The University of Chicago Press Podcast
Episodes
Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy, "Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy: India 1947 and Beyond" (UChicago Press, 2022)
30 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 prese...
Emily J. Levine, "Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University" (UChicago Press, 2021)
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
During the nineteenth century, nearly ten thousand Americans traveled to Germany to study in universities renowned for their research and teaching. By...
Elayne Oliphant, "The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris" (UChicago Press, 2021)
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At t...
Ian Tyrrell, "American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 id...
Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, "Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
15 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, tech...
Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, "Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
14 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 th...
Mark Christian Thompson, "Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
04 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Mark Christian Thompson's book, Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2022) examines the changin...
William Sites, "Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
24 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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. Renown...
Bruce Iglauer and Patrick A. Roberts, "Bitten by the Blues: The Alligator Records Story" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
08 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It’s time for The Blues! In Bitten by the Blues: The Alligator Records Story (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Alligator Records president and ...
Lisa Jane Disch, "Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
04 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The common-sense way of thinking about what representatives should do in democracies tends to revolve around the concept of responsiveness: representa...
Lina Zeldovich, "The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
03 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Keith Wailoo, "Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
31 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Aleksandra Prica, "Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
21 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’...
Brenna Moore, "Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
20 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Brenna Moore takes us inside a...
Melinda Baldwin, "Making 'Nature': The History of a Scientific Journal" (U Chicago Press, 2015)
24 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Listen to this interview of Melinda Baldwin about her book Making 'Nature': The History of a Scientific Journal (U Chicago Press, 2015). Melinda is...
Sarah S. Richardson, "The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
21 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 in...
Sarah S. Richardson, "The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
21 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 in...
David Herzberg, "White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
06 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 bac...
Efrén O. Pérez, "Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
11 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Political Scientist Efrén Pérez’s new book, Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity (U Chicago Press, 2021), explores th...
John A. Dearborn, "Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
28 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Political Scientist John Dearborn’s new book, Power Shifts: Congress and Presidential Representation (U Chicago Press, 2021), weaves together thre...
Scott Sumner, "The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
27 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Sam Wineburg, "Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
21 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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-mean...
Rachel M. Blum, "How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
14 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Helena de Bres, "Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
11 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 besi...
James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee, "The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
06 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
To many observers, Congress has become a deeply partisan institution where ideologically-distinct political parties do little more than engage in legi...
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
04 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous cat...
Michael Moore, "We Are All Whalers: The Plight of Whales and Our Responsibility" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
04 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The image most of us have of whalers includes harpoons and intentional trauma. Yet eating commercially caught seafood leads to whales' entanglement an...
Pamela J. Prickett, "Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
01 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by Pamela J. Prickett is an ethnographic study o...
Gregory Jones-Katz, "Deconstruction: An American Institution" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
01 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intel...
Caley Horan, "Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
21 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic in...
Alexander Wragge-Morley, "Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
17 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic a...
Nayanika Mathur, "Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
07 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Big cats—tigers, leopards, and lions—that make prey of humans are commonly known as “man-eaters.” Anthropologist Nayanika Mathur reconceptuali...
Christopher M. Elias, "Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
24 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 P...
Nicholas Harkness, "Glossolalia and the Problem of Language" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
24 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, has long been a subject of curiosity as well as vigorous theological debate. A worldwide phenomenon th...
Samantha Barbas, "The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
13 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Over the course of a long and successful legal career, Morris Ernst established himself as one of Americas foremost civil libertarians. Yet his advoca...
Hannah Wohl, "Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
13 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is pro...
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, "When Maps Become the World" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
10 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Helen Sword, "The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
06 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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,...
John Davies and Alexander J. Kent, "The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
06 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted an ambitious yet clandestine programme to map the world - from big cities like New York and Toky...
Alex Csiszar, "The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
04 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Jour...
Hillary Angelo, "How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
29 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 dev...
Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck, "Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
26 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jeffrey Jenkins and Justin Peck’s new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores how Congressional ...
Mary Louise Roberts, "Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
21 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, "Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
20 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ext...
Terry McGlynn, "The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
19 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Listen to this interview of Terry McGlynn, author of The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching (U Chicago Press, 2020). McGlynn is also a profe...
Mallory E. SoRelle, "Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
19 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Americans rely on credit to provide for their food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and other daily necessities and the 2008 financial crisis demon...
Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
16 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The identity of contemporary Jews is multifaceted, no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, the J...
Michael Fishbane, "Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
09 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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....
Benjamin Steege, "An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
07 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“What are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?” asks Benjamin Steege—Associate Professor of Music Theory, Col...
Stefan Vogler, "Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
07 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Sorting Sexualities: Expertise and the Politics of Legal Classification (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Stefan Vogler deftly unpacks the pol...
Rachel S. Buurma and Laura Heffernan, "The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
05 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Listen to this interview of Rachel Sagner Buurma (associate professor of English literature at Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (associate prof...
Allison Alexy, "Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
02 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In many ways, divorce is a quintessentially personal decision—the choice to leave a marriage that causes harm or feels unfulfilling to the two peopl...
Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
28 Jun 2021
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...
Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer, "Wildness: Relations of People and Place" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
16 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Anahid Nersessian, "Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
11 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I interview Anahid Nersessian, professor of English at UCLA, about her book, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (University of C...
Joel Alden Schlosser, "Herodotus in the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
27 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Political Theorist Joel Alden Schlosser has turned his attention to Herodotus, an historian and political thinker from classical Greece, to learn how ...
Jenny Bangham, "Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
26 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Blood is messy, dangerous, and charged with meaning. By following it as it circulates through people and institutions, Jenny Bangham explores the inti...
Alex Wellerstein, "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
24 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 worri...
Deborah R. Coen, "The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter" (U Chicago Press, 2013)
21 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 recording...
Joseph Rouse, "Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image" (U Chicago Press, 2015)
21 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudi...
Carrie Noland, "Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
22 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Carrie Noland's Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary (University of Chicago Press, 2020) goes past conventional understandings of Cunningham that i...
Rachel Z. Friedman, "Probable Justice: Rethinking the Politics of Risk" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
20 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The emergence of individual and commercial insurance in Early Modern Europe required an understanding of probability. In Probable Justice: Rethinki...
Joshua Gunn, "Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering" (U of Chicago Press, 2020)
14 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 offi...
Richard C. Jankowsky, "Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
02 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by Richard C. Jankowsky (an Associate Professor...
Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner, "African American Political Thought: A Collected History" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
01 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Political theorists Melvin Rogers and Jack “Chip” Turner have produced a truly magisterial edited volume centering the work by African American th...
D. A. Miller, "Hidden Hitchcock" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
31 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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’...
Aaron Tugendhaft, "The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
25 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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....
Robert Launay, "Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)
25 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ide...
Alisha Rankin, "The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science" (Alisha Rankin, 2021)
18 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 poiso...
Kara M. Schlichting, "New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
09 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Providing a fresh perspective is one of the biggest challenges for historians of New York City. Kara Murphy Schlichting, however, has managed to do ju...
Rihan Yeh, "Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City" (U of Chicago Press, 2017)
09 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Tijuana is the largest of Mexico’s northern border cities, and although it has struggled during the United States’ dramatic escalation of border e...
Evan Friss, "The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s" (U Chicago Press, 2015)
05 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Philip Mansel, "King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV" (U of Chicago Press, 2019).
03 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, "Terror Epidemics: Islamophobia and the Disease Poetics of Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
26 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in orde...
Fiona Greenland, "Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy" (U of Chicago Press, 2021)
26 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: ...
Hannah Marcus, "Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
16 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today we speak to Hannah Marcus, Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a...
Charles Hirschkind, "The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
12 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Charles Hirschkind’s lyrical and majestic new book The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (University of Chicago Press, 2020) ...
M. Condon and A. Wichowsky, "The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
11 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky have written an incredibly timely and fascinating study of our understanding of income inequality in the United Stat...
Gary Alan Fine, "The Hinge: Civil Society, Group Cultures, and the Power of Local Commitments" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
09 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Jennifer M. Rampling, "The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
08 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 al...
Tim Cresswell, "Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
03 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 Chica...
David Trouille, "Fútbol in the Park: Immigrants, Soccer, and the Creation of Social Ties" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
01 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Richard M. Jaffe, "Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
29 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Though fascinated with the land of their tradition’s birth, virtually no Japanese Buddhists visited the Indian subcontinent before the nineteenth ce...
David Sepkoski, "Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
22 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Dora Zhang, "Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
15 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this interview, I talk with Dora Zhang, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, about ...
Lisa Wedeen, "Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
11 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 authoritaria...
Michael Fisch, "An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo's Commuter Train Network" (U of Chicago Press, 2018)
08 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With its infamously packed cars and disciplined commuters, Tokyo’s commuter train network is one of the most complex technical infrastructures on Ea...
Jeremy Black, "A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
06 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 furthe...
Paul Davies, "The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
24 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What is life? For generations, scientists have struggled to make sense of this fundamental question, for life really does look like magic: even a humb...
Stuart Elden, "Shakespearean Territories" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
18 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What can Shakespeare tell us about territory, and what can territory tell us about Shakespeare? In Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicag...
Christopher M. Kelty, "The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
16 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Participation is everywhere today. It has been formalized, measured, standardized, scaled up, network-enabled, and sent around the world. Platforms, a...
Mark Wild, "Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City After World War II" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
16 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II (U Chicago Press, 2019), Mark Wild traces the achievements and losses of A...
Trevor Pearce, "Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
15 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the...
Michal Pagis, "Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
14 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There is a strong interest today in turning inward to explore the mind and body. Mindfulness meditation exemplifies this trend, and has become increas...
Matthew H. Rafalow, "Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
30 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I speak with Matt Rafalow, about his book, Digital Divisions: How Schools Create Inequality in the Tech Era (University of Chicago...
Soraya de Chadarevian, "Heredity Under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
24 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“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 M...
Ara H. Merjian, "Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
18 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
John Durham Peters, "Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, how...
Ellen Wayland-Smith, "The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wade Rindlaub and the Selling of America" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
23 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ellen Wayland-Smith is an associate professor of writing at University of Southern California. Her book The Angel in the Marketplace: Adwoman Jean Wad...
William Germano, "Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
23 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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...