The University of Chicago Press Podcast

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

23 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods An engaging biography of one of the most influe...

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

22 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell Elder...

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

19 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In this timely and bold book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (U Chicago Press, 2025), Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that...

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

19 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when theories of racial hierarchies interact with reality? How are they contested, refuted and changed in light of that encounter? What r...

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

11 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Gems and the New Science: Matter and Value in the Scientific Revolution (U Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Michael Bycroft argues that gems were connec...

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

10 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Heart of Science: A Philosophy of Scientific Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2026), philosopher Jacob Stegenga breaks with the most domina...

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

10 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. George Frazier is currently an assistant professor of Computer Information Sciences at Washburn University, where his research focuses on such top...

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

01 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers th...

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

25 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 t...

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

23 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

19 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

False Front: The Failed Promise of Presidential Power in a Polarized Age The University of Chicago Press, 2024 Kenneth Lowande Political Scientist ...

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

18 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 p...

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

09 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

"Sincerely held religious belief" is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Cou...

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

05 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a med...

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

02 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually gro...

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

27 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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

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

22 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In A Dirty History of Photography: Chemistry, Fog, and Empire (U Chicago Press, 2026), Professor Michelle Henning presents an environmental history...

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

17 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changin...

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

12 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Has American democracy outstripped its constitutional accommodations? Faith in the resilience and adaptability of the US Constitution rests on a long ...

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

10 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

31 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious...

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

30 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor and the Director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, ha...

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

20 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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, Arthu...

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

12 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 c...

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

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 peopl...

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

03 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

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

21 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 uniq...

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

17 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, E...

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

13 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism...

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

12 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A searing account of how the international community is trying—and failing—to address the worst effects of climate change and the differential bur...

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

27 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 inter...

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

20 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

14 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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, 2...

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

11 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long a...

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

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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, teac...

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

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 Ameri...

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

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Sarah talks to Daniel J. Sherman about his most recent book, Sensations: French Archaeology Between Science and Spectacle, 1890-1940...

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

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How street vendors tangle with the law in São Paulo, Brazil. With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might se...

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

18 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Master Plans and Minor Acts: Repairing the City in Post-Genocide Rwanda (U of Chicago Press, 2024) by Dr. Shakirah Hudani examines a “material poli...

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

01 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For this episode of Liminal Library, I interviewed Dan Davies about The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How t...

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

31 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book ...

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

30 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 dep...

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

18 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Racial Resentment in the Political Mind, Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson challenge the commonly held notion that all racial negativity, disag...

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

11 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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. Kir...

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

11 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The rise and popular support for authoritarianism around the world and within traditional democracies have spurred debates over the meaning of the ter...

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

01 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

29 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods ...

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

25 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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

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

25 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 U...

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

21 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our national conversation about the border has taken a religious turn. When televangelists declare, “Heaven has a wall,” activists shout back, “...

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

18 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A rethinking of African American religious history that focuses on the development and evolution of Africana spiritual traditions in Jim Crow New Orle...

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

17 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Notre Dame University Political Scientists Dave Campbell and Christina Wolbrecht have a new book that focuses on the impression that female candidates...

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

12 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 i...

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

10 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

05 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature.Medieval literature is full of strange moments whe...

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

05 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. Peop...

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

30 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reali...

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

27 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Teachers are subject matter experts that can distill information into manageable chunks for their students. In Write Like You Teach: Taking Your C...

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

19 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

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

16 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 a...

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

15 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), by Andrew Hartman To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. Peop...

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

13 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A vital examination of how social and economic justice organizations overcome resource disadvantages and build political power. Why do some coalitions...

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

02 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

HIV emerged in the world at a time when medicine and healthcare were undergoing two major transformations: globalization and a turn toward legally inf...

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

22 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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

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

16 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

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

14 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

13 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism...

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

12 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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

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

12 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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

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

01 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

30 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. ...

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

08 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Art has long played a key role in constructing how people understand and imagine America. Starting with contemporary controversies over public monumen...

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

02 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Internal Colony: Race and the American Politics of Global Decolonization (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. Sam Klug reveals the centra...

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

31 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi’ism, it prompted the more established Otto...

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

29 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterl...

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

28 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Enlightenment Biopolitics (U Chicago Press, 2024), historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopol...

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

18 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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

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

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 synthe...

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

13 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

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

12 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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

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

08 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since their origins in eighteenth-century England, railroads have spread across the globe, changing everything in their path, from where and how peopl...

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

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This biography of “African explorer” Richard Dorsey Mohun, written by one of his descendants, reveals how American greed and state power helped sh...

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

01 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“No man’s land” invokes stretches of barren landscape, twisted barbed wire, desolation, and the devastation of war. But this is not always the r...

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

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America (U Chicago Press, 2023) launches a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history ...

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

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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....

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

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trade...

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

31 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings,...

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

17 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. ...

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

17 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 informat...

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

08 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 Ch...

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

03 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

02 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

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

02 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical...

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

31 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Nick Yablon traces the birth of the time caps...

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

21 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are gr...

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

17 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

American democracy is in trouble. At the heart of the contemporary crisis is a mismatch between America's Constitution and today's nationalized, parti...

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

14 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2024) historian Dr. Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts...

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

12 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane ...

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

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and...

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

06 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Shannon Gayk joins Jana Byars to discuss her new book. Apocalyptic Ecologies: From Creation to Doom in Medieval English Literature (University of C...