The University of Chicago Press Podcast
Episodes
Victoria Lee, "The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
16 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Victoria Lee’s The Arts of the Microbial World: Fermentation Science in Twentieth-Century Japan (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an in-depth exploration...
Robert Mills, "Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages" (U Chicago Press, 2015)
09 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval ...
Apostolos Andrikopoulos, "Argonauts of West Africa: Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
05 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability...
Katie Kadue, "Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
03 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Kevin J. Elliott, "Democracy for Busy People" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
01 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Danielle Allen, "Justice by Means of Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
29 Jun 2023
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...
Nicholas Dagen Bloom, "The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
27 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Many a scholar and policy analyst has lamented American dependence on cars and the corresponding lack of federal investment in public transportation t...
Rebecca Whiteley, "Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
26 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rebecca Whiteley's book Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body (University of Chicago Press, 2023) is first full study of “bir...
J. Barton Scott, "Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
22 Jun 2023
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...
Lisabeth During, "The Chastity Plot" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
Rachel E. Walker, "Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
19 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Between the 1770s and 1860s, people across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. Physiognomy refers to using facial ...
Francis Cody, "The News Event: Popular Sovereignty in the Age of Deep Mediatization" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Scott R. Stroud, "The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
03 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Scott R. Stroud's The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a philosophi...
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, "Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
20 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Split & Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, director emeritus at the Max Plan...
Kathryn J. McGarr, "City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
19 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Kathryn McGarr’s City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (U Chicago Press, 2022) explores foreign policy jour...
Mark Paul, "The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
18 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Since the Founding, Americans have debated the true meaning of freedom. For some, freedom meant the provision of life's necessities, those basic condi...
Christina Dunbar-Hester, "Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
27 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Dror Goldberg, "Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
09 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems--coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of...
Gwen Burnyeat, "The Face of Peace: Government Pedagogy Amid Disinformation in Colombia" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
09 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Joseph Giacomelli, "Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
05 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 Un...
Natilee Harren, "Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
05 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network (U Chicago Press, 2020), Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activiti...
Dominique A. Tobbell, "Dr. Nurse: Science, Politics, and the Transformation of American Nursing" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
24 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An analysis of the efforts of American nurses to establish nursing as an academic discipline and nurses as valued researchers in the decades after Wor...
Claudio E. Benzecry, "The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
06 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (The University of Chicago Press, 2022) shows us how globalization works through the ma...
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, "Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
03 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Gary Alan Fine, "Fair Share: Senior Activism, Tiny Publics, and the Culture of Resistance" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
26 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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, ja...
Azzan Yadin-Israel, "Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
20 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple (University of Chicago Press, 2023) by Dr. Azzan Yadin-Israel presents a...
Ruth Rogaski, "Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
10 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Bruce Kuklick, "Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
08 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 migrat...
Susan Stewart, "The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
04 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, fro...
Nick Seaver, "Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, ...
David Newheiser, "The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics (University of Chicago Press, 2022), edited by Professor David Newheiser reveals the di...
Robin Bartram, "Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
29 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The buil...
Marlene Schäfers, "Voices That Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Raise your voice!” and “Speak up!” are familiar refrains that assume, all too easily, that gaining voice will lead to empowerment, healing, a...
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)
11 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What is religious liberty, anyway? What are its origins? What are religious exemptions? What would a jurisprudence of religious liberty based on the i...
Siv B. Lie, "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
04 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (U Chicago Press, 2021) shows how relationships between racial identi...
Samantha Muka, "Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
04 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Samantha Muka, Assistant Professor of Science, Te...
John P. Gluck, "Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist's Ethical Journey" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
03 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The National Institute of Health recently announced its plan to retire the fifty remaining chimpanzees held in national research facilities and place ...
Clara E. Mattei, "The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to...
Pamela H. Smith, "From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge. In From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Kn...
David Newheiser, "The Varieties of Atheism: Connecting Religion and Its Critics" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
13 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David Newheiser is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of...
Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
12 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous cat...
Robert L. Hetzel, "The Federal Reserve: A New History" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
08 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 b...
Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
08 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthe...
Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
08 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthe...
Gregory Nobles, "The Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
25 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 Jer...
Michael A. Verney, "A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
23 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Meredith Schweig, "Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Narrative, and Knowledge in Taiwan" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
11 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when nearly four decades of martial law u...
Mackenzie Cooley, "The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted e...
Kenyon Gradert, "Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists ...
Robin Waterfield, trans. and ed., "The Complete Works of Epictetus: Handbook, Discourses, and Fragments" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
18 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 exp...
Evan Haefeli, "Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
17 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Origin stories of the United States often highlight religious freedom as a foundational pillar of the earliest English settlers. But Evan Haefeli tell...
Peter Coviello, "Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
12 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
rom the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, se...
NBN Classic: Paul Musselwhite, "Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
02 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Kermit Roosevelt III, "The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Thomas Dodman, "What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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, 2...
Lewis Raven Wallace, “The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity” (U Chicago Press, 2019)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From the New York Times to NPR, many major news organizations have strict policies about how reporters can conduct themselves in relation to the stori...
Thomas S. Mullaney and Christopher Rea, "Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project That Matters to You (and the World)" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
15 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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: Choosi...
Ugo Corte, "Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
07 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 b...
Phillip B. Levine, "A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students—and Universities" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
06 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
According to A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students—and Universities (U Chicago Press, 2022) a college education ...
Sandra Eder, "How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
30 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Cassidy Puckett, "Redefining Geek: Bias and the Five Hidden Habits of Tech-Savvy Teens" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
25 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Picture a typical computer geek. Likely white, male, and someone you’d say has a “natural instinct” for technology. Yet, after six years teachin...
Elena Aronova, "Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
19 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Increasingly, scholars in the humanities are calling for a reengagement with the natural sciences. Taking their cues from recent breakthroughs in gene...
Johanna Drucker, "Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
17 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Johanna Drucker provides the ...
Ethan W. Ris, "Other People's Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
03 Aug 2022
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...
Ghassan Hage, "The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
29 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Bridging the gap between migration studies and the anthropological tradition, Ghassan Hage illustrates that transnationality and its attendant cultura...
Erica Gies, "Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
29 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Trouble with water – increasingly frequent, extreme floods and droughts – is one of the first obvious signs of climate change. Meanwhile, urban sp...
Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson, "The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
19 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy refo...
Victoria W. Wolcott, "Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
18 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (U Chicago Press, 2022) reveals the unexplored impact of utopian thought on the m...
Jonna Perrillo, "Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
18 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands (U Chicago Press, 2022) begins with the 144 children of Nazi scientists ...
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)
15 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" when nurse...
Drew Daniel, "Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
06 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Advisory: this episode discusses the literary representation of self-harm and suicide, in particular, how writers such as Shakespeare and Milton often...
Claire L. Wendland, "Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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-f...
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)
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scop...
Victor Seow, "Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy: Energy regimes in Modern East Asia (U Chicago Press, 2021) is an account of the modern “world that carbon mad...
The Future of Philanthropy: A Conversation with Emma Saunders-Hastings
28 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Philanthropists are praise for their generosity but does their desire to keep control of what happens to their donations mean they exercise power in w...
Slobodan Perovic, "From Data to Quanta: Niels Bohr’s Vision of Physics" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
22 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Niels Bohr was a central figure in quantum physics, well known for his work on atomic structure and his contributions to the Copenhagen interpretation...
Aaron Hiltner, "Taking Leave, Taking Liberties: American Troops on the World War II Home Front" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
21 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
During the Second World War, locals in Australia and Britain described American GIs as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But this conflict bet...
Alison F. Richard, "Sloth Lemur's Song: Madagascar from the Deep Past to the Uncertain Present" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
14 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 anima...
Moises Lino e Silva, "Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is a mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favel...
Judith Lochhead et al., "Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (U Chicago Press, 2021) maps a new territory for inquiry at the intersection of music, philosophy, affect theor...
Moises Lino e Silva, "Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is a mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favel...
Andy Hines, "Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
06 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding ...
Mario Daniels and John Krige, "Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is the first historical study of export control reg...
Charlie Eaton, "Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
31 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major steppi...
Jack Ashby, "Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
30 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 detec...
Steven G. Epstein, "The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
30 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since the 1970s, health professionals, researchers, governments, advocacy groups, and commercial interests have invested in the pursuit of something c...
Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, "The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Alejandro Nava, "Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
25 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 imp...
Stephen Vider, "The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
25 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States. From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histo...
Ellen Schrecker, "The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
23 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2021) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked Am...
John Lardas Modern, "Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
23 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Neuromatic: Or, a Particular History of Religion and the Brain (U Chicago Press, 2021), religious studies scholar John Lardas Modern offers a spr...
Annabella Pitkin, "Renunciation and Longing: The Life of a Twentieth-Century Himalayan Buddhist Saint" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
20 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the early twentieth century, Khunu Lama journeyed across Tibet and India, meeting Buddhist masters while sometimes living, so his students say, on ...
Dana W. Logan, "Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
13 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past ...
Aaron Cohen, "Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
04 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 heyda...
Charles Alistair McCrary, "Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
25 Apr 2022
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...
Sam Lebovic, "A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
22 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Sam Lebovic’s A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is an ex...
Michael Graziano, "Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
22 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the re...
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, "Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
21 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With this book, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century modernism, transforming our un...
Paul R. Deslandes, "The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
19 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 Davi...
Rebecca Cypess, "Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today we speak to Rebecca Cypess, Associate Professor at Rutgers University, about her new book: Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (University of ...