successful legal career, Morris Ernst established himself as one of Americas foremost civil libertarians. Yet his advocacy of free speech – an advocacy that established the case law on which much of the subsequent jurisprudence is based – stands in stark contrast with his opposition to communism and his longstanding support for J. Edgar Hoover and his anticommunist campaigns. In The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade (U Chicago Press, 2021), Samantha Barbas explores these contradictions to better understand Ernest and his legacy for our times. The son of Jewish immigrants, as a young man in college Ernst developed a gift for argumentation and an interest in progressive politics. Entering private practice after earning his law degree, he developed a reputation as a free speech crusader during the 1920s thanks to a series of high-profile legal victories and his leadership within the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet even while developing a national reputation as a liberal attorney Ernst adopted a strident opposition to communism that sometimes put him at odds with his peers. Such was his antipathy to it that he emerged as one of Hoover’s most visible defenders on the left in the 1940s and 1950s, even supplying the FBI director with insider information on ACLU activities. As Barbas explains, such activities reflected his desire to remain relevant at a time when his greatest achievements increasingly lay behind him.

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Hannah Wohl, "Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone.

Hannah Wohl speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged (U Chicago Press, 2021), her ethnographic study of the New York contemporary art scene that reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions and how aesthetic judgment evolves between artist studios, galleries, art fairs, and collectors’ houses.

We mention Paula Cooper Gallery and the work of artists Lucky DeBellevue and Gina Beavers. The Armory Show takes place in NY in early September 2021.

Hannah Wohl is an assistant professor in sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

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Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, "When Maps Become the World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

There are maps of the Earth’s landmasses, the universe, the ocean floors, human migration, the human brain: maps are so integral to how we interact with the world that we sometimes forget that they are not the world. In When Maps Become the World (University of Chicago Press), Rasmus Grunfeldt Winther considers how maps get made, used, and abused, and how processes and problems from cartography can be found in the ways we create and use scientific theories. Winther, who is professor of humanities at the University of California – Santa Cruz, shows how “pernicious reification” – taking the map or model for what it represents -- can arise in science, and he argues for a form of pluralism about our understanding of the world, called contextual objectivity, that lies between realism and constructivism. The maps and drawings filling the book highlight Winther’s discussion and illustrate the power that maps and theories have to shape the way we think about the world.

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Helen Sword, "The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Helen Sword, writing champion, brings us into the word gym. Or maybe kitchen. Either way, The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (U Chicago Press, 2016) is a short, sharp introduction to great writing based around 5 principles:

--use active verbs whenever possible;

--favour concrete language over vague abstractions;

--avoid long strings of prepositional phrases;

--employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence;

--reduce your dependence on four pernicious “waste words”: it, this, that, and there.

There are examples of the good - William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John McPhee, A. S. Byatt, Richard Dawkins, Alison Gopnik, and well, the bad. But you can fix the bad - really Dr Sword's point.

Dr Helen Sword received her doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University and has lived since 2001 in New Zealand, where she is a Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland and runs a private writing consultancy, WriteSpace Limited.

Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com

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John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, "The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted an ambitious yet clandestine programme to map the world - from big cities like New York and Tokyo, to seemingly-obscure towns like Gainsborough (Lincolnshire) and Pontiac (Missouri). The programme was unlike any other of its time, encompassing a wide variety of topographic maps and city plans in incredible detail. The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is not only a compilation of some 350 extracts of this collection, but also a deep dive into the provenance, nature and applications of these Cold War era Soviet maps.

Join us as we talk to co-authors John Davies and Alex Kent about the joys of working with maps, the difficulties they encountered researching the Soviet mapping programme, and their visions for the future.

Listeners interested in contributing to John and Alex's research may contact them at author@redatlasbook.com. Prints of Soviet City Plans are also available on their website.

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Alex Csiszar, "The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (U Chicago Press, 2018). We talk about the British, the French, and the Germans. No joke.

Alex Csiszar : "There's this myth out there about what makes a scientist a scientist. It's that they're highly skeptical of everything. They don't believe a claim until they see it with their own eyes. But anybody who spends any kind of time in the scientific process knows this is ridiculous. Most everything that everybody believes in the sciences is stuff that they've been given to believe through reading papers, through education, through being told by their colleagues, through textbooks–––almost everything anybody in the sciences believes has come to them through trust. And the formats and genres through which a lot of that stuff comes to one's eyes matter a lot for generating that trust. Though, maybe one of the lessons of the book is that the formats and genres might matter a little less than you might at first think because there are other means, perhaps more important means, through which individuals come to trust a particular claim––and personal contacts matter a lot here. But clearly what is being discussed in a lot of the debates that I follow in this book are the means through which such trust can be established, guaranteed."

Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.

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Hillary Angelo, "How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 29 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

As projects like Manhattan's High Line, Chicago's 606, China's eco-cities, and Ethiopia's tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (U Chicago Press, 2021), Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany's Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was "greened" with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley's urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

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Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck, "Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Jeffrey Jenkins and Justin Peck’s new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores how Congressional Republicans enacted laws aimed at establishing an inclusive, multiracial democracy. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Congress crafted a civil rights agenda -- including laws, strict enforcement mechanisms, and Constitutional amendments that (for a brief time) enabled Black Americans to vote, sit on juries, and exercise other civil rights. Using a rich collection of data, the book documents how the Republican coalitions that passed and enforced civil rights weakened because of GOP political weakness in the South, shifts in the political preferences of Northern voters, and lack of GOP unity over core assumptions. Jenkins and Peck offer a Congress-centered American political development perspective to understand how Republicans built civil rights yet subsequently undermined the nascent multiracial democracy that their civil rights agenda helped make possible. The book focuses on the conflict within the Republican Party and electoral trends to argue that “policy enactments are a consequence of, and a window into, evolving attitudes about civil rights.” The book’s granular political history demonstrates how legal institutions -- created by majoritarian bodies like Congress -- liberated and protected an oppressed class of citizens but also reasserted the power of the white majority.

Dr. Jeffery A. Jenkins is Provost Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law, Judith & John Bedrosian Chair of Governance and the Public Enterprise, Director of the Bedrosian Center, and Director of the Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.

Dr. Justin Peck is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University. In addition to his work on Congress and Civil Rights, he is engaged in a project that seeks to understand how the United States’ role in international affairs leads to the production of new political ideas and to the reform of domestic political institutions.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

Susan Liebell is professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “BLM versus #BLM:The Dangers of the New Armed Rebellion Narrative” was recently published as part of the Brennan Center for Justice’s series on Protest, Insurrection, and the Second Amendment and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” appeared in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Mary Louise Roberts, "Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Marching across occupied France in 1944, American GI Leroy Stewart had neither death nor glory on his mind: he was worried about his underwear. "I ran into a new problem when we walked," Stewart wrote, "the shorts and I didn't get along. They would crawl up on me all the time." Crawling underwear may have been a small price to pay for the liberation of millions of people, but in the utter wretchedness of the moment, it was quite natural for soldiers like Stewart to lose sight of that end.

In Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII (U Chicago Press, 2021), Mary Louise Roberts focuses on the corporeal experiences of the soldiers who fought in Belgium, France, and Italy during the last two years of the Second World War. In the horrendously unhygienic and often lethal conditions of the front line, their bodies broke down, stubbornly declaring their needs for warmth, rest, and good nutrition. Turning away from the accounts of high-level military strategy that dominate many WWII histories, Roberts instead relies on diaries and letters to bring to life visceral sense memories like the moans of the "screaming meemies," the acrid smell of cordite, and the shockingly mundane sight of rotting corpses.

Told in inimitable style by one of our most distinctive historians of the Second World War, Sheer Misery, published by the University of Chicago Press, gives readers both an unprecedented look at the ground-level world of the common soldier and a deeply felt rendering of the experience of being a body in war.

Douglas Bell is a historian who focuses on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies.

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Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, "Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.

With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (U Chicago Press, 2021) makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future.

Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future.

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Terry McGlynn, "The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Listen to this interview of Terry McGlynn, author of The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching (U Chicago Press, 2020). McGlynn is also a professor of biology at California State University Dominguez Hills and research associate in the Department of Entomology in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We talk about learning, actually.

Terry McGlynn : “If you’re giving students a writing assignment, like an experimental protocol, and they’re supposed to write about what they did in the lab or in the field, and it’s a cookbook project, you know, where the students don’t design the methods themselves and they're just doing what they were told to do and they're writing that down–––well, then the students are just jumping through a hoop and there's no ownership. That just gets you following through the prescribed steps, and in each of those steps, you just need to know, 'Oh, I just need to write a sentence where I've said This is where I did this,' and you write that sentence. And so, I think you can get through the whole assignment without thinking about the grand reason why you're doing it, right? Because the grand reason why you're doing it is because you need to turn it in and get your grade. And so all the little decisions you're making when you're doing the writing assignment–––all those decisions are all based on a micro level of, 'Okay, this next sentence, and that next sentence,' rather than if you had more control over what you're writing or if you had a bigger set of questions–––basically, if you knew why you're doing this assignment, you know like, what is the purpose of the assignment other than to turn it in and to get a grade–––because then that would be the purpose which is behind all those other small decisions, the purpose that guides you toward some destination."

McGlynn's blog is here.

Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research.

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Mallory E. SoRelle, "Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Americans rely on credit to provide for their food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and other daily necessities and the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated how they relied on private financial institutions that encouraged risky lending practices. Yet federal policy makers did little to change their approach to curbing risky lending practices and there was little political response from consumers or consumer groups. How can political scientists explain the behavior of government actors, interest groups, or borrowers?

In Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection (U Chicago Press, 2020), Dr. SoRelle insists that the expansion of consumer financing -- in terms of access and economic significance -- is fundamentally a political issue with serious political and economic consequences. She offers a policy-centered explanation sensitive to what she calls regulatory feedback effects that shape the behavior of bureaucrats, consumer advocates, and ordinary Americans. Individuals did not fail – they responded to systemic incentives and goals. SoRelle explains how angry borrowers' experiences with nearly invisible government policies teach them to focus their attention primarily on banks and lenders instead of demanding that lawmakers address predatory behavior. As a result, advocacy groups have been mostly unsuccessful in mobilizing borrowers in support of stronger consumer financial protections. The absence of safeguards on consumer financing is particularly dangerous because the consequences extend well beyond harm to individuals--they threaten the stability of entire economies. In addition to explaining the political dynamics of failure, SoRelle identifies possible remedies. This multi-method scholarship contributes to our understanding of policy feedback in an important and timely case study.

Dr. Mallory E. SoRelle is an assistant professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Her research interrogates how public policies are produced by, and how they reproduce, socioeconomic and political inequality in the United States. She has worked in both electoral politics and consumer advocacy. The podcast drops the week of the 10th anniversary of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” can be found in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell.

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Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The identity of contemporary Jews is multifaceted, no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with a host of complementary and sometimes clashing communities—vocational, professional, political, and cultural—whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture.

In Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities (U Chicago Press, 2021), Paul Mendes-Flohr explores the possibility of a spiritually and intellectually engaged cosmopolitan Jewish identity for our time. Reflecting on the need to participate in the spiritual life of Judaism so that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders and allows one to balance Jewish commitment with a genuine obligation to the universal, Mendes-Flohr lays out what this delicate balance can look like for contemporary Jews, both in Israel and in diasporic communities worldwide. Cultural Disjunctions walks us through the labyrinth of twentieth-century Jewish cultural identities and commitments. Ultimately, Mendes-Flohr calls for Jews to remain “discontent,” not just with themselves but also and especially with the reigning social and political order, and to fight for its betterment.

Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com.

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Michael Fishbane, "Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Perhaps no scholar has exerted a more decisive influence on the study of Jewish thought and theology over the past half century than Michael Fishbane. Continuing his recent engagement with Jewish theology, in Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Professor Fishbane articulates a four-fold matrix of theological thought and inquiry that addresses the modern person in all her complexity and perplexity, charting a path toward deep encounter, and deep meaning, to be found through engagement with life, text, and life as text.

Michael Fishbane is the Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School

David Gottlieb received his PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2018. He is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (2018). He will begin work in the summer of 2021 as director of the Jewish Studies program at the Spertus Institute for Learning and Leadership in Chicago.

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Stefan Vogler, "Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. His study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement--two situations where state actors must determine individuals' sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed--one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one--they present the same question: how do we know someone's sexuality?

In this rich ethnographic study, Vogler reveals how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Vogler shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize.

Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers.

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Benjamin Steege, "An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

“What are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?” asks Benjamin Steege—Associate Professor of Music Theory, Columbia University—in his new book An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This deceptively subtle question exercised the minds of some of Europe's most delicate musical thinkers at a time of great social and political upheaval, and continues to be of interest to musicologists today. Putting a little-discussed set of German-language primary sources into historical context (among others, the writing of Günther Anders (né Stern), Gustav Güldenstein, and Herbert Eimert) and expertly introducing them to an Anglophone audience, Steege explains the shared interests of a post–World War I constellation of musical thinkers whose disinterest in psychological and music-historical orthodoxy coalesces into a vital, if not entirely homogeneous, program for the phenomenology of music. Enriched by convincing music-analytical examples, careful handling of philosophical terms of art, and an ethical sensitivity not unlike that of its historical interlocutors, Steege's book—and the writers whose work it examines—is sure to draw attention from music historians and historians of philosophy alike, who will question the relative unfamiliarity of its subject matter and set out to reach out across this gap to explore the models of historical listening it offers.

Eamonn Bell (@_eamonnbell) is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in the Department of Music. His current research project examines the story of the compact disc from a viewpoint between musicology and media studies.

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Rachel S. Buurma and Laura Heffernan, "The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Listen to this interview of Rachel Sagner Buurma (associate professor of English literature at Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (associate professor of English at the University of North Florida). We talk about there book The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and

the great figures of English Studies--the professors and the students.

Laura Heffernan : "There is this real sense right now that the ability to read carefully, to learn how to think critically, to learn how to write well, and to conceive of those things as part of a larger life is under threat for the majority of American students. And one of the things our book really tries to do is to recover just how many of those students have participated in the making of English Studies, a discipline which is now being taking away from students, essentially. And so, our intellectual histories need really now to incorporate the institutions where such majors in the humanities are under threat and show, in really material ways as we do, that those students at those schools helped to make some of the core concepts and methods in the humanities."

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Allison Alexy, "Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two people involved. But anyone who has gone through a divorce knows the additional public dimensions of breaking up, from intense shame and societal criticism to friends’ and relatives’ unsolicited advice. In Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Allison Alexy tells the fascinating story of the changing norms surrounding divorce in Japan in the early 2000s, when sudden demographic and social changes made it a newly visible and viable option. Not only will one of three Japanese marriages today end in divorce, but divorces are suddenly much more likely to be initiated by women who cite new standards for intimacy as their motivation. As people across Japan now consider divorcing their spouses, or work to avoid separation, they face complicated questions about the risks and possibilities marriage brings: How can couples be intimate without becoming suffocatingly close? How should they build loving relationships when older models are no longer feasible? What do you do, both legally and socially, when you just can’t take it anymore?

Relating the intensely personal stories from people experiencing different stages of divorce, Alexy provides a rich ethnography of Japan while also speaking more broadly to contemporary visions of love and marriage during an era in which neoliberal values are prompting wide-ranging transformations in homes across the globe.

This book is available open access.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

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Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work currently living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at jmull@smith.edu.

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Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer, "Wildness: Relations of People and Place" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Whether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing is truly wild.

Wildness: Relations of People and Place (University of Chicago Press, 2017) charts a different path. Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness.

With this book, we gain insight into what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human.

Gavin Van Horn is the Director of Cultures of Conservation at the Center for Humans and Nature.

John Hausdoerffer is Professor of Environment, Sustainability, and Philosophy at Western State Colorado University.

Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com

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Anahid Nersessian, "Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In this episode, I interview Anahid Nersessian, professor of English at UCLA, about her book, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem.

The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between [Nersessian] and Keats, and not just Keats.” Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and she, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.

Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email.

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Joel Alden Schlosser, "Herodotus in the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 27 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Political Theorist Joel Alden Schlosser has turned his attention to Herodotus, an historian and political thinker from classical Greece, to learn how we might better think about and consider solutions to significant contemporary problems, especially those that contribute to global climate change. Schlosser explains that we are currently living in a new geologic and climatic age, the Anthropocene, which is defined as the current period where humans have had a direct effect on the geology and climate of the earth and the surrounding atmosphere. In finding ourselves in this new and potentially catastrophic period, we need to consider how to stop or solve this ongoing and evolving environmental crisis. Schlosser encourages us to turn out attention to Herodotus and his Histories, and he argues that these works, which dive into thinking about community and collective engagement, may provide guidance for contemporary politics and society. This is a fascinating structuring of reading Herodotus as an historian, examining his thinking and his critiques of Athens, of Persia, and of the political life and decisions that have been made by those in positions of power, and also in reading for guidance, to compel contemporary thinking in unanticipated ways. Schlosser centers his explication of Herodotus on the discussion of the nomoi, the informal cultures and traditions that make up our understanding of the fabric of political life, as well as the laws written by legislatures and that are more concrete. These nomoi are created by humans, to manage life. The nomoi contribute to the flourishing of society and should be designed to shift and adapt with time and circumstances. If the nomoi are not changed, they can become sclerotic, or corrupt and destructive of both humans and non-humans. This emphasis on fluidity is quite important to how we may want to craft our thinking in ways like Herodotus’s thinking.

Herodotus, as Schlosser notes, is a storyteller, and in the way that he tells stories, instead of writing factual histories like Thucydides, or making logical arguments like so many philosophers, Herodotus is able to engage in complexities of examples and of thinking. This mode of storytelling comes from older Greek traditions of the oral tales like those that Homer sang, or that the playwrights of Athens produced to communicate comedy and tragedy. This approach allows Herodotus to integrate not just the human experience, but also the experience of the non-human, all of the systems of energy that also exist and are natural, like the weather, the geography of a place, animals and other wildlife, diseases and illnesses. This weaving together of the human and the natural and non-human lays out a complexity of thinking and understanding that Schlosser suggests can be quite important for us to learn as we face complex natural, human, and non-human systems of energy that we need to repair or work collaboratively with in order to try to solve some of the more significant problems of the Anthropocene.

Herodotus in the Anthropocene (U Chicago Press, 2020) is an elegant argument that makes the case for Herodotus’s continued import, not just in the stories he tells, but in the way he grasps the world around him and how he discusses that world, of different systems of energy, and the complexities of these different entities. Herodotus, and Schlosser, compel us to broaden our ways of thinking and how we think, what we consider, and why.

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Jenny Bangham, "Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 26 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Blood is messy, dangerous, and charged with meaning. By following it as it circulates through people and institutions, Jenny Bangham explores the intimate connections between the early infrastructures of blood transfusion and the development of human genetics. Focusing on mid-twentieth-century Britain, Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics (U Chicago Press, 2020) connects histories of eugenics to the local politics of giving blood, showing how the exchange of blood carved out networks that made human populations into objects of medical surveillance and scientific research. Bangham reveals how biology was transformed by two world wars, how scientists have worked to define racial categories, and how the practices and rhetoric of public health made genetics into a human science. Today, genetics is a powerful authority on human health and identity, and Blood Relations helps us understand how this authority was achieved.

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Alex Wellerstein, "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 24 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Given the obsession with information and secrecy in today’s world, it can be difficult to imagine a time when governments held few secrets and worried little about what information was public knowledge. In Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Alex Wellerstein chronicles how much of this change can be traced to the development of atomic weapons in the 1940s and the efforts both then and since to restrict the details about them. Secrecy was a factor in nuclear technology from the start, as scientists argued amongst themselves about the need for self-censorship about the possibility of atomic weapons. By the start of the Manhattan Project the United States government had assumed responsibility for maintaining secrets, which they often did in ways that frustrated the scientists involved. What was hoped to be a temporary restriction because of the war became permanent with the onset of the Cold War, as the government fought to restrict any knowledge which they thought might aid the Soviet Union in the construction of nuclear weapons. While this effort came under attack from an increasingly aggressive group of anti-secrecy activists in the post-Watergate era, the government identified new threats in the post-Cold War era that justified the need to maintain nuclear secrets down to the present day.

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Deborah R. Coen, "The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter" (U Chicago Press, 2013)

Fri, 21 May 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet's hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordings of seismographs but also on the observations of eyewitnesses to destruction. During the nineteenth century, a scientific description of an earthquake was built of stories--stories from as many people in as many situations as possible. Sometimes their stories told of fear and devastation, sometimes of wonder and excitement.

In The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (U Chicago Press, 2013), Deborah R. Coen acquaints readers not only with the century's most eloquent seismic commentators, including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Kraus, Ernst Mach, John Muir, and William James, but also with countless other citizen-observers, many of whom were women. Coen explains how observing networks transformed an instant of panic and confusion into a field for scientific research, turning earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of the physical and human sciences. Seismology abandoned this project of citizen science with the introduction of the Richter Scale in the 1930s, only to revive it in the twenty-first century in the face of new hazards and uncertainties.The Earthquake Observers tells the history of this interrupted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk.

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Joseph Rouse, "Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 21 May 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudiates any philosophical or religious authority over the workings and conclusions of the sciences. A longstanding paradox within naturalism, however, has been the status of scientific knowledge itself, which seems, at first glance, to be something that transcends and is therefore impossible to conceptualize within scientific naturalism itself.

In Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image (U Chicago Press, 2015), Joseph Rouse argues that the most pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it.

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Carrie Noland, "Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Carrie Noland's Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary (University of Chicago Press, 2020) goes past conventional understandings of Cunningham that insist that randomness was his central goal as a choreographer, instead providing a portrait of a choreographer interested in story, connection, and affect. For Noland, chance is a starting point in understanding Cunningham, not a final destination. His chance operations were always shaped and modified by a keen choreographic and theatrical eye. Chapters explore his relation to many other artists and thinkers, including John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, James Joyce, and Bill T. Jones.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.

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Rachel Z. Friedman, "Probable Justice: Rethinking the Politics of Risk" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

The emergence of individual and commercial insurance in Early Modern Europe required an understanding of probability. In Probable Justice: Rethinking the Politics of Risk (U Chicago Press, 2020), Rachel Friedman highlights the political thinking that developed side by side with the advances in statistical methods. By the 20th century, small scale, group insurance had become national programs with profound political implications. Friedman's work traces how what she calls probabilistic social insurance played a key role in the emergence of the modern welfare state. And we discuss where we go from here, post-pandemic, when all insurances systems have been put to the test.

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves...

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Joshua Gunn, "Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering" (U of Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 04:00:00 -0000

When Trump became president, much of the country was repelled by what they saw as the vulgar spectacle of his ascent, a perversion of the highest office in the land. In his bold, innovative book, Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering (University of Chicago Press, 2020), rhetorician Joshua Gunn argues that this “mean-spirited turn” in American politics (of which Trump is the paragon) is best understood as a structural perversion in our common culture, on a continuum with infantile and “gotcha” forms of entertainment meant to engender provocation and sadistic enjoyment.

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Joshua Gunn (h) about lots of things other than Trump, from horror shows to sexting to Pee-Wee Herman, structural perversion, and, yes, some Trump.

We are recording this episode as the second impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump begins and the Trump fatigue is real. But this is not exactly a book about Trump. As Gunn puts it, “labeling Trump and his ilk as ‘fascist’ displaces our collective responsibility for their ascent to national power.” In Political Perversion, Gunn argues that “Trump’s rhetoric and person are better understood as replicating a style and genre of political discourse” that has a long history, but Gunn has eloquently re-imagined as what he calls “structural perversion.”

Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn advances a new way to interpret our contemporary political context that explains why so many of us have difficulty deciphering the appeal of aberrant public figures. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis.

We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Richard C. Jankowsky, "Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 02 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by Richard C. Jankowsky (an Associate Professor of music at Tufts University) is a rich ethnographic study of the sonic and ritual landscapes of complex religious communities in Tunisia. Using theoretical approaches of ethnomusicology that attends to questions and patterns of form, texture, and intensification of the soundscapes, along with the consideration of the uses of various instruments, such as during trance, Stambeli, and dhikr, the study illuminates the role of women, racial, and religious minorities in shaping the ritual musical landscape of the region. The book includes case studies on women's and men's Sufi orders, Jewish and Black Tunisian healing practices, and popular music across diverse socio-economic classes as a prism to consider the social work of ritual music. Jankowsky concludes with a critical discussion of the popularization of Sufi ritual music in mass-mediated staged spectacles and the ambiguous roles of these concerts. Conceptually, then, "ambient Sufism" illuminates diverse and adjacent ritual practices that serve as a musical, social, and devotional-therapeutic niche which exists within a broader ecology of practices that orbit the life and legacies of saints, especially Sufis. This book will be of interest to those who think and write on ethnomusicology, anthropology, Islamic and religious studies, and North African studies, while its accompanying website will be a great resource for those who teach on this topic.

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Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner, "African American Political Thought: A Collected History" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0000

Political theorists Melvin Rogers and Jack “Chip” Turner have produced a truly magisterial edited volume centering the work by African American thinkers over the past centuries. With thirty contributed chapters, ranging across time, place, and person, this Collected History opens up the dialogue among theorists, writers, students, and scholars to explore the work that has often been considered vital to understanding African American political thought specifically, and American political thought in general. As the authors note in their introduction, they intentionally chose to focus each chapter on an individual and that individual’s work as a thinker, moving away from other approaches that often pull together thinkers and activists under broad topics or approaches.

African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is both a reference, providing insight into one or more African American thinkers, and also an education, since the depth and span of the included work are so substantial. Rogers and Turner, and their contributing authors, wanted to bring out the complexity of individual black thinkers, thus the organization of the collection is one that provides the reader with an overview of each thinker, an analysis of their work, and the context in which to consider that work. In their introduction and in our conversation, Rogers and Turner explain the way that many of the black intellectuals and thinkers included in the collection act, in certain ways, like the original truth teller, Socrates, who emphasized the ugliness of truth, especially within democracy, but also the important need to know and understand the truth. Many of the thinkers included in this volume are truth tellers, but they are thinking and writing with great beauty, through their words, their poetry, even their music. As the editors note, this is a keen paradox of black political thought, ugly truths explained or expressed through great beauty. This extraordinary collected history will be of interest to many students, scholars, and researchers, across myriad disciplines.

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D. A. Miller, "Hidden Hitchcock" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

After decades of criticism about perhaps the most famous director in history, it seems that nothing is left to be said. But maybe critics just haven’t been willing to be surprised by the films they have watched again and again. On this episode of New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews famed literary critic Dr. D.A. Miller (h) about ropes, shoes, desserts, stains, and the other surprising little touches that characterize Hitchcock’s surplus style.

In Hidden Hitchcock (University of Chicago Press, 2016), D. A. Miller does what seems impossible: he discovers what has remained unseen in Hitchcock’s movies, a secret style that imbues his films with a radical duplicity. Focusing on three films—Strangers on a Train, Rope, and The Wrong Man—Miller shows how Hitchcock anticipates, even demands a “Too-Close Viewer.” Dwelling within us all and vigilant even when everything appears to be in good order, this Too-Close Viewer attempts to see more than the director points out, to expand the space of the film and the duration of the viewing experience. And, thanks to Hidden Hitchcock, that obsessive attention is rewarded. In Hitchcock’s visual puns, his so-called continuity errors, and his hidden appearances (not to be confused with his cameos), Miller finds wellsprings of enigma. Hidden Hitchcock is a revelatory work that not only shows how little we know this best known of filmmakers, but also how near such too-close viewing comes to cinephilic madness.

Works by D.A. Miller mentioned in this interview:

“My Lockdown with ‘Death in Venice,’” LA Review of Books

Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD

We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Aaron Tugendhaft, "The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020) unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet.

Beginning with the Islamic State’s claim that the smashed objects were idols of the “age of ignorance,” Aaron Tugendhaft questions whether there can be any political life without idolatry. He then explores the various roles Mesopotamian sculpture has played in European imperial competition, the development of artistic modernism, and the formation of Iraqi national identity, showing how this history reverberates in the choice of the Mosul Museum as performance stage.

Finally, he compares the Islamic State’s production of images to the ways in which images circulated in ancient Assyria and asks how digitization has transformed politics in the age of social media. An elegant and accessibly written introduction to the complexities of such events, The Idols of ISIS is ideal for students and readers seeking a richer cultural perspective than the media usually provides.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often with a focus on film and television studies.

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Robert Launay, "Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Take a look at a globe. Europe is there in big letters, and, to us, this hardly merits a passing thought. But Europe is a concept, a construct, an idea. So too is modernity. These categories have rich and contested histories.

It is to their lineage that Robert Launay looks in Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder (University of Chicago Press, 2018). In this lucid and discerning volume, Professor Launay explores how a host of European luminaries used others to think about themselves and their worlds.

Prior to the nineteenth century, discourses about the New World and China were much less about domination than about understanding their authors’ own social and political milieus. The figure of the Native America, the political life of China, the character of classical antiquity—all these “others” assumed different significances to different thinkers depending on the critique they sought to make about contemporary society.

Ranging as it does from Mandeville to Montaigne, Montesquieu, Kant, and many others, this book synthesizes an immense—and immensely complex—body of political thought into an accessible narrative that is doubtless of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike.

Jonathan Megerian is a doctoral candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University. He works on late medieval and Renaissance England. His dissertation explores the role of historiography in the formation of imperial ideologies in Renaissance England.

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Alisha Rankin, "The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science" (Alisha Rankin, 2021)

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 08:00:00 -0000

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story.

At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend.

Alisha Rankin's The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (U Chicago Press, 2021) sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power.

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Kara M. Schlichting, "New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Providing a fresh perspective is one of the biggest challenges for historians of New York City. Kara Murphy Schlichting, however, has managed to do just that in her recent book, New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book shifts our gaze away from Manhattan and towards the coastal periphery—where local planning initiatives, waterfront park building, the natural environment, and a growing leisure economy each had a stake in the regional development of New York City.

Schlichting’s regional and environmental approach frames New York’s extensive waterways as points of connection that unite, rather than divide, the urban core and periphery to one another. Residents of the Bronx in the nineteenth century organized groups like the Department of Street Improvements to ensure that their vision of urban expansion was realized, including implementing the grid-system to attract public and private investors from the urban core. Individuals along the East Bronx waterfront in the early-twentieth century similarly redefined the area according to their own wants and needs, converting temporary summer camp colonies into permanent bungalow communities outside, yet within reach, of Manhattan. By the 1930s, Robert Moses’ powerful State Parks Department, bolstered by New Deal and World’s Fair preparation funds, filled the natural marshlands of Flushing Meadows, connected Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx by constructing the Triborough Bridge, and lined area with new ‘modern’ recreational facilities. While differing in size and scope, each aforementioned case contributed to New York City’s conceptual and physical transition into a truly regional city.

Garrett Gutierrez is a Ph.D. Candidate of United States History at New York University. His research interests include urban/suburban history, race & ethnicity, informal economy, and youth subcultures.

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Rihan Yeh, "Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City" (U of Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Tijuana is the largest of Mexico’s northern border cities, and although it has struggled during the United States’ dramatic escalation of border enforcement, it nonetheless remains deeply connected with California by one of the largest, busiest international ports of entry in the world. In Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Rihan Yeh probes the border’s role in shaping Mexican senses of self and collectivity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Yeh examines a range of ethnographic evidence: public demonstrations, internet forums, popular music, dinner table discussions, police encounters, workplace banter, intensely personal interviews, and more. Through these everyday exchanges, she shows how the promise of passage and the threat of prohibition shape Tijuana’s communal sense of “we” and throw into relief long-standing divisions of class and citizenship in Mexico.

Out of the nitty-gritty of quotidian talk and interaction in Tijuana, Yeh captures the dynamics of desire and denial that permeate public spheres in our age of transnational crossings and fortified borders. Original and accessible, Passing is a timely work in light of current fierce debates over immigration, Latin American citizenship, and the US-Mexico border.

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Evan Friss, "The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Today on New Books in History, Dr. Evan Friss, associate professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the US to talk about The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). This book was originally released in 2015 by the University of Chicago press and we are chatting on the occasion of its paperback release in January.

Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.

The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.

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Philip Mansel, "King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV" (U of Chicago Press, 2019).

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Philip Mansel, a trustee of the Society for Court Studies and President of the Research Center of the Chateau de Versailles, has written a one-volume biography of the life and times of Louis XIV, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (The University of Chicago Press, 2019).

One of the longest reigning monarchs in Europe’s history, from 1643 to 1715, Louis XIV left a mark upon France for good and ill. He expanded the country’s borders but left it in horrible financial shape. He was a valuable patron of the arts and architecture, but wreaked havoc on some of his nation’s citizens, especially French Protestants.

He reaped the glory associated with imperial policy and dynastic intermarriages throughout Europe, but brought destruction to the lives, fortunes, and cities of his enemies. Mansel brings the court of Louis XIV alive, paying special attention to the daily personal life of the king and his associates. He reviews France’s effects on the politics of Europe and provides a detailed history of the key project of Louis’ life: the palace of Versailles.

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Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, "Terror Epidemics: Islamophobia and the Disease Poetics of Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies. In Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and tracks its tenacious hold through 9/11 and beyond. Raza Kolb assembles a diverse archive from colonial India, imperial Britain, French and independent Algeria, the postcolonial Islamic diaspora, and the neoimperial United States. Across literary, administrative, medical, and other non-literary sources, she reveals the tendency to imagine anticolonial rebellion, and Muslim insurgency specifically, as a virulent form of social contagion. In our conversation we discuss “imperial disease poetics,” British colonialism in South Asia, the 1857 rebellion, global cholera outbreaks, the Hajj pilgrimage, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the struggle for Algerian independence, Albert Camus’ The Plague, the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, Frantz Fanon, Djamila Boupacha, Salman Rushdie representation of radical Islamism, the 9/11 Commission Report, the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, and the Osama bin Laden mission.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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Fiona Greenland, "Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy" (U of Chicago Press, 2021)

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 04:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.

In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Hannah Marcus, "Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Today we speak to Hannah Marcus, Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about her new monograph, Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities.

Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Charles Hirschkind, "The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Charles Hirschkind’s lyrical and majestic new book The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (University of Chicago Press, 2020) represents a profound work of retrieval that launches and executes a stinging rebuke of an ontology of Europe that presumes its exceptionalism. The central focus of Hirschkind’s study is Andalucismo, or a discursive, aesthetic, and political tradition that seeks to disrupt the alleged cleavage between medieval and modern Spain by recovering the deep and penetrating imprints of Muslim Iberia on contemporary Spanish society. To engage Spain’s Muslim and Jewish past not as a bygone and irrelevant relic but as indelibly entwined to the present requires a form of attunement to the past that is activated by the sensoria and suspicious of historicist rigor. In the course of this poetically charged book, one meets a range of thinkers from across the political spectrum, and travels in unexpected avenues of inquiry such as the centrality of Flamenco to Andalucismo.

The Feeling of History combines piercing attention to the productive importance of the sensoria in encountering the past with an astonishingly lucid critique of dominant strands of the discipline of history. What emerges from this exercise is not only a richly textured interrogation of a hugely important though often lampooned tradition of Andalucismo, but also a politically urgent reconsideration of modern secular conceptions of how the past must engage and make claims on the present.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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M. Condon and A. Wichowsky, "The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 11 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky have written an incredibly timely and fascinating study of our understanding of income inequality in the United States, and how this understanding contributes to the policies that are pursued, or, to their point, may not be pursued by elected officials to solve some of these entrenched economic problems. The Economic Other centers on understanding how we, individually, see ourselves in cross-class comparisons and how this comparison—either looking “upwards” towards those who are wealthier than we are, or “downwards” towards those who are less economically affluent than we are—shapes our understanding of economic inequality, shapes our sense of political efficacy, and shapes our demands (or lack of demands) for policies to rectify this economic gulf. Condon and Wichowsky used a complex mixed method approach to the research, including conducting experiments and surveys for their research, asking respondents to consider themselves in these various economic comparisons, while also providing respondents with the opportunity to describe their own sense of their understanding of those who are seen as either wealthy or poor.

The analysis looks at the way that we understand our positions in society, especially economically, as relational, and therefore it is necessary to understand how this relational assessment contributes to how individuals comprehend the growing income divide in the United States. The research surfaced information that shows how social comparison thinking—our comparisons with others up and down the economic ladder—is animated by race and gender as well, connecting class politics with identity politics, noting that economic inequality or class inequality can’t be solved without attention to the racialized and gendered dimensions that are associated with income inequality. Condon and Wichowsky also explain that political rhetoric has played a role in how we understand our economic position and context, as have popular culture renderings, particularly in context of reality television programming about rich Americans. The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) is an important contribution to our understanding of how Americans understand ourselves, especially in regard to our own, personal economic status, and how this shapes our demands on politicians and policies to solve, or not solve, economic anxiety and precarity in the United States.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

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Gary Alan Fine, "The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

Most of the time, we believe our daily lives to be governed by structures determined from above (e.g., laws that dictate our behavior, companies that pay employees wages, climate patterns that determine what we eat or where we live). In contrast, social organization is often a feature of local organization. While those forces may seem beyond individual grasp, we often come together in small communities to change circumstances that would otherwise flatten us. In The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Dr. Gary Alan Fine emphasizes and describes the meso-level collectives, the organizations that bridge our individual interests and the larger structures that shape our lives. Fine describes the meso-level social collectives as “hinges” or groups that come together to pursue a shared social goal, bridging the individual and the broader society. Fine argues that understanding hinges in society is crucial to explaining how societies function – creating links between the micro- and macro-orders of society. Fine draws on historical cases and fieldwork to illustrate how these hinges work and how to describe them. In The Hinge, Fine provides reader with new theoretical tools for understanding an essential part of the social worlds.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent study, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant”, was published in Gender Issues Journal. His interests include the sociology of art and culture, sociology of death and dying, and sociology of sex and gender. He is currently working on a research project about obituary writing as an art world. More can be found about Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. by going to his website, Google Scholar, following him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or emailing him at johnstonmo at wmpenn dot edu.

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Jennifer M. Rampling, "The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 04:00:00 -0000

A four-hundred-year history of the development of alchemy in England that brings to light the evolution of the practice. Tracing the development of alchemy in England from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, Jennifer M. Rampling illuminates the role of alchemical reading and experimental practice in the broader context of national and scientific history.

Using new manuscript sources, she shows how practitioners like George Ripley, John Dee, and Edward Kelley, as well as many previously unknown alchemists, devised new practical approaches to alchemy while seeking the support of English monarchs. By reconstructing their alchemical ideas, practices, and disputes, Rampling reveals how English alchemy was continually reinvented over the space of four centuries, resulting in changes to the science itself. In so doing, The Experimental Fire The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) bridges the intellectual history of chemistry and the wider worlds of early modern patronage, medicine, and science.

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Tim Cresswell, "Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

What is the nature of place, and how does one undertake to write about it? To answer these questions, geographer and poet Tim Cresswell looks to Chicago’s iconic Maxwell Street Market area. Maxwell Street was for decades a place where people from all corners of the city mingled to buy and sell goods, play and listen to the blues, and encounter new foods and cultures. Now, redeveloped and renamed University Village, it could hardly be more different. In Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (U Chicago Press, 2019), Cresswell advocates approaching the study of place as an “assemblage” of things, meanings, and practices. He models this innovative approach through a montage format that exposes the different types of texts—primary, secondary, and photographic sources—that have attempted to capture the essence of the area. Cresswell studies his historical sources just as he explores the different elements of Maxwell Street—exposing them layer by layer. Brilliantly interweaving words and images, Maxwell Street sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place that will interest anyone in the fields of geography, urban studies, or cultural history.

Tim Cresswell is the Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place was published in 2019 by the University of Chicago Press.

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David Trouille, "Fútbol in the Park: Immigrants, Soccer, and the Creation of Social Ties" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 09:00:00 -0000

What meaning does a daily soccer game in a public Los Angeles park have for a group of Latino men and the ethnographer who studied them? In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. David Trouille, Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University, about the ten years of fieldwork behind his new book Fútbol in the Park from the University of Chicago press.

In a thoughtful self-reflexive conversation, David tells us how a neighborhood campaign against the players initially drew him to the community of Latino soccer players that are the subject of his book. He describes how he built relationships with the men over time on and off the field, and how the social space of the games created social ties that were essential to their ability to find work. While surrounding well-to-do mostly white communities accepted the men as workers in their homes, they simultaneously resisted their visible presence in the park. David tells us how this stigmatization, combined with national discourses constructing Latino men as “bad hombres” created dilemmas in how to write about his research. He explains how he made difficult decisions to only partially anonymize the men but not write about their immigration status, and ultimately describe the men as complex and real human beings, including writing about their drinking and occasional fighting.

For more information about Ethnographic Marginalia, please click here.

Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago.

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Richard M. Jaffe, "Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 10:00:00 -0000

Dr. Richard M Jaffe is a Religious Studies Professor at Duke University focusing on Japanese Buddhism. He is also the director of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke.

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David Sepkoski, "Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

We live in an age in which we are repeatedly reminded—by scientists, by the media, by popular culture—of the looming threat of mass extinction. We’re told that human activity is currently producing a sixth mass extinction, perhaps of even greater magnitude than the five previous geological catastrophes that drastically altered life on Earth. Indeed, there is a very real concern that the human species may itself be poised to go the way of the dinosaurs, victims of the most recent mass extinction some 65 million years ago.

How we interpret the causes and consequences of extinction and their ensuing moral imperatives is deeply embedded in the cultural values of any given historical moment. And, as David Sepkoski reveals, the history of scientific ideas about extinction over the past two hundred years—as both a past and a current process—is implicated in major changes in the way Western society has approached biological and cultural diversity. It seems self-evident to most of us that diverse ecosystems and societies are intrinsically valuable, but the current fascination with diversity is a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, the way we value diversity depends crucially on our sense that it is precarious—that it is something actively threatened, and that its loss could have profound consequences. In Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Sepkoski uncovers how and why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to think catastrophically about extinction.

This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian of science and capitalism at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here, or find him on twitter here.

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Dora Zhang, "Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

In this interview, I talk with Dora Zhang, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, about her book Strange Likeness: Description in the Modernist Novel, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. While description has been “near universally devalued” in literary thinking, and particularly in Modernism, Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers. She focuses on the works of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust to investigate how modernist descriptive techniques shift from a transcription of visuals to a translation and revelation of relations—social, formal, and experiential—between disparate phenomena. These writers maintained realism’s descriptive intentions to empirically document the world but expanded these commitments in new ways to render immaterial phenomena into language. In doing so, Zhang carries us beyond the classic dichotomies between narration and description and definition and description in order to rethink description and its place in the novel and, more broadly, literature.

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Lisa Wedeen, "Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

How has the Syrian regime been able to bear the brunt of the challenges raised against it? And, what can we learn about the seductions of authoritarian politics more generally from the study of Syria? These questions animate Lisa Wedeen’s Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her answers to them journey far beyond narrow causal inferences about the war in Syria, into an empirically rich, theoretically sophisticated account of the part that ideology as form plays in the making of subjects. Drawing on a decade of multi-sited ethnography, Wedeen traverses the day-to-day violence of war to attend to how Syrians are interpolated into arrangements for political domination through logics of disavowal. Weaving her interlocutors’ cultural products and interpretations of conditions in Syria together with work by Althusser, Arendt and Wittgenstein, she offers a complex and unsettling account of how people are brought into deeply ambivalent relationships with neoliberal autocracy, at once desiring political change and craving social order.

Listeners to this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science might also be interested in two other episodes on exemplary interpretivist political scientific studies featured in this series: Sarah Marie Wiebe on Everyday Exposure, and James C. Scott on Against the Grain.

To download or stream episodes in this series, please subscribe to our host channel: New Books in Political Science.

Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University, and a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group. He co-hosts the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel.

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Michael Fisch, "An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Earth. In An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Fisch provides a nuanced perspective on how Tokyo’s commuter train network embodies the lived realities of technology in our modern world. Drawing on his fine-grained knowledge of transportation, work, and everyday life in Tokyo, Fisch shows how fitting into a system that operates on the extreme edge of sustainability can take a physical and emotional toll on a community while also creating a collective way of life—one with unique limitations and possibilities. An Anthropology of the Machine is a creative ethnographic study of the culture, history, and experience of commuting in Tokyo. At the same time, it is a theoretically ambitious attempt to think through our very relationship with technology and our possible ecological futures. Fisch provides an unblinking glimpse into what it might be like to inhabit a future in which more and more of our infrastructure—and the planet itself—will have to operate beyond capacity to accommodate our ever-growing population.

John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations.

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Jeremy Black, "A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 09:00:00 -0000

The First World War was marked by an exceptional expansion in the use and production of military cartography. But World War II took things even further, employing maps, charts, reconnaissance, and the systematic recording and processing of geographical and topographical information on an unprecedented scale. As Jeremy Black—one of the world's leading military and cartographic historians—convincingly shows in this lavish full-color book, it is impossible to understand the events and outcomes of the Second World War without deep reference to mapping at all levels. In World War II, maps themselves became the weapons.

A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press, 2020) traces how military cartography developed from simply recording and reflecting history to having a decisive impact on events of a global scale. Drawing on one hundred key maps from the unparalleled collections of the British Library and other sources—many of which have never been published in book form before—Jeremy Black takes us from the prewar mapping programs undertaken by both Germany and the United Kingdom in the mid-1930s through the conflict's end a decade later. Black shows how the development of maps led directly to the planning of the complex and fluid maneuvers that defined the European theater in World War II: for example, aerial reconnaissance photography allowed for the charting of beach gradients and ocean depths in the runup to the D-Day landings, and the subsequent troop movements at Normandy would have been impossible without the help of situation maps and photos. In the course of the conflict, both in Europe and the Pacific, the realities of climate, terrain, and logistics—recorded on maps—overcame the Axis powers. Maps also became propaganda tools as the pages of Time outlined the directions of the campaigns and the Allies dropped maps from their aircraft.

In this thrilling and unique book, Jeremy Black blends his singular cartographic and military expertise into a captivating overview of World War II from the air, sea, and sky, making clear how fundamental maps were to every aspect of this unforgettable global conflict. Beautifully illustrated and with a past master of the historical art form as the author, A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps is the perfect holiday gift for both the academi and the lay educated reader.

Charles Coutinho Ph. D. of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles.

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Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

What is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question, for life really does look like magic: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. Huge advances in molecular biology over the past few decades have served only to deepen the mystery. In this penetrating and wide-ranging book, world-renowned physicist and science communicator Paul Davies searches for answers in a field so new and fast-moving that it lacks a name; it is a domain where biology, computing, logic, chemistry, quantum physics, and nanotechnology intersect. At the heart of these diverse fields, Davies explains, is the concept of information: a quantity which has the power to unify biology with physics, transform technology and medicine, and force us to fundamentally reconsider what it means to be alive—even illuminating the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.

From life’s murky origins to the microscopic engines that run the cells of our bodies, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (U Chicago Press, 2020) journeys across an astounding landscape of cutting-edge science. Weaving together cancer and consciousness, two-headed worms and bird navigation, Davies reveals how biological organisms garner and process information to conjure order out of chaos, opening a window onto the secret of life itself.

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Stuart Elden, "Shakespearean Territories" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

What can Shakespeare tell us about territory, and what can territory tell us about Shakespeare?

In Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and author of the Progressive Geographies blog, explores both of these questions, drawing on his earlier work theorising territory, as well as an extensive discussion of numerous works of Shakespeare. The book considers a range of subjects associated with the concept of territory, from the geo-politics of King Lear, the idea of sovereignty in King John, and power in Richard II, to questions of the body in Coriolanus, and ideas of calculation and measurement in The Merchant of Venice. Alongside Shakespeare’s relevance for understanding territory, territory offers a framework for alternative readings of Macbeth and Hamlet, and draws attention to often neglected or even completely ignored parts of Henry V. Fascinating and wide ranging, at the intersection of geography and English literature, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

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Christopher M. Kelty, "The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, algorithms, and software offer to make participation easier, but new technologies have had the opposite effect. We find ourselves suspicious of how participation extracts our data or monetizes our emotions, and the more procedural participation becomes, the more it seems to recede from our grasp.

In The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Christopher M. Kelty traces four stories of participation across the twentieth century, showing how they are part of a much longer-term problem in relation to the individual and collective experience of representative democracy. Kelty argues that in the last century or so, the power of participation has dwindled; over time, it has been formatted in ways that cramp and dwarf it, even as the drive to participate has spread to nearly every kind of human endeavor, all around the world. The Participant is a historical ethnography of the concept of participation, investigating how the concept has evolved into the form it takes today. It is a book that asks, "Why do we participate?" And sometimes, "Why do we refuse?"

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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Mark Wild, "Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City After World War II" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II (U Chicago Press, 2019), Mark Wild traces the achievements and losses of American mainline Protestant Christians as they attempted to renew their churches and their cities in the twentieth century.

Urban church renewal began as an effort to restore the church’s standing; in the process these liberal mainline Protestants adopted methods of social science and the language of urban renewal and secularization. Their campaigns embraced an interwoven relationship with government and local authorities all while maintaining an overarching belief in the goodness and righteousness of their Protestant influence and power. These efforts often collided with social causes and social conflict, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty.

Renewal illuminates this important facet of American church history and complicates narratives of liberal Protestant decline.

Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis.

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Trevor Pearce, "Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. Many are familiar with John Dewey's 1909 assertion that evolutionary ideas overturned two thousand years of philosophy--but what exactly happened in the fifty years prior to Dewey's claim? What form did evolutionary ideas take? When and how were they received by American philosophers?

Although the various thinkers associated with pragmatism--from Charles Sanders Peirce to Jane Addams and beyond--were towering figures in American intellectual life, few realize the full extent of their engagement with the life sciences. In his analysis, Pearce focuses on a series of debates in biology from 1860 to 1910--from the instincts of honeybees to the inheritance of acquired characteristics--in which the pragmatists were active participants. If we want to understand the pragmatists and their influence, Pearce argues, we need to understand the relationship between pragmatism and biology.

Trevor Pearce is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Alec Kacew is a medical school student at the University of Chicago.

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Michal Pagis, "Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0000

There is a strong interest today in turning inward to explore the mind and body. Mindfulness meditation exemplifies this trend, and has become increasingly well-known and widely practiced. In Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Michal Pagis, who lectures in sociology at Bar-Ilan university, explores in depth one school of mindfulness, or vipassana, founded by the Indian teacher S.N. Goenka and now established in countries around the world. Pagis draws on her own meditation experience and on in-depth interviews with vipassana meditators in both Israel and the United States. She explores the communities that form when people go on silent meditation retreats, the impact of focusing on bodily sensations over the course of an intensive retreat, and the ways that retreat practice affect practitioners and those close to them.

Jack Petranker is the Director of the Center for Creative Inquiry and the Mangalam Research Center in Berkeley, CA. He presents programs in Full Presence Mindfulness, an approach grounded in the teachings of Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku.

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Matthew H. Rafalow, "Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In this episode, I speak with Matt Rafalow, about his book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This book provides an ethnographic study of students and teachers at three Los Angeles schools utilizing instructional technology. We discuss the role of play in learning, how disciplinary dispositions are influenced by race and class, and how the prevalence ed tech can reinforce existing social heirarchies.

His recommended books included the following:

Teachers and Machines: Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 by Larry Cuban (Teachers' College Press, 1986)
Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs by Paul Willis and Stanley Aronowitz (Columbia University Press, 1981)
Keepin' It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White: Why School Success Has No Color by Prudence L. Carter (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Trevor Mattea is an educational consultant and speaker. His areas of expertise include deeper learning, parent involvement, project-based learning, and technology integration. He can be reached by email at info@trevormattea.com or on Twitter at @tsmattea.

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Soraya de Chadarevian, "Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

“What are chromosomes? And what does it mean to treat them as visual objects?” asks Soraya de Chadarevian in her new book, Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Considering this question as she follows the history of microscope-based practices in chromosomal research across a variety of contexts—from the medical clinic to the study of human variation—de Chadarevian offers readers a new history of postwar human genetics. This approach enables her to argue that cytogenetics was far from just “old fashioned biology that was eventually superseded by molecular approaches” and to show the continuities and interdependencies between different methods for studying our DNA.

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Ara H. Merjian, "Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Ara Marjian, Professor of Italian and affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History at New York University about his newest book Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Paosolini, a filmmaker who created art in a variety of media, has something approaching a cult following. Merjian explores, “Pasolini’s fraught relationship to the aesthetic experiments of his own age… [and] demonstrates how Pasolini's campaign against neocapitalist culture fueled his hostility to the avant-garde. An atheist indebted to Catholic ritual; a revolutionary communist inimical to the creed of 1968; a homosexual hostile to the project of gay liberation: Pasolini refused the politics of identity in favor of a scandalously paradoxical practice, one vital to any understanding of his legacy. Against the Avant-Garde examines these paradoxes through case studies from the 1960s and 1970s, concluding with a reflection on Pasolini's far-reaching influence on post-1970s art. Merjian not only reconsiders the multifaceted work of Italy's most prominent postwar intellectual, but also the fraught politics of a European neo-avant-garde grappling with a new capitalist hegemony.”

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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John Durham Peters, "Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news, maps, weather, and porn indifferently. Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (U Chicago Press, 2020), begun by the late Kenneth Cmiel and completed by his close friend John Durham Peters, provides a genealogy of the information age from its early origins up to the reign of Google. It examines how we think about fact, image, and knowledge, centering on the different ways that claims of truth are complicated when they pass to a larger public. To explore these ideas, Cmiel and Peters focus on three main periods—the late nineteenth century, 1925 to 1945, and 1975 to 2000, with constant reference to the present.

Cmiel’s original text examines the growing gulf between politics and aesthetics in postmodern architecture, the distancing of images from everyday life in magical realist cinema, the waning support for national betterment through taxation, and the inability of a single presentational strategy to contain the social whole. Peters brings Cmiel’s study into the present moment, providing the backstory to current controversies about the slipperiness of facts in a digital age. A hybrid work from two innovative thinkers, Promiscuous Knowledge enlightens our understanding of the internet and the profuse visual culture of our time.

Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on film and television studies.

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Ellen Wayland-Smith, "The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Ellen Wayland-Smith is an associate professor of writing at University of Southern California. Her book The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America (University of Chicago Press, 2020) follows the career of adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub who in the mid-twentieth century created the advertising campaigns selling consumer products to the average American housewife. More than products, Rindlaub sold a dream of domesticity and prosperity delivered through free-market capitalism and a Christian corporate order. The market offered an equitable allocation of products and resources to create the most efficient and comfortable society. Women found their place as patriotic housewives engaged in educated consumption and moral market choices. Rindlaub produced some of the most successful and award-winning advertising campaigns for such brands as Betty Crocker, Campbell’s soup, and Chiquita bananas. At the end of her career, Rindlaub began to question the ideas she had once promoted and to doubt the free market as the solution to social ills.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectdual history of feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir.

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William Germano, "Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

When I put down Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 2016), I looked up and began to wonder. I wondered about the book on gnomic poetry in Medieval Greek I had read over the weekend. I wondered about the PDF conference volume on my desktop between other PDFs downloaded at my university library. Casting an eye to the bookshelves along my wall, I looked at the spines of all the books there, upright and peaceful in their rows, and I wondered just who did the publishing of those books. Who printed the bindings and pages? Who stocked backlisted copies in the warehouse? Who encouraged booksellers to buy? Who adopted the project early stages? Who chauffeured the manuscript through marketing? Which editor oversaw production while which harried professor, between lectures biting into a sandwich, flipped the pages and weighed the arguments and challenged the ideas? Getting It Published opens up the other spaces which are inside of every book. There's quite a lot besides just the research inside those books on our Works Cited lists, and we don't know. Or we don't know enough, anyway.

Getting It Published, as the subtitle announces, is the guide to everything a scholar needs to know about where his or her research goes. William Germano, the author, is the guide of the book. A deft hand at elegant and lucid prose, William Germano has the industry experience, the university experience, and the teaching experience to know what writers of research will need when they go to submit their own manuscript, the manuscript that just might become the next book on a shelf or the next PDF on a desktop.

Scholarly Communication is the podcast series about how knowledge gets known. Scholarly Communication adheres to the principle that research improves when scholars better understand their role as communicators. Give scholars more opportunities to learn about publishing, and scholars will communicate their research better.

The interviewer, Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communication, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write writingprogram@zsl.uni-heidelberg.de

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Fernando Domínguez Rubio, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 08:00:00 -0000

This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”

Fernando Domínguez Rubio is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California-San Diego.

Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey.

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Fabian Holt, "Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (University of Chicago Press), Fabian In Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions (University of Chicago Press), Fabian Holt shows how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades.

Adopting a critical approach, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a theory of performance institutions. The two central institutions of popular music—the club and the festival—are analyzed within the broader history of music and cultural life in modernity, shedding new light on organized cultural life in capitalism, urban media cultures, and the role of festive events in society. Everyone Loves Live Music argues that while live music provides exciting experiences for many people, it also promotes a new ideology of music in neoliberal capitalism.

Dr. Fabian Holt is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University. He is also the author of the book Genre in Popular Music, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations.

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Joseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades have seen a drastic change in the way we approach it. In the past, a person going through a time of difficulty might keep a journal or see a therapist, but now the psychological has been replaced by the biological: instead of treating the heart, soul, and mind, we take a pill to treat the brain.

Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery (University of Chicago Press) is a field report on how ordinary people dealing with common problems explain their suffering, how they’re increasingly turning to the thin and mechanistic language of the “body/brain,” and what these encounters might tell us.

Drawing on interviews with people dealing with struggles such as underperformance in school or work, grief after the end of a relationship, or disappointment with how their life is unfolding, Joseph E. Davis reveals the profound revolution in consciousness that is underway. We now see suffering as an imbalance in the brain that needs to be fixed, usually through chemical means. This has rippled into our social and cultural conversations, and it has affected how we, as a society, imagine ourselves and envision what constitutes a good life.

Davis warns that what we envision as a neurological revolution, in which suffering is a mechanistic problem, has troubling and entrapping consequences. And he makes the case that by turning away from an interpretive, meaning-making view of ourselves, we thwart our chances to enrich our souls and learn important truths about ourselves and the social conditions under which we live.

Joe Davis is Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia

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Zachary Dorner, "Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long 18th Century" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In Merchants of Medicine: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (The University of Chicago Press), medicines embody the hopes of those who prepared, sold, and ingested them.

By investigating the different contexts and practices associated with the British long-distance trade in patent medicines, Zachary Dorner unravels the intertwined history of financial markets, health concerns, and colonial warfare. He argues that from the late seventeenth-century, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways, providing solutions to the problems of labor shortages in the armed forces, trading companies and plantations, while also informing the categories of difference that organized such institutions.

Zachary Dorner is the Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in history at Johns Hopkins University.

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Anita Kurimay, "Queer Budapest, 1873-1961" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

By the dawn of the twentieth century, Budapest was a burgeoning cosmopolitan metropolis. Known at the time as the “Pearl of the Danube,” it boasted some of Europe’s most innovative architectural and cultural achievements, and its growing middle class was committed to advancing the city’s liberal politics and making it an intellectual and commercial crossroads between East and West.

In addition, as historian Anita Kurimay reveals, fin-de-siècle Budapest was also famous for its boisterous public sexual culture, including a robust gay subculture. Queer Budapest, 1873-1961 (University of Chicago Press) is the riveting story of nonnormative sexualities in Hungary as they were understood, experienced, and policed between the birth of the capital as a unified metropolis in 1873 and the decriminalization of male homosexual acts in 1961.

Kurimay explores how and why a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes came to regulate but also tolerate and protect queer life. She also explains how the precarious coexistence between the illiberal state and queer community ended abruptly at the close of World War II. A stunning reappraisal of sexuality’s political implications, Queer Budapest recuperates queer communities as an integral part of Hungary’s—and Europe’s—modern incarnation.

Anita Kurimay is an Associate Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College (USA).

Steven Seegel is Professor of History, University of Northern Colorado

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Jessica Pierce, "Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

A life shared with pets brings many emotions. We feel love for our companions, certainly, and happiness at the thought that we’re providing them with a safe, healthy life. But there’s another emotion, less often acknowledged, that can be nearly as powerful: guilt. When we see our cats gazing wistfully out the window, or watch a goldfish swim lazy circles in a bowl, we can’t help but wonder: are we doing the right thing, keeping these independent beings locked up, subject to our control? Is keeping pets actually good for the pets themselves?

That’s the question that animates Jessica Pierce’s powerful Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets (University of Chicago Press). A lover of pets herself (including, over the years, dogs, cats, fish, rats, hermit crabs, and more), Pierce understands the joys that pets bring us. But she also refuses to deny the ambiguous ethics at the heart of the relationship, and through a mix of personal stories, philosophical reflections, and scientifically informed analyses of animal behavior and natural history, she puts pet-keeping to the test.

Is it ethical to keep pets at all? Are some species more suited to the relationship than others? Are there species one should never attempt to own? And are there ways that we can improve our pets’ lives, so that we can be confident that we are giving them as much as they give us?

Deeply empathetic, yet rigorous and unflinching in her thinking, Pierce has written a book that is sure to help any pet owner, unsettling assumptions but also giving them the knowledge to build deeper, better relationships with the animals with whom they’ve chosen to share their lives.

Jessica Pierce is an American bioethicist, philosopher, and writer. She currently has a loose affiliation with the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado Denver, but considers herself mostly independent.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Nathan J. Kelly, "America's Inequality Trap" (U of Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 08:00:00 -0000

America's Inequality Trap (University of Chicago Press, 2020) focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and American politics. Nathan J. Kelly, Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, argues that the increasing concentration of economic power effects political power, thus allowing the gap between the rich and everyone else to become more acute and more rigid. The increasing level of inequality, according to Kelly, also tends to be reinforced by public policies. This then creates a self-perpetuating plutocracy because those with more economic resources will have more political power or the capacity to influence those with political power and the kinds of policies that are being made. Thus, we have the theory of the inequality trap.

Kelly’s analysis is fairly specific to the United States, since the inequality trap itself combines aspects of the American political system that are rather unique, but he notes that the trip is not exclusive to the U.S., it is part of a “more general phenomenon.” In order to understand this inequality trap, Kelly’s research links politics, policy, and income inequality. He then explores different pathways that contribute to establishing and perpetuating this system, which concentrates more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Each chapter assesses a different pathway: public opinion, elections, inegalitarian policy convergence, and policy stagnation, all of which contribute to economic inequality in the United States and how it operates within the political system. Public opinion and elections center around political attitudes and behavior while inegalitarian policy convergence and policy stagnation focus on policy-making institutions and processes. Each pathway shares the same outcome that they contribute to the inequality trap in which only those who are wealthy benefit from it.

In analyzing the effects of high inequality on each of the pathways, Kelly exposes the pattern of political response, or non-response, to the problem of inequality and the role of partisan politics within these dynamics. Kelly also emphasizes that racial bias and economic inequality play a substantial role in political decision making, especially in public opinion and elections. These distinct areas often have some overlap in terms of voter engagement and political behavior and choices and, according to the research, this also helps us understand the outcome in the 2016 presidential election. America’s Inequality Trap concludes with a discussion about economic inequality before the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Both events occurred during times of high economic inequality but there were distinct differences in the political response to that inequality and the economic collapses that followed. Kelly explains how and why the political responses differed, and by comparing the two, he suggests possible strategies for escaping the ongoing inequality trap.

Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.

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Dan Edelstein, "On the Spirit of Rights" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 28 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures?

In On the Spirit of Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others, who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

Dan Edelstein is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and (by courtesy) professor of history at Stanford University. He is the author of The Terror of Natural Right, The Enlightenment, and On the Spirit of Rights, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London.

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Steven Shapin, "The Scientific Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2018), his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship.

Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. His books include Leviathan and the Air-Pump (with Simon Schaffer), A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, and The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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C. Besteman and H. Gusterson, "Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

How can we understand computerization as a social process? Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a timely and welcome edited volume in which a set of interdisciplinary contributors explore how people make automated processes work, and how these systems reciprocally transform everyday life. From farming to finance—not to mention schools to prisons—the volume amounts to an urgent plea to remove the veil of corporate and government secrecy shrouding technologies that subtly restructure our social and material worlds without any semblance of democratic oversight. I spoke with the book’s editors, Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, about how to do the anthropology of algorithms, and what they learned from bringing these accounts together.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used statistics to make claims of discrimination in 1970s America, and how the relationship between rights and numbers became a flashpoint in political struggles over bureaucracy, race, and law.

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Emily Pawley, "The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (University Of Chicago Press) aims to remake this staid vision.

Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world.

Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, U.S. history, and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation.

New Books Network listeners can purchase The Nature of the Future for 25% off using the coupon code PAWLEY here.

Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history. He lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

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Daniel P. Aldrich, "Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Despite the devastation caused by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and 60-foot tsunami that struck Japan in 2011, some 96% of those living and working in the most disaster-stricken region of Tōhoku made it through. Smaller earthquakes and tsunamis have killed far more people in nearby China and India. What accounts for the exceptionally high survival rate? And why is it that some towns and cities in the Tōhoku region have built back more quickly than others?

Black Wave: How Networks and Governance Shaped Japan’s 3/11 Disasters (University of Chicago Press) illuminates two critical factors that had a direct influence on why survival rates varied so much across the Tōhoku region following the 3/11 disasters and why the rebuilding process has also not moved in lockstep across the region. Individuals and communities with stronger networks and better governance, Daniel P. Aldrich shows, had higher survival rates and accelerated recoveries. Less-connected communities with fewer such ties faced harder recovery processes and lower survival rates.

Beyond the individual and neighborhood levels of survival and recovery, the rebuilding process has varied greatly, as some towns and cities have sought to work independently on rebuilding plans, ignoring recommendations from the national government and moving quickly to institute their own visions, while others have followed the guidelines offered by Tokyo-based bureaucrats for economic development and rebuilding.

The datasets Daniel mentions in the podcast are available here.

Daniel P. Aldrich is director of the Security and Resilience Studies Program and professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University. You can find him on twitter @DanielPAldrich

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch.

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Andrew S. Baer, "Beyond the Usual Beating" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys and elected officials looked the other way. In his book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago (University of Chicago Press), Andrew Baer explains how the eponymous detective and others hid their violence, and the arduous struggle to get Burge fired and win reparations for survivors.

He blends legal and social history with ethnography to chronicle the labyrinthine legal system that concealed this torture, and the challenges of political coalition-building across class, race, and prison walls. The result is a history of the fraying reform discourse with which we live.

Andrew S. Baer is assistant professor of history with a secondary appointment in African American studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Patrick Reilly studies US history, race, and civilian cooperation with police at Vanderbilt University.

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Elizabeth A. Williams, "Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750-1950" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Elizabeth A. Williams is professor emerita of history at Oklahoma State University.

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David Kaiser, "Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

David Kaiser is a truly unique scholar: he is simultaneously a physics researcher and a historian of science whose writing beautifully melds the past and future of science.

As a historian, he studies mostly 20th-century physics, and in particular the history of quantum mechanics, Feynman diagrams, physics in the counterculture era, and much more. As a physicist, he studies particle physics and theories of cosmology, focused mostly on the early expansion of the universe.

In this New Books Network podcast, I speak to David Kaiser about his new book, Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (University of Chicago Press, 2020). It’s a collection of essays, many of them adapted from magazine and newspaper articles he’s penned over the years.

The book paints intimate portraits of some incredible luminaries—Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Paul Dirac, among many others—explains how physics has changed as a discipline in the last century, and demonstrates how science is inseparable from its social context. David Kaiser is an incredible ambassador for physics and its history, and it was a delight to speak with him.

David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Matthew Jordan is an instructor at McMaster University, where he teaches courses on AI and the history of science. You can follow him on Twitter @mattyj612 or his website matthewleejordan.com.

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Marianna Ritchey, "Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Wed, 08 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

What is the place of classical music in contemporary society?

In Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Marianna Ritchey, an assistant professor of music history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explores the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and classical music, showing how many of the democratizing and innovative elements of the genre go hand-in-hand with corporate power.

Using detailed social and musicological studies of key composers, movements, opera companies, and tech advertising, the book offers a critical but sympathetic analysis of the potential, but also the limits, of classical music. Accessibly written, blending critical theory with contemporary case studies the book will be essential reading across arts and social sciences, as well as for business and technology scholars.

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Ruth Leys, "The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique" (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Ruth Leys (she/hers), Professor Emeritus of Johns Hopkins University, on The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well. Yet, surprisingly, there is still no consensus on their basic nature or workings. Ruth Leys’s brilliant, much anticipated history, therefore, is a story of controversy and disagreement.

The Ascent of Affect focuses on the post–World War II period, when interest in emotions as an object of study began to revive. Leys analyzes the ongoing debate over how to understand emotions, paying particular attention to the continual conflict between camps that argue for the intentionality or meaning of emotions but have trouble explaining their presence in non-human animals and those that argue for the universality of emotions but struggle when the question turns to meaning.

Addressing the work of key figures from across the spectrum, considering the potentially misleading appeal of neuroscience for those working in the humanities, and bringing her story fully up to date by taking in the latest debates, Leys presents here the most thorough analysis available of how we have tried to think about how we feel.

We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @rhetoriclee for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts.

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Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 08:00:00 -0000

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Robert Samet, "Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, has been ranked as one of the most violent cities in the world.

In Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Robert Samet undertakes ethnography with crime journalists on their reporting practices to offer a compelling argument about the relationship between populist politics and the news.

Samet participates with and observes a group of crime reporters as they traverse the city, investigating crimes, recording interviews with victims, and writing up their stories. Reporters commonly collected and publicized denuncias, victims’ accusations or denouncements of wrongdoing that can also include calls for justice.

Samet details the substance and variation of such denuncias to demonstrate how the ubiquity and prevalence of these pronouncements articulate a popular will.

This book contributes to studies of media and journalism, Latin American politics and society, and political anthropology in order to expand our understanding of the role of journalism in amplifying the will of the people.

Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.

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Edgar Garcia, "Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs and Khipu" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In his sixth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin wrote, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.” Edgar Garcia is one such historian…and if you’re not yet convinced of Benjamin’s dictum, you should listen to this interview.

In Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2019) Garcia sets sparks flying by inviting us to explore the literature and theory created by 20th and 21st century writers who deploy sign systems that, according to the creation myth of European hegemony, alphabetized thought supposedly superseded and destroyed. Akin to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic in ambition and originality, Signs of the Americas not only pries open a fascinating archive but also forces us to question the organizational principles that govern intellectual history and cultural criticism in this hemisphere. In this interview, we discuss work by Jaime de Angulo, Cecilia Vicuña, John Borrows, and Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as Garcia’s own Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019), which serves as a kind of poetic companion to Signs.

David Gutherz is a Teaching Fellow in Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research deals with the history of the human sciences, with a special interest in how intellectuals have aided and undermined authoritarian movements. You can find out more about his work at www.davidmaxgutherz.com

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Robert Pippin, "Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Robert Pippin's book Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form (University of Chicago Press, 2020) is a work in the philosophy of film published in 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. Each chapter in Filmed Thought treats a film in-depth, including works by Hitchcock, Ray, Malick, Sirk, Almodovar, Polanski, and the Dardenne brothers. The book is written in an accessible style that does not seize upon films as merely convenient illustrations of already established philosophical ideas. Instead, Pippindevotes as much energy to analysing the expressive capacities of cinema as he does to articulating the philosophical themes and questions of social context he sees reflected in each of the films treated. This gives his writing a delicacy and sensitivity that lovers of cinema may find surprising in a professional philosopher. Nonetheless, there are plenty of ideas worked through in the text, many inspired by Pippin’s reading of Hegel and Cavell, including the limits of moral judgement, the dimensions of cinematic irony, the critical possibilities of genre films, the relation between interiority and bodily expression, and the intriguing problem of ‘unknowingness’.

Robert Pippin is a philosopher known principally for his work in the area of German Idealism, particularly Hegel, although he has previously published widely in film-philosophy, including the Western genre, film noir, and Hitchcock.

Bill Schaffer is a lecturer in film studies. He is currently a scholar of no fixed institution.

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Alexander L. Fattal, "Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 29 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2019) investigates the Colombian government’s campaign to turn Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC into consumer citizens. In this ethnography, Alexander L. Fattal explores the ways marketing became a tactic of counterinsurgency as a means of a humanitarian intervention, which has proven stunning and illusory. The work draws on archival research and extensive fieldwork with Colombian Ministry of Defense, former rebels, political exiles, and peace negotiators in Colombia, Sweden, and Cuba. Alex. Fattal is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of California at San Diego.

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Sonali Chakravarti, "Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Mon, 11 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Sonali 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 earlier work on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and how citizens were incorporated into the process of transitional justice and engagement in democratic spaces.

In Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Chakravarti argues that the jury room is an important democratic space that is generally ignored as an opportunity to engage citizens in active participation in and with the law. Because we generally are not trained or taught about the actual process we will encounter as jurors, outside of popular culture renderings, we rarely enter into the process with knowledge about either the law itself, or the role that juries can play in their decisions, not only with regard to the case in front of them but also in regard to the legitimacy of the laws themselves. Chakravarti follows up on Alexis de Tocqueville’s praise of the American jury system, while pushing beyond Tocqueville’s admiration to suggest that the jurors themselves can be radically enfranchised as citizens on the jury. Jurors can be better prepared to serve and thus can more fully engage this democratic space if they had more education about the process itself and their capacities inside the jury room. Chakravarti charts both the history of the jury process in the United States, and the various ways that juries have changed how they operate and behave within the parameters of the legal system. This is a fascinating examination of an often obscured but important democratic space.

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Peter La Chapelle, "I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Historians, musicologists, and sociologists have long studied the relationship between politics and music. Peter La Chapelle’s new book, I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music (University of Chicago Press, 2019) traces interactions between country music and politics beginning with two late nineteenth-century politicians who fiddled to their supporters and ending with the 2016 election season. He establishes some long-standing associations between celebrity candidates, populist insurgents, outsider politics and country music. La Chapelle also does not shy away from exposing the ways that racist and anti-Semitic political figures have used country music to support their beliefs. While today many people think of country music as a politically conservative genre, La Chapelle brings to light a more complex story of politicians across the spectrum looking to country music to support their beliefs, publicize their campaigns, and establish their authenticity with their constituents.

Peter La Chapelle is a professor of history at Nevada State College. A cultural historian, his research centers on the intersections between country music, politics, and national identity in the United States.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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Owen Whooley, "On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping new book tells us, peering deep into the human mind is, well, really hard.

On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing (University Chicago Press, 2019) begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the United States in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no anti-psychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results.

In this interview, Dr. Whooley and I discuss the sociology of knowledge and ignorance that guide this book. We then discuss the changing identity of the field of psychiatry, how the DSM affected the legitimacy and perception of the discipline, and ways of managing ignorance. I highly recommend this book for students, professors, and anyone else interested in sociology of knowledge, health and illness and medical sociology, historical sociology, and mental health.

Dr. Owen Whooley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Mexico and Senior Fellow, UNM Center for Health Policy.

Krystina Millar is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sociology of the body, and sexuality. You can find her on Twitter at @KrystinaMillar.

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Marco Z. Garrido, "The Patchwork City: Class, Space and Politics in Metro Manila" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In contemporary Manila, slums and squatter settlements are peppered throughout the city, often pushing right up against the walled enclaves of the privileged, creating the complex geopolitical pattern of what sociologist Marco Garrido calls the “patchwork city.” Synthesizing literature in political sociology and urban studies, Garrido shows how experiences along the housing divide in Manila constitute political subjectivities and shape the very experience of democracy in contemporary Philippines.

The Patchwork City: Class, Space and Politics in Metro Manila (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is a beautifully written ethnography is divided into two parts. In the first part, Garrido documents the fragmentation of Manila into a mélange of spaces defined by class, particularly slums and upper- and middle-class enclaves. He calls the pattern of urban fragmentation “interspersion” and persuasively argues that it is a spatial form distinct to cities in the Global South. This distinction is marked not by increasing segregation (as is the case with cities in the Global North) but by increasing proximity and dependence. For enclave residents, the proximity of slums is a source of insecurity, compelling them to impose spatial boundaries on slum residents. For slum residents, the regular imposition of these boundaries creates a pervasive sense of discrimination. Within this everyday, and almost normalized, sense of discrimination, the urban poor and middle class emerge not as labor and capital but as “squatters” and “villagers,” Manila’s name for subdivision residents. In other words, economic identities are unflinchingly spatialized.

In the second part, Garrido looks beyond urban fragmentation to delineate its effects on class relations and politics, arguing that the proliferation of these slums and enclaves and their subsequent proximity have intensified class relations. Going beyond the realm of “the urban”, Garrido examines the politicization of this socio-spatial divide with the specific case of the populist president Joseph Estrada. The book ultimately argues that the two sides – middle-class and urban poor – are drawn into contention over not just the right to the city, but the nature of democracy itself.

In all, The Patchwork City illuminates how segregation, class relations, and democracy are all intensely connected. It makes clear, ultimately, that class as a social structure is as indispensable to the study of Manila—and of many other cities of the Global South—as race is to the study of American cities.

Sneha Annavarapu is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.

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Steven Seegel, "Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Steven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map making which is written through and by individual geographers/cartographers/map men. The book focuses primarily on four countries: Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. When guiding his reader through the entanglements of transnational endeavors of making maps, Seegel zeroes in on personal stories of five, what he calls, characters/protagonists: Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pal Teleki. An individual story is an archive of biographical data and statistics, but it also opens up an entire world of history and geography that provides an insight into geopolitical decisions which eventually change and impact lives of those who happen to be part of this map journey. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Map Men offers a personalized version of how maps are drawn and made. At first glance, maps may seem stable and crystalized. However, as Seegel insightfully shows, this is an illusion: maps are fantasies, as he puts it in this interview. This understanding of maps does not in any way minimize the science that lies behind the map creating. However, what Map Men does is show the making of maps in their multiple and at times complex and intertwined processes: maps are points of references, but maps are also texts which invite a diversity of stories and interpretations.

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Spencer Dew, "The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 20 Mar 2020 08:00:00 -0000

In his dazzling new book The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Spencer Dew treats his readers to a riveting and often counterintuitive account of the interaction of law, race, and citizenship in the discourses of the Moorish Science Temple and other movements inspired by Noble Drew Ali. How do theological visions of democracy serve as critiques of racism and exclusionary politics? In what ways does a notion of sovereignty as located in faith and outside history mobilize popular sovereignty to critique modern state sovereignty? What are the complicated mechanisms through which legal institutions, texts, and theaters are engaged and negotiated to make space for a notion of citizenship grounded in the entanglement of law, love, and social transformation? These are among the central questions that animate this sparkling study, situated at the intersection of legal studies, African American Religion, and American Islam. Lucidly composed, theoretically charged, and discursively playful, The Aliites is sure to transform the way we look at Noble Drew Ali and his profound and complex legacy. This book will also generate important and productive conversations in various undergraduate and graduate seminars on American Islam, American Religion, Political Studies, History, and Law.

SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Todd Shepard, "Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Departing from the bold and compelling claim that we cannot fully understand the histories of decolonization and the so-called “sexual revolution” apart from one another, Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is a complex analysis of the lasting impact of the Algerian Revolution through the cultural politics of sex, gender, and power in France. Shepard tracks the figure of the “Arab” man from Algerian independence to the Iranian Revolution. Just as the “Arab” man’s pathologized sexuality played a key role in discussions of French defeat in Algeria as a “failure” of French masculinity on the political “Right,” so too did he become a “heroic” figure for the post-decolonization “Left.” From gay liberation to feminism, debates about sexual norms, prostitution, and rape, the “Arab” man appeared again and again in forms that replayed and riffed off of the sexual orientalism of the colonial period.

Drawing attention to the ways the “erotics of Algerian difference” shaped the terrain of what could and couldn’t be thought in terms of sex post-1962, the book highlights the ideas and work of a number of authors from North Africa and elsewhere, voices that have been written out of histories that understand the sexual revolution as a strictly trans-Atlantic phenomenon. The “vanilla” narratives that have resulted have left out sites such as North Africa, failing to see the role of anti-colonialism in the history of the sexual revolution. At the same time, conventional histories have also regularly refused to deal with sex itself, eliding the significance of discussions of sex acts (like sodomy) as sites of politics and power. As Shepard shows, the Arab man and the legacies of the Algerian Revolution were all over the field of “sex talk” in France through the 1960s and 70s. During this period, then, the war did not vanish from view as other histories have suggested. And the end of this era that was linked to the Iranian Revolution brought a shoring up of Western notions of sexual liberation in response to the oppression and violence (of women and homosexuals in particular) deemed inherent to Arab/Muslim societies. A book that brings together an impressive research corpus with killer historical and political analysis, Sex, France, and Arab Men will captivate readers interested in the (global) history of sex, as well as anyone seeking to better understand the cultural and political landscape of post-decolonization France.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, '"No Hiroshima in Africa": The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara' appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca).

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Eric Lomazoff, "Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Eric Lomazoff has written a kind of detective novel about the national bank controversy during the early years of the new republic. Lomazoff poses, in the introduction, and at the start of each chapter, the general understanding that many scholars and citizens have about the bank controversy itself and the constitutional decision in McCulloch vs. Maryland. And Lomazoff notes that these contours are generally accurate but that they elide significant components of the controversy that is actually spread out over an extended period of time. Given this more extensive time frame, Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic (University of Chicago Press, 2018) does exactly what the title promises, in compiling different aspects of our understanding of the controversy, and integrating key shifts in the political and economic landscape that also changed parts of the actual controversy itself. Lomazoff takes the reader through the general understanding of the National Bank controversy, untangling different threads of the argument and the changing political and economic dynamics in the United States. Because the bank controversy is often collapsed into the debate over either a strict or broad interpretation of the Necessary and Proper clause of the Constitution, many aspects of American political development are generally pushed into the background—these ignored or obscured aspects of the controversy are the focus of Reconstructing the National Bank Controversy: Politics and Law in the Early American Republic, and rightly so, since they trace a deeper and more complex understanding of changing monetary policy, banking regulation, and congressional and executive fiscal power in the new republic. This is an action-packed discussion of the general understanding of the early American Republic, and the real controversy around the establishment of the national bank.

Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as author of The Politics of Military Base Closings: Not in My District (Peter Lang Publishers, 2003).

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Alistair Sponsel, "Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Dr. Alistair Sponsel talks about Darwin’s experiences on HMS Beagle and his early career as a naturalist. His close reading of Darwin’s journals and letters reveals insights about the man that would become known as the father of evolution. Sponsel is the author Darwin’s Evolving Identity: Adventure, Ambition, and the Sin of Speculation (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Why—against his mentor’s exhortations to publish—did Charles Darwin take twenty years to reveal his theory of evolution by natural selection? In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, Alistair Sponsel argues that Darwin adopted this cautious approach to atone for his provocative theorizing as a young author spurred by that mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell. While we might expect him to have been tormented by guilt about his private study of evolution, Darwin was most distressed by harsh reactions to his published work on coral reefs, volcanoes, and earthquakes, judging himself guilty of an authorial “sin of speculation.” It was the battle to defend himself against charges of overzealous theorizing as a geologist, rather than the prospect of broader public outcry over evolution, which made Darwin such a cautious author of Origin of Species.

Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Shai M. Dromi, "Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

Thu, 13 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

How should we understand humanitarian NGOs? In Above the Fray: The Red Cross and the Making of the Humanitarian NGO Sector (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Shai M. Dromi, a lecturer in sociology at Harvard University, uses insights from cultural sociology to reframe the history of the Red Cross. The book blends a detailed historical analysis with field theory and the strong programme in cultural sociology to show the longstanding influence of key individuals and texts, as well as accounting for influences of nationalism and Christianity. The historical analysis of the Red Cross presents crucial lessons for our current context, as well as providing the basis for comparisons with other approaches to humanitarian interventions. The book is both an excellent example of the strengths of the strong programme, along with a fascinating analysis of a key element of our modern world.

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Michael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006)

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006). The disappearance of the Franklin Expedition in 1845 turned the Arctic into an object of fascination. By the end of the century, it had become an ‘Arctic Fever.’ Fox is the host of the radio program Geographical Imaginations for RadioFabrik in Salzburg, which is also available on iTunes as a podcast.

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Penny Sinanoglou, "Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 09:00:00 -0000

Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of the Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partition—that is, a division of territory and sovereignty—in British mandate Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Inverting the spate of narratives that focus on how the idea contributed to, or hindered, the development of future Israeli and Palestinian states, Penny Sinanoglou asks instead what drove and constrained British policymaking around partition, and why partition was simultaneously so appealing to British policymakers yet ultimately proved so difficult for them to enact. Taking a broad view not only of local and regional factors, but also of Palestine’s place in the British empire and its status as a League of Nations mandate, Sinanoglou deftly recasts the story of partition in Palestine as a struggle to maintain imperial control. After all, British partition plans imagined space both for a Zionist state indebted to Britain and for continued British control over key geostrategic assets, depending in large part on the forced movement of Arab populations. With her detailed look at the development of the idea of partition from its origins in the 1920s, Sinanoglou makes a bold contribution to our understanding of the complex interplay between internationalism and imperialism at the end of the British empire and reveals the legacies of British partitionist thinking in the broader history of decolonization in the modern Middle East.

Penny Sinanoglou is an associate professor of history at Wake Forest University, where she teaches British and European imperial and international history.

Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.

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Nick Yablon, "Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

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Susan Schulten, "A History of America in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press 2018)

Fri, 03 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0000

In her new book A History of America in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press 2018), historian Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. Schulten’s “visual tour of American history” considers the different purposes for which maps are created—maps as tools of statecraft and diplomacy, maps made to amuse and entertain, and maps made as instruments of social reform. Some of the maps she discusses document journeys, others strategize for war. Some trace the spread of disease, others the pathways of rivers or the decline of endangered species. Some are produced by trained cartographers, others by amateurs, one by a young schoolgirl. Together, they offer a compelling—and at times quite beautiful—case for the power of maps to shape our world and the ways we navigate through it.

You can preview some of the maps in the book here.

Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu.

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Adeline Masquelier, "Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

Fada: Boredom and Belonging in Niger (University of Chicago Press 2019) is a study of the kinds of experimentation and creative engagements that young men in the urban public spaces of Niger undertake when confronted with the precarity and boredom of unemployed adult life. “The sitting that kills the pants” as a reflection of the space of the fada seeks to present a counterpoint to the ‘crisis of youth’ that is widely discussed and regulated in the global south. Adeline Masquelier offers a compelling ethnography of the possibilities of the fada, a space where young men gather, faced with the anxiety of being ‘good at being a man’ (Herzfeld 1985). The fada becomes a productive site to establish regimes, friendships and alternate practices of self-realization through music and dance, drinking tea and making conversation, discussing and practicing romantic courtship, pursuing zigzag politics and cultivating sartorial choices. These solidarities and the possibilities which coalesce around it situate the fada with the resources to counteract the anxieties that the elderly have about the ‘inversion of the inter-generational contract’ (Roth 2008). It does so by providing a set of repertoires that make adulthood meaningful in the absence of employment and state support.

Adeline joins us for a conversation about her book on the history of the fada as a masculine-urban space, the study of ‘generation’ as an analytic for the study of kinship and change particularly in the study of so-called traditional societies in Africa and its bearings on the current field of ‘youth studies’, the possibilities of heterosexual love and romance imagined homosocialy and the practice of a visual language in ethnography.

Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at Yale University.

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Dave Tell, "Remembering Emmett Till" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Dave Tell (he/him/his)--Professor of Communication at The University of Kansas--on the insightful Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book takes a rhetorical approach on the commemoration of Emmett Till by looking at acts of remembering Emmett following his brutal murder in the 1960s until the present day. Tell persuasively demonstrates the way in which the act of commemorating has saturated the physical landscape of the Mississippi Delta. In addition to a fascinating discussion of Till’s legacy and the current commemoration of racial tragedy in the American South, Dave also introduces listeners to the Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), which, among other things, offers a free app through which all of us can calibrate our relationship to Emmett to civil rights as an ongoing collective project.

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Karen Routledge, "Do You See Ice?: Inuit and Americans at Home and Away" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0000

In the 1800s, explorers and whalers returning home from the Arctic described a cold, desolate world, one that could swallow up expeditions without leaving a trace. But this did not describe the Arctic of the Inuit, who called this world their home. Karen Routledge tells the story of Baffin Island’s Inuit community as they came into contact with western whalers and explorers in the nineteenth century. Even though the Inuit worked closely with outsiders, their views of the Arctic world, their ideas about meaning of home, even their concept of time itself remained very different from the men they encountered. Routledge is a historian for Parks Canada. Her book, Do You See Ice?: Inuit and Americans at Home and Away, was recently published by University of Chicago Press (2018).

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Jamie L. Pietruska, "Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

A fortune teller, cotton prophet, and a weather forecaster walk into a bar—probably a more common occurrence than you might think in the Gilded Age United States! Jamie Pietruska’s Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2017) assesses how different varieties of forecasting created an often-contradictory “culture of prediction” during the rise of modern bureaucracies. Looking to the countryside, her book engages histories of capitalism to think about how everyday rural Americans engaged with the rise of probability, and how private and state forecasters competed for authority and audiences for their figures.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He is writing a dissertation on how people used discrimination statistics to argue about rights in 1970s America, and what this means for histories of bureaucracy, quantification, law, politics, and race.

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Jolyon Baraka Thomas, "Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Jolyon Baraka Thomas’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019) challenges the commonsensical notion that the Japanese empire granted its subjects no religious freedom—that, despite the legal provision in the Meiji Constitution of 1890 affirming freedom of worship, “State Shinto” was the law of the land—and that it was the American-led occupation which finally granted freedom of conscience and worship to the benighted Japanese. Thomas shows first that this vision of history obscures internal debates about religious freedom in both Japanese and American circles, but also that while the narrative in which religious freedom was bestowed upon Japan by the US was in fact strategic and deeply embedded in a particular historical moment and geopolitical context, it has had a long tail of consequences for our understandings of religion after 1945. Faking Liberties is divided into two deliberately paralleled parts, the first treating what Thomas calls the Meiji Constitutional Period (1890-1945), the second examining the occupation (1945-1952) and the long-term consequences of the rhetorical moves made by the occupiers for the way that religion has been understood in the postwar period. The book argues that the particular political circumstance of the Japanese occupation was instrumental in defining the religious-secular and “good-bad” religion binaries, as well as the idea of religious freedom as a human right that has become hegemonic in much of the postwar West. Faking Liberties is a challenging intervention into not only the historiography of modern Japan, but religious studies more generally.

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Benjamin Kahan, "The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

In this installment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Benjamin Kahan, Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at LSU, about his newest work, The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Despite countless dropped calls, Jana and Benjamin have a delightful conversation about what Eve Sedgwick called “the great paradigm shift,” in which all sexual deviancy fell out of discussion to make way for the homo-hetero binary. The conversation covers major changes in the cultural discourse around sexual identity, but still makes time for conversation about sexual magicians and wanderlust.

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Bryan Jones, "The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Bryan Jones, Sean Theriault, and Michelle Whyman are out with a big book on with a provocative thesis. In The Great Broadening: How the Vast Expansion of the Policymaking Agenda Transformed American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019), the authors argue that there are dimensions to the broadening of the US federal government into new areas of public life largely overlooked by previous scholars. Rather than public opinion or changes in the party system, they claim that it is the social movement system that is an underappreciated driver of the broadening of government in the 1960s. They continue that polarization and the growth of interest groups are each a consequence of this transformation of government, not a primary cause.

The Great Broadening is rooted in a massive exploration of data connected with the Policy Agendas Projects. Culling data across nearly a century of American politics and government, the book raises as many new questions as it conclusively answers. The authors are candid that they are expanding the conversation about American political development, not necessarily refuting previous claims. They do so with a heap of quantitative measures on agenda setting in congress, federal expenditures, and the size of the administrative state. This is a must read for students of American politics.

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Shayne Legassie, "The Medieval Invention of Travel" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Shayne Legassie talks about medieval travel, especially long distance travel, and the way it was feared, praised, and sometimes treated with suspicion. He also talks about the role the Middle Ages played in creating modern conceptions of travel and travel writing. Legassie is an associate professor of English and Comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Medieval Invention of Travel (University of Chicago, 2017).

Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility.

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William Elison, "The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

William Elison's The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai(University of Chicago Press, 2018) explores how slum residents, tribal people, and members of other marginalized groups use religious icons to mark urban spaces in Mumbai. Interestingly, not all of Elison's interview subjects identify as Hindu, which bolsters has argument that sacred space in Mumbai is created by visual and somatic practices performed across religious boundaries. Join as as we discuss Elison's rich fieldwork in the streets, slums, and movie studios of Mumbai.

For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com.

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Douglas Irwin, "Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Scholars of US history have treated trade policy in less than enthusiastic ways. One economic historian described tariffs as “extraordinarily uninteresting things unless related to the political events which give them meaning.” While another historian said the tariff has caused “narcolepsy” among his colleagues. One piece of evidence of this sentiment is that the last comprehensive history of of US trade policy was published in the the late 19th century!

Despite the seemingly soporific qualities of the subject, Douglas Irwin wrote a 900-page tome on trade policy. The book, Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is remarkably erudite and surprisingly entertaining. Irwin shows how trade policy was at the heart of so many of the major crises and transitions in US history, everything from the Revolution of 1776 to the post-Cold War moment. Indeed, Irwin fashions a focus on tariffs into a new history of the republic itself.

Douglas Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at dexter.fergie@u.northwestern.edu or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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John T. Lysaker, "Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

What is the relationship between the form of writing and what can be thought? How is a writer’s thinking shaped by form? How is a reader’s? Does this matter for philosophy? In Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2018), John T. Lysaker explores the importance of the praxis of writing for philosophy. Essaying a variety of forms, the book invites the reader to investigate the volume in their hands as a performance. It engages with, among others, the work of Plato, Emerson, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Cavell, not only to show how form matters for thought, but also how thought is always made possible by what has come before. The book argues for philosophy to reconsider academic articles as the dominant mode of writing in the profession and offers an example of the creative ways in which philosophy can unfold.

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Michael Zakim, "Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made (U Chicago Press, 2018), Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust.

This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.”

Lukas Rieppel teaches history at Brown University. His new book, Assembling the Dinosaur, has recently been published by Harvard University press. You can find him online at https://sites.google.com/view/lukasrieppel/ or on twitter @lrieppel.

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Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 26 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration(University of Chicago Press, 2019).

During the long twentieth century, explorers went in unprecedented numbers to the hottest, coldest, and highest points on the globe. Taking us from the Himalaya to Antarctica and beyond, Higher and Colder presents the first history of extreme physiology, the study of the human body at its physical limits. Each chapter explores a seminal question in the history of science, while also showing how the apparently exotic locations and experiments contributed to broader political and social shifts in twentieth-century scientific thinking.

Unlike most books on modern biomedicine, Higher and Colder focuses on fieldwork, expeditions, and exploration, and in doing so provides a welcome alternative to laboratory-dominated accounts of the history of modern life sciences. Though centered on male-dominated practices—science and exploration—it recovers the stories of women’s contributions that were sometimes accidentally, and sometimes deliberately, erased. Engaging and provocative, this book is a history of the scientists and physiologists who face challenges that are physically demanding, frequently dangerous, and sometimes fatal, in the interest of advancing modern science and pushing the boundaries of human ability.

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Jennifer A. Jones, "The Browning of the New South" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

The dawn of the new millennium bore witness to an unprecedented transformation of the population in the Southeastern United States as evidenced by Dr. Jennifer A. Jones in her new book The Browning of the New South (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Jones, an Assistant Professor of Sociology as well as Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examines the evolution of race relations in the face of rapid demographic change as Mexican immigrants move into the traditionally biracial American South. Employing a community-based ethnographic approach, Jones vividly illustrates shifting Southern race relations through the case study of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Browning of the New South contributes to the scholarship on immigration and racial formation by revealing the mechanisms that spur collaboration (rather than division) between Latino immigrants and African Americans in a process that Jones calls “minority linked fate.” Counter to a generally national conception of racial formation, Jones emphasizes its local nature, not simply based on preexisting racial hierarchies or phenotype but instead on personal experiences of discrimination, unique social pressures, and local political dynamics. Ultimately, this study of the newly triracial South has immense implications for the future of U.S. politics and our understanding of how race is made.

Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.

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David Varel, "The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Allison Davis (1902-1983) was a pioneering anthropologist who did ground-breaking fieldwork in the Jim Crow south, challenged the racial bias of IQ tests, and became the first African American to be tenured at the University of Chicago. And yet despite these contributions Davis's work is little read today. The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought(University of Chicago Press, 2018) is the first full-length biography of Davis ever written. In it, historian David Varel documents Davis's remarkable life. In this episode in New Books in Anthropology we talk about Davis's collaboration with authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Sapir, John Dollard, W. Lloyd Warner Warner, St. Clair Drake, and many others. We also discuss how Davis pioneered concepts such as structural racism and explored the relationship between race and class. David Varel talks about the choices he made as a White academic writing about an African American life, and the importance of widening intellectual genealogies by including 'lost' figures such as Davis.

David Varel earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Lost Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is his first book.

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of the article "Welcoming the New Amateurs: A future (and past) for non-academic anthropologists" as well as other books and articles.

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Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Thu, 04 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to develop a cancer vaccine drew more money than the Human Genome Project. In his first book, MIT historian of science Robin Wolfe Scheffler takes readers through the twists and turns of the American effort to identify human cancer viruses— a search which made fundamental contributions to molecular biology. In this podcast, we discuss how this was an effort which raises fundamental questions regarding how we think about disease in the laboratory and the legislature.

Dr. Robin Scheffler’s book is called A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine(University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Dr. Dorian Deshauer is a psychiatrist, historian, and assistant professor at the University of Toronto. He is associate editor for the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Canada’s leading peer-reviewed general medical journal and is one of the hosts of CMAJ Podcasts, a medical podcast for doctors and researchers.

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T. Brook, M. van Walt van Praag, M. Boltjes, "Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 03 Jul 2019 08:00:00 -0000

With thorny topics in Asian international relations, sovereignty, territory and borders in the news more or less daily, understanding what is at stake in this vitally important region, and why there are so many disagreements here, has never been more important. But while it is widely known that ‘modern’ bounded sovereign statehood is a pretty new and a historically contingent phenomenon in much of the world, the afterlives of the political orders that came before this are usually less appreciated.

Timothy Brook, Michael van Walt van Praag and Miek Boltjes’ part co-edited, part co-authored book Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan (University of Chicago Press, 2018) thus fills a vital gap. Multidisciplinary and vast in scope, this uniquely structured volume presents writing from the junctures of history, international relations, international law and many other adjacent subject areas, arguing forcefully and in rich detail for the relevance of longstanding Mongolian, Tibetan, Chinese, Manchu and other political practices to the contemporary world. Appreciating the enduring relevance of layered, relational and non-exclusive ties which dominated this part of Asia before the arrival of Euro-derived political ‘modernity’ may help us see what is afoot when the Chinese Communist Party intercedes in matters of Buddhist reincarnation. Still more optimistically, such an understanding may also help to resolve some of the globe’s most intractable and consequential conflicts.

Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

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Matthew Edney, "Cartography: The Ideal and Its History" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include.

In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.

Matthew Edney is the Osher Professor in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine. In addition to Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press, 2019) he is the author of Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Since 2005, Matthew has directed the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-editor with Mary S. Pedley of Cartography in the European Enlightenment, a massive compilation (at 1,920 pages!) now in press as Volume Four of Chicago’s The History of Cartography series. (Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 6 are already available on open access. Matthew also run a personal blog, Mapping as Process, which features his commentary on the study of map production, circulation, and consumption.

Steven Seegel is a Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado

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Rachel Augustine Potter, "Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Rule-making may rarely make headlines, but the significance of this largely hidden process cannot be underestimated. Rachel Augustine Potter makes the case in Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019) that rulemaking is incredibly important, but also political in ways that are misunderstood. Potter is assistant professor at the University of Virginia.

With Bending the Rules, Rachel Augustine Potter shows that rulemaking is not the rote administrative activity it is commonly imagined to be, but rather is an intensely political activity. Because rulemaking occurs in a separation of powers system, bureaucrats are not free to implement their preferred policies unimpeded: the president, Congress, and the courts can all get involved in the process, often in conjunction with interest groups. However, rather than capitulating to demands, bureaucrats routinely employ “procedural politicking,” using their deep knowledge of the process to strategically insulate proposals from political scrutiny and interference. Potter shows how bureaucrats use procedures to resist interference from Congress, the President, and the courts at each stage of the process

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Ben Merriman, "Conservative Innovators: How States Are Challenging Federal Power" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Expansion of federal power has typically come with the consent of states, often eager to receive the funding tied to new policy priorities. Not so any more, as some states have famously rejected funding for Medicaid expansion. Was the case of Medicaid and Obamacare an aberration or part of a larger strategy? Such is the focus of Conservative Innovators: How States Are Challenging Federal Power (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Ben Merriman’s new book explores what he calls uncooperative federalism. He finds a deliberate conservative strategy to use the courts and state executive power to resist federal influence in state affairs. He focuses especially on Kansas and the activity of far-right conservatives in the state who have in the past decade used the powers of state-level offices to fight federal regulation on a range of topics from gun control to voting processes to Medicaid.

Merriman — a sociologist by training — is an assistant professor at the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas.

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Toby Green, "A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Fri, 17 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

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Harold J. Cook, "The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 15 May 2019 08:00:00 -0000

Harold J. Cook talks about the travels and trials of the young Descartes, a man who spent as much time traveling and fighting as he did studying philosophy. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War out this year with University of Chicago Press (2018).

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Chip Colwell, "Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage. Winner of the 2019 National Council on Public History Book Award, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture(University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers Colwell's personal account of the process of repatriation, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct. These specific stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics.

Things, like people, have biographies. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums and tribes to acknowledge that fact—and heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.

Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

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Robert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 04 Apr 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil. In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreens. In his excellent new book The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Robert A. Voeks explains that while rainforests may indeed have much to offer in the way of medically useful compounds, the fanfare for tropical miracle medicines and superfoods has been largely in err, counterproductive, and at times prejudicial.

The jungle medicine narrative – the idea that indigenous shamans of the virgin rainforst hold the antidotes to many of humankind’s most pernicious woes – grew widespread in the 1970s after childhood leukemia was all but cured with the Madagascar periwinkle. But the subsequent efforts of pharmaceutical companies to accelerate innovation through bioprospecting had a much deeper historical precedent. Christopher Columbus earmarked West Indian medicinal plants on his first voyage and European imperialists attempted to more systematically appropriate native medical knowledge though the Enlightenment. By tracing this long colonial history, Voeks emphasizes that the hype of the last 50 years has been mostly just that; rather than reflecting the advancement of science, the jungle medicine narrative derives instead from racial ideologies in which indigenous peoples are associated with wild, virgin nature. It is little surprise, then, that blockbuster drugs have proven allusive. If the profits of appropriating medical knowledge have been overblown, so too, writes Voeks, has been the criticism. Examples of exploitative biopiracy can be found, but these are exceptions in what are mostly more complex and dynamic interactions between researchers and healers.

We have much to gain from abandoning the jungle medicine narrative. Without its simplicities, stereotypes, and essentialisms perhaps we can come to a better appreciation the variety of ways that humans make knowledge about the natural world and without its promises of panaceas perhaps we can better understand how this knowledge has and can yet sustain communities in the face of environmental and political changes.

Robert A. Voeks is Professor of Geography and the Environment at California State University, Fullerton.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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S. M. Milkis and D. J. Tichenor, "Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:00:00 -0000

Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor have written Rivalry and Reform: Presidents, Social Movements, and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor in the Department of Politics and a senior fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Tichenor is the Philip H. Knight Chair of Political Science and director of the Program on Democratic Engagement and Governance of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon.

Rivalry and Reform explores the historical relationships between presidents and social movements. Through several cases, including Lincoln and abolitionism, Johnson and the civil rights movement, and Ronald Reagan and the New Christian Right, Milkis and Tichenor show that major political change happens through compromise between movement leaders and presidents negotiated over decades. The book concludes by focusing on Barack Obama’s approach to social movements such as Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, and Marriage Equality.

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Emily Baum, "The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Emily Baum’s The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 as part of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series, is a genealogy of “psychiatric modernity,” of the invention and reinvention of modern mental illness in Beijing, 1901-1937. Focusing on the pivotal roles of the city’s police-run municipal asylum and the Peking Union Medical College, Baum chronicles the transition from eclectic but largely family-centered premodern apprehensions and treatments of “mad behaviors” to a more unified, biomedical, institutionalized view of madness that was intimately linked to questions of social control, political legitimacy, and the rubric of “mental hygiene.” Along the way, this history of neuropsychiatry’s penetration of the administrative and social fabric of modern China examines topics including disjunctures between state and civil actors concerning new understandings and practices around mental illness, as well as the “psychiatric entrepreneurs” who profited from—and sometimes helped to invent or define—new psychiatric conditions. Baum’s careful unearthing of these tensions and innovations sheds informative light on the ways in which madness was invented not just as a top-down administrative or biomedical-neuropsychiatric project but in negotiation with a wide range of actors.

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Thomas F. Gieryn, "Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe" (U Chicago, 2018)

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Is the existence of truth coming to a screeching halt? Does truth still exist? In Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dr. Thomas F. Gieryn takes time to explain how place informs truth. During this interview Dr. Gieryn offers an in-depth explanation of how history and biography have fed the narratives told about truth-spots. Dr. Gieryn presents us with the beliefs and claims that have developed Mount Parnassus, Delphi, Walden Pond, Seneca, Selma, Stonewall, courthouses, laboratories, and several other places across the globe as truth-spots.

The advancement of technology has improved human travel and allows humans access to almost anywhere around the globe. An improvement in human mobility allows more people to access truth-spots that would otherwise be unavailable. This access paired with mass media has heightened human awareness to claims humans make about their accounts of truth-spots. Dr. Gieryn provides an account of how he views the automobile and other modes of transportation contributing to the creation and conservation of truth-spots.

Dr. Tom Gieryn is Rudy Professor of Sociology Emeritis at Indiana University.

Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the continuous process that occurs with placemaking at farmers’ market.

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B. I. Page, J. Seawright, and M. J. Lacombe, "Billionaires and Stealth Politics" U Chicago Press, 2019)

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 11:00:00 -0000

With at least one new billionaire in the 2020 presidential race, the politics of the one percent are with us again. What do billionaires believe? And do they believe the same things as the average American? Answering these questions has until now been frustrated by the difficulty of fielding surveys of the very rich. Just finding where they live is hard enough. But a new book has solved part of this problem and answers many questions. Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe have written Billionaires and Stealth Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Page is the Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University; Seawright is professor of political science at the Northwestern University, and Matthew J. Lacombe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and is joining the faculty of Barnard College in the fall. In the book, we learn about the stealthy ways most billionaires participate in politics. They rarely utter a word about their beliefs in public, but do spend huge sums of money influencing politics. Unfortunately, only small amounts of that spending is publicly disclosed. Much of their spending is masked behind the non-transparent organizations that populate American politics. Stealthy politics, like the dark money groups that benefit, is a politics of secrecy and mystery, hardly the democratic politics of openness and transparency.

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Robin Wallace, "Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery" (UChicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 22:32:00 -0000

Music lovers and researchers alike have long been fascinated by the story of Ludwig van Beethoven who became profoundly deaf as an adult and could not hear some of his most famous compositions including the Ninth Symphony. Many people have written about Beethoven’s deafness and speculated how he might have been able to compose despite his disability. Robin Wallace, however, is the first musicologist to write about Beethoven’s life and music who has had an intimate experience with deafness. Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery published by University of Chicago Press in 2018 pairs a new consideration of the effects of Beethoven’s deafness on his life and music with a loving memoir of the last years of Wallace’s first marriage after his wife, Barbara, suddenly lost her hearing. Written for a general audience as well as musicologists, in Hearing Beethoven, Wallace applies what he learned from Barbara’s experiences to Beethoven’s life. Wallace focuses on three main areas: Beethoven’s social life, the technology he used to help him hear speaking voices and music, and his compositional method and music. While providing new insights into Beethoven’s biography and compositions, Wallace also undermines some of the most enduring myths about Beethoven. He reminds us that neither Beethoven nor his wife Barbara overcame the challenges presented by their deafness, instead they strove to find “wholeness by learning to live within them.”

Robin Wallace is a Professor of Musicology in the School of Music at Baylor University. He has published widely on the critical reception of Beethoven’s music including his first book, Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions During the Composer’s Lifetime (University of Cambridge Press, 1986). In addition to his scholarly publications, Wallace is the author of an introductory music textbook from Oxford University Press titled Take Note: An Introduction to Music through Active Listening.

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Daromir Rudnyckyj, "Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 24 Jan 2019 11:00:00 -0000

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. In Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2018), anthropologist Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the Malaysian state, led by the central bank, is seeking to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Beyond Debt tracks efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria.

Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Pamela E. Klassen, "The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 11:00:00 -0000

At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Pamela E. Klassen retalls Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment in her newest book, The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Following Du Vernet’s journey westward across Canada, Klassen examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—reveal the spiritual work of colonial settlement.

Pamela Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.

Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

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Judd C. Kinzley, "Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 11:00:00 -0000

As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the first place. Judd Kinzley’s new book Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands(University of Chicago Press, 2018) goes a long way to answering this and many other related questions, discussing both why and how the Chinese state has today managed to make itself so forcefully present so far from the country's heartlands.

Kinzley's fascinating new resource-centric perspective on the state incorporation of Xinjiang retrains our eyes on the material and physical dimensions to politics, showing how treasured items from oil to tungsten have attained a totemic political role as “a critical but largely overlooked factor in shaping the region’s connections to China, regional neighbours and indeed the world” (p.7). Deftly handling its multilingual and multi-perspectival scholarship, 'Natural Resources and the New Frontier' accounts for how successive ‘layers’ left by state and non-state actors - Chinese and Russian as well as British - have institutionalised the presence of outside actors in Xinjiang over time. These dynamics, Kinzley shows, also underlie much of the discord evident between Han Chinese immigrants and indigenous Turkic groups in this troubled region today.

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Radhika Govindrajan, "Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 11:00:00 -0000

In what is sure to become a classic, Radhika Govindrajan’s Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (University of Chicago Press, 2018) mobilizes the thematic of “interspecies relatedness” to explore a variety of human/non-human animal encounters in contemporary India. Animal Intimacies is a path paving work that combines theoretical innovation and playfulness, ethnographic depth, and profound attunement to capturing the aspirations and tragedies of everyday life through the art of narrative. By exploring complex modes of relatedness that bind humans with non-human animals ranging from cows, goats, pigs, and bears, in such varied conceptual and political arenas as animal sacrifice, animal protection, the law, and sexuality and queer desire, this book brings into view a vision of love and intimacy that exceeds and subverts the colonizing grammar of often assumed hierarchies like human/animal, state/citizen, and love/violence. Focused on the state of Uttarakhand, Animal Intimacies mobilizes the theme of interspecies relatedness, with much aesthetic poise, to both uncover and bring into question the operation and cooperation of anthropomorphism, the insidious fantasies of modern state sovereignty, and the enduring violence of patriarchy. In addition to its astonishing erudition, Animal Intimacies is also written with breathtaking clarity and lyrical panache. It will also be a delight to teach in undergraduate and graduate seminars on modern South Asia, theories and methods in anthropology and Religious Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Animal Studies.

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D.A. Silver and T.N. Clark, "Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 18:55:00 -0000

I don’t mean to make a scene, but please open your eyes and look around. There are complex scenes everywhere and we have all served witness to them. A scene is an experience in which we feel connected to other people. Scenes also cultivate skills, create ambiances, and nourish communities.

In Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life(University of Chicago Press, 2016), Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark examine the patterns and consequences of amenities that shape our daily lives. They articulate the core dimensions of the theatricality, authenticity, and legitimacy of local and global scenes (e.g., churches, cafes, restaurants, parks, galleries, bowling alleys, and more). The scenes that make up a city are reciprocally part of shaping (and reshaping) the economic development, residential patterns, and political attitudes and actions of its people. Silver and Clark challenge reimagine the city in cultural terms and to think about the influences of place.

Dr. Daniel Aaron Silver is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. He conducts research in the areas of social theory, cities, culture, and cultural policy. Silver is co-editor of The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy and for Theory (the Newsletter of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Sociological Theory). He was the recipient of the 2013 Theory Prize and received an honorable mention for the 2015 Junior Theorist Award, both from the American Sociological Association Theory Section. Silver is currently researching the role of arts and culture in city politics, economics, and residential patterns; the enduring political orders of cities; the use of diagrams and figures in social theory; and international variations in how sociological theory is taught.

Dr. Terry Nichols Clark is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the International Coordinator of the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation Project, which is surveying city officials across the United States and in thirty-five other countries. Clark also serves as a board member for the Cultural Policy Center at University of Chicago; he is a Task Force Member for Advancing Chicago’s Civic Agenda Through the Arts; and serves as Co-Chair for the Cultural Institutions Committee, Task Force on Quality of Life in Bronzeville, Chicago. Clarks research interest is in the use of decision-making theory to approach urban politics and other social phenomena.

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Llerena Searle, "Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India" (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 13:40:00 -0000

Few who have visited India in the past two decades will have failed to noticed the sudden and spectacular urban transformation that has taken place in many of its cities. Gated residential complexes with tennis courts and indoor gyms, glitzy office buildings, gleaming five-star hotels, and of course air-conditioned malls have become ubiquitous as the new face of a “new” India, often understood as symbols of a long-awaited global modernity. Getting behind the glittery facade, Llerena Searle’s new book Landscapes of Accumulation: Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India (University of Chicago Press, 2015) shows that these buildings are not built to service consumer India; they are built for real estate developers and international investors for whom Indian real estate has become a profitable speculative gamble. Indian land and buildings are no longer local resources for production or use; they are turning, or more accurately being turned, into internationally tradeable financial assets. How this happens, by whose effort, and against what frictions is the story that the book tells. Searle shows that it is through the narrative of a rising Indian middle class that investments are solicited and a real estate boom created. Through ethnographic attention to the practices and labors of real estate producers, Searle offers an innovative, sophisticated and refreshingly human story of the making of neoliberal India, a story has ultimately shows that the new landscapes that are cropping up all over India are landscapes first and foremost of accumulation. This book will be of interest to readers in urban studies, economics, anthropology, and of course South Asian Studies.

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Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 12:33:00 -0000

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question American physiologist Walter Cannon first asked in 1926: “Why don’t we die daily?” In the erudite chapters that follow, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers explore how practitioners and theorists working during and after World War I tried to answer that very thorny problem in light of the challenges of wound shock. This functional disorder demanded that doctors, surgeons, and physiologists account for two medical realities: first, that wound shock was a whole-body, multi-systemic response to trauma; and second, that a fairly homogenous group—namely the young, male soldier-patient—responded to wound shock in highly variable and individuals ways. Whereas the historiography of World War I and trauma has largely focused on psychopathological models, Geroulanos and Meyers illuminate how the work of Henry Head, Réné Leriche, Kurt Goldstein and others enacted a wholesale transformation of the concept of the individual, one that would define medico-physiological individuality as an integrated and indivisible body, but one constantly on “the verge of collapse.”

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David Charles Sloane, “Is the Cemetery Dead?” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 11:00:00 -0000

It is certain that we all will experience death in our life. What is less certain is how and where our bodies will be disposed of. In Is the Cemetery Dead? (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dr. David Charles Sloane discussed how cemeteries have transformed across time and place. He also explores alternative methods to dispose of the human body and commemorate loved ones. Dr. Sloane explores the practices of cremation, aquamation, virtual cemeteries, memorial tattoos, roadside memorials, and even ghost bikes.

David Charles Sloane teaches courses in urban planning, policy, history, and community health planning at University of Southern California Price School of Public Policy. He facilitates Borthwick George Washington Lecture Series, a USC Price project in collaboration with the Fred W. Smith Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon. His research examines urban planning and public health, health disparities and community development, and public and private commemoration. He is also the author of The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (1991), co-author of Medicine Moves to the Mall (2003), and editor of Planning Los Angeles (2012), as well as the author of several articles and book chapters on related topics.

Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is currently conducting research on the placemaking associated with the development of farmers’ market.

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Shobita Parthasarathy, “Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 11:00:00 -0000

In Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Shobita Parthasarathy takes us through a thirty year history of the legal debates around patents. This is an understudied area of STS that Parthasarathy carefully navigates in order to understand how knowledge production interacts with law. The reader learns the differences in values, law and objects between US and European patent politics. This comparison brings into focus the role that law, biotechnology corporations, scientists, activists, and more play in deciding what knowledge deserves legal protection. Patent Politics is a fascinating read that will continue to be relevant for many years to come.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, “Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Magical thinking lies at the heart of J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood’s new book, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Oliver is professor of political science at the University of Chicago and Wood is assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University.

In the book, they argue that our intuitions and differences in whether you use intuition or reason to guide your life, strongly relate to our politics. The intuitionists, those who believe in magical thinking, are sharply divided from the rationalists, those who rely on reason and science. Not only do these two groups differ on what makes them anxious, Oliver and Wood find that these emotional responses to stress seem to relate to ideology and political belief. Though there are examples of each way of thinking in both parties, intuitionists were more likely to support Donald Trump and respond to the conspiratorial politics that the President has promoted.

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Gary Alan Fine, “Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Most people have heard of the Masters of Fine Arts–“MFA”–degree, but few know about the grueling process one must undergo to complete one. In Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education (University of Chicago Press, 2018), sociologist and ethnographer Dr. Gary Alan Fine asks how MFA students learn to make art and to speak intelligently about their work, how they become “artists” and what what it means to be an “MFA.”

Gary Alan Fine is the James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Fine has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Center for Advancement Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University.

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Ching Kwan Lee, “The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018), an amazing new book based on her field study in Africa where she investigated the Chinese investments. The book is extremely interesting for its methodology and unconventional findings. Lee’s research project lasted for 7 years during which she has conducted field research in copper mines and construction sites in Zambia. A key question addressed is if Chinese capital is a different type of capital. By the end of the conversation we will know if it is different and if yes, if it is a better or a worse type of capital. Lee has defined Chinese state capital compared with global private capital in terms of business objectives, labour practices, managerial ethos and political engagement with Zambia. She has written a book with huge policy implications. A great contribution to so many fields, sociology of labour first among them. But above all she has written a beautiful book that is a pleasure to read. At times it reads like a novel, particularly the long appendix, called ‘An ethnographer’s odyssey: the mundane and the sublime of searching China in Zambia’.

We discussed why China’s presence in Africa is so controversial and what type of Chinese investors are there. Her work focuses on large state-owned companies. Lee’s project in Africa is a continuation of her previous field study of labour in China (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press, 2007). But this book has another important predecessor, the study of labour in Zambian mines conducted by the great British-American sociologist, Michael Burawoy. She told us about her relationship with him and his work. Lee also discussed whether it is appropriate to use the term “imperialism” to represent Chinese presence in Africa. She argues it is not. The book includes pictures of her field work in mines and construction sites. Definitely a beautiful book, brave piece of field research, nonconformist, original, important, erudite, pleasant to read.

Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of economics at Sapienza University of Rome, and is editor of the open access economics journals ‘PSL Quarterly Review’ and ‘Moneta e Credito’. His recent publications include the ‘Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics’ (Routledge, 2017) and ‘Classical Political Economy Today’ (Anthem, 2018), both as co-editor.

Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies.

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Yulia Frumer, “Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2018) charts a “profound shift in attitude toward foreign technology” between the 16th century (when European devices arrived in Japan) and reforms to the traditional temporal system in 1873. While it provides an exceptionally rich and focused case study grounded in careful research with Japanese documents and material objects, Frumer’s book also offers a critical analysis of what it is that we’re doing when we study the relationship between societies and technologies that has potentially far-reaching consequences well beyond the history of Japan.

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

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Tom Cliff, “Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang” (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Compared to the provinces’s native Uyghur population, Han Chinese settlers in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have not attracted as much scholarly or indeed journalistic attention of late. But in a profoundly troubled and troubling present for Xinjiang, one that is thankfully now gaining somewhat more notice from concerned parties...

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G. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a painting of a goanna, the contributions to this edited collection invite curiosity, care and wonder in their meditations on these objects of the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans.

Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Marco Armiero is the Director of the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Robert S. Emmett is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Roanoke College Environmental Studies program.

Ruth A. Morgan is a Senior Research Fellow in the History Program at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

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Peter James Hudson, “Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of being strongly narrative-driven. Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017) defies this stereotype. An examination of private lending in the Caribbean by North American bankers between the 1890s and the 1930s, Hudson tells a colorful, albeit at-times disturbing tale of a few American bankers who were able to operate virtually without restriction or regulation. Acting almost as freebooters, they dreamt up new practices to try out on Latin American governments, usually not to their benefit, while reinforcing many North American attitudes and stereotypes about Latin Americans, most of all racially.

The result of this imperial lending was traumatic for Caribbean and Latin American governments. For much of this period, bankers enjoyed the official backing of the U.S. government, allowing them to operate with immunity and total security. Through President Taft’s policy of “Dollar Diplomacy,” they were able to operate as an arm of U.S. foreign policy. By making funds available to repressive governments, they helped to cement their place in power at the expense of their subjects, while the amount owed by these governments soon left them under the de facto control of banks and by extension the U.S. government. Ultimately, much of this system came crashing down with the Great Depression, which helped to expose these lending practices as dangerous and ill-regulated. Nevertheless, the effect on the region outlived these practices.

Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com.

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Michele Margolis, “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0000

On this American Political Science Association special podcast, we welcome a special guest host – and former guest of the podcast – Andy Lewis. In addition to his recent book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics, Andy is a contributor to the Religion in Public blog and is associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati.

Andy and I had the real pleasure to talk with Michele Margolis about her new book From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Margolis is assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

The central argument of From Politics to the Pews is that a solid partisan identity forms before a solid religious identity, thus partisanship can inform religious behavior in ways that we may not have fully understood in the past. Margolis argues that many Americans step away from religion in early adulthood, returning later at the point of decisions about marriage and children. This break in religious activity and practice – though not necessarily in faith or belief– happens as partisan identity and behaviors have already set in. She relies on a wide variety of data to show how this happens and the implications for the relationship between partisanship, religion, and political behavior.

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Heather Schoenfeld, “Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 08 Aug 2018 10:00:00 -0000

How did prisons become a tool of racial inequality? Using historical data, Heather Schoenfeld’s new book Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2018) “answers how the United States became a nation of prisons and prisoners” (p. 5). Schoenfeld exposes the reader to the historical development of prisons and policy development. She focuses specifically on Florida as a case study to show how prisons become racialized social systems. Interestingly, much of the crime control we have today grew out of racialized punishments and unrest shaped during the civil rights era. Bringing us all the way up to 2016, Schoenfeld sheds light on how prisons developed over time, even as crime rates have fallen. Often incentivized as a source of economic potential in rural areas, prisons have a unique history in the U.S. and this book uncovers that fascinating history.

This book will be of interest to Sociologists and Criminologists, but also Political Scientists and social activists. Sections of the book could be used in an undergraduate Criminology course or a course specifically focused on race and crime. This text would also be critically important to have in a graduate level Criminology course.

Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch.

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Courtney Fullilove, “The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0000

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century, rural America transformed into the familiar arrangement of large scale, mechanized mono-cropping for distant markets. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Midwest, where the prairie, plowed into “Amber Waves of Grain,” came to signify all the promises of settler colonialism. The Profit of the Earth explains the creation of this arrangement by excavating the ways that farmers, settlers, and, bureaucrats learned about the earth and its possibilities as they sought a living, a profit, tax income, or national progress. In this way, Fullilove demonstrates that the advent of the American style of agriculture grew out of the co-optation and reworking of local forms of rural knowledge.

Courtney Fullilove is an Associate Professor of History and affiliated faculty in the Science in Society Program and the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University.

Lance C. Thurner is a doctoral candidate in History at Rutgers University, where he has recently defended his dissertation on race, medicine, and scientific exploration in 18th-century Mexico.

Enter the code “NBN10” and get 10% off this book and any book at University Press Books, Berkeley.

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Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who sought to establish for the collection of sense data what astronomers had done for the movements of heavenly bodies, they appeal to a general consensus that the acceleration of data collection through computing technologies requires a parallel shift toward computational thinking. This raises the question, however, of how computational practices have changed over the last few decades. Sabina Leonelli’s Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study (U of Chicago Press, 2016) is the first book-length treatment of how large-scale data collection impacts the work of the life sciences. The book offers a historically and socially informed epistemology of data, situating its production, consumption, and regulation within laboratory practices.

In fact, while much work in the history and sociology of biotechnology has attended to the kind of scalar changes associated with visible endeavors like the Human Genome Project, Leonelli’s account bucks this trend by looking at how plant biologists have made use of new tools and adopted different norms of sharing. The political economy of data she describes is biopolitical in a more pervasive sense, and the book offers support for the Open Science movement while subjecting it to keen philosophical scrutiny.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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Richard Ivan Jobs, “Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Ever go backpacking through Europe? In Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Richard Ivan Jobs traces the postwar cultural history of the making of Europe through the stories and perspectives of the young people who moved across the continent’s borders. A history of European integration from the end of the Second World War to the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, the book emphasizes the roles that young people played in postwar recovery and reconciliation efforts, their participation in Europeanization, the upheavals of 1968, and the ways that young people’s movements were circumscribed by the Cold War and transformed by its end.

Backpack Ambassadors examines the emergence of a “community of practice” defined by young people themselves, a community complicated by gender, class, race, and other differences. While youth are the key agents in this history, the book also considers the policies, programs, and regulations of the states that sought to encourage and manage the movement of young travelers across Europe in various ways. Transnational in subject and method, the chapters of the book draw on multiple archives and sources from several countries, including interviews with former backpackers and the experiences of the author himself. Absorbing in its myriad stories and compelling in its analysis, Backpack Ambassadors is a must-read for anyone interested in research and writing that connects culture and politics while pushing past the limits of national history. Highly readable and human in its approach, the book is also a fantastic resource for those teaching European integration at the undergraduate or graduate levels.

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Martin Shuster, “New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Thu, 19 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0000

How should we understand our new golden age of television? In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Martin Shuster, Director of Judaic Studies and Assistant Professor at Goucher College, interrogates New Television and offers both a defense and critique. Drawing on the work of the late Stanley Cavell, along with others including Hannah Arendt, the book explores the ontology of New Television, the medium of the screen, and the nature of storytelling. New Television has a vast range of examples, including chapters specifically focused on The Wire, Weeds and Justified. Along with detailed aesthetic philosophical discussion of each program, the book ultimately poses the problem of the politics of New Television, questioning the extent to which it offers critical, emancipatory, or regressive contributions to our understanding of modern life. The book is essential reading for anyone watching television, and also those who are not!

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Stephen C. Yeazell, “Lawsuits in a Market Economy: The Evolution of Civil Litigation” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Tue, 10 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Stephen C. Yeazell‘s Lawsuits in a Market Economy: The Evolution of Civil Litigation (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an in-depth look at the development and current situation of civil litigation. It beings with the question of why civil lawsuits have become such a political question and uses that to explore our world of settlements, arbitration, trials and insurance adjusting. It gives an expert, informed and even-handed look at what can be a contentious topic and is accessible to the layperson and edifying even to the professional. It portrays our environment of civil litigation as an evolving one where real people solve real problems, often for society’s benefit.

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Joanna Radin, “Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Whether through the anxiety of mutually assured destruction or the promise of decolonization throughout Asia and Africa, Cold War politics had a peculiar temporality. In Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Joanna Radin explores the conjuncture of time and temperature in Cold War “salvage biology” projects.

Cryobiology, genetic epidemiology, and freezer anthropology constructed a dense and tangled global infrastructure of blood circulation. By following these circuits, Radin weaves a narrative about the Cold War human sciences that takes readers up to present ethical debates about the insufficiency of informed consent and the need to better involve communities whose vital materials have been taken for the sake of biomedical research. This book will be of interest to all historians of science, technology, and medicine, as well as to anthropologists and scholars working in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Mikey McGovern is a PhD candidate in Princeton University’s Program in the History of Science. He works on computing, quantification, communication, and governance in modern America.

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Daniel Hopkins, “The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 04 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Will voters this fall be voting for or against Donald Trump, even though he isn’t on the ballot? Will they be voting on national issues, such as immigration or relations with North Korea, even when the election is for city council or mayor? If all politics is ultimately local, then the answer should be no. Instead, most assume that national issues will dominate vote choice up and down the ballot in 2018. For Daniel Hopkins, this is not a new phenomenon: the United States has been nationalizing for a long time, and political behavior has long reflected it. Hopkins is the author of The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized (University of Chicago Press, 2018). He is associate professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania.

In his new book, Hopkins marshals an incredible amount of data, from reanalysis of existing data to newly collected surveys to original experiments. From this mound of data, he shows how US politics has nationalized and why. The increasingly national news media and party polarization has change the way voters consume political information and what they are consuming. The result is an orientation of parties to national issues and political behavior that reflects this shift.

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Gordon Mathews, “The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 03 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0000

When we think of globalization and global cities, we might be inclined to think of New York or London. Yet in recent years, Guangzhou, the central manufacturing node in the world, has acted as a magnet for foreign traders. Anthropologist Gordon Mathews (with Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang) chronicles...

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James M. Jasper, “The Emotions of Protests” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 10:00:00 -0000

How do emotions affect participation in protests, and in politics more generally? In The Emotions of Protests (University of Chicago Press, 2018), James M. Jasper develops a solid critique to approaches that present political action as strictly rational and emotions as something outside the realm of strategy. Instead, Jasper speaks about feeling-thinking processes to highlight the interaction between strategic thinking and emotions, and the impact they have on participation in politics.

Jasper divides emotions in five categories: reflex emotions (what we normally thinking of when we refer to emotions), urges, moods, affective commitments, and moral commitments. Through an extensive elaboration of these five concepts and the different emotions associated with each of them, Jasper builds a solid ground for the development of what he terms a ‘theory of action’.

This book will stimulate sociologists and political scientists interested in social movements and protests, as well as anyone attracted by debates about rationality.

Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives.

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Christopher W. Schmidt, “The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 13:06:00 -0000

The sit-in movement that swept the Southern states in 1960 was one of the iconic moments of the post-World War II civil rights movement. Yet the images of students patiently sitting at “whites-only” lunch counters conveys only one facet of a complex series of events. In The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Christopher W. Schmidt chronicles the movement and its impact on the political and legal struggle for civil rights for African Americans. As Schmidt explains, prior to the sit-ins the main civil rights organizations were fighting segregation primarily through the courts. The incremental pace of change frustrated younger activists, with four students at North Carolina A&T ultimately deciding to fight segregation through direct protest. Yet the lunch counter protests they inspired were viewed with considerable ambivalence by the civil rights leadership, who were doubtful that the counters could be compelled to accept black patrons under existing law. Their uncertainly was reflected on the Supreme Court, where the justices’ division on the legality of segregation in privately-run facilities ultimately left the matter to be resolved by Congress in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

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Lilliana Mason, “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity” (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Recent debates about partisan polarization have focused primarily on ideology and policy views. In Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018), social identity moves to the center of how to think about the differences that divide the country. Instead of alignment of just party and ideology, recent social sorting has resulted in an array of social identities grouping together within each party. The consequence of this sorting is strong in-group bias and extreme emotional response to electoral outcomes.

Uncivil Agreement is written by Lilliana Mason. Mason is assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Mason combines analysis of historic survey data on elections and novel social experiments. What she discovers is a new dimension of the polarization debate, and one that has few obvious solutions. As she notes throughout the book, this is worrisome for the democracy and the responsiveness of parties to the electorate.

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Yoav Di-Capua, “No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 31 May 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Yoav Di-Capua‘s new book, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is narrative intellectual history at its best: a tale of friendship and betrayal, of missed connections and surprising syntheses, of unfinished revolutions, Oedipal revolts, and angst-ridden meditations on the meaning of freedom. Di-Capua’s story begins in May of 1944 with a six-hour dissertation defense heard around the Arab world, in which ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi demonstrated the compatibility of Heideggerian phenomenology and Sufism. The subsequent chapters of No Exit offer a tour of existentialist hotbeds across the Middle East, ending with a detailed account of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Claude Lanzmann’s visit to the region on the eve of the 1967 war. At each juncture, Di-Capua offers a lucid analysis of how the Arab intelligentsia struggled with a set of intertwined questions about decolonization: What does it take to “secure the physical liberation of the population and define its space?” What should be done to repair the “colonial destruction of the sociocultural fabric?” And “what does it mean to be a person after colonialism?” Our conversation focused primarily on the quest for being, the meaning of intellectual “commitment,” and the role existentialism played in the development of Palestinian political philosophy.

David Gutherz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research centers on the history of the human sciences and revolutionary politics, with a special interest in Fascist and Post-Fascist Italy.”

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Jeffrey Tulis and Nicole Mellow, “Legacies of Losing in American Politics” (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

Wed, 23 May 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Donald Trump famously said “We’re going to win so much you may even get tired of winning.” Tell that to the losers of politics; those who have lost major elections or key political debates. We rarely focus on those who have lost, but Jeffrey Tulis and Nicole Mellow suggest we can learn a lot from the losers. In Legacies of Losing in American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2018), they demonstrate that in three key points in American political history, the losing side won a lot more than we typically acknowledge or understand. Focusing on the founding period, the Civil War era, and the time after the passage of the New Deal, they show how the direction of the country was greatly shaped by defeat.

Tulis teaches American politics and political theory at the University of Texas at Austin. Mellow is professor of political science at Williams College.

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Erik Mueggler, “Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 21 May 2018 10:00:00 -0000

The Lòlop’ò of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province have a folktale in which they, Han Chinese, and Tibetans were given the technology of writing. The Han man was wealthy, purchased paper, and wrote on paper. And so the Han continue to have writing today. The Tibetan man wrote on an animal...

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Mark Liechty, “Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal” (U of Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 01 May 2018 10:00:00 -0000

How did Nepal become synonymous, in the minds of many Westerners, with the idea of a mystical paradise and a place to find enlightenment? How did Kathmandu become the subject of songs by countercultural icons such as Janis Joplin and Cat Stevens? What did Nepalis make of the strange seekers who turned up on their doorsteps? In his book Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal (University of Chicago Press, 2017), anthropologist and historian Mark Liechty offers a deeply researched and thoroughly engaging to all of these questions and more.

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John Gennari, “Flavor and Soul: Italian America and Its African American Edge” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 10:00:00 -0000

In his book, Flavor and Soul: Italian America and Its African American Edge (University of Chicago Press, 2017), scholar John Gennari examines the intersectionalities between African American and Italian American cultures in the United States. Using an auto-ethnographic lens, Gennari explores this relationship, what he calls “the edge”, between the two cultures. Gennari examines the intersectionalities in music, film, sports, and foodways, spotlighting the edge as a way to highlight the ways in which the relationship between Italian American and African American cultures has been both joyous and beneficial as well as fraught with violence and suspicion. He posits that an Afro-Italian sensibility has vitalized American culture, even with the conflicts over urban spaces, political and personal respect, and overlapping histories of exclusion. Through his personal connections as well as critical and well-researched chapters on the intersections between these two cultures, Gennari gives readers a deeper understanding of the histories and relationships between African Americans and Italian Americans.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Jenny Reardon, “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 10:00:00 -0000

How do we create meaning after the genome? Such a profound question is at the center of the recently published book by Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Drawing upon nearly a hundred interviews including with genetic scientists, social scientists, activists, lawyers and policy makers, Reardon constructs an engaging story detailing accounts of genomic projects from several field sites around the globe. Beyond her ethnographic accounts, Reardon engages with historical antecedents, such as the infamous Tuskegee study and the following Belmont Report, as well as philosophical discussions and insights from the likes of Hannah Arendt and Jean François Lyotard. The result is a reconsideration of genomics in a society vexed by inequality, and a push toward matters of science and justice.

Following the completion of the Human Genome Project, many subsequent genomic related projects (such as the Human Genome Diversity Project, Generation Scotland, and personal genomic projects like 23andMe) had to quibble with issues over labor, interpretation, cost, consent, and diversity. While many well-intentioned scientists hoped to be more inclusive and rebuke activist claims of “genetic colonialism”, these attempts fell through, due in part to problems of consent, structural inequalities, and conflicting points of view between scientists and potential DNA donors regarding the meaning and value of the genome. Other projects, such as Generation Scotland, had to deal with rising cost, and industry push toward more computerized, automated sequencing. For genomic researchers and investors, automation means reduced labor and reduced human error; however, citing Arendt, Reardon argues that such automation could jeopardize the very acts of meaningful speech that bring matters of concern, like the genome, into being. Instead, we should engage with a plurality of stories and gatherings around such matters of care and justice as they may come to constitute a new common world, including a transformed genomic science.

Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek.

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John Krinsky and Maud Simonet, “Who Cleans the Park? Public Works and Urban Governance in New York City” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 10:00:00 -0000

It is possible that you did not know that you need a comprehensive labor market analysis of the New York City Parks Department, but John Krinsky and Maud Simonet, in their new book, Who Cleans the Park? Public Works and Urban Governance in New York City (University of Chicago Press, 2017), show that you do. Join us as we talk with Krinsky about what this wildly segmented labor force tells us about work, workers, and workplaces today (not to mention race, sexual harassment, and real estate). The answer to “Who Cleans the Park?” is, in fact, much more complicated — and much more important — than you might think.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).

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John Aldrich and John Griffin, “Why Parties Matter: Political Competition and Democracy in the American South” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 10:00:00 -0000

John Aldrich and John Griffin are the co-authors of Why Parties Matter: Political Competition and Democracy in the American South (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Aldrich is the Pfizer-Pratt University Professor of Political Science at Duke University; Griffin is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Why Parties Matter argues that competition between political parties is an essential component of a democracy. Competition facilitates responsiveness to citizens and a politics better able to address citizen concerns. Aldrich and Griffin follow the history of the parties in the United States through four eras—the Democratic—Whig party era that preceded the Civil War; the post-Reconstruction period; the Jim Crow era; and the modern era. They show the emergence of competition between the parties and when it succeeded and failed.

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Japonica Brown-Saracino, “How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Many of us move to a new place at some point in our lives for a variety of reasons: for a job, to be with a partner, to attend school, for a change of scenery, to retire. When we have a choice, we consider a host of place characteristics to make a decision on where to go: its cost of living, crime rate, climate, array of “qualities” (life, schools, housing), amenities. And, we often assume that when we get there we will either always “be ourselves” or reinvent ourselves, and become a new person. Little do we know that our identities—how we think about and perform them—are more out of our control in new environments than we ever would have thought and could never have planned. In her provocative new book, How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities, sociologist Japonica Brown-Saracino challenges the idea that we always possess a “core self” wherever we go. By examining lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women in four cities around the U.S. (Ithaca, NY; San Luis Obispo, CA; Portland, ME; and Greenfield, MA), she strikingly finds homogeneity in terms of how people self-identify within places, but heterogeneity across places despite both the cities and people being similar. Brown-Saracino discovers that these women adopt distinct local “sexual identity cultures” that are shaped by elements in each place’s ecology, specifically how they perceive the abundance and acceptance there of others like them, the city’s narratives about itself, and the types of women like them that they meet. Most importantly, how they arrange and act out these identities are often very different from how they did so before they moved there. Featuring a rigorous analysis and compelling presentation, this book forces us to rethink what we know about the identities we hold, the communities we belong to, and the places where we live.

Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City and Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography.

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David Rapp, “Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Chicago Cubs and the Dream of Modern America” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Today we are joined by David Rapp, author of the book Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Chicago Cubs and the Dawn of Modern America (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Rapp spent 30 years as a journalist in the Washington. D.C., area and was the former editor of Congressional Quarterly,...

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Chad Alan Goldberg, “Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought” (U Chicago Press, 2017

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 10:00:00 -0000

In his new book, Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Chad Alan Goldberg looks at how social thinkers from Karl Marx, to Emile Durkheim, to Robert Park mobilized ideas and ideologies about Jews to conceptualize the big themes of modernity. Goldberg shows for example how inherited schemas, which had historically painted Jews as both backwards “Orientals” and, at the same time, as ultra-modern cosmopolitans, were mobilized consciously and unconsciously to serve different sociological theories. That is, as Goldberg illustrates, because of their contradictory and ambivalent status within the European imagination, the Jew became a central object of study and a key symbol for social theorists, a symbol that they found useful for thinking through the contradictions and ambivalences of nationhood and citizenship in France, economics and power in Germany, and urbanization and assimilation in the United States. As Goldberg writes, in a phrase borrowed from Claude Levi-Strauss, “Jews were good to think.”

In this episode, we talk about Durkheim’s reactions to the reactionary right, and how his view about Jews may have informed other aspects of his thought; we talk about the Chicago schools idea of assimilation, which, as Goldberg argues, begins with recognizing the “marginal man” as a key character of the Modern era and ends with a vision of diversity and collaboration; we talk about the two different ways Karl Marx depicted Jews and their relationship to capital and to European history; and we talk about how the Jew or rather, the figure of the Jew continues to serve “as an intermediary for self-reflection in our own time.”

Daveeda Goldberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada.

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George Paul Meiu, “Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money and Belonging in Kenya” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Professor George Paul Meiu‘s debut anthropological book, Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2017), dives into the commodification of culture and sex on the beachfronts of coastal Kenya, as well as the ramifications and shifting economic power dynamics in rural Samburu villages that result from this new economy. Utilizing over a decade of community engagement and research, Meiu expertly engages in intense anthropological study without exploitation and judgment. Rather he succeeds in humanizing his subjects as he explores the creation and development of a new economy, that of engaging with white, largely Western European women, in romantic relationships in exchange for money, goods and, eventually, higher economic and social status in their home rural communities. But with this new economy comes challenges to traditional social structures, as sexuality and wealth intersect with traditional land tenure and power. Meiu, with his deep understanding of the Samburu people, rituals and culture, explores how power dynamics change, and how new money is challenged and reconciled. This book is highly readable, without skimping on academic literature and theoretical context, resulting in a book that will engage everyone from first year anthropology students through seasoned academics.

Erin Freas-Smith, Ph.D can be reached at efreassmith@gmail.com.

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Menachem Fisch, “Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency” (U Chicago Press, 2017 )

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 10:00:00 -0000

Thomas Kuhn upset both scientists and philosophers of science when he argued that transitions from one scientific framework (or “paradigm”) to another were irrational: the change was like a religious conversion experience rather than a reasoned shift from one theory to another based on the best evidence. But even if one disagrees with Kuhn, how can this change be shown to be rational? More generally, how can transitions from one set of normative standards to another be rational, given that there is no neutral position from which to criticize one’s own normative standards? In Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Menachem Fisch takes up this challenge, defending an account of framework change which accepts that we cannot be self-critical of our own standards, but we can be destabilized by external criticism. Some of those who are “ambivalated” in this way creatively attempt to tackle their ambivalence by developing hybrid theories that provide others in a scientific community with a means to critically assess their frameworks and develop new ones. Fisch, who is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University, draws on work from Korsgaard, Friedman, Galison, McDowell and others in a rich discussion of the dynamics of normativity in science, illustrated with a case study of debates on the foundations of algebra in the 1830s.

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Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “Of Beard and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair” (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 11:00:00 -0000

Throughout Western history the clean-shaven face has been the default style. However, the ideal of the cleanly-shaven face has been challenged across time in Western society. Facial hair is a symbol of masculinity and the sculpting of facial hair allows men to negotiate their manliness in public spaces. In Of Beard and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Dr. Christopher Oldstone-Moore discusses Western history of the beard and how beard movements have been developed to challenge the ideals of masculinity presented in wearing facial hair. He traces the history of the beard from Hadrian in the second century to the more recent bristled resurgence of today. Dr. Oldstone-Moore presents the beard as being a symbol of self-reliance and being unconventional, whereas the clean-shaven face presents a virtuous and sociable man.

Christopher R. Oldstone-Moore, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer of History at Wright State University. Dr. Oldstone-Moore’s research focuses on gender and masculinity, and particularly the aspect of the hair and body. He is currently researching the history of adventure.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled “Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.”

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Douglas Hartman, “Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy” (U Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 11:00:00 -0000

The concept of late-night basketball gained prominence in the late 1980s when G. Van Standifer founded Midnight Basketball League as a vehicle upon which citizens, businesses, and institutions can stand together to prevent crime, violence, and drug abuse. The concept ignited and late-night basketball leagues were developed in dozens of cities across America. In Midnight Basketball: Race, Sports, and Neoliberal Social Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Douglas Hartmann traces the history of late-night basketball with particular emphasis on the racial ideologies, cultural tensions, and institutional realities that continue to shape sports-based social policy. Hartmann brings to life the experience he had as a researcher in the field working with late-night basketball programs and the young men they were intended to serve. This experience provided him with a more grounded and nuanced understanding of the intricate ways sports, race, and risk intersect and interact in urban America.

Douglas Hartman is a professor and the chair of sociology at University of Minnesota.

Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled “Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.”

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Sam Rosenfeld, “The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era” (U Chicago Press, 2018)

Mon, 05 Feb 2018 11:00:00 -0000

In our hyper polarized world, it is easy to assume that this is a natural state of being, the result of natural shifts in politics. In Sam Rosenfeld‘s new book, The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), he argues otherwise. Rosenfeld takes us back to the 1940s when another crisis of polarization dominated the headlines. Instead of too much, scholars worried about too little. No less than E. E. Schattschneider championed a debate on whether a move to more clearly identifiable parties would improve democracy through so-called “responsible parties.” Over time, informed by the ideas of political scientists, the two parties did in fact shift, taking on much clearer ideological agendas and issue positions. Unlike the 1940s, it is much clearer to voters what it means to vote for one party or the other.

Rosenfeld tracks the people—the Architects in his subtitle—who initiated changes in party rules and institutions that facilitated the development of the parties. The book is rich in historical details and meaning for our current political moment.

Rosenfeld is an assistant professor of political science at Colgate University.

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Hendrik Meijer, “Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 17:24:00 -0000

As a United States senator in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Vandenberg was one of the leading Republican voices shaping the nation’s foreign policy. Though initially a staunch isolationist, as Hendrik Meijer explains in Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Vandenberg eventually became one of the foremost advocates for America’s engagement with the world. As a young man Vandenberg embarked upon a career as a journalist, and soon rose to become the editor of the local newspaper in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Vandenberg’s platform made him a force in state politics, and his editorials enjoyed a national readership among Republican leaders. Appointed to the Senate in 1928, Vandenberg soon made a name for himself for his ability to compromise on legislation, and with the electoral decimation of the party in Congress in the 1930s he emerged as one of its most prominent figures. Meijer details the ways in which Vandenberg used his stature to shape American policy, from his role in the drafting of the United Nations Charter to his involvement in the passage of the Marshall Plan and the treaty that established NATO.

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Jonathan R. Wynn, “Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport” (U of Chicago, 2015)

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 11:00:00 -0000

A city in its original state is arbitrary and has no meaning. The act of placemaking is a multifaceted process in the planning, designing, and management of public spaces. The social construction of meaning is a process that capitalizes on the assets, inspiration, and potential of a public space. This meaning is constructed from the social and emotional sentiments that people evoke from the city. The structural and physical aspects of the city are less important. Jonathan R. Wynn, the author of Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport (University of Chicago, 2015) and my guest for this episode, studied the process of placemaking through observing major music festivals for the cities of Austin, Texas; Nashville, Texas; and Newport, Rhode Island. In our interview, we discuss how this study was shaped from his past study on tour guides and how community members serve as major contributors to placemaking. Wynn also shares his thoughts on the current climate of music festivals in the United States compared to Canada.

Jonathan R. Wynn, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Undergraduate Program Director at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Wynn is an urban sociologist who published The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York and regularly contributes to the Everyday Sociology blog. He is currently working on a project about hospitals as a central hub for urban communities.

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Jason Josephson-Storm, “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences” (U. Chicago, 2017)

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 11:30:00 -0000

We tend to think of ourselves—our modern selves–as disenchanted. We have traded magic, myth, and spirits for science, reason, and logic. But this is false. Jason Josephson-Storm, in his exciting new book titled The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017) challenges this classical story of modernity. Josephson-Storm, associate professor in and chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College, argues that modernity is riddled with magic, and that attempts to curtail it have often failed. Adding a twist to a well-known expression, he writes that we have never been disenchanted. Josephson-Storm investigates the human sciences—philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, and folklore studies, to name a few—which were critical to the creation and spread of the myth of a mythless society. But the human sciences were themselves also deeply entangled with magic. They often, Josephson-Storm reveals, emerged from occult origins, flirted with the paranormal, or even produced new enchantments. As can be surmised from this brief description, the audience of The Myth of Disenchantment will be a broad and eclectic one. The book will be of interest to scholars in religious studies, science and technology studies, and historians of philosophy, science, ideas, culture, and Europe.

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Catherine Zuckert, “Machiavelli’s Politics” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 11:00:00 -0000

Catherine Zuckert‘s new book, Machiavelli’s Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017), systematically analyzes all the texts that Machiavelli wrote, exploring each text individually, but also as part of Machiavelli’s more expansive teaching as a philosopher, but more precisely as a philosopher of politics. Zuckert examines not only Machiavelli’s own work, but she also integrates the vast scholarship of Machiavelli’s work, exploring others scholars assessment of Machiavelli’s particular project in each work and also the broader interpretation of Machiavelli as a political thinker. Machiavelli’s reputation has long been a caricature of his actual work and teaching, and Zuckert’s book delves into not only the reason for his reputation, but also how and where it is derived in the texts themselves, often at the expense or in the absence of attention to corresponding teachings in other texts, especially texts beyond The Prince. Zuckert not only pays attention to the texts themselves and the myriad other works of scholarship and analysis, she also unpacks the historical data that Machiavelli integrates into his work while focusing on the ways in which the texts are dedicated, to whom, and how these aspects of the texts are important to understanding the content as well.

By exploring all of Machiavelli’s works, and how they connect to each other and refract the teaching in each text, Zuckert goes on to elucidate Machiavelli’s political project, which she explains provides a kind of teaching that is distinct from classical theorists as well as those who came after Machiavelli and who wrote in a much different manner. Machiavelli’s Politics is not only a beautifully written book, clear and complex simultaneously, it is an extraordinary resource with extensive integration of other works and scholars who have delved into analyzing and considering Machiavelli’s works over multiple centuries from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

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Kathryn Lofton, “Consuming Religion” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 15:51:00 -0000

Kathryn Lofton is a professor of religious studies and history at Yale University. Her book Consuming Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a collection of eleven essays of cultural critique that reflect on the connections between religion, consumer culture, celebrity and the corporation. Her definition of religion is capacious and founded on Durkheim’s understanding of it as a form of social organization that determines who we are. In contemporary culture religion is an attempt to mass-produce relations of value and generate both control and freedom. Applying this definition to popular culture, she examines binge watching, the cubicle of the Action Office of Herman Miller, Purity Balls, Hotel Preston’s innovation in the Spiritual Menu offerings, and the fascination with the Kardashians. In an ethnographic study of the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, she demonstrates how the idea of corporate culture becomes a form of religion. Lofton challenges us to see religion everywhere in our construction of meaning and values.

This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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Joel Dinerstein, “The Origins of Cool in Postwar America” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 10:00:00 -0000

In his new book, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Cultural Studies scholar Joel Dinerstein explores the cultural history of cool and the codes that defined the style and attitude of this relatively new concept. Using cultural icons such as Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Albert Camus, Billie Holiday, Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, and Lorraine Hansberry to name a few, Dinerstein weaves an image of cool in the 1940s and 1950s as it intersects jazz, film noir, literature, and existentialism. Well researched and compellingly written, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America examines the ways in which popular culture works to define cool throughout the Cold War. Dinerstein’s work interrogates cool, presenting the way in which individuals show how cool is a way of rebellion and resistance against racism or other cultural and social norms. Cool brings a hope to individuals during cultural shifts that Dinerstein presents in this thorough and thoughtful exploration into cool and the icons who exuded the term.

Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in people’s lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.

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Mya Guranieri Jaradat, “The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others” (U. Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017)

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 17:57:00 -0000

In The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2017), Mya Guarnieri-Jaradat offers her readers an intimate, often devastatingly gloomy portrait of the lives of Southeast Asian migrant workers and African asylum seekers in Israel. She depicts an image of a reality of poverty, harassment, and abuse that often goes largely unseen. Based on a decade’s worth of experience in the field, The Unchosen sheds light on Israel’s often brutal treatment of these marginalized and frequently silenced peoples, providing them with a space where their voices can be heard.

Mya Guarnieri Jaradat is a journalist and writer who spent nearly a decade covering Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Her work has been published in a number of literary and media outlets, including the Nation, Al Jazeera English, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Narrative, Kenyon Review, and Boston Review.

Yaacov Yadgar is the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Sovereign Jews: Israel, Zionism and Judaism (SUNY Press, 2017). You can read more of Yadgar’s work here.

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Yakov M. Rabkin, “What Is Modern Israel?” (U. Chicago/Pluto Press, 2016)

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 19:11:00 -0000

In What is Modern Israel? (University of Chicago/Pluto Press, 2016), Yakov Rabkin, a professor of history at the University of Montreal, discusses some of the most fundamental issues pertaining to the history and socio-politics of Israel. He does not shy away from dealing with some of the most sensitive and controversial issues, such as the Christian roots of Zionist ideology, the commemoration and political uses of the Holocaust in Israel, and the problematic stance of Zionist ideology towards Jewish tradition. Rabkin’s earlier work has charted some of the main streams of Jewish opposition to Zionism. In this book, he offers a coherent Jewish critique of his own.

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Maurice Samuels, “The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 10:00:00 -0000

In The Right To Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Maurice Samuels, Betty Jane Anylan Professor of French and director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism at Yale University, demonstrates that Jewish difference has always been essential to the elaboration of French universalism. Looking at novelists, philosophers, filmmakers and political figures Samuels recovers the forgotten history of a more open, pluralistic form of French universalism. This is sure to become a classic and essential text.

Max Kaiser is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.

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Julia Mickenberg, “American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the American Dream” (U of Chicago Press, 2017)

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 11:50:00 -0000

In American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the American Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Julia Mickenberg tells the story of women both famous and unknown, committed radicals and adventure seekers who went to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. She explores their motivations and experiences, as well...

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Hussein Fancy, “The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 16:09:00 -0000

Hussein Fancy’s book The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) begins with the description of five Muslim jenets, or cavalrymen, journeying through Spain in 1285 to serve as soldiers for the crown of Aragon. As Fancy explains, these men were not outliers, but just a few of the many thousands who were employed by successive Aragonese kings over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, and their service challenges many of our long-held assumptions of the divide between the Christian and Islamic worlds during the Middle Ages. For the kings of Aragon, hiring jenets gave them a powerful force of light cavalry that could be used to foster their imperial ambitions, while the jenets themselves saw their service for Christian kings as fully compatible with their tradition of jihad. By describing their relationship, Fancy’s work highlights one of the many ties that linked Christian Aragon to Muslim North Africa, two regions that are usually treated separately rather than part of the interconnected Mediterranean world that emerges from his pages.

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Ilana Gershon, “Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

Sun, 06 Aug 2017 15:22:00 -0000

Labor markets are not what they used to be, as Ilana Gershon argues in Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Job seekers are increasingly being taught that they need to sell themselves as if they were their own business, and what will set them apart from other applicants is not their skills or their experience, but the distinctiveness of their brand. Join us for a provocative discussion about how workers are being taught to position themselves to employers, and how modern labor markets, as a consequence, differ from those in the past — and why that matters.

Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Nathan Kalmoe and David Kinder, “Neither Liberal or Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 13:42:00 -0000

Nathan Kalmoe and Donald Kinder are the authors of Neither Liberal or Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Kalmoe is an assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University and Kinder is the Philip E. Converse Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. Neither Liberal or Conservative looks straightly at what we have known in the past about ideology and the formation of ideology.

Kalmoe and Kinder take up the seminal research of Phillip Converse on “ideological innocence.” What they find largely supports this historic finding that Americans are not that ideological. Several decades later, most of the country remains innocent of ideology. With the exception of some highly engaged and informed individuals, partisanship remains the central organizing feature of political life and identification for most Americans.

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Anita Hannig, “Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 16:39:00 -0000

Anita Hannig‘s first book, Beyond Surgery: Injury, Healing, and Religion at an Ethiopian Hospital (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is an in-depth, ethnography of two fistula repair and rehabilitation centers in northern Ethiopia. Focusing on the juxtaposition of culture, religion and medicine, Hannig turns the heroic narrative of surgery on its head to expose the realities of life for women treated in, and living at the centers. Utilizing first-person interviews, she show the human face to the surgery and its aftermath. Moving beyond the easy and cathartic narrative promulgated by the media and non-profit fundraisers, Hannig shows the complex reality of life post-surgery. Hannig’s book is a testament to the importance of good, long-term research in the arena of public health in the developing world.

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Steven Seegel, “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire” (U. of Chicago Press, 2012)

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 22:38:00 -0000

Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012) provided a firm foundation for his reputation by exploring how imperial priorities shaped map-making of he dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and how these changed over the long century during which a fully independent Polish state did not exist. While focused primarily on Russian cartography is the primary focus of this work, Seegel places those developments in context with discussion of Polish nationalist map-making and a discussion of Habsburg map-making of the region as well. In so doing, he also offers intriguing portraits of the cartographers who ultimately made this research possible. It was a pleasure to interview him at last about this book and I invite you to listen to our discussion of his work.

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Jessie Daniels and Arlene Stein, “Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 10:56:00 -0000

Jessie Daniels and Arlene Stein have written Going Public: A Guide for Social Scientists (University of Chicago Press, 2017). How can political scientists and other social scientists speak beyond campus walls? Through blogs, social media, and podcasts, scholars are finding new avenues for intellectual expression. In Going Public, Daniels and Stein offer careful advice for how to use these avenues and ways to avoid some of the pitfalls.

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Marilyn Palmer and Ian West, “Technology and the Country House” (Historic England Publishing/U.Chicago, 2016)

Fri, 26 May 2017 18:05:00 -0000

For the aristocracy in Britain and Ireland, country house living was dependent upon the labors of men and women who performed innumerable chores involving cooking, cleaning, and the basic operation of the household. In the 18th century, however, the Industrial Revolution began to change this by introducing new devices and systems that simplified a wide range of duties. In Technology in the Country House (Historic England Publishing, 2016; distributed in the U.S. by University of Chicago Press) Marilyn Palmer and Ian West detail the extensive range of innovations adopted by country house owners from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries and their impact on the operations of their homes and estates. As West explains in this podcast, though many of these innovations were labor-saving devices, often they required not fewer servants, but ones trained in the new tasks of how to operate and maintain them. Their introduction was often undertaken by owners out of a personal interest in the innovations of the age, or who adopted them because of their fashionability–motives which, as West explains, provide useful examples of how technology is introduced into society generally both then and today.

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Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra, eds. “The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside” (U. Chicago, 2017)

Fri, 26 May 2017 17:44:00 -0000

“Boxing has always attracted writers because it issues a standing challenge to their powers of description and imagination, and also a warning–really a promise–that no matter how many layers of meaning you peel away there will always be others beneath them” (1).

Over the past half-century boxing has endured a strange fate: a fall from cultural dominance simultaneous to a rise in payouts so enormous that top fighters are the most valuable athletes on the planet. A puzzle like this attracts the fighter, the fan, and the scholar; and boxing is full of such befuddlers. Expressive of a variety of injustices and imbalances of power, boxing offers careful analysts the chance to look beyond the perfectly pebbled abs and airbrushed promotional photos to see into the lives of the people cross-pressured by vast economic and cultural forces both at their command and beyond their control. Enter The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside (University of Chicago Press, 2017) edited by Carlo Rotella and Michael Ezra; a new collection of original essays that probes the mysteries of the sport, business, and spectacle of boxing, asking us to look again at one hundred years of history at the fights.

Bringing together essays by fighters, managers, and keen observers of boxing’s past and present, this collection restores the qualitative weight of what appear to be quantitative measures–like a fighter’s win-loss record–peeling back the layers of history and culture and life experience in events and careers in the fight industry. While they engage the legacy of boxings all-time greats, the writers here also plumb the networks of amateur and Olympic fighters, trainers, managers, and administrators who make up the vast majority of those in the fight world. Often correcting for the force of the “invisible numbers” behind the record book page, this book’s perspectives from around the fight world reveal the ways in which national culture, race, gender, and social status open and close opportunities for a professional fighter, and influence current and future earning potential. Fitness, skill, speed, and style can lift a fighter to greatness, but it takes a different level of savvy to carve an opening in the industry in a fighter’s post-prime; a savvy that the sport itself may need to capture in a culture that seems to have moved on to younger, stronger attractions.

For sports historians, fight fans, and observers of American writing, The Bittersweet Science provides a potent sampling of “either the glorious last stand or amazing comeback of boxing writing as a genre of literature,” and offers fans and scholars the analytical tools and historical perspective to make meaning of fighters climbing into the ring.

Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com.

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Sharrona Pearl, “Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

Thu, 18 May 2017 18:56:00 -0000

Sharrona Pearl‘s new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations (FAT), commonly known as face transplants, in order to offer a careful and fascinating study of the stakes for changing the face, and the changing stakes for the face. Troubling the indexical relationship between the face and character and reminding us that “[t]he self has always been a set of choices,” Pearl explores face transplantation as it relates to cosmetic surgery and whole-organ transplants, the cinema of the 1960s, television shows, and more. She carefully and sensitively takes us into the debates among surgeons, bioethicists, and journalists that circled the first partial face transplant of Isabelle Dinoire in 2005, and offers a way toward a philosophical approach that brings together Levinas with the kind of (Deleuzian) subjectivity that allows for individuality through constant change and understands the self to be constantly in a process of becoming. The final chapter of the book also situates the analysis within larger contexts of online subjectivities and work with facial and bodily manipulation by artists and performers. It’s sparklingly written and well worth a read!

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Willliam Rankin, “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

Wed, 17 May 2017 21:01:00 -0000

Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, and countless other activities. Yet by the 1960s and 1970s, interest in maps waned while electronic coordinate systems emerged. But this was not solely a shift in technology, as William Rankin writes in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016). The shift from maps to coordinate systems, and then eventually to GPS produced novel geographical subjectivities, navigational experiences and geopolitical arrangements. It was a shift in the meaning of territory itself.

By day, William Rankin is an assistant professor of history at Yale; by night, he is an award-winning cartographer, whose work you can find here. Rankin has also set up a website to accompany the book, at which readers can see the books images, data, and bibliography.

Dexter Fergie will be pursuing his PhD in US and Global history at Northwestern University in September 2017.

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Amir Engel, “Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography” (U. Chicago Press, 2017)

Mon, 15 May 2017 17:38:00 -0000

In Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2017) , Amir Engel, a lecturer in the German Department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, positions Gershom Scholem’s work and life within early twentieth-century Germany, Palestine and later the state of Israel. This book is an accessible and illuminating account of Gershom Scholem’s thought. It will become a very important reference for many years to come.

Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.

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Sophia Roosth, “Synthetic: How Life Got Made” (U Chicago Press, 2017)

Sat, 13 May 2017 12:31:00 -0000

Sophia Roosth‘s wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historically informed anthropological analysis based on many years of ethnographic work, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (University of Chicago Press, 2017) offers a fascinating account of the changing relationship between making and understanding in the life sciences, and of the metamorphoses of life itself as an analytic object. The chapters of the book consider traditional ethnographic conventions as they manifest in the case of synthetic biology and reflect the forms of life being built by the synthetic biologists: religion, kinship, economy and property, labor, household, origin tales. Interludes between the chapters function as keyword entries, each probing earlier articulations of what it meant to be synthetic in different contexts, from the synthetic fabrics industry to Soviet synthetic dance to music, chemistry, and much more. It is a beautifully written and totally absorbing study.

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Helen Anne Curry, “Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 08 May 2017 10:00:00 -0000

Nowadays, it might seem perplexing for the founder of a seed company to express the intention to “shock Mother Nature,” or at least in bad taste. Yet, this was precisely the goal of agricultural innovators like David Burpee, of the Burpee Seed Company, who sought to use radiation and chemical mutagens to accelerate the generation of new plant varieties, a process otherwise requiring painstaking, slow, and resource-intensive artificial selection. Helen Anne Curry‘s Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a fascinating history of biotechnology that documents the interplay between genetic research and agricultural production; genetic engineering avant la lettre, one is tempted to say, although botanist A. F. Blakeslee, who figures prominently in the narrative, made a failed attempt to promote the designation “genetics engineer” to describe his work. Through the lens of three different technologies–x-rays, the chemical colchicine, and atomic radiation–Curry shows how chromosomes and genetic mutations became sites of speculation for industrial agriculture and of experimentation for amateur plant breeders. She deftly restores the experimental station, the marketplace, and the garden to their proper place as sites of knowledge production, showing that landscape and lab were perhaps never so separable as our modern conceit might make them appear.

This is part one of a series of new work on twentieth-century biotechnology–look out for further interviews featuring some great new work published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Leonard Barkan, “Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 08 May 2017 10:00:00 -0000

In Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Leonard Barkan, the class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, examines the complex histories of Jewish life in Berlin. He offers a nuanced and idiosyncratic account of Jewish lives, places and legacies in this city. This book is a highly readable contribution which will accompany Jews on their trips to Berlin for many years to come. Barkan brings to light little known figures, places and stories in a very personal journey.

Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.

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Tania Munz, “The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 11:29:00 -0000

Tania Munz‘s new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as experimental, communicating creatures. The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language (University of Chicago Press, 2016) alternates between chapters that take us into the work and life of a fascinating scientist amid the Nazi rise to power, and bee vignettes that chart the transformations of bees in the popular and scientific imagination over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readers follow von Frisch from his early intimate connection with a small Brazilian parakeet that lived with the family while von Frisch was a boy, to his work on the sensory powers of fish and bees, to his work on bee communication and beyond. Munz introduces us not just to von Frisch’s texts, lectures, and experiments, but also to his work making films and his struggles to live and work under Nazi power. Munz’s book is both compellingly argued and a pleasure to read!

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Brandon Kendhammer, “Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy and Law in Northern Nigeria” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 10:00:00 -0000

Brandon Kendhammer takes a fresh approach to the juxtaposition of Islam and democracy in his latest book, Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy and Law in Northern Nigeria (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Rather than employing a top-down approach to understanding Islam’s compatibility with democracy, Kendhammer chose to speak with blue-collar, working-class Muslims in cities across Northern Nigeria. Through this approach, Kendhammer exposes the pragmatic views of ordinary citizens more concerned with economic stability than jihadist rhetoric.

As the political situation gets more violent and the idea of democracy more remote in Nigeria, Kenhammer offers a viewpoint of deep understanding for the complex situation. Based upon hundreds of conversations with ordinary citizens, he sketches a picture of how Islam and democracy can, and often is, reconciled in the neighborhoods and marketplaces of urban Nigeria’s centers, where Christians and Muslims live side-by-side. It is in the daily political and social negotiations that the way forward can be seen. However, with the increasingly violent acts of Boko Haram, it seems that the ordinary voices are being lost to unwavering religious rhetoric. While this books only tackles Northern Nigeria, the themes and lessons can be extended into the larger Muslim world grappling with the possibility of fitting Islamic values into a democratic state.

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Colleen Derkatch, “Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 10:00:00 -0000

What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their conception of human biology? Are the criteria of the sciences amenable to healing practices that are touted for their focus on singularity, rather than uniformity? Colleen Derkatch‘s Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2016) investigates how boundaries between traditional and novel are erected at the level of medical rhetoric.

Derkatch analyzes both expert and popular literature on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), an umbrella term designed to encompass homeopathy, meditation, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine, among other things. Demand for alternative treatments by patients has produced an uncertain situation in which clinical frameworks are used for practices traditionally seen as being outside the realm of biomedicine. Through concerted engagement with different genres of medical communication, Derkatch’s rhetorical cultural approach allows the reader to see the extent to which the boundaries of what counts as biomedicine or not rest on conceptions of evidence and categorization schemes promoted by allopathic medical professionals. With a keen eye turned to communication strategies and assumptions, Derkatch shows the subtle ways in which the norms of biomedicine are challenged and strengthened by attempts to reduce other treatments to processes that can be evaluated on the basis of standards of evidence and efficacy.

This is the second of a pair of interviews on alternative medicine: for a historical consideration of naturopathy as an alternative to allopathic medicine, look out for my interview with Susan Cayleff on her book, Nature’s Path.

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Gregory Mitchell, “Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual Economy” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:00:00 -0000

Moving through the saunas of Rio de Janeiro, the Amazonian eco-resorts of Manaus, and the Afro-Brazilian heritage of Bahia, Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazils Sexual Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores sex as an epistemology – a way of knowing. The ethnographic, theoretical and prosaic prowess of Assistant Professor Gregory Mitchell captures the individual experiences and identities of male sex workers and their transnational clients. Delving into the complex and refractive affective flows that attempt to make desire legible – across culture, race and sexuality – Tourist Attractions proposes that sex work be reframed as a form of performative labor. Exploring how affect and labour shape the performance of masculinity, Mitchell makes a robust contribution to ideas of queer kinship, authenticity and cultural memory. It follows that the conceptual depth of Tourist Attractions is also met by the contextual breadth of its subject matter – from the influence of political economic considerations, to the missionary agenda of gay rights rhetoric, to the metonymic role of the body in heritage tourism and ecotourism. The reader cannot but help become an enthralled audience member to the social choreography that Mitchell observes, navigating the culturally specific affects of individual sexual exchanges and cross-continental tourism.

Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture.

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Christopher Lowen Agee, “The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972” (U. Chicago Press, 2014)

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 21:14:00 -0000

Policing tactics have recently been the subject of lively political debates and the target of protest groups like the Black Lives Matter movement. Police reform is not new, of course. The 1950s and 1960s, in fact, saw one of the most active periods of change surrounding standard policing procedures and a moment of political reexamination of the role of police in a democracy. Christopher Lowen Agee, Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver, examines these changes in San Francisco in his recent book. The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes on a city where police notoriously clashed with leftist activists, but also a city run by liberals. The Streets of San Francisco examines the causes, consequences, and limits of reform from street-level interactions between police and residents to policing politics in city hall.

In this episode of New Books in History, Agee discusses his new book. He tells listeners about reform in the San Francisco Police Department in the 1950s and 1960s. He talks about some of the unusual alliances formed among reformers and a few of the several controversies that his book examines, explaining to listeners how those controversies changed police procedures. He discusses the role of police discretion and force, of activists responding to police tactics, and also the limits of reform, particularly those surrounding race. The legacies of these reforms continue to influence policing today. Finally, Agee talks about conducting oral histories for this book and more generally about researching policing during the era.

Christine Lamberson is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at clamberson@angelo.edu.

To download this interview file directly, right click here and select “Save Link (or ‘Target’) As…”

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Iza Hussin, “The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016)

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 18:19:00 -0000

In her fascinating new book The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Iza Hussin, Lecturer of Politics at University of Cambridge examines the transformation of Islamic law in colonial Malay, Egypt, and India. Combining archival, institutional, and political history, this book charts in staggering detail the centralization of Islamic Law in the shadow of colonial power during and after its attempted marginalization in Muslim societies. Much of this book is focused on explaining this apparent paradox, and a task that it achieves with convincing clarity. By presenting a nuanced and complicated picture of the interaction of colonial power and the colonized elite, Hussin offers a narrative of the making and remaking of Islamic Law in modernity that will delight the intellectual palate of specialists and non-specialists alike.

SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.

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Randy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 22:09:00 -0000

Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured professor who resigned from his academic post to earn a degree from the world-renowned University of Southern California film school. As a documentary filmmaker, Olson has sought to fuse critical thinking and Hollywood storytelling. And as the author or co-author of three books, Olson has shown how scientists and academics in general can improve their communication skills and harness the power of narrative to improve their writing and presentations. Narrative is an indispensable tool that geographers and others can use to communicate with our students and the general public. Yet Olson also shows how we can hone our narrative intuition and use our story sense to write better abstracts, articles, and grant applications. Houston, We Have a Narrative has gems of wisdom for physical geographers, human geographers, and academics of all stripes.

Bob Wilson is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research interests include historical geography and environmental history, animal studies, and climate change politics and activism. Wilson also teaches Writing Geography, a graduate seminar that introduces students to storytelling, creative nonfiction, and ways to employ these techniques in theses, articles, and books.

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Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, “Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become Our Teachers”(U. Chicago Press, 2016)

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 19:21:00 -0000

With Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become Our Teachers (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful and different perspective of the parenting experience than we are used to, showing that parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, we begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring–voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle– are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them. Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a MacArthur prize-winning sociologist whose work examines the culture of schools, the broad ecology of education, and the relationship between human development and social change. She has written 10 books, including Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools (1978), Beyond Bias: Perspectives on Classrooms (1979), and The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture (1983), which received the 1984 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association, and Balm In Gilead: Journey of A Healer (1988), which won the 1988 Christopher Award, given for “literary merit and humanitarian achievement.” Dr. Lightfoot is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard University.

Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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Matthew L. Jones, “Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 22:51:00 -0000

Matthew L. Jones’s wonderful new book traces a history of failed efforts to make calculating machines, from Blaise Pascal’s work in the 1640s through the efforts of Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, incorporating an account of both the work and relationships of scholars and artisans, and their reflections on the nature of invention. Innovative in its approach and its form, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016) offers a thoughtful and beautifully-written history of technology that offers an important perspective on a division between two poles of writing the history of technology: “the collective, deterministic account of inventive activity and the individualistic, heroic, creative account (7).” In Jones’s hands, we are offered a third way of understanding cultural production in early modernity, one that did not bifurcate between imitation and originality, social and individual making, or design and production. Central to the story is the history of efforts to mechanize the process of carrying ones in addition, and this fascinating problem persists as a thread through many of the projects discussed in the book. On the pages of Reckoning with Matter, readers will not only enjoy a compelling account of machine calculation through the nineteenth century, but will also find the story of a frog that tears out the eyes of a fish, a man who designed machines for making breakfast, and discussions of the significance of credit and intellectual property, modern programming, sketching, imitation, and debates over the nature of thinking. Highly recommended!

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Projit Bihari Mukharji, “Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science: (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 22:59:00 -0000

Projit Bihari Mukharji’s new book explores the power of small, non-spectacular, and everyday technologies as motors or catalysts of change in the history of science and medicine. Focusing on practices of Ayurveda in British Bengal between about 1870-1930, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Science (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is structured around five case studies that each describe the incorporation of a particular technology into Ayurvedic practice, resulting in a braiding together of strands of sciences and the production of a new body image. Mukharji develops and engages a number of key concepts in the work, significantly introducing a notion of physiograms (materialized physiologies or materialized body metaphors, a development of John Tresch’s notion of cosmograms) and a way of thinking about the braiding of strands of science and medicine. It’s a beautifully written and compellingly argued work that will be of interest to a wide range of readers of the history of science and medicine!

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David Shafer, “Antonin Artaud” (Reaktion/U Chicago Press, 2016)

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 02:11:00 -0000

“Artaud lived with his neck placed firmly in the noose.”

-Bauhaus*

David Shafer’s new biography, Antonin Artaud (Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, 2016), situates the life of this enigmatic and fascinating figure in historical context. From his bourgeois family background, through a life that included a variety of physical and mental health challenges, drug use, and institutionalization, Shafer traces the ways that Artaud’s intellectual and artistic development was shaped by broader historical and political events and forces. An actor of stage and screen, a poet, and theatre director, Artaud emerges in these chapters as the embodiment of the French revolutionary tradition in the cultural realm. Shafer traces his subjects geographic movements from his Mediterranean origins to the streets of Paris, and on to other destinations, Mexico and Ireland among these. In addition to these sites, Artaud held in his imagination a number of other locales, including the physical and cultural landscapes of an East that informed his critique of Western society and its traditions.

Throughout the book, Shafer takes Artaud on his own terms, avoiding judgments and hasty conclusions about the ideas, beliefs, and experiences of his protagonist. The result is an empathetic, yet still critical, biography of an icon of the world of performance. Readers not familiar with Artaud’s far-reaching influence across the domains of art, music, literature, theatre, and film up to the present will find much in these pages to justify his consideration as one of the most important cultural players of the last century.

*After our interview, David shared the link to Aural Assault, a blog post on Artaud and music that he wrote for the Reaktion Books website. In it, he discusses the music he listened to while writing the biography, as well as the links between Artaud and musicians like Richard Hell and Patti Smith.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email.

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Matt Houlbrook, “Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook” (U. of Chicago Press 2016)

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 11:17:00 -0000

How should we understand the interwar years in Britain? In Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Matt Houlbrook, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham,tells the fascinating and complex story of Netley Lucas, a character whose fragmented and complex story offers clues to the social changes of the period. Netley’s career as confidence trickster, fraudulent journalist and editor, and creator of counterfeit royal biographies, forms the basis of an engagement with anxieties over class boundaries, the reassertion of social norms, and the nature of the historical source. The book is resplendent with a complex cast of characters and offers a rich portrait of the period. Houlbrook raises the question of how to tell the story of the trickster, if it is possible to capture a life of half-truths and duplicity, and the struggle of historical practice, ultimately causing us to question the possibility of history itself. The book is a fascinating tale, as well as being of interest across the humanities and to the general reader.

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Robert Aronowitz, “Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 19:37:00 -0000

Statistics have been on the minds of more people than usual in the run-up and post-mortem of this past U.S. presidential election; some feel as though they were misled by numbers intended to lend a modicum of certainty to the complex calculus of modern life. But while election predictions come and go, the “empire of chance” lays siege to more and more aspects of daily life, alongside increasing possibilities for technological intervention–nowhere, perhaps, is this more clear than in medicine. Robert Aronowitz’s Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear and Uncertainty (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is both a nuanced and accessible exploration of the historical transformation of risk in modern biomedicine. Through a series of case studies and broader reflections on the ways in which modern medicine has become “risky,” Aronowitz teases out salient features of an increasingly complex system of interventions and indicators.

In the book, Aronowitz defines three key aspects of our modern “risky medicine.” The first one discussed is a converged experience of risk and disease, exemplified in cancer screening in which bodies-at-risk can be subject to similar treatment and prevention regimes as those marked by a chronic condition or trying to prevent remission. Another aspect is the notion of risk reduction standing in place of efficacy for the psychological and social work it performs, which provides some explanation for the costliness of American medicine relative to the outcomes it achieves. Finally, Aronowitz argues that risk interventions have been driven by expansion of the medical market, and calls upon policymakers to become aware of the control pharmaceutical companies have in the generation of new health risks and the data to support them.

One way of understanding Aronowitz’s contribution is to contextualize it within the trajectory of sociological work on risk in modern society. Originally published in 1986 (in German), Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity was a watershed book for the understanding of modernity and technological change. Much of Beck’s account is concerned with environmental risks; the book came out on the heels of the Three Mile Island and Bhopal disasters. However, Beck’s take on medicine is somewhat lacking. Beck presciently calls attention to the “reflexive market strategy” of pharmaceutical companies, in which they profit from self-produced risks–echoing the third aspect of “risky medicine’–but misses its more immediate social and psychological dimensions, stating merely that the rise of chronic disease is evidence of a divergence of diagnosis and therapy. Aronowitz’s case studies suggest even more immediate consequences at hand. The importance of Risky Medicine is evident in how it disaggregates the changing landscape of health and medicine from an inexorable creep of modernity, spelling out the logic subjecting more bodies to greater interventions and recovering the relationship between experience and an ambivalent, anticipatory social order.

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Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 21:47:00 -0000

Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were relatively inexpensive collectibles that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her photographs in her name and added the caption “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth.”

Featuring the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published, Enduring Truths: Sojourners Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is the first book to explore how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself.

A Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley, the book’s author, Dr. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French and American art, visual and material culture, particularly in relation to the politics of race and colonialism. Dr. Grigsby writes on painting, sculpture, photography and engineering as well as the relationships among reproductive media and new technologies from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. Dr. Grigsby is also the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including two Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowships, a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, a History of Art Undergraduate Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Historical Education, and The Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of California at Berkeley. Some of Dr. Grigsby’s previous works include Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France and Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal. In addition to her teaching, Dr. Grigsby is currently conducting research for a book project tentatively titled Creole Looking: Portraying France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century, which will examine France’s relationship to the Caribbean and Americas.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Marc Steinberg, “England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 11:05:00 -0000

Marc Steinberg is a professor of sociology at Smith College. His latest book, England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a response to Karl Polyani’s vision of an emerging modern labor market in The Great Transformation. Steinberg complicates our understanding of changing power relations by examining how workers were contracted to their employers. The book is centered around three case studies of employers using draconian master-servant laws to control the labor force. Historically rigorous and sociologically imaginative, Steinberg’s analysis does true justice to the stories of his subjects.

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Sally Engle Merry, “The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 11:00:00 -0000

Quantification is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when hearing or reading about the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights (OHCHR). Yet in the 21st century, a wide range of policy and advocacy agendas begin with numbers. Those numbers become indicators, composites, standards, and measurement tools, which then get adopted in advocacy rhetoric or policy practice.

In The Seduction of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Sally Engle Merry combines ethnography, human rights, and science and technology studies to explore how people living in vulnerable situations across the globe are represented by the numbers designed to both name and support them. While numbers do not have agency, and cannot help or hurt on their own, Merry dedicates most of the book to untangling the politics and practice of developing standards and indicators, and interpreting the realities that come with “governance by numbers.” The genealogy of these indicators and standards are given as much space as their application, as Merry describes their highly political origins and a process of their subtle acceptance as normalover time.

With roots in colonial authority and population management, indicators have been developed and used for a range of purposes in governance: to manage people, resources, planning, dissent, and reputations among others. Merry explores indicators and indices from legal, anthropological, historical, and genealogical perspectives, describing a range of unexpected stewards from short-term United Nations consultants to U.S. State Department officials to computer algorithms. While the book focuses on the globalization of definitions, measurements, and management techniques, it simultaneously explores the widely varied phenomena of gender violence, human rights, and human trafficking. On a set of topics that have been broadly fetishized, the overlay of quantified assessments and accompanying responses to them raises many questions about voice, politics, and international policy-making among many other topics.

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Kate Merkel-Hess, “The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China” (U. Chicago Press, 2016)

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 18:03:00 -0000

Kate Merkel-Hess‘s new book looks closely at a loose group of rural reformers in 1920s and 1930s China who were trying to create a rural alternative to urban modernity. Focusing on the Rural Reconstruction Movement of roughly 1933-1937, The Rural Modern: Reconstructing the Self and State in Republican China (University...

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Andrew Cole, “The Birth of Theory” (U. of Chicago Press, 2014)

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 17:15:00 -0000

Was Hegel a medieval thinker?

In The Birth of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Andrew Cole puts forward a reexamination of Hegelian dialectics that embeds Hegel in a long tradition of medieval dialectical thinking and suggests that it is precisely Hegel’s engagement with medieval modes of thought that make his work a productive source for Marx and the later thinkers who develop dialectical thinking into theory as we know it today. The Birth of Theory challenges readers with insights won from strenuous contests with the writing of history, philosophy, religion, literature, and political economy. As he makes the case for rereading Hegelian dialectics based on the essentially feudal social and economic organization of Germany in Hegel’s moment, Cole drives at the arbitrary distinctions between medieval and modern but also those between dialectical and anti-dialectical thinking, writing a long arc of intellectual history that renegotiates theory’s relationship to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Deleuze and many others in between (xviii).

Along the way, the argument asks readers to dispense with a host of critical cliches as it winds deftly between close readings of Pseudo-Dionysius and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy to comparative readings of Hegel on the Eucharist and Marx on the commodity, closing with focused and revelatory attention on the legacy established by Hegel in using medieval genres in response to the modern condition.

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Frances Lee, “Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 20:39:00 -0000

Frances Lee is the author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Lee is professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. For much of the 20th century, Democrats were in the majority. Republicans had little chance to win back control, and Democrats had little fear of losing it. By the 1980s, things began to shift, and ever since, majority control has been on the line. The consequence of this changing political landscape is the subject of Lee’s new book. She shows how this new competition for control drives both parties to focus on undercutting the opposition. Rather than a strategy of bipartisan cooperation to win policy victories, Insecure Majorities reveals the rise of party messaging and strategic communications as the way of Congress.

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Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 10:00:00 -0000

Sarah Abrevaya Stein’s rich new book, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2016) takes readers on a global journey in search of late 19th and early 20th century Sephardi Jews with roots in the Ottoman Empire who sought citizenship within European nations for a variety of reasons, including socio-economic mobility and political refuge. While analyzing complex legal systems and the ways in which different nations viewed their extraterritorial subjects, Abrevaya Stein never loses site of the individual experiences of Jewish men and women. Indeed, by offering a series of case studies that range from Salonica during the Balkans War to 1930s Shanghai and Baghdad, she demonstrates how questions over citizenship and status were often determined by local politics and personalities and could lead to vastly different fates for these Jewish “proteges.”

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Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 09:55:00 -0000

Is the scientific value of objectivity in conflict with the social justice commitment to diversity? In her latest book, Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Sandra Harding (Education and Gender Studies, UCLA) argues not only that objectivity and diversity need not be in conflict, but that good research ought to be committed to both values at the same time. The book draws on a rich array of scholarship, spanning from 20th century philosophy of science to contemporary studies in indigenous and postcolonial philosophy and activism. It is an intricate study of the ways in which objectivity, positivism, and secularism are all deeply intertwined with their social contexts and historical moments. The book ultimately advocates a science that is both responsive to a methodological requirement for strong objectivity, and originates in local communities.

Emily Crandall is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a current fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics in the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast.

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Sandra Harding, “Objectivity and Diversity: A New Logic of Scientific Inquiry” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 09:55:00 -0000

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Jonathan Garb, “Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 10:00:00 -0000

In Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Jonathan Garb, the Gershom Scholem Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores the rich psychological tradition in modern Kabbalah and modern mysticism. Tracing Kabbalistic writing from sixteenth-century Safed to contemporary New York, he shows how both psychoanalysis and modern Kabbalah have been expressions of the process of modernization.

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Peter Trawny, “Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 10:20:00 -0000

In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Peter Trawny, professor of philosophy and founder and director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal, explores the place of anti-Semitism in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Using Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks, Trawny explains that the philosopher’s anti-Semitism was not just a few stray remarks, but was deeply incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking.

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Peter Harrison, “The Territories of Science and Religion” (U. of Chicago Press, 2014)

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:28:00 -0000

Contemporary debates would lead you to believe that science and religion are eternally at odds with each other. In The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Peter Harrison,Director, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Queensland, interrogates the modern assumptions behind this viewpoint and delineates the story of the categories science and religion. He shows that understanding these concepts divided as distinct realms of inquiry is a relatively recent history, politically shaped, and often accidental in its construction. In reality, what we conceptualize as these two separate spheres of life were intimately bound up with one another, often in concert in social life. Harrison also warns us about the consequences of projecting our contemporary conceptual spheres back through the past. In our conversation we discuss ancient Greek philosophy, early Christian thought, natural theology and natural philosophers, conceptions of progress, forms of charity, the professionalization of science, and the creation of scientists.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu.

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April R. Haynes, “Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 20:59:00 -0000

April R. Haynes is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth- Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Haynes shows how the campaign against masturbation redefined women’s sexuality and reformulated the battle for political rights. Beginning with Sylvester Graham’s “Lecture to Mothers” to reform-minded women to the black abolitionists Sarah Mapps Douglas’s sex education lectures to African American women, masturbation became a topic with both gender and racial import. After a long history of neglect, it became tied to issues of purity, virtue and self-government. Through women reformers the proscriptions against masturbation were popularized and institutionalized. Haynes sheds light on the continued attention given to masturbation in American culture and the women’s movement, demonstrating its political significance.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation.

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Phaedra Daipha, “Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

Sat, 09 Jul 2016 14:02:00 -0000

Phaedra Daipha’s thoughtful new book uses a careful sociological study of a particular community of weather forecasters to develop a sociology of decision making. Based on fieldwork conducted over five years at a local office of the National Weather Service, Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth (University of Chicago Press, 2015) develops a theory of decision making as a habitual, practical, social activity shaped by particular contexts of action. In addition to working closely with (and contributing substantively to) pragmatist philosophy and theoretical STS, Masters of Uncertainty also offers a thick and fascinating description of the practices and local environments of a community of artisan-practitioners charged with creating a kind of object–a weather forecast–that many of us consume regularly. After developing a sociological theory of decision making within the context of this case study, Daipha concludes the book by testing the theory in two other fields: finance and medicine. This is a compelling and clearly-written account that will be of interest to sociologists, STS scholars, and general readers alike!

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Sabine Arnaud, “On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 17:20:00 -0000

Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) considers a wide range of issues that are both specific to the particular history of hysteria, and more broadly applicable to the history medicine. Arnaud pays special attention to the role played by language in the definition of any medical category, basing her analysis on a masterful analysis of a spectrum of written medical genres (including dialogue, autobiography, correspondence, narrative, and polemic) that have largely been forgotten by the history of medicine. Arnaud asks, “What made it possible to view dozens of different diagnoses as variants of a single pathology, hysteria?” The answer can be found in a long process of rewriting and negotiation over the definition of these diagnoses enabled this retrospective assimilation, which was driven by enormously diverse political and epistemological stakes. In a series of fascinating chapters, the book interweaves the history of hysteria with studies of gender, class, literature, metaphor, narrative, and and religion. It’s an expertly-researched and compellingly-written account that will amply reward readers interested in the histories of medicine and gender.

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Jessa Crispin, “The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 17:12:00 -0000

Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that there are certain ways lives can be lived. This is particularly true of the lives of women, which are often, in biography, confined to the marriage plot and detailed as events in the lives of men. As Jessa Crispin writes in her new book, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats & Ex-Countries (University of Chicago Press, 2015), “The important task is to understand and modify the stories that are holding sway.”

The founder and editor of the recently shuttered lit-blog Bookslut, Crispin spent a year and a half traveling abroad. Her genre-bending book, The Dead Ladies Project, is the legacy of that year and it’s a work that goes a long way in modifying the stories we typically tell, not just about women but about human beings- as thinkers, travelers, artists, and individuals.

It’s a contemplative, wandering work, which captures the disorientations of travel, the anxiety/ecstasy of being alone, the ways in which we carry our pasts with us, and the integral role stories play in our understanding of our possibilities and the ways in which we live our lives.”What saves you is a new story to tell yourself about how things could be,” Crispin suggests and, as she moves from Berlin, Trieste, Sarajevo, St. Petersburg, contemplating the lives of William James, Nora Barnacle, Rebecca West, and Claude Cahun, she opens up story after story, expanding the narrative possibilities as she goes.

Hers is a story which suggests the richness that comes of bouncing our lives off those of others. “It was the dead I wanted to talk to,” she writes, as she sets out on her travels. “I’d always been attracted to the unloosed, the wandering souls who were willing to scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere. I needed to know how they did it, how they survived.” It’s an account which suggests the hunger for and value of such stories- the stories of lives which, as Carolyn G. Heilbrun put it, enable us to forge new fictions and new narratives for our own.

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Ayesha Ramachandran, “Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 -0000

At what point does the world end? More importantly, how did this idea of a whole, unified world emerge to begin with? In Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Ayesha Ramachandran illustrates the anticipated enormity and surprising subtlety of these questions. Prose, vivid imagery and poetry form the text’s arc as Ramachandran distills an interdisciplinary evolution of Eurocentric debates about the relationship between self and god, self and nation, world and empire, and world and universe.

Worldmakers combines a set of “founding” works, from maps to medical literature, to portray a period where allegory, the Cosmos, and classical myth interacted directly with physics and biology. Dr. Ramachandran creatively captures “two modes of world-making: imperial and cosmic” through the constructed notion of the “Other”, which frames not only the logic of imperial conquest, but earlier attempts to separate and organize the sciences. Rather than seeking to narrate a coherent whole, as is the goal of many of the book’s main characters, Ramachandran highlights the disparate trajectory of these ideas in mythical, then imperial and national, and finally scientific imagination.

Anna Levy is an independent researcher and policy analyst with interests in critical political economy, historical memory, histories and philosophies of normalization, accountability politics, science & technology, and structural inequality. She is based in Brooklyn, NY and Amman, Jordan.

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Katherine J. Cramer, “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)

Sat, 07 May 2016 10:57:00 -0000

Katherine J. Cramer is the author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Cramer is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Morgridge Center for Public Service.

Do rural voters have an identity? Do they view politics through a lens of rural America? In The Politics of Resentment, Cramer delves into the political beliefs of Wisconsin voters to understand rural consciousness. Collected over years of study, the book links the growing resentment of rural residents in the state to the rise of Governor Scott Walker. Cramer discovers the ways that resentment of urban parts of the state drives views toward the size and scope of government.

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David J. Meltzer, “The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past” (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 26 Apr 2016 11:58:00 -0000

David J. Meltzer‘s new book is a meticulous study of the controversy over human antiquity in America, a dispute that transformed North American archaeology as a practice and discipline, tracing it from 1862-1941. The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of Americas Ice Age Past (University of Chicago Press, 2015) traces the heated and multi-disciplinary debates over the existence of a Pleistocene human antiquity in North America. Meltzer’s book is a thick history that introduces readers not only to the major conceptual, epistemological, and methodological issues at stake in the controversy, but also to the figures who debated the nature and scope of human antiquity in America. Anyone with an interest in the history of archaeology or the study of human origins should check it out!

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Sigrid Schmalzer, “Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China” (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 11:52:00 -0000

Sigrid Schmalzer‘s new book is an excellent and important contribution to both science studies and the history of China. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (University of Chicago Press, 2016) reframes how we understand the relationships between science and politics in history by looking closely at the...

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Seth Kimmel, “Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 13:18:00 -0000

In his path clearing new book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, presents a fascinating account of how conversion from Islam to Christianity was imagined, debated, and contested in early modern Spain. Shifting focus from the experiences of converts to intellectual discussions and disputes on matters such as coercion and assimilation, Kimmel demonstrates that such discussions were intimately tied to not only questions of religious reform but also to the demarcation of varied scholarly disciplines within Christianity. It is this nexus of knowledge, religious reform, and conversion that this book brilliantly explores and uncovers. Questioning binaries such as tolerance/intolerance and religious/secular, Kimmel highlights the complex material, intellectual, and political conditions and considerations that informed scholarly engagements with the questions and puzzles of religious conversion in early Modern Spain. In our conversation, we talked about the major themes and arguments of the book and its striking relevance to discourses on religious tolerance in the present. Parables of Coercion is at once beautifully written and unusually multilayered for a first book. It will also make an excellent choice for courses on Muslim-Christian relations, early modern religion, religious conversion, secularism, and Islamic Spain.

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Deirdre de la Cruz, “Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 15:56:00 -0000

There is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Filipino Catholics are especially drawn to Mama Mary and have a strong belief in her power, including her ability to appear to her followers. In Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detailed examination of Filipino interactions with Marian apparitions and miracles. By analyzing the effects of mass media on the perception and proliferation of these phenomena, de la Cruz charts the emergence of voices in the Philippines that are broadcasting Marian discourse globally. She traces a shift from local to national to transnational contexts, and from the representational to the virtual – in short, Mother Figured explores what Mary tells us about becoming modern.

Deirdre de la Cruz is assistant professor of Southeast Asian studies and history at the University of Michigan.

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Carin Berkowitz, “Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:18:00 -0000

Carin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philosopher. Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks closely at the involvement of Bell and others in a project of conservative reform in nineteenth century British medical education. We follow Berkowitz not only into the pages of the works that made Bell famous, but also into the classrooms in which Bell advocated a pedagogy that trained hand and eye together and developed his interest in systems of all sorts, including the nerves, education, and display. Readers will learn about the growth of a new genre of medical weeklies that changed the public face of medicine, the founding of new institutions that changed the teaching of medicine, and the controversy over motor and sensory nerves that accompanied major transformations in the medical science of Bell’s lifetime. It is a fascinating story that honors the importance of the history of education in shaping the histories of science and medicine.

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Cindy R. Lobel, “Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Sat, 06 Feb 2016 11:13:00 -0000

New York City’s growth, from colonial outpost to the center of the gastronomic world is artfully crafted by Cindy R. Lobel, Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center, in her tome Urban Appetites: Food & Culture in Nineteenth Century New York (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Lobel examines the evolution of the metropolis as gastronomic capital through the lens of public markets, grocers, restaurants, dining rooms and kitchens as they rose and fell in popularity through the nineteenth century.

Lobel’s attention to poignant historical moments, such as the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of middle/leisure class culturalism demonstrate the importance New York City has, and continues to play on gastronomic evolution. Not short on the politicizing of the market industry in the early to mid-nineteenth century, we are taken on the journey through the gritty dairy and meatpacking mills of the city, leading us into the bright light of reform, and healthier and affordable food choices.

The “creation of a new urban culture” is explored in chapter four, “To See and Be Seen.” The restaurant, as the new social center of life in the city pointedly addresses the inequalities of gender, class, and ethnicity in the development of this consumer leisure experience. Lobel next takes us into the intimate dining rooms of the emerging middle class, centering the reader in the ideology of “Domestic Goddess.” Gender roles, consumerism, leisure class and capitalism are central to this new “designated space to enact rituals of cohesion and inoculate children with middle class values.”

The final chapter all things that make a modern urban setting unique are conflicted with Lobel’s honest examination of immigrant diversity and cultural differences. “Issues of race, class, and ‘perceived’ Anglo-American superiority” coupled with the ongoing regionalization of the cityscape are put on the plate for us to indulge in what makes an urban setting the unique tapestry of difference we have come to appreciate. This journey of nineteenth century New York City is both colorful and satisfying to all who seek gastronomic fulfillment. Enjoy!

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Jessica Martucci, “Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 13:16:00 -0000

Jessica Martucci‘s fascinating new book traces the emergence, rise, and continued practice of breastfeeding in America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks at the lives and work of scientists, nurses, medical researchers, lay groups, doctors, and mothers to understand the shifting meanings of breastfeeding since the 1930s. Early chapters that explore the construction of a modern ideology of “natural motherhood” in the “psy-ences” and beyond, and look carefully at the medical profession’s interest in breastfeeding in the early-mid twentieth century. The next chapters consider the roles that women played – as mothers and nurses – in the survival of the practice through the midcentury, and consider the rise of lay organizations like La Leche League. The last chapters of the book follow the development and rise of breast pump technology and the “professionalization of breastfeeding expertise,” and consider how the events chronicled in the book continue to shape mothers’ experiences with breastfeeding, suggesting ways for addressing the “ongoing tensions surrounding” arguments that mothers should go “back to the breast.” It is a wonderfully readable and carefully researched study that I highly recommend!

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Annette Miae Kim, “Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 07:03:00 -0000

Sidewalk City: Remapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is a remarkable book about overlooked yet ubiquitous urban spaces, and the people and things that occupy them. Drawing on the resources of property rights theory, spatial ethnography and critical cartography Annette Miae Kim rethinks public space and re-maps the sidewalks of Vietnam’s southern metropolis. Combining a powerful aesthetic sensibility with excellent scholarship, her book is of rare quality: beautifully written, visually compelling, and passionately argued.

Annette Miae Kim joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss sidewalk symbols and vendors, the regulation of public space old and new, the right to the city, pushing the boundaries of the map, and the passing of time along the streets and alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City.

To download and view a space-time map and a narrative map from Sidewalk City click here, hereand here. Thank you to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reproduce these maps on the New Books Network websites. More maps, and more on the book, are available on the Spatial Analysis Lab website.

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James Farrer and Andrew D. Field, “Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 30 Dec 2015 11:28:00 -0000

James Farrer and Andrew D. Field bring their respective areas of sociological and historical expertise to a new study of cosmopolitan nightlife in modern Shanghai. The fruit of two decades of collaborative work, the co-authored Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores continuity and change over a century of singing, dancing, drinking, playing, and otherwise cavorting in Shanghai’s twentieth century and beyond. The book focuses on the ways that urban nightlife transformed alongside major historical, political, and social changes from the 1920s through the 1990s, but also traces its major threads through later developments in the twenty-first century. Its pages take readers into the cabarets and dance halls of Jazz Age Shanghai in the 1930s and 1930s, secret at-home dance parties, dancing and drinking clubs where revelers first experienced Hong Kong-style DJs or new forms of social drinking, jazz clubs, and nightlife transzones that were crucibles of social change. It’s a fascinating study of modern China, and its urban cultures.

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Neil Roberts, “Freedom as Marronage” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 12:14:00 -0000

What does it mean to be free? How can paying attention to the relationship between freedom and slavery help construct a concept and practice of freedom that is “perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight” (181)? In his book Freedom as Marronage University of Chicago Press, 2015), Neil Roberts (Africana Studies, Religion, and Political Science, Williams College) explores this and many other questions. Proceeding from and working with the concept and practice of marronage – modes of escape from slavery emerging from the Caribbean – Roberts articulates a theory of freedom that is historically specific while having trans-historical reverberations, and that is attentive to lived experiences of freedom and slavery. In doing so, he engages histories of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, diaspora, the Haitian Revolution, and American slavery. Arguing for the need to creolize political theory and philosophy, Roberts also takes up the thought and practice of W.E.B. DuBois, Hannah Arendt, Philip Petit, Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Edouard Glissant, Rastafari, and much more.

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Yarimar Bonilla, “Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 15:03:00 -0000

As overseas departments of France, the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique are frequently described as anomalies within the postcolonial Caribbean. Yet in reality, as Yarimar Bonilla argues in her new book Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the majority of Caribbean...

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Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria” (U of Chicago, 2014)

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 13:02:00 -0000

In Saharan Jews and the Fate of French Algeria (University of Chicago, 2014), Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, takes a new perspective to the history of Algerian Jews, looking at the Saharan Jews to south of the larger, coastal communities. Saharan Jews received different treatment from French authorities, asking us to rethink the story we tell about colonialism and decolonization and Jewish history.

Stein draws on materials from thirty archives across six countries to shed light on this small, but revealing, community that has not received its due attention until now.

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Mark A. Smith, “Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 06:00:00 -0000

Mark A. Smith is the author of Secular Faith: Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Smith is professor of political science at the University of Washington.

The provocative central thesis of this book is that religion is not the unchanging institution of tradition we might sometimes think. Smith argues that religion in the U.S., especially the Christian church, responds to changing political and cultural values rather than shaping them. Smith makes his case by charting five contentious issues in America’s history: slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women’s rights. For each, he shows how the political views of even the most conservative Christians evolved in the same direction as the rest of society–perhaps not as swiftly, but always on the same arc. During periods of cultural transition, Christian leaders may resist prevailing values and behaviors, yet those same leaders eventually change–often by reinterpreting the Bible–if their positions become no longer tenable. Secular ideas and influences thereby shape the ways Christians read and interpret their scriptures.

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Nick Hopwood, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 05:00:00 -0000

Nick Hopwood‘s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (University of Chicago Press, 2015) blends textual and visual analysis to answer the question of how images succeed or fail. Hopwood is Reader in History of Science at Cambridge University, and creator on the online exhibition “Making Visible Embryos,” which display some of the images from the book.

Hopwood’s ambitious book retraces the social life of drawings of embryos first produced in 1868 by the German embryologist Ernst Haeckel. The book follows the turbulent travels of the images across 150 years and three countries. Some of the perennial controversy surrounding the images centered on debates about Darwinism, for in them Haeckel drew the development of human embryos alongside that of other animals and, in retrospect, seemed to illustrate his famous claim that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” But Hopwood argues that, while Haeckel’s reputation has continued to suffer from repeated allegations of fraud, his images have actually thrived on controversy, appearing in 2010, for example, on the cover of Nature magazine. Hopwood’s far-reaching and intricate analysis explains how one of the most controversial images in the history of science–namely, Haeckel’s embryo grid–has also been one of its most successful. The book is an essential study in the history of images and is itself a masterpiece of visual argument.

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Robert Stoker, et al., “Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 14:43:00 -0000

Robert Stoker is the co-author (with Clarence Stone, John Betancur, Susan Clarke, Marilyn Dantico, Martin Horak, Karen Mossberger, Juliet Musso, Jeffrey Sellers, Ellen Shiau, Harold Wolman, and Donn Worgs) of Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Stoker is professor of public policy political science at George Washington University and a member of the faculty of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Administration.

After decades of deindustrialization and population loss, the revitalization of cities has paid scant attention to empowering neighborhoods and neighborhood leaders to move ahead. Focusing on neighborhoods in six cities (Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto), recasts the debate about the future of cities as one about neighborhoods, rather than downtown development.

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Dan Bouk, “How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 05:00:00 -0000

Who made life risky? In his dynamic new book, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (University of Chicago Press, 2015), historian Dan Bouk argues that starting in the late nineteenth century, the life-insurance industry embedded risk-making within American society and American psyches. Bouk is assistant professor of history at Colgate University, and his new book shows how insurers categorized individuals and grouped social classes in ways that assigned monetary value to race, class, lifestyles, and bodies. With lively prose, Bouk gives historical context and character to the rise of the “statistical individual” from the Guided Age to the New Deal. Bouk’s primary argument is that risks did not always already exist, nor was risk invented by the medical establishment. Instead, the threat (and reality) of economic crisis helped insurers to create risk as a commodity, and eventually to control the lives it measured. As Bouk phrases it in the interview, “Insurers improved their bottom line by improving Americans’ bottom lines.” Bouk invites readers critically to reflect upon how we have come to see ourselves through a statistical lens in our daily lives– an issue of continued relevance in the age of big data and vast analytical capabilities.

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John Durham Peters, “The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 13:05:00 -0000

John Durham Peters‘ wonderful new book is a brilliant and beautifully-written consideration of natural environments as subjects for media studies. Accessible and informative for a broad readership. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is structured as a series of meditations on and explorations of water, fire, air, earth, and ether media. After a chapter that sets out some of the foundational ideas shaping the book and charts an intellectual landscape for rethinking media, each of the following chapters offers a carefully curated series of studies of particulars – dolphin jaws, candles, towers, watches, clouds, feet, bells, weathermen, Google, and more – as a means of examining the significance of infrastructure, forgetting, technicity, and other modes of understanding media. Peters asks us to come with a fresh perspective to notions that we otherwise take for granted, and the result is a thoughtful and inspiring account that brings together media studies, theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences in thoroughly compelling ways. Among other things, the book is a call for a “greener media studies” that “appreciates our long natural history of shaping and being shaped by our habitats as a process of mediation.” What if, Peters asks, we took nature instead of the mind as the “epitome of meaning”? What are the stakes of doing so? The result is among the most exciting and enjoyable books that I’ve read in some time.

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Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph, “Why Washington Won’t Work” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 06:00:00 -0000

Marc J. Hetherington and Thomas J. Rudolph have written the alliteratively titled Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is professor of political science at Vanderbilt University; Rudolph is professor of political science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Who do you trust? According to Why Washington Won’t Work, you definitely do not trust the government, especially if you are a Republican. Today, more than in the past, political trust divides the country. Hetherington and Rudolph argue that a profound, and historically high, lack of trust among the public reduces the likelihood of compromise in Congress. In an increasingly polarized political environment that is already pre-disposed to gridlock, this finding on public trust helps to further explain the inability of Washington to govern, effectively legislate, and work.

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Richard H. King, “Arendt and America” (U of Chicago, 2015)

Sun, 08 Nov 2015 20:34:00 -0000

Richard H. King is Emeritus Professor of American and Canadian Studies at The University of Nottingham. His book Arendt and America (University of Chicago, 2015) is an intellectual biography and transnational synthesis of ideas and explores how the German-Jewish exile and political thinker Hannah Arendt’s American experience shaped her thought as she sought an alternative to totalitarianism. Her books The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution display the marks of her engagement with the American Republic of the Founders and the possibilities of its survival under the threat of mass society. King examines her corpus as she engaged with the diversity of thought from the Western political tradition to mid-century America allowing us to see the range of her ideas. Her interests were neither social nor cultural, but the political sphere. In Cold War America, she became part of a moral center of the New York intellectuals and forged relationships with people such David Reisman, Dwight MacDonald, Irving Howe, and Mary McCarthy. Arendt expressed a continual concern with the nature of political action, the possibility of new beginnings and the idea of the “banality of evil,” introduced in the controversial 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Difficult to categorize ideologically, Arendt sought a “worldly” politic, rather than politics based in idealism or pragmatism. Her thought influenced post-war thinking on political participation, civil disobedience, race, the Holocaust and the meaning of republicanism and liberalism. King has given us a portrait of a complex, and often ironic, relationship of a seminal thinker with America as a place and a set of ideas and institutions.

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Anita Guerrini, “The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 10:54:00 -0000

Anita Guerrini‘s wonderful new book explores Paris as a site of anatomy, dissection, and science during the reign of Louis XIV between 1643-1715. The journey begins with readers accompanying a dead body to sites of dissection across the city, after which we are introduced to four anatomists – charter members of the Paris Academy of Sciences – who will act as focal points for the rest of the story.The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris (University of Chicago Press, 2015) opens up Parisian bodies – human and animal, dead and alive – to argue that dissection played a major role in the development of experimental methods in seventeenth century science. In Guerrini’s hands, the history of science and medicine in early modern Paris was simultaneously a history of fairy tales and opera, dogs and chameleons, artists and knife-makers, labyrinth-making and oratory. It is a fascinating book that is a must-read for historians of anatomy and of early modern science and medicine, and will be accessible and gripping for readers well beyond those fields.

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James Curry, “Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 13 Oct 2015 14:44:00 -0000

James Curry has written Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Curry is assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah.

With Congress in the news, a new book about the House arrives in timely fashion. Not only is Curry’s book timely, it also helps explain part of what’s been going on in Washington. Curry argues that House leaders use special procedural tactics to restrict information about bills from rank-and-file members. By limiting information, leaders can efficiently push ahead an agenda with much less opposition. This is an effect strategy, but can lead to resentment and distrust, two of the factors that may have created the environment for the search for a new speaker.

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Lila Corwin Berman, “Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit” (U of Chicago, 2015)

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 10:46:00 -0000

In Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Lila Corwin Berman, Associate Professor of History, Murray Friedman Chair of American Jewish History, and Director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University, looks at how post-WWII American Jews retained a deep connection to cities, even after migrating to the suburbs in large numbers. A work of Jewish urban history, Berman’s book investigates the enduring and evolving commitment of Detroit Jews to the city as a real and imagined space.

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John Kinder, “Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 13:04:00 -0000

John Kinder brings to life the challenges and problems faced by the disabled veteran in American history from the Civil War to the current day in his evocative book, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Considered by many reviewers to be one of the most important books in recent years on the human cost of war, Paying with Their Bodies blends lively anecdotal accounts of individual veterans with the complex questions of their imagined and real place in society before, during, and after their time served. Not surprisingly the answers are at times even more disheartening as Kinder uncovers a pattern of promises made and unfulfilled, in which the only consistencies across time are episodes of exploitation for political and personal gain by others and the eventual neglect as the public memory of their sacrifice fades.

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Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder, “Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening” (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 14:25:00 -0000

In their book, Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening (University of Chicago Press, 2015) UCLA sociologist and current department chair Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder, assistant professor of social medicine and anthropology at the University of North Carolina address tough questions about the efficacy of genetic testing through a longitudinal study of a genetics clinic.

Screening for common genetic disorders is a high opportunity area for the application of biomedical knowledge to the clinic. However, this population health measure can quickly precipitate personal crises and emotional upheaval in the process of confirming results that often turn out to be false positives. For many families, this taxing diagnostic ordeal profoundly shapes the experience of starting or growing their family, and for some it is only the beginning of a greater therapeutic odyssey. Newborn genetic screening undoubtedly saves lives, but its social repercussions require greater scrutiny.

This is precisely the task to which Saving Babies? sets itself: an ethnographically-informed assessment of the intended and unintended consequences of genetic screening as they impact families in the clinic and beyond. While newborn screening is meant to provide actionable certainty, its reality is far less clear-cut. Uncertainty is not simply lack of knowledge that the application of technology can eradicate, but rather an intrinsic characteristic of the clinical situation that more information, even more precise information, can often exacerbate. Moreover, longstanding inequalities in the U.S. healthcare system often prevent conditions that can be easily diagnosed from being treated.

Saving Babies? is a serious exercise in the sociology of knowledge driven by engaging personal narratives that get at the urgency of newborn screening as a felt phenomenon, as much as an important public health program. As such, it is great reading for sociologists, anthropologists, and clinicians interested in the broader social dimensions of medical practice.

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Richard C. Keller, “Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 12:46:00 -0000

In August 2003, a heat wave in France killed close to 15,000 people, the majority of whom were over 75. Prominent among the dead were a group of victims known as “the forgotten,” people who died alone and whose bodies were never claimed. Known as the “forgotten,” their stories are at the heart of Richard C. Keller‘s fascinating new book Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Official narratives of the disaster focused narrowly on the problem of the elderly who died alone, seemingly because their families were too busy vacationing to check in or claim their relatives. Yet, as Keller shows, these official narratives were incomplete and often incorrect. Moreover, by focusing so intently on elderly victims, these narratives have shaped subsequent public health initiatives, which have collectively identified the elderly as the most vulnerable population in the event of heat, all the while ignoring other similarly vulnerable groups.

Fatal Isolation pushes past official narratives to provide the first historical treatment of the disaster. By drawing on disaster studies, social theory, ethnography, demography, and sociology, Keller weaves together the August vacation, housing policy, architecture, and debates over the place of the aging in French society. In the process, Fatal Isolation uncovers a much longer, much richer, and much more complex history of the disaster and French society’s own contributions to it.

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Dana Simmons, “Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 17:40:00 -0000

Dana Simmons‘s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range well beyond modern French history. Early in this fascinating study, Simmons articulates an argument that threads through the book: “a science of human needs undergirded the modern wage economy and the welfare state.” That science was collaboratively built by a diverse community of agronomists, chemists, doctors, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, amateur data gatherers, trade unions, and others who collectively attempted to define and then measure human needs for the sake of better social organization. How to do this was not at all self-evident, and fierce debates were waged that challenged participants to rethink the most basic elements of a notion of society: What were the “needs” that must be fulfilled in order to keep persons productive? Were those needs physical and/or psychological? What were the characteristics of a model “person,” anyway? The chapters of the book narrate the traces that these debates left on the bodies of workers, the pages of history, and the basic notions (like “minimum wage,” like “citizen”) that make up modern conceptions of civil society. Highly recommended!

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Bhavani Raman, “Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India” (U of Chicago Press, 2012)

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 06:00:00 -0000

Bhavani Raman‘s new book Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (University of Chicago Press, 2012) explores the world of colonial clerks in the Madras Presidency. Arguing that paper played an important role in colonial rule, Raman analyses cutcherry scribes and the allegations of corruption that surrounded them, accountant-scribes and their amazing memory skills, the changes in the education system wrought by the colonial encounter, issues of forgery and finally the use of petitions that helped form a particular type of colonial subject. The book details this fascinating topic with extreme subtlety and care and pushes the reader to ask many questions about corruption and the importance of paper not only in colonial but also in contemporary India.

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Kelly J. Whitmer, “The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Sun, 30 Aug 2015 17:14:00 -0000

Kelly J. Whitmer‘s new book offers a history of science set in the Halle Orphanage, a building that was founded in the middle of the 1690s in the Prussian city of Halle by a group of German Lutherans known as Pietists. The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2015) understands this orphanage as a scientific community, thereby countering a tendency to approach the history of science in a way that treats science and religion and distinct and oppositional endeavors, and problematizing previous ways of understanding the space as an enclave of Pietists who were “enthusiastically opposed to rational approaches to knowing the natural world, and to science and the Enlightenment more generally.” As the fascinating story unfolds, Whitmer’s account meaningfully contributes to histories of observation, material culture, models and modeling, and education.

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Janet Vertesi, “Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 10 Aug 2015 16:53:00 -0000

Janet Vertesi‘s fascinating new book is an ethnography of the Mars Rover mission that takes readers into the practices involved in working with the two robotic explorers Spirit and Opportunity. Based on two years of immersive ethnography from 2006-2008, Seeing like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the visuality of the mission, exploring “how scientists and engineers on Earth work with the digital images” sent by their robots to make sense of Mars and to work together to explore it. Vertesi proposes a way of understanding image-making practices as a kind of teamwork: learning to see like a rover, here, is an embodied, skilled, social achievement. Building on Wittgenstein’s notion of seeing as, Vertesi conceptualizes these imaging practices in terms of an analytic framework of drawing as: the Rover scientists “use digital tools to draw Mars as consisting of different kinds of materials or surfaces, with implications for future viewings and for team relations.” From mapping Mars to robot funerals, it’s a wonderful study for readers interested in space exploration, visual studies, sociology, and STS alike!

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Raf De Bont, “Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 19:27:00 -0000

While museums, labs, and botanical gardens have been widely studied by historians of science, field stations have received comparatively little attention.Raf De Bont‘s new book rectifies this oversight, turning our attention to the importance of biological field stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in generating new scientific practices, theories, and networks. Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2015) focuses on the German- and French-speaking scientific community in Europe, looking at a number of influential case studies that collectively embody what de Bont calls a “station movement” in this period. Exploring the relationship between these field stations and a notion of “experimentalism” embraced therein, de Bont usefully undermines a tendency to focus on laboratories as sites of experimentation in the history of science. The stations ranged in kind from very technologically sophisticated marine labs to cabins in the woods, from urban Naples to the isolated beaches of France to the birdlands of East Prussia. Some of the practices cultivated at these sites spread into a wider political and intellectual economy, transforming disciplines and spaces of inquiry and education in the process. It’s a fascinating study that offers readers a more robust and complex understanding of the spaces of modern science and their entangled histories.

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Eric Reed, “Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 18:22:00 -0000

The Tour de France is happening right now! The 2015 edition started on July 4th and will continue until July 26th. I’m excited to be able to share this interview with Eric Reed about his new book, Selling the Yellow Jersey: The Tour de France in the Global Era (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as riders make their way through the various stages of this, the most famous bike race in the world.

A compelling historical narrative of the Tour, including some of its most significant moments and stars, Selling the Yellow Jersey explores the Tour as a global phenomenon. Reed argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, France was a full participant in a globalization that the Tour exemplified as a business and media enterprise, and a spectacle consumed by millions of fans around the world. Considering the roles of organizers, riders, and spectators within and outside of France, the book examines the meanings of “Frenchness” in contexts regional, national, and global. From the Tour’s emergence in 1903 during a “cycling craze” that had a particular vitality in France, to the doping scandals of more recent years, Selling the Yellow Jersey traces the Tour’s triumphs and scandals over more than a hundred years. It is a history of culture and commerce, from an organizational home base in Paris, to smaller French host cities such as Pau and Brest, to an international scene of participants both on, and beyond, the saddle.

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Jeffery Witsoe, “Democracy against Development: Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 17:29:00 -0000

Jeffery Witsoe‘s book Democracy against Development: Lower-Caste Politics and Political Modernity in Postcolonial India (University of Chicago Press, 2013) takes the reader to urban and rural Bihar and into the world of so called lower caste politics. Here we see how democratic mobilisation around caste lines destabilizes state development projects. Moving across scales of the state, the books is a wonderful account of how post-colonial democracy functions.

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Winnifred F. Sullivan, “A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 18:25:00 -0000

As patterns of religiosity have changed in the United States, chaplains have come to occupy an increasingly important place in the nation’s public institutions, especially its prisons, hospitals and military. In her newest book, A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Winnifred F. Sullivan offers a comprehensive study of contemporary chaplaincy, paying particular attention to how it sits at the intersection of law, government regulation, and spiritual care. She shows how much this ubiquitous but often invisible institution can tell us about religion in the US today, and moreover the role that law plays in structuring American ideas about, and experience of, religion.

Winnifred F. Sullivan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and Affiliate Professor in the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University Bloomington.

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James A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Fri, 03 Jul 2015 15:02:00 -0000

James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) is a fascinating exploration of books and their readers during a moment of intense transformation in British society. Secord brings us into a period of the nineteenth century when transformations in publishing and an expanded reading public helped create a wide-ranging conversation about science and its possible futures. Out of this utopian moment several works emerged that reflected on the practices and prospects of science, and Secord guides us through seven of them in turn: the dialogues of Humphry Davy’s Consolations in Travel, the polemic of Charles Babbage’s Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, John Herschel’s moralizing Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Mary Somerville’s mathematical On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, George Combe’s phrenological The Constitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects, and Thomas Carlyle’s bizarre and wonderful Sartor Resartus. In each case, Secord pays careful attention to the physicality of books and the ways that their readers create and transform them. In addition to being great fun to read, the book will also be helpful for teachers putting together material for undergraduate lecture courses on the history of science and/or book history, and will find a happy home on syllabi for upper-level undergraduate or graduate seminars in the history of books and reading, the sciences and modernity, and many others.

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Steven E. Kemper, “Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Sat, 27 Jun 2015 12:42:00 -0000

In his recent book, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Steven E. Kemper examines the Sinhala layman Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933) and argues that this figure has been misunderstood by both Sinhala nationalists, who have appropriated him for their own political ends, and scholars, who have portrayed Dharmapala primarily as a social reformer and a Sinhala chauvinist. Making extensive use of theJournal of the Mahabodhi Society,effectively a forum for the expression of Dharmapala’s own opinions, and the entirety of Dharmapala’s meticulous diaries, which cover a forty-year period, Kemper asserts that Dharmapala was above all a religious seeker–a world renouncer who at times sought to emulate the life of the Buddha. Central to Kemper’s study of Dharmapala are the diametrically opposed themes of universalism and nationalism.While Dharmapala was realistic in so far as he understood that the various Buddhist sects and orders could not be united due to sectarian, ethnic, and caste and class-related divisions, his Buddhist identity was in no way based on his own Sinhala identity, and his life was organized around three universalisms: an Asian Buddhist universalism, the universalism of Theosophy, and the universalism of the British imperium.He spent most of his adult life living outside of Sri Lanka and at various times imagined and hoped to be reborn in India, Japan, Switzerland, and England. Dharmapala devoted much of his life to establishing Buddhist control of the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya, India, which had been the legal property of a Saivite monastic order since the early eighteenth century and had since come to be thoroughly incorporated into a Hindu pilgrimage route. His interest in the temple was in part a result of his own efforts to follow in the footsteps of the Buddha, but was also his attempt to establish a geographical point of focus for Buddhists–a Buddhist Mecca, if you will–around which Buddhists could rally and come together. He looked to many sources of potential support, including the Bengali elite, Japan, the Thai royal family, and British government officials in India, but in the end failed to achieve his aim. In contrast to previous depictions of Dharmapala as a Protestant Buddhist who encouraged the laicization of Buddhism, Kemper shows that Dharmapala was if anything an ascetic at heart who believed celibacy was a prerequisite for soteriological progress and participation in Buddhist work (sasana), who emphasized meditation, and whose spiritual aspirations are visible from a very early age.Kemper also shows that the influence of Theosophy on Dharmapala’s interpretation of Buddhism and thought more broadly did not end with his formal break with the American Colonel Olcott and the Theosophical Society in 1905, but continued to the end of his life, a fact obscured by Sinhala nationalistic portrayals of him. At some 500 pages,Rescued from the Nationincludes detailed discussions of many contemporaneous figures, movements, and trends. These include Japanese institutional interest in India, Japanese nationalism, and the struggles of Japanese Buddhism in the aftermath of the Meiji restoration; the World Parliament of Religions that took place in Chicago in 1893 and the emergence of the category of “world religion”; the Bengali Renaissance and associated figures such as Swami Vivekananda; Western interest in Buddhism and Indian religion; and South Asian resistance to British colonial governance. In this way, this book will be of great value to those interested in Asian religions and modernity, Buddhist and Hindu revival movements, Asian nationalisms, and Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Claire Virginia Eby, “Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 14:01:00 -0000

Clare Virginia Eby is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. In Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Eby examines the origins of how we think of marriage through the theoretical and experimental reform of the institution in...

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Andrew Hartman, “The War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Sat, 20 Jun 2015 19:24:00 -0000

Andrew Hartman is associate professor of history at Illinois State University. His book A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2015) provides a whirlwind tour through the most salient debates of what became known as the culture wars of the late twentieth century. As a set of debates and political tussles the culture wars reflected America’s struggle to deal with the vast changes left by 1960s and more complex than a simple left/right, secular/religious binary that characterized public discussion. Beginning with the normative Americanism fragmenting under the influence of the New Left, Hartman shows us how the watershed decade set the terms for the cultural wars. Public intellectuals such as Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills to rock stars such as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the comedy duo the Smothers Brothers marked the changes. Seemingly everything about American life from sexual mores to national history was up for renegotiation. Hartman places the genesis of the debate for the American future in the struggle between the New Left and their chief ideological opponents, and former liberals, neoconservatives. Soon this initial intellectual battle fueled a popular war for the social, religious, and economic future drawing in the newly formed Christian Right, self-identified ethnic groups, feminist and others. The struggles over school curriculum, the rewriting of history, cultural power, the family, religion, and the nature of truth, was the process of coming to terms with a new reality – a situation of a permanent culture revolution and the loss of a normative shared culture. With the heat of the battle significantly cooled, we are left with what Hartman calls an “antiauthoritarian individualism” under intransigent capitalism weakening the hope for social democracy.

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M. Alper Yalcinkaya, “Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 12:30:00 -0000

What were Ottomans talking about when they talked about science?

In posing and answering that question (spoiler: they were talking about people), M. Alper Yalcinkaya‘s new book Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2015) introduces the history of science as discussed and debated by nineteenth-century Turkish-speaking Muslim Ottomans in Istanbul. The book compellingly argues that these discussions and debates were not so much about the nature of science than the characteristics of the “man of science” and his relationship to Ottoman identity. In the course of YalÃ§inkaya’s study, readers also learn about the economic and political transformations of nineteenth century Ottoman society, the changes wrought by the gradual integration of the Ottoman Empire into the world capitalist system, and the consequences of those changes for the Ottoman state and its relationship to education and the press. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the entangled histories of science and modernity, and the ways that particular forms of identity and subjectivity emerged from inscriptions of that entanglement. I especially recommend it to readers paying special attention to the histories of the press, language, and the state as they are bound up with nineteenth century science and technology.

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Kyle Mattes and David Redlawsk, “The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning” (U of Chicago Press 2014)

Sun, 14 Jun 2015 18:36:00 -0000

Kyle Mattes and David Redlawsk are the authors of The Positive Case for Negative Campaigning (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Mattes is assistant professor of political science at Florida International University; Redlawsk is professor of political science at the Eagleton Institute’s Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University.

Each campaign season, a near public consensus is reached that everybody hates negative campaign ads. But do we all agree with what actually constitutes a negative ad and does that matter? Mattes and Redlawsk investigate the paradox of nearly universal hatred of negative ads yet persistent use by candidates. How can these two be? In the book, Mattes and Redlawsk designed a series of experiments to figure out what is it about negativity that voters truly dislike. In doing so, they separate ads that merely refer to a campaign opponent from those that criticize family and personal characteristics. What they discover will help anyone interested in politics better understand the way campaign communications actually works.

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Beatrix Hoffman, “Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930” (U of Chicago, 2012)

Thu, 28 May 2015 09:26:00 -0000

Disputes over the definitions or legality of ‘rights’ and ‘rationing’ in their various guises have animated much of the debate around the United States Affordable Care Act. Many legislators and vocal members of their constituency have strong convictions about the state of our current national health care system and where it is going. Far fewer, however, understand how our current state of affairs is the product of a quite recent and contingent history, which is precisely what Beatrix Hoffman‘s Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930 (University of Chicago, 2012) sets out to explain. While Hoffman’s scope is the U.S. as a whole, she draws out the local consequences of sweeping wartime and post-war reform by focusing on various cities, notably Chicago. Using a framework that addresses the reciprocal roles of rights and rationing as articulated by physicians, policymakers, and patients throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, she presents a concise history that speaks to far greater questions.

Throughout Health Care for Some, we learn much about the institutional transformations of modern U.S. healthcare: how the expansive yet exclusive county hospital system was not inevitable but fell in line with other infrastructural imperatives, while war-wrecked European nations actually improved primary care coverage through austerity policies; how doctors increasingly struggled with poor state management and strictures that, despite being legally sanctioned, discouraged providing care to the most needy; how Medicare and Medicaid were motivated as much by the civil rights movement as arguments for dignity of old age as a social right. Importantly, the human dimensions of care are never hidden from sight, as Hoffman unravels narratives of entangled structures and subjectivities that evince the personal damage wrought by a system too diffuse to overhaul. Her book is an engaging, informative, and concise read, as capable of becoming a valuable reference as it is of fomenting thought and action.

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Winnie Won Yin Wong, "Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade" (U Chicago Press, 2014)

Tue, 26 May 2015 08:00:00 -0000

Reading Winnie Wong's new book on image production in Dafen village will likely change the way you think about copying, China, and the relationship between them. Based on fieldwork that included artist interviews, studio visits, and participant observation alongside local officials, bosses, interpreters, foreign artists, buyers, and traders, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes readers into the production of images in a village in Shenzhen. After establishing what we're talking about when we talk about "copying" and "copies" in this context, Wong guides us through a series of media and spaces that collectively upend several assumptions that are often brought to understanding Dafen and its painters specifically, and copying and creativity in China more broadly. Indeed, understanding what Dafen painters are not is a crucial first step toward understanding what is happening in their work and home lives. Dafen painters, we learn, are not "especially unfree victims" of global capitalism or of totalitarian communism in a way that prevents them from making original and creative art. (In fact, Wong challenges us to think again about what and where "creativity" is, and how and by whom it is produced as a value.) Dafen painters do not work on a typical mass assembly-line. And their paintings are not simply "forgeries" of Western masterpieces. After coming to understand this, we learn about the painters and their work by visiting their workshops, reading about their life trajectories and the different sorts of training they receive, exploring propagandistic TV dramas and documentaries about them, and peering into some of the ways that artists working outside of Dafen (in Beijing, in Germany, in Amsterdam, and beyond) have understood and engaged with Dafen painting practices. It is an arresting and masterfully argued study and should be required reading for anyone interested in labor, art, and/or the history of authenticity and copying in modern China.

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Lawrence Jacobs, “Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation” (U Chicago Press, 2015)

Mon, 18 May 2015 11:41:00 -0000

Lawrence Jacobs is the author (with James Druckman) of Who Governs? Presidents, Public Opinion, and Manipulation (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Jacobs is the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota.

Just how responsive is the president to the public? In theory, we all hope very, but increasingly we worry that presidents have grown more distant from the wishes of the public. In Who Governs?, we get an empirical answer to that question that is at once novel and also deeply disturbing. Jacobs and Druckman explore how presidents, since Kennedy, have used public opinion polling to craft public messages and shape public priorities. Polling has grown significantly since the 1960s, both in its utilization, and also its sophistication, and presidents, especially Ronald Reagan, have given increasing attention to their results. But rather than using polls to closely adhere to the average voter, many presidents have catered to narrow segments of the populace, rending polling another tool used to undermine democratic governance.

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J. Bronsteen, C. Buccafusco, and J. S. Masur, “Happiness and the Law” (U Chicago Press, 2014)

Tue, 12 May 2015 16:11:00 -0000

In their new book Happiness and the Law (University of Chicago Press 2014), John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan S. Masur argue through the use of hedonic psychological data that we should consider happiness when determining the best ways to effectuate law. In this podcast Buccafusco, Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for Empirical Studies of Intellectual Property at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College, shares some of the following aspects of the book:

* How hedonic psychology measures human happiness and some of the things these studies have revealed

* The author’s new approach to evaluating laws called “well-being analysis”

* Ways the new data on happiness has revealed a need to rethink criminal punishment

* What the future holds for happiness research

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Hillel D. Braude, “Intuition in Medicine: A Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning” (U Chicago Press, 2012)

Tue, 12 May 2015 15:05:00 -0000

Can we define ‘clinical reasoning’? Is it the ability to marshal the best available evidence to come to adecision within a medical framework, or is it the capacity to think holistically aboutwhether a given intervention is in the patient’s best interest? In his book, Intuition in Medicine: A Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Hillel Braude considers this apparent gap in the history of medical thought. He argues throughout that intuition provides the missing link between medical and moral reasoning. Rather than setting forth a definition of intuition outright, Braude traces its articulations through canonical works of philosophy and medical ethics. One comes away with an understanding that intuition is something like a pre-reflective practical wisdom bound to human faculties, resisting abstraction. Even this definition is contextually malleable, and through his historical and philosophical exploration he draws out the epistemological (and often practical) consequences of assuming it to be anything more finite or less consequential.

The scope of Braude’s work is impressive, as it touches on classic philosophical texts–including a thorough treatment of Aristotle–as much as work better known by medical ethicists. It also tackles the modernization of medicine, from the works of pathologist Xavier Bichat and statistician Francis Galton to more contemporaryissues such asequipoise in clinical trials and Evidence Based Medicine. Throughout, Braude’s clarity and scrutiny shine through his treatment of the material, while he suggests new ways forward through phenomenology as a deeper consideration of both the doctor and patient as subjects. Intuition in Medicine keeps the doors of the medical humanities open to both physicians and philosophers by elucidating a foundational issue about which both groups can–and must–learn from one another.

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Finis Dunaway, “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images” (

Mon, 11 May 2015 14:40:00 -0000

Oil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The “crying Indian” in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half-century, and have played a pivotal role in alerting the public about ecological problems and galvanizing public action. Yet scholars are more likely to focus on the science related to environmental problems or the policy responses to them.

Finis Dunaway‘s new book, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (University of Chicago, 2015) takes such images seriously. He examines these iconic photos and films, as well as many others, and he argues that they were crucial in developing popular environmentalism. Dunaway, associate professor of history at Trent University, shows how such images were produced and traces the effect they had on American culture. More importantly, he argues that such images implicitly or explicitly encouraged consumer-based, individually-oriented responses to the ecological crisis rather than actions focusing on the structural roots of environmental problems.

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Eva Illouz, “Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best-Sellers, and Society” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Mon, 27 Apr 2015 06:00:00 -0000

Eva Illouz is professor of sociology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and president of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her book Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best Sellers, and Society (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a feminist-sociological analysis of the soft pornographic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. The book, and its two sequels written by E.L. James, began as fan fiction and subsequently reached record-breaking sales as an e-book. With two central characters, a sexual ingenue and a powerful enigmatic anti-hero, the novel is poorly written and formulaic, yet managed to capture the imagination of millions of women. Illouz tells us how the novel was the perfect combination of fantasy and self-help delivered to an audience increasingly confuse and uncertain in negotiating their heterosexual relationships. With its sadomasochistic sex and images of female submission and male dominance, Fifty Shades of Grey, is a gothic romance adapted to modern sexual dilemmas and emotional confusion. Combining the romantic fantasy and self-help genres, it acts a catalyst for renegotiating heterosexual relationships. By placing the novel within the history of the commodification of the book, the dynamics of the sexual marketplace, and the sociology of sexuality, Illouz locates Fifty Shades of Grey in the contemporary context. The reader of Hard-Core Romance will find an intriguing argument for why after feminism and the sexual revolution dominance and submission, resistance and surrender, remain as enigmas of modern relationships.

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Christopher J. Phillips, “The New Math: A Political History” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Thu, 26 Mar 2015 10:58:00 -0000

Christopher J. Phillips‘ new book is a political history of the “New Math,” a collection of curriculum reform projects in the 1950s & 1960s that were partially sponsored by the NSF and involved hundreds of mathematicians, teachers, professors, administrators, parents, and students. The New Math: A Political History (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores the formation of an idea of the “American subject” in an environment where math was considered to be a component of intelligent citizenship. As classrooms became sites shaped by Cold War politics, efforts to reform mathematics curricula were bound up in ideas of subjectivity and discipline. Phillips pays special attention to the work of the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG) in this context, looking closely at the textbooks that the SMSG produced for children studying at a range of levels. Importantly, The New Math explores not just the production of these textbooks but also what happened when they were actually brought into American classrooms and engaged by teachers, students, and parents. As a result, in addition to being a fascinating political history it’s also a model of how we can treat the archaeology of the classroom as a way to approach the history of science.

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Joanna Kempner, “Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 13:31:00 -0000

Migraine is real, and it is pervasive–at least 12% of Americans suffer some form of this spectrum disorder. Still, migraine remains a conflicted illness–people routinely dispute the legitimacy of both the experience and its sufferers. In Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Joanna Kempner sets out to explore “how migraine can simultaneously disrupt so many lives and continue to be questioned and trivialized by the culture at large.” Kempner begins by tracing the changing biomedical understandings of migraine over the past three hundred years, discovering a long history of “migraine’s association with weak, gendered personalities.” Kempner then turns to four contemporary figures and cases: headache specialists, migraine advocates, pharmaceutical companies, and the case of cluster headaches (a disorder commonly associated with men). Throughout, she shows how the recent recasting of migraine from a “disorder of neurotic women” to a neurobiological disease has done little to change the cultural meaning of headache disorders because “even as a ‘brain disease,’ migraine remains plagued by gendered images, metaphors, and stereotypes.”

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A. Mark Smith, “From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics” (U of Chicago Press, 2015)

Sat, 21 Mar 2015 11:19:00 -0000

A. Mark Smith‘s new book is a magisterial history of optics over the course of two millennia. From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) suggests that the transition from ancient toward modern optics was accompanied by a turn in optical studies from a concern with explaining sight to a focus on light by optical scholars. The book argues that Kepler’s theory of retinal imaging was instrumental in this turn. In the course of an amazingly comprehensive narrative of optical studies from Aristotle through the seventeenth century, From Sight to Light offers clear and persuasive discussions of the historical understanding of color and of visual illusions, the use of mirrors as optical devices, the relationships between physical and psychological theories of visual perception, and the study of reflection and refraction. Smith pays special attention to explaining the mathematical bases of optical theories, and he highlights the formative role that Arabic scientists and translation played in the history of optics. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sight, vision, light, and the study thereof

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Nick Wilding, "Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge" (U Chicago Press, 2014)

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 08:00:00 -0000

Nick Wilding's new book is brilliant, thoughtful, and an absolute pleasure to read. Galileo's Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and The Politics of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2014) takes an unusual approach to understanding Galileo and his context by focusing its narrative on his closest friend, student, and patron, the Venetian Gianfrancesco Sagredo. Though most readers might be familiar with Sagredo largely as one of the protagonists of Galileo's 1632 Dialogue upon the Two Main Systems of the World, here he takes center stage. In order to bring Sagredo to life and help us understand his significance both for Galileo and for early modern science in context more broadly conceived, Wilding has worked with an impressive range of materials that include poems, paintings, ornamental woodcuts, epistolary hoaxes, intercepted letters, murder case files, and more. After a chapter that reads like a detective story as Wilding tracks down and expertly reads missing portraits of Sagredo, subsequent chapters explore the Venetian's role in major disputes involving the Jesuits, his family's mining interests, his time as treasurer for a fortress and a consul to Syria, and his performance as a "rich, old, slightly batty widow" in the context of a rather hilarious epistolary hoax. We also come to understand Galileo anew, as Wilding pays careful attention to his use of scribal publication to control and disseminate his writing and the relationship between instrument and text in his work. (In one wonderful chapter, Wilding reads woodcuts associated with the Sidereus nuncius in order to reframe how we understand the history of production and publication of this text in the context of transalpine book smuggling.) Along the way, the chapters make significant interventions in the historiography of science, suggesting ways that Sagredo helps us think anew about the use of visual sources, the agency of "intermediaries and go-betweens" in creating their own networks, the importance of understanding the sense of humor of our historical actors, the social nature of early modern authorship, and the need to reassess the historiography of the global scientific network of the Jesuits.

There are also some really, horribly, wonderfully bad puns. (Consider yourselves forewarned.)

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Robert P. Burns, “Kafka’s Law: ‘The Trial’ and American Criminal Justice” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 10:03:00 -0000

Professor Robert P. Burns of Northwestern University School of Law offers an insightful critique of the modern American criminal justice system in his new work Kafka’s Law: ‘The Trial’ and American Criminal Justice (University of Chicago Press 2014). This interview explores the characteristics of Kafka’s “Law” and exposes where and how these characteristics exist within the American criminal justice system.

Burns leads us through the absurd regime The Trial‘s protagonist must navigate after he finds himself accused of an unknown crime. Kafka’s dystopian law is unknowable, ubiquitous, overly bureaucratic and yet overly informal. In the story’s world the law functions like God and guilt is inevitable. These legal characteristics may appear to be part of an absurd dystopian fantasy world derived from the same wild imagination that produced a story in which a man metamorphoses into a bug. However, we learn in the second half of the interview that the dystopian themes in The Trial capture a present-day reality for many who are accused of crimes in America.

Burns’s work exposing Kafkaesque aspects of our legal system and his search to find the most effective means of remedying these situations is vastly important to the societal goal of narrowing the gap between justice and law.

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Kimberly A. Hamlin, “From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America” (U Chicago Press, 2014)

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 13:57:00 -0000

Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a history of how a group of women’s rights advocates turned to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to answer the eternal “woman question.” Hamlin’s fascinating intellectual history uncovers how the new evolutionary science provided multiple arguments by which to advance the cause of women’s rights in the home and society. Many scholars are familiar with the Enlightenment, religious, and socialist origins of feminist thought. Hamlin suggests another significant strand of thought offered by the science of human origins. She argues that Darwinism, often with unorthodox interpretations, was effective in overturning a central ideological obstacle to women’s equality–the biblical story of Eve. Charles Darwin’s theory, against his own conservative views, turned upside down traditional ideas about women. Freethinkers, socialist, sexologist seized on evolutionary science to build arguments against recalcitrant traditional views. They asserted that their contemporary culture was a construct of erroneous ideas calling for change, in order to live in accordance to the evolutionary laws of nature. As “reform Darwinists,” Hamlin’s subjects stood against social Darwinism, religious teaching, and custom. Yet, evolutionary science under male control was deployed to reassert women’s subordination. Sex difference as interpreted by many male scientists pointed to female intellectual inferiority. Women, mostly outside the science establishment, called on the evidence of “woman’s experience” against claims of scientific men.Hamlin offers a lucid narrative of how a group of women intervened in a period between the demise of Eve, as the metanarrative for the meaning of womanhood, and the masculinist consolidation of evolutionary science.

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Joseph M. Gabriel, “Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry” (U Chicago Press, 2013)

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 11:09:00 -0000

Commercial interests are often understood as impinging upon the ethical norms of medicine. In his new book, Medical Monopoly: Intellectual Property Rights and the Origins of the Modern Pharmaceutical Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Joe Gabriel shows how the modernization of American medicine was bound up in the ownership, manufacture, and marketing of drugs. Gabriel unearths the early history of intellectual property concerns as they entered the domain of medical practice itself. Through his careful marshaling of evidence, he takes readers back to a time when the norms and legal structures of commercial capitalism in the U.S. were just as much at issue as those of the professionalization of medicine. This fascinating book serves as a pointed reminder that the sources of therapeutic rationale are just as much tied to the production and regulation of therapies as the collective decision-making on ethical practice. Along with my previous interview with Jeremy Greene, this discussion will hopefully make accessible a broad perspective on the development of medicine in the 20th century by focusing on its ties to industry.

Medical Monopoly charts the history of property rights over medicines at the dawn of the 19th century through World War I. The important broader transition here is that while before the Civil War–at least in medicine–patents were seen as tantamount to granting problematic monopoly, by the end of the 19th century they were understood as the best available regulatory mechanism for preventing more problematic imitation. Whereas patent medicines had previously been linked to quackery, the emergence and rapid expansion of the “ethical” pharmaceutical industry after the Civil War was due to its adherents advocating for more effective regulation of commerce within medicine. Rather than reverting to secrecy, firms began to circulate and publish information on new remedies and the results of studies to physicians. As the explosion of new medicines remained at pace with the boom of consumer goods in the late 19th century, patenting and corporate investment in monopolistic practices became understood as a mechanism to advance the public good. The expansion of laboratory science and norms of chemical manufacturing in the 20th century only bolstered this union further.Medical Monopoly is a fascinating and important read that people interested in medical policy should pay attention to.

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Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 13:18:00 -0000

“Show me how it doos.”

Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experiments on falling cats, Maxwell went on to have an intense conversion experience that brought him to evangelicalism. The young T.H. Huxley (1825-95), on the other hand, busied himself at “delivering sermons from tree stumps” as a young boy, before joining the navy, studying jellyfish, eventually launching an assault against the Anglican Church and gaining world renown as the biologist who was “Darwin’s Bulldog.”

Matthew Stanley’s wonderful new book introduces us to Maxwell and Huxley as they embodied theistic and naturalistic science, respectively, in Victorian Britain. Moving well beyond the widespread assumption that modern science and religion are and always have been fundamentally antithetical to one another, Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a history of scientific naturalism that illustrates the deep and fundamental commonalities between positions on the proper practice of science that began to diverge relatively late and in very particular historical circumstances. Beginning at a point when Maxwell’s theistic science was the “standard” and Huxley was the “challenger,” and ending at the point when Huxley “won,” Stanley goes on to guide readers through some of the major topics of debate that characterized Victorian science (including the nature of miracles and of consciousness, the limits of science, the origin of the universe, the question of intellectual freedom, the morality of education, the possibility of free will) to show the gradual divergence of perspectives that were always rooted in concerns about scientific practice, and to consider the ramifications of this history for how we understand and conduct debates over Intelligent Design and related issues today.

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Elena Conis, “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization” (University of Chicago, 2014)

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 17:51:00 -0000

The 1960s marked a “new era of vaccination,” when Americans eagerly exposed their arms and hind ends for shots that would prevent a range of everyday illnesses–not only prevent the lurking killers, like polio. Medical historian Elena Conis shows that Americans’ gradual acceptance of vaccination was far from a medical fait accompli: it was–and remains–a political accomplishment that has stemmed from a patchwork of efforts to expose children, in particular, to compulsory vaccine programs. Grown in the culture of postwar American politics, vaccines deliver more than prophylactics. They succor a set of assumptions about economic inequality, racial difference, sexual norms, and gendered divisions of labor. Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization (University of Chicago, 2014) is a timely and accessible social history of American policy and practices towards vaccination that shows how support for vaccination has rarely advanced for medical reasons alone.

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Martin Shuster, “Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 15:12:00 -0000

The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s most well known text written with Max Horkheimer, is reassessed in a new book of philosophy by Martin Shuster. Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers how autonomy might exist under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, following the disastrous inhumanity of events in the twentieth century.

Shuster explores the nature of autonomy in four ways. The book opens with a re-reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment, as a means to engage and critique Kant’s notion of autonomy. The text then turns to consider a potential ‘response’ from Kant, in the form of Kant’s conception of a rational theology. It is here where Shuster considers the importance of God to Kantian ethics, most notably the role of God as establishing the value of humanity in the categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is juxtaposed with Adorno’s later work, which Shuster argues provides a way to think about autonomy that moves beyond and between the totalizing dialectic of enlightenment and Kant’s rational theology. The book closes with a consideration of Hegel’s relationship to this reading of Adorno, reassessing topics such as the teleology of history in Hegel through to the contemporary work of Stanley Cavell. The conclusion provides a practical call to arms based on the conception of autonomy developed in the book. The chapter on Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a stimulating reassessment of a text central to the critical theory tradition and should attract a general readership looking to add depth to their knowledge of this work. However the book itself will also be of interest to all readers of contemporary philosophy, holocaust studies and those wondering how we should live now.

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Anne Knowles, Mastering Iron (U of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2014)

Fri, 30 Jan 2015 15:21:00 -0000

Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society and geography. In many ways, these nineteenth-century maps were the predecessors to the maps made through Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

In the past decade, geographers and historians have begun using GIS for innovative historical research. Among the most innovative scholars using this technology is Anne Knowles, professor of geography at Middlebury College. Her new books Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (co-edited with Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano) are superb examples of how scholars can use GIS to better understand the past.

In this podcast, Professor Knowles discusses the iron industry in Antebellum America, the Holocaust, and how GIS can help illuminate previously unknown facets of both.

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Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, “The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America ( U Chicago Press, 2014)

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 06:00:00 -0000

Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones are the authors of The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill and Jones is the J. J. “Jake” Pickle Regents Chair in Congressional Studies and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Politics of Information picks up where the authors’ last book, The Politics of Attention, leaves off. They explore how information enters into the policy process and how that has evolved over time, focusing on what they call the “paradox of search”. They make extensive use of the publicly available data that they have collected over the last decade called the Policy Agendas Project. They argue that: “Information determines priorities, and priorities determine action” (p. 40). They discover is that the policy process is replete with information – not all high quality – and that different policy problems integrate information in different ways. They also find that the government has “broadened” – addressing an ever growing array of issues – rather than just “thickening” – through growth in the overall size of government.

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Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, “Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Fri, 16 Jan 2015 15:49:00 -0000

In lucid prose that’s a real pleasure to read, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain‘s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. Life on Display: Revolutionizing U. S. Museums of Science & Natural History in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) guides readers through a transformation in American science and nature museums as museums moved from a nineteenth-century focus on research and specimen collections to a twentieth-century emphasis on public engagement and display. Written collaboratively over nearly a decade, Life on Display simultaneously develops an argument for a “renegotiation of the relationship between display, research, and education in American museums of nature and science,” and opens up an archive of fascinating (and at times hilarious and moving) stories of members of the museum-going public (some of who gifted dog fleas and dead pets to their local museums), non-human inhabitants of interactive museum displays (including an owl with a penchant for riding in cars and “trim, up-on-their-toes cockroaches”), and museum professionals who painted, debated, made dioramas, invented “Exploratoria,” and occasionally wrote limericks. This is a book for anyone interested in American history, museum studies, visual culture, science studies, the history of education, grasshopper surgery, or Jurassic Park (among many, many other fields it contributes to). It’s a wonderfully engaging history.

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Erik Braun, “The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Thu, 08 Jan 2015 06:00:00 -0000

Erik Braun‘s recent book, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013), examines the spread of Burmese Buddhist meditation practices during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the social, political, and intellectual historical contexts that gave rise to this development. Braun accomplishes this by focusing on the role that the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923) played in this movement, drawing primarily on Ledi Sayadaw’s own writings, three biographies, polemical responses to Ledi Sayadaw’s writings, and contemporaneous periodicals.

Central to the book is the importance of the Abhidhamma (Buddhist metaphysics or psychology) in Burmese Buddhist monasticism and, more specifically, the way in which Ledi Sayadaw spread the study of the Abhidhamma among the laity and used it as the foundation for insight meditation. In contrast to many recent proponents of insight meditation (both Asian and not), who emphasize technique at the expense of study and theory, Ledi Sayadaw saw insight meditation and study of the Abhidhamma as an inseparable pair, with the latter serving as a basis for the former. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s approach in the larger context of Buddhist and Burmese theories about meditation, exploring the different views on the relationships among samatha (concentration meditation), the jhanas (stages of meditative absorption), insight meditation as direct awareness of sensory and mental experience, and insight meditation as discursive thinking informed by Abhidhammic categories.

Exploring the cultural milieu of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Burma, Braun demonstrates that Ledi Sayadaw exhibits characteristics that we would regard as traditional (e.g., the importance he grants to literary competence, his belief in Buddhist cosmology) as well as those we might think of as modern (e.g., his charismatic style of preaching, his focus on the laity). In addition, as opposed to Buddhist reformers who argued that Buddhism was in fact applicable to and accorded with modernity (being synonymous with the West, in most such cases), Ledi Sayadaw flipped this relationship on its head by asserting that modernity (e.g., Western science) was in agreement with Buddhism. In so doing he avoided the usual contradictions between Buddhism and modernity but without apparently compromising the Buddhist worldview in the process. Braun places Ledi Sayadaw’s thoughts on these matters in the larger historical context of colonialism: Burma was annexed by the British (in three stages: 1826, 1852, 1886) and many Burmese believed that Buddhism’s final days were nigh. Ledi Sayadaw’s theories, then, were in part a response to a new environment in which Buddhist monks were losing their traditional position as educators, and in which the age-old relationship between the sa

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Carl H. Nightingale, “Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities” (U of Chicago Press, 2012)

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 17:21:00 -0000

We often think of South Africa or America when we hear the word ‘segregation.’ Or — a popular view — that social groups have always chosen to live apart.But as Carl H. Nightingale shows in his new book, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the racial phenomenon is both modern and international. To be sure, laws and informal practices separating individuals by membership in a caste can be found everywhere in the ancient and medieval world. Those with or seeking wealth and power have always sought to preserve or increase their position by disuniting people on the grounds of social category. Yet the idea of “race” and the enduring belief that human beings can be distinguished in such terms has its origins in the rise of European colonialism, starting with British rule in Madras (Chennai) and the East India Company’s decision to split Calcutta (Kolkata) into “White Town” and “Black Town.” The word ‘segregation’ itself comes from techniques used in Hong Kong and Bombay (Mumbai) in the 1890’s, part of a viral “mania” that, Nightingale explains, pivoted around the challenges of mass urbanization and sent the institution north, south, east, and west — even to Latin American cities like Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, where the distinction between ‘white’ and ‘black’ was murky at best.

This globalization depended heavily on imperialist governments, and often just as importantly relied on multinational corporations (real estate especially) and intellectual networks, which provided in the first case institutional precedent and protocol and in the second rationalization and legitimacy for the pseudo-scientific notion of ‘race.’ Yet, as this ambitious work demonstrates, segregation appeared under every form of government, with and without the help of capitalism. The line betweende facto and de jure was often hard to tell or irrelevant. (One might note here, for example, that, contrary to popular belief, most businesses in the Old South were not forced by law to put up those ‘Whites Only’ signs.)

Indeed, there is more than a bit of paradox and irony in this tragic story. And while the late 1900’s saw the rise of powerful movements opposed to segregation, the world’s population is now majority-urban for the first time, and still lives with these awful legacies. Attempts to rollback segregation will have to grapple with this complex and global history. Thankfully, Nightingale has given us a very useful starting point.

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Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Lubienski, “The Public School Advantage” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 11:35:00 -0000

Conventional thinking tells us that private school education is better than public schooling in the US. Why else would parents pay the hefty price tag often associate with private education, especially at very elite schools? But, Dr. Christopher Lubienski and Dr. Sarah Lubienski question this assumption in their new book, entitled The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013). In this publication, the authors use two large-scale datasets on mathematics outcomes to isolate the effects of schooling on children and they find that public schools actually score better than their private school counterparts in this measure when the proper variables are held constant. To explain their findings, Lubienski and Lubienski argue that public school usually have better certified teachers and more often teach with more modern pedagogical methods. While the book does not contend that all public schools are great, the authors would like their findings that show traditional public schools do in fact show positive outcomes to be considered alongside a policy discourse that is increasingly dominated by calls of privatization and autonomy–such as vouchers and charter schools. Dr. Christopher Lubienski joins New Books in Education for the interview. You can follow him and the host of this podcast on Twitter at @CLub_edu and @PoliticsAndEd, respectively.

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Susan Schulten, “Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Fri, 12 Dec 2014 18:56:00 -0000

Our everyday lives are saturated with maps. We use maps on our smart phones to help us navigate from place to place. Maps in the newspaper and online show us the spread of disease, the state of the planet, and the conflicts among nations.

Susan Schulten‘s Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines how the very idea of a map radically changed it the nineteenth century. Author Susan Schulten shows the pivotal role maps played in nineteenth-century American life, from helping Americans forge a national identity and better understand their past to showing the pervasiveness of slavery in different parts of the South and the prospect for emancipation. Those with a keen interest in cartography–or even a passing interest–will find her book and this interview fascinating.

Professor Schulten has also created an excellent companion site for the book, www.mappingthenation.com. There you will find hi-resolution digital copies of the maps she examines in the book and that we discuss in our interview.

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Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Tue, 09 Dec 2014 13:02:00 -0000

Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepreneurial science in the early modern Netherlands. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers scientific knowledge as a commodity, looking carefully at how the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age shaped anatomy and natural history as commercial practices. Margocsy argues that commercialization stimulated “a debate over the epistemological status of visual facts in natural history & anatomy,” transforming the concept of visual representation in the process. While learning about these debates and transformations, readers are guided on a tour through a world of seashells, forgeries, and wax-filled cadavers, evidence of a commercially-driven proliferation of ways to represent living and dead bodies and a series of heated debates about them. Commercial Visions convincingly demonstrates that paying attention to the commercial aspects of early modern science can inform how we think about early modern circulation, the history of “objectivity,” and the concept of the public sphere. Don’t miss the beautiful color plates nestled in the midst of the book!

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Carolyn L. Kane, “Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 12:35:00 -0000

Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014) places color at the center of media studies, exploring some amazing works of art and technology to understand the changing history of the relationship between color as embodied in machine code and screen interface. Using a methodology called “media archaeology” that is informed by the work of Foucault, Nietzsche, Kittler, Heidegger, Stiegler, and others, Chromatic Algorithms traces a transformation of color from optics to algorithms. The chapters trace a history of synthetic color in Western aesthetics and philosophy, the rise of Day-Glo, the aesthetics of color in video art from the 1960s and 1970s, the technology of color TVs, the connection between color and notions of transcendence and utopia, “democratic color” and Salvador DalÃ’s urinated-upon pen, the early history of art/engineering at Bell Labs, the technology of digital infrared visualization, the aesthetics of “Photoshop cinema,” bioart and its glow-in-the-dark bunnies, and the work of some amazing artists including Lillian Schwartz, Jeremy Blake, and many many others. It is a gorgeous and fascinating study of color, technology, visualization, the digital, and beyond.

As you work through the book, I highly recommend searching the Web for some of the amazing work described in its chapters. I’m based in Canada and so some of the following links may not work for you: in that case, just try searching on your own for the title:

The rock opera Battle for Milkquarious! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zDMhwq3pcA

Jeremy Blake, Winchester Redux http://vimeo.com/16485005

Zbigniew RybczyÅ„ski, Tango http://vimeo.com/9033947

Paper Rad: http://www.paperrad.org/

This site has some clips from Lillian Schwartz’z Proxima Centauri: http://lillian.com/kinetic/

You can browse video clips from WGBH’s New Television Workshop here: http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/

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Scott Samuelson, “The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Tue, 02 Dec 2014 14:57:00 -0000

Philosophy does not have to be stuck in the clouds. It can have relevance in everyday life, for everyday people, and Scott Samuelson attempts to do just that in his book, entitled The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Samuelson weaves in a personal narrative from his experience teaching at Kirkwood Community College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa and a deep historical exploration of philosophy. His students provide interesting and everyday lessons that the author forges into the foundation for complex philosophical issues. The book is organized into four sections that each focus on a single question, yet vast question: What is Philosophy? What is Happiness? Is Knowledge of God Possible? and What is the Nature of Good and Evil?. From Socrates, to Pascal, from the Stoics to Epicureans, Samuelson allows for an easier understanding of advanced philosophical discourse, and without watering down the complexity. He joins New Books in Education for the interview.

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John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (U Chicago Press, 2014)

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 17:32:00 -0000

After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism.

John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine.

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Andrea Louise Campbell, “Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:12:00 -0000

Andrea Louise Campbell is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Campbell is professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Trapped in America’s Safety Net sheds light on the reality of means-tested programs in the United States. Following an accident that left her sister-in-law paralyzed, Campbell sees the vast array of federal and California state assistance programs up close. The book highlights the peculiar aspects of these programs, including the burden of asset tests that compel disabled Americans – and others receiving benefits – to liquidate assets and prevents them from saving for the future. The book is at once deeply personal, but also a great overview of how social policy actually works and often fails.

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Beth Linker, “War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:45:00 -0000

Beth Linker is the author of War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (University of Chicago Press, 2011). As she reveals, the story of individual rehabilitation from war-related injury was intertwined with other political concerns at multiple levels. These century-old accounts matter greatly, as the First World War was that point where modern rehabilitative medicine and social policy was born, with many of the attitudes and aspects of this early response lingering to the present day. Beth’s book is an insightful consideration of the conflicted responses Americans presented to the unanticipated challenges of post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation for the nation’s thousands of veterans, standing in no small way as a cautionary tale as America winds down from its latest conflicts.

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Michael Osborne, “The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Thu, 11 Sep 2014 15:49:00 -0000

In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-European or Anglo-centric models of the history of colonial medicine, Osborne’s book focuses on the centrality, transformations, and ultimate demise of naval medicine in France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Motivating the central arguments and narrative of the book is a concern with place, places, and emplacement, and Osborne explores maritime medical practices and the ecology of disease in French provincial port cities, on ships, in prisons, in hospitals and schools, and beyond. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France pays special attention to how the study and conception of race, and its connection with health and disease, was formed and reformed in these settings. Readers with a special interest in the relationship between medicine and the military will find much to enjoy here, as will those who come to the book wanting to know more about the maritime history of diseases like Yellow Fever, lead poisoning, and Malaria. There’s also some wonderful storytelling here, including a fascinating account of a book-bomber in Chapter 4. It is a beautifully written account, and it should be required reading for those interested in the history of medicine and healing, of France, of the colonial medical past, and of place and locality.

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John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Fri, 05 Sep 2014 13:25:00 -0000

John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012) narrates the emergence of a new image of the machine, a new concept of nature, a new theory of knowledge, and a new political orientation through a series of chapters that each use the work of a single figure to open up a world of romantic machines.

Part 1 of the book looks at the work of physical scientists whose model of precision experiment and math was transformed by an encounter with romantic philosophy and aesthetics, and introduces the electro-magnetic work of physicist AndreMarie Ampre, the instrumental practices of Prussian geophysical researcher Alexander von Humboldt, and the labor theory of knowledge in relation to the instruments of astronomer and politician Francois Arago. Part 2 looks at the impact of technology on theories of the self and the human, focusing on the fantastic arts and public spectacles featuring new discoveries in optics, mechanics, and natural history. (Readers will find lively discussions of dioramas, hallucinatory opera, symphonies, museums, magic shows, and expositions, here.) Part 3 treats the utopian thinkers and engineer-scientists of the late Restoration and the July Monarchy, looking at religiously-inflected social technologies of conversion, communication, and temporal coordination in the work and thought of Saint-Simon and his followers, printer and literary critic Pierre Leroux’s work and theories, and Auguste Comte’s instruments of thought and paper. It is a rich, elegantly argued work that offers not just a history of science and technology, but also a tracing of the roots of some contemporary continental philosophy, as well.

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Daryn Lehoux, “What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Sat, 16 Aug 2014 18:48:00 -0000

Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a fascinating account of the co-production of facts and worlds, taking readers into the sciences of Rome from the first century BC to the second century AD. Masterfully blending approaches from the history and philosophy of science, Lehoux traces the significance of the “threefold cord” of nature, law, and the gods in making up the early Roman world. The chapters use the works of Cicero, Seneca, Galen, Ptolemy, and others to explore topics making up the foundation of a history of Roman science, including the importance of divination to Roman politics and natural knowledge, the relationship between optics and ethics in the Roman world, and the entanglements of law, nature, and witnessing. What Did the Romans Know? also contributes to philosophical debates over the theory-ladenness of observation, scientific and historical realism, and relativism. Lehoux ends his account as an “epistemological coherentist,” suggesting a model for thinking about and with the sciences in history and beyond. On top of all of this, the language of the text sparkles. It’s a wonderfully enjoyable read.

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Mary Terrall, “Catching Nature in the Act” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 11:40:00 -0000

Mary Terrall‘s new book is a beautifully-written, carefully-researched, and compellingly-argued account of the practices of natural history in the eighteenth-century francophone world. Catching Nature in the Act: Reaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2014) explores this world via the work of Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur and his vast and varied networks of correspondents, assistants, colleagues, and co-naturalists. As we read, we follow this loose network across the bakeries, gardens, tidepools, hedges, studies, academies, kitchens, poultry yards, specimen collections, and other spaces of quotidian life and their associated practices of natural history. As these men and women observed, chased, collected, dissected, preserved, painted, described, and tested, they practiced the production of knowledge about the natural world as a part of their intimate, daily lives. The chapters of Terrall’s book observe them as they in turn observe aphids, mayflies, sea anemones, chickens, and other creatures as a means to understand larger questions about the nature of generation, metamorphosis, reproduction, and other lived behaviors and processes. They feed material from inside the quills of young pigeon feathers to spiders in order to study spider silk and its commercial potential. They glue glass to cocoons to create windows into the metamorphoses of the butterflies inside. They use hog bristles to turn tiny polyps inside-out and observe how they responded. They draw, they incubate, and they incorporate practices and materials from the physical sciences to do so. Catching Nature in the Act contributes thoughtfully to several interrelated historiographical threads in the history of science – the histories of practice and place, the importance of the household as a space of observation and experiment, the role of networks of correspondence and collaboration, the relationship between natural science and theology – and offers helpful revisions of dominant approaches to each of those historiographies of science and its histories. It is a must-read for historians of science, and a fascinating narrative for any interested reader.

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Omar W. Nasim, “Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 10:55:00 -0000

In Omar W. Nasim‘s new book, a series of fascinating characters sketch, paint, and etch their way toward a mapping of the cosmos and the human mind. Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the history of observation of celestial nebulae in the nineteenth century, exploring the relationships among the acts of seeing, drawing, and knowing in producing visual knowledge about the heavens and its bodies. Observing by Hand treats not just published images, but also argues for the centrality of “working images” to the histories of science and observation, paying special attention to personal drawings in private notebooks as instruments of individual and collective observation. Nasim’s approach blends the history and philosophy of science in a study that informs the histories of astronomy, images, and paperwork, and that emphasizes the importance of the philosophy of mind and its history in shaping this heavenly narrative. His transdisciplinary approach spans several media that include maps and portraits, oil paintings and etchings, private drawings and collectively-produced published images. The book helped me see Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, and the starry night above, with new eyes and a new appreciation for the vision and visioning of nineteenth century astronomical observers.

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Alison Pearlman, “Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America” (University of Chicago, 2013)

Thu, 29 May 2014 11:59:00 -0000

When you imagine a gourmet experience, what comes to mind? An elegant restaurant, perhaps, with a single candle flickering at the center of a luminous white tablecloth? Maybe a quartet plays somewhere in the romantic distance, as the waiter slips a perfectly plated appetizer of escargot before you, and you proceed to nuzzle them out of their shells with silver tongs and that dainty fork? Perhaps this isn’t your image. Perhaps yours includes a view of the Pacific shore or the skyline of Manhattan or a wine list as long as actuarial table. But does your image include a taco truck? When Food & Wine magazine declared Roy Choi on of its “Best New Chefs” of 2010 for the food he was serving up in his Kogi BBQ truck, it signaled something like a sea change had happened in our idea of gourmet eating.

And that’s the very change that Alison Pearlman explores in her book, Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America (University of Chicago, 2013). As she puts it, “Between 1975 and 2010, the style of gourmet dining in America transformed. Increasingly, restaurants of ‘fine’ dining incorporated food, dÃ©cor, and other elements formally limited to the ‘casual’ dining experience.” The result, as Pearlman shows us, is a gourmet experience “replete with eroded hierarchies and pointed style contrasts, convergences of haute and ordinary.” And, we might add, taco trucks. In a keen investigation of every element of the dining experience, from menus to molecular gastronomy, Pearlman’s book reveals the surprising nature of what fine dining means for us today.

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Marwa Elshakry, “Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Fri, 23 May 2014 14:15:00 -0000

The work of Charles Darwin, together with the writing of associated scholars of society and its organs and organisms, had a particularly global reach in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marwa Elshakry‘s new book offers a fascinating window into the ways that this work was read and rendered in modern Arabic-language contexts. Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2013) invites us into a late nineteenth-century moment when the notions of “science” and “civilization” mutually transformed one another, and offers a thoughtful and nuanced account of the ways that this played out for scholars working and writing in Syria and Egypt. The early chapters of Elshakry’s book focus on the central role played by popular science journals like Al-Muqtataf (The Digest) in translating and disseminating Darwin’s ideas. We meet Ya’qub Sarruf and Faris Nimr, young teachers at the Syrian Protestant College who were instrumental in translating scientific works into Arabic there and, later, in Egypt. An entire chapter looks closely at Isma’il Mazhar’s work producing the first verbatim translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Arabic, but the book also looks well beyond Darwin to consider broader Arabic discourses on the relationship between science and society, as those discourses were shaped by engagements with the work of Herbert Spencer, and many others. Elshakry pays special attention to the ways that this story is embedded in the histories of print culture, the politics of empire, and debates over educational reform, materialism, and socialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and concludes with a consideration of the continuing reverberations of these issues into late twentieth century Egypt and beyond. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the entanglements of science, translation, and empire in the modern world, and it will change the way we understand the place of Arabic interlocutors in the history of modern science.

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Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Wed, 14 May 2014 10:42:00 -0000

During the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then consumed by flames. We know this thanks to a diary in which he recorded these burnings and burials. In his new book, Richard Yeo contextualizes the diary-keeping and document-organizing practices of men like Pepys within a rich, detailed account of notes and note-taking among early modern English virtuosi. Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a fascinating glimpse into practices of information management as they allowed English scholars to bridge text and memory, print media and manuscripts, journals and commonplace books, reading and observation, the individual and the collective. Yeo’s book explores the relationship between early modern methods of collecting and storing information and the larger project of Baconian natural history, paying special attention to the ways that Bacon and several Fellows of the Royal Society used notebooks and other note-keeping technologies. Beyond this, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science is also deeply embedded in the history of memory and its (dis)contents, and engages (especially in a chapter on Samuel Hartlib and his circle) the historiography of epistolary networks and early modern histories of correspondence. Enjoy!

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Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, “The Religious Question in Modern China” University of Chicago Press, 2011

Mon, 28 Apr 2014 12:00:00 -0000

Social phenomena that some people like to call ‘religion’ has long shaped Chinese culture. In the twentieth century, defining the boundaries of what constitutes ‘religion’ has been central to the construction of a modern nation. In this far reaching book, The Religious Question in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), authors Vincent Goossaert, directeur d’etudes in Chinese religions at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and David A. Palmer, professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, help us tread the complex field of phenomena where ‘religion’ is the central question. The question is answered again and again by intellectuals, politicians, and practitioners each seeking their own objective in classifying particular social activities as religious or not. The authors lead us through the debates revolving around what various practices entailed and if they merit the classification ‘religion,’ such as athletic practices, lay Buddhist activity, traditional medicine, Confucian movements, self-cultivation, evangelic Christianity, dietary practices, and Falun Gong. Of course, the answer depends on who you asked and when. This rich book offers a detailed analysis of Chinese questions about religion, secularity, and modernity in a global world. It has garnered wide recognition and made an important contribution to the study of Chinese religions.

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Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Open Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 17:51:00 -0000

Jamie Cohen-Cole‘s new book explores the emergence of a discourse of creativity, interdisciplinarity, and the “open mind” in the context of Cold War American politics, education, and society. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2014) considers how open-mindedness took on a political role (as a model of citizenship contrasted with that of totalitarian states), an academic role (as a model of a scientist or thinker), and a broader role as a model of human nature in the mid-late twentieth century. Cohen-Cole’s book not only offers a fascinating glimpse into the development of mid-century psychology and cognitive science, but also shows the deep connections among what was happening in what might otherwise be considered separate social and political spaces that include laboratories, classrooms, cocktail parties, conferences, academic departments, and various physical and textual loci of political and social engagement. It is exceptionally clear in its narrative structure, prose style, and argument, and it offers a fresh perspective on how we understand the co-creation of science and society in Cold War America.

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Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, “Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 11:45:00 -0000

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare‘s wonderful new book is a thoughtful, provocative, and balanced account of the intersecting histories and practices of drug research in modern Ghana, South Africa, and Madagascar. Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2014) tells the stories of six plants, all sourced in African countries, that competing groups of plant specialists have tried to transform into pharmaceuticals since the 1880s. The leaves and roots and seeds of the book’s narrative collectively map the contours of a story that emerges from a crucial and germinal tension: on the one hand, much of the history of the plant sciences in these African spaces is motivated by a race for patents and scientific credit; at the same time, the mobility of plants across the borders of Osseo-Asare’s study has complicated efforts to assign priority of discovery to individuals or groups, and in fact challenges the very notion of a “traditional” or “indigenous” body of knowledge in the first place. Simultaneously a carefully situated ethnography and a history informed by a material archive that encompasses pages and petals, the book explores that tension in a critical assessment of what it means to talk about “African” science or “local” knowledge. Bitter Roots will deservedly have a wide audience in African studies, science studies, and the histories of medicine, pharmacy, and botany.

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Nicholas Carnes, “White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 06:00:00 -0000

Nicholas Carnes is the author of White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Carnes is an assistant professor of public policy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

There is surprisingly little in the research literature on the link between social class and legislative behavior. For a topic that seems so ripe for investigation, Carnes’ data collection and analysis open new ground and answer pressing questions. He shows that formerly blue collar workers who serve in Congress behave differently than formerly white collar workers. Blue collar workers are in the extreme minority in numbers, meaning their efforts to pass legislation that tilts towards the working class are often stymied. Carnes offers fresh insight into why this matters for representation more generally and several recommendations for how to rectify this in the future.

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Sarah Anzia, “Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups” (University of Chicago Press 2013)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 06:00:00 -0000

Sarah Anzia is the author of Timing and Turnout: How Off-Cycle Elections Favor Organized Groups (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Anzia is assistant professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley.

Why are some elections held in November and others in May, June, or July? Why are some elections timed to correspond with the congressional schedule, but others on odd years? When elections occur has long been known to strongly relate to voter turnout, but little research has pushed beyond this simple conclusion.

Anzia’s book explores the motivations behind moving local elections from “on-cycle” – held to correspond with presidential or congressional elections in November — to “off-cycle”. She explores the history of the issue and the ways Progressive Era reformers saw advantages in holding municipal elections separate from national and state elections. She tracks that history up to today with excellent data on the relationship between when an election is held and certain policy outcomes. She finds that interest groups stand to benefit from off-cycle election. Teacher pay is substantially higher in school districts that hold elections off-cycle, rather than on.

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Matthew C. Hunter, “Wicked Intelligence” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Sun, 23 Mar 2014 12:31:00 -0000

The pages of Matthew C. Hunter‘s wonderful new book are full of paper fish, comets, sleepy-eyed gazes, drunk ants, and a cast full of fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) members of the experimental community of Restoration London. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013) maps the visual traces of drawing, collecting, and building practices between 1650 and 1720 to narrate the emergence of a particular kind of intelligence that was formed by visualization techniques. Hunter’s book pays close attention to the work of Robert Hooke while situating Hooke within a community of painters, architects, writers, customs brokers, telescope makers, and other fashioners of early modern experiments of all sorts. A significant contribution to both the histories of science and of art, Wicked Intelligence pays equal attention to the flat spaces of the imaged page and the built spaces of the museum, the city, and the “laboratory of the mind.” It is a beautifully written book based on a gorgeously weird archive. Enjoy!

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John R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Wed, 26 Feb 2014 05:00:00 -0000

Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coastal nation; it’s become one again.

According to John R. Gillis‘s provocative new book The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the same may be said of the entire world. Humans, he says, started–or rather quickly became after they evolved in eastern Africa 200,000 ago–a coastal species. We stayed very close to the oceans and seas until the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Thereafter, we moved into various interiors. Now, he says, we are moving back to the shore in force. We are transforming it and, alas, destroying much of it. Gillis calls on us to think of the shore not as a place to settle, but a habitat that is essential to our future prosperity and, one might say, survival. Listen in.

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Michael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Wed, 19 Feb 2014 05:00:00 -0000

Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as a pseudoscience. And indeed it is. But it wasn’t always so. There was a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when practitioners and advocates of parapsychology abounded. William James, one of the very founders of modern psychological science, was a fan. Most of the founders of modern psychology, of course, weren’t fans. They considered the parapsychologists frauds peddling cheap tricks to gullible people. These con-men, they said, gave true psychological science a bad name. There was only one thing to do: unmask them.

As Michael Pettit shows in his fascinating book The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), that is precisely what the scientific psychologists did, or at least tried to do. They worked hard to create a firm boundary between their legitimate practice and what they considered illegitimate trickery. In so doing, they developed a science of deception, one that had far reaching implications for science, the law, and commerce in the United States. Listen in.

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John L. Modern, “Secularism in Antebellum America” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 15:13:00 -0000

The notion of secularism is something that has a ubiquitous presence in contemporary society. And while there is a general everyday use of this term, meaning ‘not religious,’ the understanding of this term has shifted throughout time. In Secularism in Antebellum America (University Of Chicago Press, 2011) we are presented with a complex narrative that examines the vocabularies, styles of reasoning, and imaginings of social life that enabled people to engage “True Religion.” John L. Modern, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, employs secularism as an analytical lens to examine different aspects of modernity, especially whether people defined themselves as religious or not. Rather than seeking the causes of secularism, Modern offers a thick genealogical investigation of “novel experiences” or the local effects of secularism, which he found in evangelicalism, Unitarianism, phrenology, spiritualism, early anthropology, and prison reform. This rich book about nineteenth century U.S. religious history is too expansive to try to summarize and in our conversation we barely scratched the surface of the amazing history Modern offers. During the interview we discussed Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, metaphors, ghosts, spirituality, machines, ethnographic inquiry, Sing Sing Penitentiary, personal agency versus structural power, technology, storytelling, Vinyl Prayers, and John Murray Spear’s sexual encounter with the New Motive Power.

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Hallam Stevens, “Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 18:59:00 -0000

Hallam Stevens‘s new book is a rich and fascinating ethnographic and historical account of the transformations wrought by integrating statistical and computational methods and materials into the biological sciences. Life Out Of Sequence: A Data-Driven History of Bioinformatics (University of Chicago Press, 2013) follows the data through the physical and virtual spaces from which the “new epistemic things” of bioinformatics have emerged. As computers were introduced into biology, they changed the nature of biological questions. Hallam traces the resulting reshaping of the practices, problems, and objects of biology, guiding readers through the pipeline to watch the transformation from material to digital as biological samples move through computational programs, get translated into ontologies, and become data. The histories of biology, computing, database technology, and bioinformatic imaging all play a role in this wonderfully trans-disciplinary story.

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Robert J. Richards, “Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 11:51:00 -0000

In his new collection of wonderfully engaging and provocative set of essays on Darwin and Darwinians, Robert J. Richards explores the history of biology and so much more. The eight essays collected in Was Hitler a Darwinian?: Disputed Questions in the History of Evolutionary Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), include reflections on Darwin’s theories of natural selection and divergence, Ernst Haeckel’s life and work, the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer, the linguistic theories of August Schleicher, and the historical tendency to relate Hitler’s Nazism to Darwinian evolutionary theory. Individually, the essays are models of close and careful reading of the documentary traces of the life and work of Darwin, Haeckel, and others, and include some exceptionally affecting and tragic moments. Many of them touch on evolutionary theory’s moral character, its roots in Romanticism, and its conception of mankind. In addition to offering a fascinating set of case studies in the history of biology, the essays and appendices also collectively raise some important questions about how historians understand the past and bring it into narrative existence. What kind of thing is the past? What sets the history of science apart from other historical disciplines? Is it reasonable to use contemporary science to help construe the past? What is a scientific theory and where is it located? What does it mean to ask (and what might it look like to carefully answer) a question like, Was Hitler a Darwinian? The essays in Richards’ collection are wonderfully reflective considerations that reward the time and attention of both specialists in the history of biology and thoughtful general readers alike.

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Joshua Mitchell, “Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Mon, 20 Jan 2014 06:00:00 -0000

Joshua Mitchell is the author of Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age (University of Chicago Press 2013). Mitchell is professor of political science in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He has written several previous books including: The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Mitchell writes as a political theorist but also as a memoirist. He weaves his personal history in the region with his experiences in 2005 teaching Tocqueville in the Georgetown campus in Doha, Qatar. What he produces then is both a re-introduction to Democracy in America, but also an introduction to a country and a generation of students. This is a book of theory, of travel, but also of pedagogy

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Angela N. H. Creager, “Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 11:57:00 -0000

Angela Creager‘s deeply researched and elegantly written new book is a must-read account of the history of science in twentieth-century America. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2013) traces a history of radioisotopes as military and civilian objects, for experimentation and therapeutic use, from the 1930s through the late twentieth century. Creager follows the emergence of a political and economic market for radioisotopes, looking carefully at their use as controversial political instruments, as representations of the benefits of atomic energy for US citizens, and as commodities.

After six chapters that trace these broader contexts of the production and circulation of radioisotopes, the second half of the book offers a set of fascinating case studies that explore representative users and uses of the technology in biochemistry, molecular biology, medicine, and ecology. Aspects of the story touch on the history of scientific and medical research using human and animal subjects, the early history of radiation therapy, and the history of ecology and environmental science. Not only is it a historiographically important and meticulously crafted work based on exhaustive research, but it’s also a great set of stories. The pages of Life Atomic are full of guinea pigs, scientific vaudeville, and stories and characters from many different fields of the modern life sciences, expertly weaving them together into a compelling set of arguments. Enjoy!

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Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn, “The Politics of Belonging: Race, Public Opinion, and Immigration” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 06:00:00 -0000

On the podcast over the last few months, we’ve heard from Phil Krestedemas, Ron Schmidt, Shannon Gleeson about various aspects of immigration and immigrants in the US. Adding to this impressive list is Natalie Masuoka and Jane Junn are authors of The Politics of Belonging: Race, Public Opinion, and Immigration (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Masuoka is assistant professor of political science at Tufts University. Junn is professor of political science at the University of Southern California and has previously published Education and Democratic Citizenship in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Masuoka and Junn marshal a variety of data sources to unpack how immigrants in the US form political identity and beliefs. They argue that the relative placement of immigrant groups and the unique history and experiences of racialization by group as important factors related to public opinion on immigration.

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Conevery Bolton Valencius, “The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Sat, 28 Dec 2013 17:24:00 -0000

The story begins with Davy Crockett and his hunting dogs chasing a bear in 1826. The bear gets caught in an earthquake crack, an effect of the great Mississippi Valley earthquakes of 1811-1812 that are now collectively known as the New Madrid earthquakes. In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Conevery Bolton Valencius beautifully narrates a riveting tale of the production and forgetting of knowledge surrounding these earthquakes, massively disruptive events that liquefied the soil in much of the Mississippi floodplain and briefly made the Mississippi River flow backward. Valencius situates these events in the New Madrid seismic zone within their past, present, and possible futures. We are treated to the perspectives of those who experienced the quakes and their transformation of New Madrid into a hinterland, from river travelers and writers to the “Shawnee Prophets” Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. Because of the wide range of historical actors treated in the book, the account is of relevance not only to the histories of early American science and environmental studies, but also to the histories of religious practice and native American politics and culture. Undoubtedly a rich and fascinating story, The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes is also a special pleasure to read, thanks to the warm (and often very funny) asides and anecdotes with which Valencius peppers the book. Enjoy!

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William G. Howell et al., “The Wartime President” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 06:00:00 -0000

William G. Howell, Saul P. Jackman, and Jon C. Rogowski are the authors of The Wartime President: Executive Influence and the Nationalizing Politics of Threat (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Howell is professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Jackman is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Rogowski is assistant professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis.

The book is a meaty and complex analysis of the presidency during war. They rely on formal modeling to develop a theory of Policy Priority. In other work, that has bogged down the prose, but here the writing is clear and the case studies presented toward the end of the book enrich their analysis. What we learn is that presidents benefit from war in their domestic agenda. As members of congress shift to focusing on national concerns, rather than local, they more closely adhere to the preferences of the president. This pattern isn’t without exceptions, and Howell et al. show the interesting cases (LBJ with Vietnam and GW Bush in 2005 with social security reform) where the model doesn’t predict outcomes as well.

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Daniel Sherman, "French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975" (U Chicago Press, 2011)

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 09:00:00 -0000

The "primitivist idea" has played an important role in art and culture from at least the late nineteenth century. From Paul Gauguin to Pablo Picasso, to the more recent MusÃ©e du Quai Branly (opened in 2006), a variety of individuals and institutions have engaged with so-called "primitive" peoples; collected their artifacts; displayed, represented, and mimicked their cultural forms and practices. Daniel Sherman's French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975 (University of Chicago Press, 2011) examines the postwar history of primitivism as one inflected throughout by the colonial past and present. Offering readers a perspective on the trente glorieuses ("thirty glorious years") following the Second World War, Sherman challenges oversimplified narratives of economic recovery and prosperity, reminding us that the period was one of deep cultural and political cleavages that cannot be understood without reference to the history and legacies of French imperialism.

The book looks at the visual arts, of course, but also makes fascinating links between this domain and others: ethnography, ideas about home dÃ©cor, tourism, and nuclear testing. Tensions between notions of modernity and tradition run throughout the chapters of French Primitivism. Postwar anthropologists, artists, museum curators, and planners considered the primitive in the metropolitan context, developing internal as well as external forms of preservationism and systems of knowledge/representation that drew on long-standing ideas and practices directed at colonial subjects and cultures. From rural Brittany to Paris, to French Polynesia, French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire illustrates an interdependence of culture and imperialism that continues to resonate in contemporary France.

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Matthew L. Basso, “Meet Joe Copper: Maculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 18:15:00 -0000

In the United States, World War II is now called “The Good War,” as opposed to bad ones, I suppose, like Vietnam. Moreover, the Americans who fought in World War II are now called “The Greatest Generation,” as opposed to lesser generations, I suppose. Now most of the Americans of “The Greatest Generation” who fought in “The Good War” were men. What made them the “greatest” was that they had proved not only their willingness pro patria mori, but also their masculinity. They were, well, “real men.”

But what about those American men who, though of “The Greatest Generation,” did not actually fight in “The Good War?” There were millions of them. Early in the war Washington designated certain industries essential to the war effort and therefore exempted those who worked in them from the draft. These men “fought” on the Home Front, of course. But they knew very well that fighting on the “Home Front” was not the same as fighting on the actual front. As men of fighting age but not fighting, they were the object of a certain skepticism. “Why,” they imagined people asking, “weren’t they in uniform?” Maybe they weren’t “real men…”

In his path-breaking new book Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Matthew L. Basso explores the ways in which American men on the “Home Front” protected their masculinity during the War, and the ways in which those efforts reverberated in the decades that followed it. It’s a fascinating story. Listen in.

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Marga Vicedo, “The Nature and Nurture of Love” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Sat, 19 Oct 2013 11:10:00 -0000

Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emotional development. In Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Marga Vicedo explores the emergence of the science of children’s emotional needs in the twentieth century. Masterfully bringing together approaches from the history and philosophy of the biological sciences, Vicedo’s book focuses on British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907-1990), whose ethological work became one of the most influential and controversial psychological theories of the 20th century. Vicedo uses the story of Bowlby’s science to explore a broader modern history of work on animal and human behavior that includes Konrad Lorenz, Anna Freud, Benjamin Spock, and Niko Tinbergen, among others. Along the way, The Nature & Nurture of Love chronicles the emergence of a kind of anthropomorphic material culture of the human sciences, inhabiting its story with a fascinating cast of robots, dolls, geese, monkeys, and stuffed animals, as well as humans. It is a fascinating and gripping trans-disciplinary story and an absolute pleasure to read.

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Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 20:49:00 -0000

During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W. Hunter’s 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for the test. What followed has become one of the most well-known accounts in the history of science and one of the most famous trials of twentieth-century America.

In Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Adam R. Shapiro urges us to look beyond the rubrics of “science” and “religion” to understand how the Scopes trial became such an important event in the histories of both. The story begins with a pair of Pinkerton detectives spying on a pair of textbook salesmen in the Edwards Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. Shapiro brings us from that hotel room into a series of classrooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms while exploring the battle over textbook reform in the twentieth-century US. Based on a close reading of high school curricular materials around the discipline of botany, with special attention to the emergence of “civic botany” as a pedagogical field, Shapiro’s book uses the debates over pedagogy, evolution, and the textbook industry to explore a number of issues that are of central importance to the history of science: the construction of authorship, the histories of reading practices, the co-emergence of economies and technologies, and the ways that urban and rural localities shape the nature of sciences and their publics. It is a gripping, moving, and enlightening story. Enjoy!

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Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Sun, 08 Sep 2013 14:35:00 -0000

In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of professional and public engagements with science and technology in the 1960s. Based on an archive that spans texts, oral histories, and interviews with some of its major figures, The Gaia Hypothesis charts the development of the idea of the earth as a self-regulating organism. Ruse explores the development of the idea by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, and analyzes the nature and bases of the reactions to Margulis and Lovelock’s ideas from within different scientific and public communities. All of this is contextualized in a deep history of the different world concepts and philosophies of nature that informed the heated debate over Gaia, considering the idea of the earth as organism and nature as a self-regulating system in a range of texts that include Plato’s Timaeus, the work of German idealists, and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, among many others. (The attentive reader will also note a surprising connection between Gaia and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.) The book is full of empathetic, insightful, and often very funny portraits of Margulis, Lovelock, and a community of other figures associated with Gaia and its histories. It is also a wonderfully lively and readable narrative. Enjoy!

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Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (U. Chicago Press, 2013)

Thu, 18 Jul 2013 13:34:00 -0000

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing medical remedies on others before using them on her friends and family. Elisabeth was an invalid patient whose preferred treatments included topical remedies and ministrations from the “almighty physician,” but never “the smear.” We meet these three lively women in the pages of Alisha Rankin‘s wonderful new book on the medical practices of noblewomen from the last decades of the sixteenth century. Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013) considers the intellectual and social contexts of healing practices in early modern Germany, focusing on elite women who spent much of their adult lives devising and administering medicinal remedies. The book argues that noblewomen were celebrated as healers not despite their gender, but because of it, offering a useful corrective to the historiography of gender and the sciences in early modernity. Rankin situates three in-depth case studies within a careful exploration of some of the main factors that enabled the kind of success that noblewomen-healers like Dorothea of Mansfield and Anna of Saxony enjoyed in sixteenth-century Germany: more opportunities for information exchange through local communities and wider epistolary networks; an increasing focus on empirical knowledge in its many forms; and the foundation role of written medicinal recipes as a form of kunst. It is a thoughtfully written and very clearly argued work that informs many aspects of the history of gender, of science and medicine, and of practical epistemologies. Enjoy!

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Gretchen Soderlund, “Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 12:44:00 -0000

Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the new book from the University of Oregon’s Gretchen Soderlund, is about far more than the title suggests. Using sex trafficking and scandal as a starting point, Soderlund delves into an era of journalism that features muckrakers and sensationalists, key political players and journalists with social and cultural agendas. It is a book about racial identity, journalists and their audiences, and Great Britain’s influence on journalistic practices and culture. “From an early twenty-first century vantage point,” Soderlund writes, “it is clear that issues of immigration, urbanization, heterosociability, and racial mixing were stitched into white slavery narratives.” Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism took Soderlund deep into the archives of journalism history. The result is a thorough, important discussion about one of the key periods in American journalism.

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Mary Louise Roberts, “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:29:00 -0000

Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts‘ latest book reveals a side of the Liberation of 1944-45 that is typically obscured in histories of the D-Day landings and the months that followed. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013) draws on a wealth of material from French and American archives to show us that the war was an experience saturated with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Battles were critical, of course, but so too was sex.

The American GI in war-torn France was a soldier, a tourist, a liberator, and also a destroyer. Military propaganda represented the Normandy campaign as a soldier’s opportunity for sexual adventure, framing the invasion and occupation of France in terms of the rescue of damsels in distress by heroic tough guys from a manly nation. Convinced of the hyper-sexuality of French women and culture, many American soldiers courted, paid for sex with, and even assaulted women they met in French homes, streets, hotels, and brothels. This is a book about what American GIs thought about France; what they did while they were “over there”; how French women and men received and responded to the “advances” of American troops; and the lasting impact of this complex set of encounters on individual lives, communities, and politics.

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Helen Longino, “Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Wed, 15 May 2013 06:00:00 -0000

What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the “both” answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (University of Chicago Press) Longino looks closely at a variety of scientific approaches to the study of human aggression and sexuality to argue that there is no one right way to divide nature from nurture within the scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and that the nature/nurture dichotomy reinforces and reflects an undue emphasis on explanations that focus on the dispositions of individuals rather than those that look at patterns of frequency and distribution of behavior within populations. She reveals the distinct and incompatible ways these different approaches define the factors that explain behavior, how these different explanatory approaches are related, and how the bias towards particular types of explanation is reflected in the way the scientific findings are publicly disseminated.

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Thane Rosenbaum, “Payback: The Case for Revenge” (Chicago UP, 2013)

Wed, 08 May 2013 13:05:00 -0000

All humans have an emotionally-driven sense of fairness. We get treated unfairly and we get mad. It’s no wonder, then, that our laws–and those of almost everyone else–are intended to assure that people are treated fairly. When those laws fail and we are treated unfairly, we encounter another human universal–the desire for revenge. If someone pokes you in the eye, more likely than not your first inclination is going to be to poke them in the eye too. That “eye-for-an-eye” logic just feels intuitively fair to us. Yet, our laws–and those of most “civilized” places–explicitly deny victims the right to avenge their injuries. The state has a monopoly on justice, and the state’s justice (theoretically) has nothing to do with revenge. The courts asks victims to check their “irrational” desire for revenge and pursue what is (supposedly) a higher, more “rational” form of justice.

In Payback: The Case for Revenge (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Thane Rosenbaum argues that we’ve gone way too far in our rejection of revenge. By denying the right to revenge, we have essentially asked people to do something that is impossible–squelch their very natural feeling that wrong-doers must pay in equal measure for the harms they brought. In order for the moral universe to be righted, scofflaws must pay–and be seen to have paid–for what they have done. Our laws recognize none of this, says Rosenbaum, and we should do something about it. We need to bring revenge, he argues, back in.

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Stephen T. Asma, “Against Fairness” (University of Chicago, 2013)

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:23:00 -0000

Modern liberalism is built on the principle of equality and its corollary, the principle of fairness (treating equals equally). But have we taken the one and the other too far? Are we deceiving ourselves about our ability to treat each others equally, that is, to be “fair?” In his provocative new book Against Fairness (University of Chicago, 2013), Stephen T. Asma makes the case that we have indeed become kind of fairness-mad, and that this madness has led us all to be (at best) hypocrites and (at worst) harmful to ourselves and others. Asma says we should temper our (Western) notion of fairness with one that looks at the causes and benefits of favoritism realistically, and even sympathetically.

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Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 17:09:00 -0000

Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he used the past to understand and offer counsel on the events of the present. Ralegh passed seven of his many years of incarceration in the Tower of London excerpting, rearranging, editing, and recopying passages from his 500+ volume library to produce a book that has been read and interpreted in many different (and sometimes conflicting) ways in the hundreds of years since its initial printing.

Popper’s book uses a very focused account of the texture of this single book as a basis from which to offer a wonderfully expansive account of the practices of history in the Renaissance, and the ways that Ralegh’s work and associated practices of historical analysis ultimately transformed European politics, religion, and scholarship. Along the way, there are fascinating accounts of the origins of the modern archival mode of historiography, the differences between causal and narrative accounts of the past, and the many ways that early modern historical practices were inextricable from scriptural exegesis. Popper’s study is both inspired by the methods and insights of the historiography of science, and offers a way to think about the practices of knowledge-production that help identify what we’re talking about when we talk about early modern “science.” Enjoy!

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Nathan Hesselink, “SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:38:00 -0000

The name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink‘s new book traces the transformations of this complex contemporary Korean drumming ensemble from its first concert in a cramped Seoul basement in 1978 through the 1990s, by which time they had...

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Sean Cocco, “Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:07:00 -0000

The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for exploring the histories of natural history, travel, observation, imaging, astronomy, and many other aspects of the places and identities of early modern history. Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) pays special attention to the many resonances of emplacement and locality, and to the agency of the Vesuvian landscape, as it explores the continuities and transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century volcanic landscape. Volcanology emerged along with Neapolitan identity while volcanoes became emblematic of the south in the writings of European travelers: rumbling, unpredictable, given to heated eruptions. Cocco’s account shows us the beauty of these transformations as they were embodied in paintings, poems, letters, and other media. Scholars and enthusiasts of the urban and political history of Europe will find much of interest here, as will readers interested in the history of vernacular understandings of nature. Enjoy!

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Lawrence M. Principe, “The Secrets of Alchemy” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:16:00 -0000

What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish?

Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction to the history of western alchemy. The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the genealogy of alchemical practices from their early Greco-Egyptian foundations through early modern chymistry, pausing along the way to reflect on the reinterpretation and refashioning of alchemy from the eighteenth century to the present. Principe’s pages reveal histories of alchemy that are wonderfully rich and diverse, and we meet them in laboratories, recipes, images, dramatic plays, and poems. In the course of our conversation, we talked about aspects of the craft of the alchemist as well as that of the historian, including Principe’s fascinating attempts to recreate alchemical recipes and practices in his own laboratory. Enjoy!

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John E. Murray, “The Charleston Orphan House” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:49:00 -0000

There were always and will always be orphans. The question is what to do with them. In his terrific new book The Charleston Orphan House: Children’s Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), economic historian John E. Murray tells us how one Southern American city did it in the 18th and 19th centuries. Charleston was a city divided between free whites and enslaved African Americans. The whites felt insecure and, according to Murray, this is one of the reasons they founded and funded America’s first public orphanage. The white-only institution not only helped indigent parents and their children, but it also brought the city’s white population together in a way no other body did. It was an expression of civic humanity, but it was also an expression of white unity against the black masses. Listen to John tell the tale.

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E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:26:00 -0000

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), controversies over digestion provided a space for the working out of power struggles between political, religious, medical, and culinary thinkers. Faced with a cuisine bursting with new materials and flavors, French society debated various ways of negotiating the opposing poles of indulgence and sobriety, luxury and reform. This is illustrated in several detailed case studies that include coffee and its implication in networks of expertise; cafes as social leveling-grounds, performance spaces, and chemical laboratories; and the production of new liqueurs. Spary’s work urges us to reconsider the way we write commodity histories, and is well worth reading. Enjoy!

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Amir Eshel, “Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 12:37:00 -0000

In his very recent work, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past(University of Chicago Press, 2013), Amir Eshel presents us with a very interesting examination of what he refers to as “futurity” or literature’s ability to provide us with a way to access the past, rethink it, and move forward. Eshel’s work here can best be understood as part of the larger effort in literary studies to move beyond the tired and exceedingly fruitless lens of the hermeneutics of suspicion and the despairing chasm of postmodernity. As foci, Eshel examines postwar German literature and Hebrew literature particularly focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Overall, the portion of Futurity that continues to linger with me is Eshel’s beautiful ruminations on W.G. Sebald’s masterpiece, Austerlitz. Eshel’s reflections on Austerlitz encouraged me to pick up that novel once more and for this alone I highly encourage anyone interested in postwar German literature, Hebrew literature, and or the future and meaning of literary studies to give Eshel’s work a read.

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Michael D. Gordin, “The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:33:00 -0000

“No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist.”

From the very first sentence, Michael D. Gordin’s new book introduces readers to the characters, plotlines, and crises that have shaped the narratives of fringe science since the early twentieth century. Focusing on Cold War America from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the transformations of science at the margins that were stimulated by Immanuel Velikovsky, “the first grand wizard of the Universal Order of Mass Pseudo-Scholarship” and a Russian-born psychoanalyst whose Worlds in Collision triggered an epistemic avalanche among members of the American scientific community. Gordin tracks the surprising relationships of Velikovsky and his work, from Zionism to Creationism, and from Freud to Einstein. It becomes a story of competing attitudes toward historical evidence, as the scientific orthodoxy reacted to threats from the margins and those on the margins sought to preserve their own orthodoxy on the fringes. Gordin’s book is a multi-layered modern history of problem of scientific demarcation as well as a fascinating read. We talked about many aspects of the book, as well as Gordin’s approach to the craft of research and writing for a book-length project.

For a different take on The Pseudoscience Wars, see also the interview on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

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Katy Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 16:51:00 -0000

You were amused to find you too could fear

“The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.”

The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of the many media through which people explored the ramifications of Einstein’s ideas about the cosmos in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Masterfully incorporating a contextual sensibility of the historian of science with a sensitivity to textual texture of the literary scholar, Katy Price guides us through the ways that readers and writers of newspapers, popular fiction, poems, magazines, and essays translated and incorporated Einsteinian relativity. Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe (University of Chicago Press, 2012) situates this popular engagement with the physical sciences within the political transformations of early twentieth-century Britain, looking at how the scientific and publishing communities attempted (with different levels of success) to use media coverage of relativity to rally the support of a wider reading public. It is a rich study that has much to offer to those interested in the history of science, of literature, and of popular culture, while helpfully complicating all of those categories.

“Fly with me then to all’s and the world’s end

And plumb for safety down the gaps of stars

Let the last gulf or topless cliff befriend,

What tyrant there our variance debars?”

*Both quotes above are from William Empson’s poems, and can be found on pages 167 and 162 of Price’s book.

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Michael Gordin, “The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 14:16:00 -0000

When I agreed to host New Books and Science Fiction and Fantasy there were a number of authors I hoped to interview, including Michael Gordin. This might come as a surprise to listeners, because Michael is neither a science-fiction nor a fantasy author. He is, rather, a prominent historian of science at Princeton University. But his work intersects with the subject-matter of this podcast in a number of ways. Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War asked us to consider what might have been had Tokyo refused to surrender and the US had continued to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Mike will soon start co-teaching a class on invented languages which includes a unit on Klingon. And the main subject of this interview, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012), touches on both the history of science fiction, key themes within the genre, and where much of its source material comes from. Indeed, while this channel will continue to focus on new books within the SF and Fantasy genres, it will also interview scholars and practitioners whose expertise illuminates and enhances our understanding of those genres. I hope this interview does so for its listeners.

For those of you interested in a different take on The Pseudoscience Wars, you should check out Michael’s forthcoming interview on the New Books in Science, Technology, and Society channel.

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Sally Smith Hughes, “Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:54:00 -0000

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (University of Chicago Press, 2011) tells many stories of many things. It is the story of a handful of people who figured out how to make recombinant DNA technology into a thriving business. It is the story of the emergence of a new hybrid organism, the entrepreneurial biologist, who lived with one leg in academia and one in corporate research. It is the story of a series of compounds that became big business in the American corporate world: human insulin, human growth hormone, and interferon among them. Drawing on a series of fascinating oral histories, Sally Smith Hughes recounts all of these tales as they unfolded in a volatile environment sparking with questions over the political and ethical implications of recombinant DNA technology: Could living organisms be patented? Did scientists own their research materials? When a team of scientists discovered something that was worth millions or billions of dollars, who should get credit and reap the rewards? Hughes’ story manages to address these major issues without sacrificing the human stories and colorful characters behind the rise of Genentech.

For the Bancroft Library Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies Regional Oral History Office, see this website.

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Daniela Bleichmar, “Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:24:00 -0000

Daniela Bleichmar‘s new book is a story about 12,000 images.

In Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Bleichmar uses this vast (and gorgeous) archive of botanical images assembled by Spanish natural history expeditions to explore the connections between natural history, visual culture, and empire in the eighteenth century Hispanic world. In beautifully argued chapters, Bleichmar explores that ways that eighteenth century natural history expeditions were grounded in a visual epistemology where observation and representation were powerful tools for negotiating both scientific and imperial spheres. The “botanical reconquista” spanned fields, shops, gardens, and cabinets across the New World and the Old. Botanists, artists, and others employed images for collaboration and competition, developing distinct styles and practices for observing and representing the natural world. The expeditions’ taxonomic botanizing was ultimately more successful than their efforts to exploit the cinnamon, cinchona, and other products that comprised the “green gold” of the colonial herbarium. Nonetheless, they made imperial nature visible…even as they made much of the empire invisible. Enjoy the book! And be sure to check out the fifth chapter, which juxtaposes Casta paintings from Mexico with some fascinating and little-known paintings from Quito and Peru to deepen and extend our understanding of the visuality of Spanish empire in the eighteenth century.

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David Sepkoski, “Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline” (University of Chicago, 2012)

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 20:34:00 -0000

In Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press, 1012), David Sepkoski tells a story that explains the many ways that paleontologists have interpreted the meaning and importance of fossils in the light of evolutionary theory. Starting with Darwin and his dilemma concerning the fossil record, Sepkoski tracks the relationships between paleontology and evolutionary theory over the course of the twentieth century. As it was formulated at mid-century the evolutionary synthesis did not really allow paleontology to contribute to evolutionary theory and it fell to a self-consciously revolutionary generation of paleontologists in the 1970s to argue that reading the fossil record could change the theory of evolution. Drawing on increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling and simulating evolutionary processes, as well as on increasingly available computational power, paleobiologists built institutions and articulated ideas, such as punctuated equilibrium, mass extinction, and macroevolution, that demonstrated how the history of life revealed by reading the fossil record can amend evolutionary theory.

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Jason Josephson, “The Invention of Religion in Japan” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 15:00:00 -0000

In 1853, the Japanese were required to consider what the word religion meant when western powers compelled the Tokugawa government to ensure freedom of religion to Christian missionaries. The challenge this request posed was based on the fact that prior to the nineteenth century Japanese language had no parallel terminology for the category of religion. In The Invention of Religion in Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Jason Josephson, Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College, delineates a genealogy of the Japanese construction of the category of religion, which was catalyzed by this political encounter between East and West. Josephson argues that opposed to the common notion that religion is an ethnographic or academic creation that we can place religion through diplomatic and legal discourses that invent or manufacture an identifiable, yet elastic, category. Prior to this political demand, contact between different Japanese and western social groups were discussed in bilateral descriptions of orthodoxy and heresy, either from a Christian or Buddhist perspective. Added to this developing understanding of terminology were the influences of western science, the negotiation of local practices, and the rise of nationalism. The Japanese depiction of Shinto poses the greatest challenge to customary notions of religion because it is described as a national or political science that is markedly nonreligious. Overall, Josephson demonstrates that in the defining of legal and social categories there was a trinary creation of religion, superstition, and the secular. In our conversation we discuss theocentric and heirocentric definitions of “religion,” the role of the demonic, heresy, varieties of Shinto, theories of secularization, superstition, civilizing projects, personal interior belief versus external behavior, and the institutional confirmation of these beliefs in legal contexts.

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Laura Stark, “Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 12:41:00 -0000

Laura Stark‘s lucid and engaging new book explores the making and enacting of the rules that govern human subjects research in the US. Using a thoughtfully conceived combination of ethnographic and archival work, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research (University of Chicago Press, 2012) locates the emergence of a system of “governing with experts” by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in the middle of the twentieth century. Stark shows how the features that now characterize the IRB deliberations that consider whether research on people can proceed in institutional contexts emerged in the particular context of the NIH Clinical Research Committee in 1950s and 1960s, and she explains how they managed to spread thereafter across the US and the globe. Behind Closed Doors draws from a wide and transdisciplinary set of methodological resources in articulating the power of performative language in shaping negotiations around human subjects research, suggesting innovative ways to read documentary evidence as a narrative of voices in time.

True to its title, Stark’s story takes us behind the closed doors of occasionally heated IRB deliberations. It also introduces us to some of the spirited and disruptive “healthy patients” of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), prisoners and conscientious objectors among them, as they were dosed with LSD or infected with malaria and influenza, making a kind of home in the Center or cleverly escaping from it. It’s a wonderfully stimulating book that should be widely read and included on the syllabi of many graduate seminars to come.

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Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 19:10:00 -0000

Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method, the concept of a unified science, the increasing divergence of what we might translate as theoretical and practical scientific pursuits. Though these concepts will seem familiar to readers, Phillips’ careful study pays special attention to how science emerged and transformed in German-speaking Europe in very locally-specific ways. Following the transformation of Naturwissenschaft from an eighteenth century invention to a “rallying-cry” by the middle of the nineteenth century, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850 maps the relationships between the collective use of words, the development of concepts, and the creation and ramification of collective social sites. Phillips reveals a world of many distinct but overlapping publics, spanning private learned societies, technical academies, gardens, agricultural societies, and universities, among others. Phillips urges to move beyond simple binaries in our understanding of history, demonstrating that the conceptual and material foundations of modern science in German-speaking Europe, and the figures that populated its spaces, emerged out of border zones and juxtapositions. Enjoy!

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Ben Cawthra, “Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography in Jazz” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 18:06:00 -0000

Ben Cawthra‘s Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago, 2011) discusses the way images of jazz and the musicians who played it both reflected and influenced our racial perceptions during the period between the 1930s and 1960s. Cawthra reveals the complex interactions between socially conscious photographers, magazine editors, record producers, jazz critics and the musicians themselves. From swing to bebop to cool, to West Coast Jazz to hard bop, Cawthra’s book gives the reader fascinating photographic and biographical portraits of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane among others. The photographers, too, including Charles Peterson, Gijon Mili, Francis Wolff, William Claxton, Herman Leonard, William Gottlieb, and Roy DeCarava had nuanced and unique photographic styles. Cawtha also gives insight as to how African-American jazz musicians such as Gillespie, Davis, and Rollins attempted to control their own economic and image destinies within the ever-changing political economy of the record industry. Cawthra also explains how Life Magazine, the development of the Long Playing Record (LP), and the concurrent milestones in civil rights all influenced the photographic culture of jazz – and there is a fascinating section on the very conscious marketing of “West Coast Jazz” to emerging white suburban markets in the 50s and 60s. The complex confluences of such a wide depth and breadth of social history is bound to stimulate much thinking and raise many additional questions. Rich, thought-provoking, and with images and insights that stay with you: read it, look at the photos and think long and hard…there’s no end to the combination and permutations of analyses….like jazz itself.

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Helene Mialet, “Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:15:00 -0000

“By error or by chance, I think I have discovered an angel.”

First things first: Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a masterful, inspiring book. Rather than producing a biography of Hawking, which this is decidedly not, Helene Mialet‘s book encourages us to question the very possibility of knowing who Hawking is without taking away the agency of the man himself, ultimately helping readers reconsider how we think about individuality, embodiment, and personhood in extremely productive ways. Taking a beautifully cinematic approach, Mialet guides us through a series of chapters that help us understand different aspects of the production of Hawking and HAWKING (the distinction becoming clear in the course of the book and the interview) by looking at the machines, bodies, inscriptions, images, and movements that constitute Stephen Hawking. Together, the chapters explore the productive tensions and co-creations of the collective and the individual. Inspired by Actor-Network Theory but pushing it into new territory, Mialet’s study uses a thick description of Hawking’s “extended body” to allow us a glimpse into the formation, movement, and circulation of identity in general, in the sciences and potentially well beyond. What does it mean to say “he thinks”? What’s the difference between dealing with texts and people? How do we define what is “original” and how does that translate into the archive? Mialet’s work explores these and other questions in a series of ethnographic accounts and stories that are both fascinating to read and extremely helpful to think with. Enjoy!

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J. Hillis Miller, “The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:50:00 -0000

In his recent book, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (University of Chicago Press, 2011), J. Hillis Miller sets outs to address Theodor Adorno’s famous proclamation that to write poetry after Auschwitz is impossible and barbaric. One should make clear from the outset that Miller’s central project in this regard is not to make some grand claim about the value or worth of literature in the face of dehumanization and atrocity. The value of literature for him and for us is a given. There is nothing to argue. Rather, Miller is most concerned with addressing the question of whether or not literature can truly bear witness to the Shoah. While this question has indeed been a central concern of literary scholars, philosophers, and artists since Celan and Adorno, Miller’s method of approaching this topic by way of the theoretical concept of “community,” and more specifically, “literary communities,” is rather intriguing. Here, Miller invokes the work of Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy in particular.

As a way of illustrating his theoretical claims, Miller looks extensively at Kafka’s The Castle, The Man Who Disappeared, and The Trial In fact, Miller spends almost two-thirds of The Conflagration of Community examining these and several other Kafka works in order to reveal the extent to which literature can “imagine” the bureaucracies and social infrastructures of the Shoah. Miller’s love and deep admiration for Kafka shines through here and he does an amazing job of penetrating Kafka’s writing and making sense of it in light of his theoretical perspective.

Beside the work of Kafka, Miller also looks extensively at novels that explicitly invoke the Shoah. Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus make this list and Miller does each justice.

In addition to the central issue of literature and the Shoah, there also exist several parallel concerns throughout The Conflagration of Community. Among these are American slavery and the serious injustices and human rights violations committed during the Bush administration.

In a refreshing way, Miller’s work in The Conflagration of Community ends up being about much more than the Shoah and in successfully completing the Benjaminian constellation he tells us is his intention to construct in the preface, Miller creates something that is both profound and that persists beyond the page.

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Anne M. Blackburn, “Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka,” (The University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:35:00 -0000

In this important contribution to both the study of South Asian Buddhism as well the burgeoning field of Buddhist modernity, Anne Blackburn‘s Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) discusses the life and times of the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Hikkaduve.

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Andrew S. Berish, “Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s” (University of Chicago, 2012)

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 17:45:00 -0000

American history is all about movement: geographical, cultural, ideological. Economic depression and war make the 1930s and ’40s a dramatic example of this movement. In Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s (University of Chicago, 2012), Andrew S. Berish explores the flourishing big band dance music of these decades as it reflected and influenced movement with the United States. Conceptually, he examines the amorphous ideas of space and place, and the ways dance band jazz was defined by and helped create the places and spaces of mid-twentieth century America. Empirically, Berish’s focus is on the music of specific musicians and bands (Jan Garber, Charlie Barnet, Duke Ellington, Charlie Christian), the performances of their music (“Avalon,” “Make Believe Ballroom,” “Air-Conditioned Jungle”) and the places in which the performances took place (Casino Ballroom, Meadowbrook Inn, Chicago Civic Opera House, the road). America’s movement through war, depression, and racial integration are at the core of Berish’s analysis of big band jazz, and his detailed cultural and ethnomusicological analyses support his reasoning that music can tell us a lot about the social conditions of our times.

Andrew S. Berish is assistant professor in the Humanities and Cultural Studies Department at the University of South Florida.

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John Burnham, “After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 21:15:00 -0000

Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case.

In After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012)–part of what John Burnham calls “The New Freud Studies”–we encounter scholars looking closely at the way in which American culture interfaced with psychoanalytic thinking. During the mid-twentieth century, for myriad reasons, (the Cold War among them), psychoanalysis was a force to be reckoned with in the States. The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time–including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few.

Given the contemporary context, aka today, in which psychoanalysis is not currying much favor as a mode of treatment or as a system of ideas, looking at the profession in its hey day will give one cause to pause. These historians argue that cultural shifts, among them the advent of psychopharmeceuticals coupled with new ideas about the self that do not consider the unconscious, have placed psychoanalysis on the sidelines.

Dr. Burnham was a pleasure to interview and, as an historian, has been studying all things psychoanalytic since the 1950s. What we love to consider is that he has seen, in his lifetime, many of the changes that the book he has edited chronicles. That he has been writing about psychoanalysis, beginning with the completion of his doctorate in 1958 on the early origins of this profession, only makes this interview more compelling. Something prompted him to take notice then and it is an abiding interest that he has cultivated ever since. We were so pleased to have him with us as a result.

In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins.

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Wendy Steiner, “The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art” (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 13:50:00 -0000

As the last of what Wendy Steiner refers to as “a loose trilogy” with her earlier works, The Scandal of Pleasure (1995) and Venus in Exile (2001), The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (University of Chicago, 2010) sets out to establish the centrality of “the model” in art to our understanding of subjectivity and freedom and the ethical imperative that she suggests lies within it.

For Steiner, “the model,” historically conceptualized and understood as female and objectified as such, assumes the level of ontological importance and acts as a symbolic structure that not only lays bare the hierarchies and mechanics of power, but possess the unique ability to reimagine and “introduce new hierarchies into the world” (20). “The model” along with politics and power in Steiner’s estimation are closely linked and in fact bound together. The intriguing and theoretical tension between the seeming contradiction that what on the level of the symbol can be read as object can also be accessed in order to influence the real is one that is thrilling to see the author trace and work out. To this point specifically, Steiner does an incredible job. Her theoretical argument invokes the work of Kant, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler to varying degrees.

Neatly divided into three parts, The Real Real Thing moves from a theoretical exploration of “the model” to several fascinating studies of artists and art works that have employed the model as Steiner envisions it.Bringing “the model” from the realm of the theoretical to that of the real, Steiner closes the book by returning to her notion of the ethical imperative inherent to it. She makes a strong and impassioned case for modern art and what she sees as its “democratic” and “progressive” nature in its ability to not just call attention to itself as art, as an end in itself, but to invite the spectator into a symbiotic union that creates. It is within this union that traditionally rigid aesthetic notions of beauty and perfection can be overridden and redefined anew.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art and I encourage anyone interested in aesthetics, the future of art, and the future of the arts especially to read this book.

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Ronit Ricci, “Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:15:00 -0000

Muslims have been historically connected in various ways. Networks have fostered the spread of Islam through commerce and trade, Sufi brotherhoods and pilgrimage. Ideas too have traveled these paths and literary networks have facilitated cultural exchange across geographic and linguistic boundaries. The role of language in the process of making Islam intelligible to various local audiences serves as a shared thread for an excellent new book, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2011). This innovative study, which won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions Award, explores the role of Arabic in South and Southeast Asia as it affected Javanese, Malay, and Tamil literatures. Ronit Ricci, Researcher at the Australian National University, determines the relationship between translation and religious conversion in the process Arabization and vernacularization in these three linguistic contexts. Translation serves as tool for self-fashioning Islam in particular contexts, which is witnessed in the numerous tellings of the Book of One Thousand Questions. This detailed and theoretically rich study offers new perspectives for understanding Muslim communities who formulate and maintain a collective identity through textual production in local languages. It should be required reading for anyone who is interested in non-Arabic speaking Muslims communities from now on.

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Bob Riesman, “I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 15:30:00 -0000

Big Bill Broonzy was a master storyteller. From his name, he was born Lee Conly Bradley, to his age, he typically added a decade, to the facts of his growing up in the pre-civil rights segregated South (not that he didn’t, he simply embellished a lot) Bill could spin a yarn. As Bob Riesman tells it in I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy (University of Chicago, 2011) Bill mythologized his life in order to tell a story that was larger than his own, the story of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. For the most part, Bill told his story through songs–he recorded hundreds of them in his more than three decade career–some of which, like “Key to the Highway” and “Black, Brown, and White Blues,” remain popular and relevant to this day. But he also told his story through the many candid conversations he had with fellow blues travelers that were recorded by the likes of Studs Terkel, Alan Lomox, and Win Stracke. The Belgian husband and wife team of Yannick and Margo Bruynoghe compiled and edited a lengthy series of Bill’s own writings into an autobiography, Big Bill Blues. All-in-all, Big Bill Broonzy stands as one of the giants of American blues and jazz. He played with and/or influenced the blues of many musicians including, but not limited to: Roosevelt Sykes, Washboard Sam, Lil Green, Muddy Waters, Big Maceo Merriweather, Sonny Boy Williamson, Mahalia Jackson, Pete Seeger, Eric Clapton, Ray Davies, and Pete Townshend. Big Bill himself may not be lodged in the memories of most people these days, but his music and stories surely are.

Bob Riesman is coeditor of Chicago Folk: Images of the Sixties Music Scene: The Photographs of Raeburn Flerlage. He produced and cowrote the television documentary American “Roots Music: Chicago” and was a contributor to Routledge’s Encyclopedia of the Blues.

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Jim Endersby, “Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

Wed, 23 May 2012 18:48:00 -0000

I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, 2008) does a wonderful job of keeping readers engaged with the story of Joseph Hooker – his travels, his personal and professional battles, his friendships – while offering a thoughtful account of the practices of Victorian science that sustained his life and work. You will not just find texts in this story. It is also full of paper and lenses, leather and wood, paint and pencils, arguing for the importance of a material history of science, and of botany in particular. Jim Endersby ranges with the characters in his book from the Antarctic to Kew Gardens, and helps us understand how the consequences of empire shaped the emergence of a scientific profession in Hooker’s lifetime. This will be required reading for scholars of Victorian science, of natural history, and of the history of imperial science, but it will also reward any reader interested in a compelling story written by a writer’s writer. It was a pleasure to read, and equally a pleasure to talk with Jim about it.

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Barry Kernfeld, “Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:43:00 -0000

Have you ever illegally downloaded a song from the internet? How about illicitly burned copies of a CD? Made a “party tape?” Bought a bootleg album? You may have done these things, but have you purchased a bootlegged song-sheet? In Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929 (University of Chicago, 2011) Barry Kernfeld fills us in on the history of disobedient music reproduction and distribution since, well, before the advent of recording technology. Along the way he discusses the above mentioned disobedient distribution techniques along with a few others: fake books, music photocopying, and pirate radio round out the book. Kernfeld suggests that the history of pop music piracy is never ending, with battles of different types of disobedience taking similar forms: the music “monopolists” (song owners) attempting to enact prohibitions on illegal production and distribution, the failed containment of said production and distribution systems and, finally, the assimilation of disobedient forms into the mainstream production and distribution industries.

Barry Kernfeld is on the staff of the Special Collections Library of the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians and What to Listen for in Jazz, and he is the editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He is also a professional jazz saxophonist playing in Jazza-ma-phone and a clarinetist in local musical theater productions.

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Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, “Intimacies” (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:58:00 -0000

In Intimacies and in this interview, Leo Bersani asks “does knowledge of the Other create a foundation for intimacy?” Troubling certain psychoanalytic models that survey the analysand’s past, gathering information about the vicissitudes of childhood, dreams, and other communications, he wonders if intimacy lies elsewhere. Reflecting on Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power, he suggests that intimacy is in trouble unless it is reformulated as a mode of being with, rather than a mode of knowing about. He wonders what might create a new mode of relationality altogether, and as he ponders this, he takes many fascinating detours that further illuminate his thinking. Since the confrontation with difference is what most often prompts violence, and since some schools of psychoanalytic thought place a premium on the ability to recognize the other, he suggests we embrace of a bit more narcissism of an “impersonal” variety. This part of his argument is fascinating and will give many in the field and those who are near it cause to pause.

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Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:00:00 -0000

“Guns don’t kill people; people do.” That’s a common refrain from the National Rifle Association, but it expresses a certain view of our relations to the things we make that also affects our thinking about the scope of ethics. On this traditional view, human persons are moral agents, and artifacts, or products of technology in general, are just tools; they have no moral significance in and of themselves.

In his new book, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Peter-Paul Verbeek, professor of philosophy at the University of Twente and Delft University, The Netherlands, argues persuasively that this traditional view is no longer tenable. Instead, we need to understand the moral role of technology as one of active mediation, and of ourselves as technologically mediated moral agents. Ultrasound, for example, isn’t just a matter of peeking into the womb; the fetus becomes a potential patient, the womb becomes an environment for moral decisions, and the parents become responsible for making these newly relevant decisions. In general, if “ought” implies “can”, and if what we can do is expanded and conditioned by technology, then the range and nature of moral decisions and actions must also be expanded and conditioned by technology, and the designing of technology itself can be seen explicitly as having an important moral dimension. In Moralizing Technology, Verbeek spells out this new view of the moral relevance of artifacts and some of its implications for moral subjects, technological design, and ethical theory.

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Mark Rowe, “Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:11:00 -0000

Mark Rowe‘s new book Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a fascinating study of the life of Buddhism in Japan by looking at the many facets of death in modern Japanese Buddhism. Rowe guides us from the...

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Ellen Lewin, “Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America” (University of Chicago, 2009)

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:22:00 -0000

When anthropologist Ellen Lewin gave a preliminary report on her research on gay fathers, a member of the audience asked how she could write about such “yucky people.” Yes, that’s the technical anthropological term for same-sex attracted men who parent children. But here’s the punch line: the questioner was not a homophobe who believes that gay men who wish to share their lives with children must be pedophiles. Rather, the questioner was what Lewin terms a “queer fundamentalist”: someone who believes that gay men (or lesbians) who wish to parent are assimilationists, undermining the radical potential of queerness.

In her award-winning book, Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Lewin explores the intersection of two worlds that many on both sides of the “culture wars” assume to be mutually exclusive: gay manhood and parenting. How do gay men become parents? How do they understand their relationships to extended family; to religious, racial, and ethnic communities? What meanings do they attribute to their choices in parenting? How do assumptions about the gendered nature of parenting – or should I say mothering – shape their struggles? And how do they reconcile a gay identity with their day-to-day lives as parents?

A professor of Anthropology and of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, Lewin has written a readable and humane account of a group that’s charting new territory. I learned a lot from this book, and you will too.

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David Gordon White, “Sinister Yogis” (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:15:00 -0000

A classic text, the Mahabharata, reports, “Yogis who are without restraints [and] endowed with the power of yoga are [so many] masters, who enter into [the bodies of] the Prajapatis, the sages, the gods, and the great beings.” Finding this passage was one of the inspirational moments that motivated David Gordon White, J. F. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to pursue an investigation into the development of yogic practices. Wondering, “If these be yogis, then what is yoga?,” White tackled the history of yoga by focusing on those individuals who were called yogis in his latest book, Sinister Yogis (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

This approach challenges many of the preconceived Western notions of yoga. There is little meditation, breathing, exercise, impossible contortionism, etc. that is often associated with the practice. Further, it offers an alterative reading of histories of the philosophical development of yogic teachings, which are based primarily on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. What we are presented with is possession, shape-shifting, and creation of multiple selves, among other things. Overall, yogis, were defined as such, when they entered into or took over the bodies of others. White examines this history in a variety of contexts and across a vast expanse of history. Sinister Yogis continues White’s earlier work, Kiss of the Yogini: ‘Tantric Sex’ in its South Asian Contexts and The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, and foreshadows his upcoming projects, Yoga in Practice and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A Biography. Altogether, White’s research is rich and detailed but thoroughly readable, as he is a skilled storyteller. One will discover this with delight already on the first pages, which recount White’s encounters with yogis (or maybe the same yogi) from the mountains of Kathmandu to the parking lot of Los Angeles’ Trader Joe’s.

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Scott Brooks, “Black Men Can’t Shoot” (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:22:00 -0000

With the NBA in the midst of a labor disagreement, players from the world’s premier basketball league are scattering in different directions to maintain their skills (and get paid). This past summer, a number of NBA players returned to their roots, so to speak, by playing in summer leagues in...

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Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:35:00 -0000

When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines!” What in the heck did that mean? I’d never seen a “Swed-ish mag-a-zine.” Thanks to Elizabeth Heineman‘s wonderful book Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (University of Chicago Press, 2011), now I understand. You see, the last and perhaps most significant Swedish contribution (if that’s what it was) to Western Civilization was legalized hardcore porn. In the early 1970s the Swedes (and their porn-allies, the Danes) flooded European markets with the stuff. The Scandinavians were making a killing.

As Lisa explains, the “Swedish Invasion” put the queen of the German erotica industry, Beate Uhse, in something of a bind – but it also came at a moment of great opportunity. In the first two decades after World War II, the Luftwaffe pilot-turned erotica entrepreneur had built a sex empire legitimized by the idea that erotica helped married, heterosexual couples have more fulfilling relationships. After all, the bread and butter of the industry were condoms (for customers who could hardly afford babies, given wartime devastation) and basic how-to manuals (for customers suffered from dire sexual ignorance). And the demand was there: by the early 1960s, fully half of West German household had patronized a mail-order erotica firm. But by the end of that decade, pornography – both homegrown and imported – was the backbone of the industry. So what, exactly, was the social mission of the erotica industry in this brave new world? In the end, the market decided with more than a little help from liberalism: German men wanted porn and the West German courts and Parliament couldn’t think of a reason not to let them have it. And so it is that you can buy porn on every high street in Germany, often in a Beate Uhse Erotik-Shop (Warning: really NSFW).

This is a terrifically interesting book. Read it.

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Gregory Koger, “Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate” (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:18:00 -0000

In recent months, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about filibustering in the Senate, about how Senate Democrats acquired a filibuster-proof majority in the 2008 elections only to lose it by the midterm elections of 2010 when Scott Brown was elected to replace Ted Kennedy. Filibustering has become the norm in the Senate, so much so that it is taken for granted that the Senate minority party will threaten filibustering more often than not. This has led Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to issue calls for reforming the filibuster process in order to make it more difficult for any minority party in the Senate to be obstructionist.

In a timely new book, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Gregory Koger explains the American filibuster, catalogs its use in the House and Senate, measures its impact, and finally theorizes why and how obstruction has been institutionalized in the Senate, particularly in the last 50 years.

In this interview he explains, among other things, the long pedigree of obstruction in the Senate, how and why filibustering became routinized, and why reform will not be easy.

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Carrie Pitzulo, “Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:10:00 -0000

Playboy is having (another) moment. Since its fiftieth birthday in 2003, the brand’s relevance has risen after a period of decline. The Girls Next Door, a reality television show about the goings-on at Hugh Hefner’s Los Angeles mansion, was a breakout hit starting in 2005, and it eventually spawned two spin-offs and a lot of merchandise. Though The Girls Next Door and the second coming of Playboy clubs suggest that the brand has a place in the twenty-first century, reflections on its place in the twentieth are even more numerous. Hefner’s impact has been reconsidered in several documentaries, the most recent of which is Brigitte Berman’s acclaimed Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel (2009). More recently, NBC picked up The Playboy Club for Fall 2011, which is set in the Chicago club in the 1960s. Ads for the show proclaim the brand’s importance: “A provocative drama about a time and place in which a visionary created an empire, and an icon changed American culture.”

Scholars too are reconsidering Hefner and Playboy‘s contribution to American literature, art, politics, and, of course, sexuality, in the twentieth century. On the heels of Elizabeth Fratterigo’s Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America and Steven Watts’s Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream, historian Carrie Pitzulo’s new Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy (University of Chicago Press, 2011) explores the pages of the magazine from its inception in 1953 to the end of its heyday in the 1970s. Pitzulo offers fresh and provocative readings of the notorious Playmates, but also discusses aspects of the magazine that have garnered less attention, including the popular Playboy Advisor column of the 1960s-70s. Bachelors and Bunnies is an exciting new feminist entry into the ever-broadening scholarship on Playboy.

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Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Tue, 31 May 2011 18:19:00 -0000

In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor...

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Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead” (University of Chicago, 2010)

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 19:09:00 -0000

What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count Pope–all believed that humans would benefit most from a proper comprehension of temporal things, and most particularly humanity itself. For them, understanding humanity meant, first and foremost, understanding the human body. Naturally, then, the philosophes and their successors paid close attention to the body. They cut it up, took it apart, measured it and attempted to see how it worked. They were most interested in one part in particular–the human head. It was the seat of the human characteristic the Enlightenment scientists admired most: intelligence. If one could get a handle on the human cranium, then one would understand what it meant to be human. Or at least so they thought.

In her fascinating new book The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Ann Fabian introduces us to a group of American philosophes who began to collect and study human crania in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, they took most of their cues from their European counterparts. They did, however, adapt craniology to a peculiar American context. Living in a social order in part built on supposed racial difference, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Africans mattered. Their work could support the suppositions of slavery, or not. Moreover, living in a social order that was at the very time they were working involved in a quasi-genocidal campaign against indigenous peoples, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Native Americans mattered as well. Their work might buttress the movement for Indian removal, or it might not. And being people of the “New World,” the American skull collectors knew that they were looked down upon by many of their European colleagues. They needed to collect skulls aggressively in order to establish craniology as an American science.

As one might expect, the American skull collectors were, by our lights, a strange bunch. Racists, imperialists, and nationalists to be sure. But also scientists, curators, and founders of physical anthropology. Thanks to Ann for bringing them to us in all their contradictory richness.

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James Banner, Jr. and John Gillis, “Becoming Historians” (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Thu, 28 May 2009 01:24:00 -0000

When I was young, I remember going to my high school library (not to study, mind you) and thinking “Who the hell reads all these books? And who writes them?” Just a few years later I found myself enrolling in a graduate program in history to do both. I’d always been interested in history, by which I mean things that go off, blow up, or otherwise maim and kill. Yes, I admit it, my entry point into history was, well, war. But really my historical career (if you can call it that) was more or less an accident caused by my arbitrary assignment to this man in college. I wanted to play basketball; he wanted me to study history. As it happened, I was better at the latter than the former (though I did school Barack Obama once upon a time). My stumble into academic history was far from unique, as you can read in James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis’s interesting book Becoming Historians (University of Chicago, 2009). Not surprisingly, almost no one grows up wanting to be a historian. Astronaut, baseball player, doctor, yes–historian, no. History–and especially hardcore academic history–is clearly an acquired taste. Banner and Gillis asked nine historians born around World War II to explain how they acquired it. The results are fascinating. Let me tell you, academic history ain’t what it used to be. If you want to know how and why, read this book.

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