Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Its holdings encompass a vast range—including paintings, sculptures, costumes, instruments, and arms and armor—and span millennia, from ancient Egypt and Greece to Islamic art to European Old Masters and modern artists. How did the Met amass this trove, and what do the experiences of the people who bought, restored, catalogued, visited, and watched over these works tell us about the museum?

The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Conlin is a groundbreaking bottom-up history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exploring both its triumphs and its failings. Dr. Conlin tells the stories of the people who have shaped the museum—from curators and artists to museumgoers and security guards—and the communities that have made it their own. Highlighting inequalities of wealth, race, and gender, he exposes the hidden costs of the museum’s reliance on “robber barons” and oligarchs, the exclusionary immigration policies that influenced the foundation of the American Wing, and the obstacles faced by women curators. Drawing on extensive interviews with past and current staff, Conlin brings the story up to the present, including the museum’s troubled 150th anniversary in 2020. As the Met faces continued controversy, this book offers a timely account of the people behind an iconic institution and a compelling case for the museum’s vision of shared human creativity.

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.

Medical schools have increasingly incorporated the humanities and social sciences into their teaching, seeking to make future physicians more empathetic and more concerned with equity. In practice, however, these good intentions have not translated into critical consciousness. Humanities and social sciences education has often not only failed to deliver on its promise but even entrenched the inequalities that the medical profession set out to address. 

In Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities (Columbia UP, 2024), Lauren D. Olsen examines how U.S. medical school faculty conceived, designed, and implemented their vision of education, tracing the failures of curricular reform. She argues that the way medical students encounter humanities and social sciences material in practice has served to reinforce the status quo by teaching them to individualize systemic problems. Students learn to avoid advocacy, critique, and attention to structural inequalities—while also gathering that it will be up to them to find coping strategies for problems from burnout to systemic racism. Olsen pinpoints the limitations of how clinical faculty understand the humanities and social sciences, arguing that in structuring and teaching courses, they assumed, reinforced, and glorified a white, elite model of the medical profession. Showing how deeply intertwined professional and social identities are in medical education, Curricular Injustice has significant implications for how occupations, organizations, and institutions shape understandings of inequality.

In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizing and writing Hindi literary history. He responds to recent developments in quantitative and qualitative approaches to book history - including tools developed within the digital humanities - by applying new as well as traditional techniques of paleography, codicology, and bibliography to handwritten copies of romances, epics, songbooks, treatises, and scriptures. 

To make the book more accessible and enjoyable for cross-disciplinary readers, Williams bookends (so to speak) each chapter with the story of a specific artifact - an ascetic's notebook, a Mughal general's storybook, a pandit's textbook, or a guru's copy of a sacred scripture - in order to pose and then apply the questions about writing, textuality, and performance that the chapter addresses. By combining distant and close reading that is mindful of the materiality of these manuscripts, Tyler reveals literary, intellectual, and religious practices that we would otherwise be unable to see.

How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? Rajbir Singh Judge offers new ways to understand loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab.

Sikh sovereignty in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British annexed the Sikh kingdom and, eventually, exiled its child maharaja, Duleep Singh, to England. In the 1880s, Singh embarked on an abortive attempt to restore the lost Sikh kingdom. Judge explores not only Singh’s efforts but also the Sikh people’s responses—the dreams, fantasies, and hopes that became attached to the Khalsa Raj. He shows how a community engaged military, political, and psychological loss through theological debate, literary production, bodily discipline, and ethical practice in order to contest colonial politics. This book argues that Sikhs in the final decades of the nineteenth century were not simply looking to recuperate the past but to remake it—and to dwell within loss instead of transcending it—and in so doing opened new possibilities.

Bringing together Sikh tradition, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial thought, Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty, and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia (Columbia UP, 2024) provides bracing insights into concepts of sovereignty and the writing of history.

Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh.

As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific.

In Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures (Columbia UP, 2024), Sarah Dimick links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via literature. She documents how the unseasonable reverberates through environmentally privileged and environmentally precarious communities. In chapters ranging from Henry David Thoreau’s journals to Alexis Wright’s depiction of Australia’s catastrophic bushfires, from classical Tamil poetry to repeat photography, Dimick illustrates how seasonal rhythms determine what flourishes and what perishes. She contends that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue, unfolding not only along the axes of who and where but also in relation to when. Amid misaligned and broken rhythms, attending to the shared but disparate experience of the unseasonable can realign or sharpen solidarities within the climate crisis.

Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres.

As the 2024 American presidential election approaches, it is common to hear scholars and journalists discuss the role of particular groups such as Latino men or suburban white women might play in a razor tight race. Less attention is paid to the nation’s youngest voters: Gen Z. Born between 1997 and 2012, these voters have experienced a decade of upheaval including, the murder of George Floyd, changing political norms with the election of Donald Trump, an insurrection after the election of Joe Biden, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Gen Z voters have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, these voters are mobilizing -- and left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have the potential to move U.S. politics to the left.

Dr. Melissa Deckman uses original data – including nearly one hundred interviews with Gen Z activists and several national surveys – to highlight the increasing role of Zoomers. She argues that women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers, creating a historic "reverse gender gap." Dr. Deckman explores Gen Z’s activism using mixed methods data and compelling personal narratives of how Gen Z activists have mobilized to defend reproductive rights, prevent gun violence, stem climate change, and win political office. A deep dive into the politics of Gen Z, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy (Columbia UP, 2024) sheds new light on how young voters view politics and why their commitment to progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead.

Dr. Melissa Deckman is the CEO of PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute. She is a political scientist who studies the impact of gender, religion, and age on public opinion and political behavior. She was previously the Louis L. Goldstein Professor of Public Affairs at Washington College. Her previous books include the Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the Changing Face of the American Right (2016) which examines the role of women in conservative politics.

Melissa mentions Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings, 2024) and the New Books Network’s Dan Hill interviewed with Richard Reeves about the book.

Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many perils, from enabling human rights abuses to seeding future threats. Policy makers, however, have sought to mitigate the risks of partnering with irregular armed groups. Militia group leaders in far-flung corners of these war-torn countries were subjected to background checks and instructed about international law and human rights, and their funding was cut when they crossed red lines. To what extent have such mechanisms curbed the dangers of proxy warfare, and what unforeseen consequences has this approach unleashed?

Drawing on a decade of field research and hundreds of interviews with stakeholders, in Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Erica L. Gaston unpacks the dilemmas of attempting to control proxy forces. She demonstrates that, although the tools U.S. policy makers used to constrain partners’ behavior increased in number and sophistication, they never fully addressed the range of political, security, and legal concerns surrounding these forces. Moreover, by shifting policy makers’ calculations, the use of proxy forces introduced additional moral hazards and may have enabled riskier decision making. Featuring substantial empirical detail and close analysis of key internal debates, Illusions of Control offers new perspectives on some of the most significant and controversial elements of recent U.S. security policy. In addition to nuanced insights about proxy relationships, this book provides a novel analytical toolkit for exploring transnational bargaining and foreign policy deliberations in hybrid political environments.

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.

Beth Blum, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “neo-stoical” self-help gurus of today, who preach male and female versions of “stop apologizing!” You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll either help yourself or learn how to stop caring.

Mentioned

• Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
• Rachel Hollis, Girl, Stop Apologizing (2019)
• Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k (2016)
• Richard Carlson, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…. (1997)
• Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (2012)
• New Thought (philosophy? religious movement?)
• Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)
• Orison Swett Marden, How to Succeed (1896)
• David Riesman et al. The Lonely Crowd (1950)
• Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1945)
• Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All (1982)
• Micki McGee, Self-Help Inc. (2007; concept of”self-belabourment”)
• Tiffany Dufu, Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less
• Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019)
• Sarah Knight, The Life-Changing Magic Art of Not Giving a Fuck (2015)

Recallable books

• Epictetus, Handbook (125 C.E.)
• Sheil Heti, How Should a Person Be (2012)
• Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
• Joseph Conrad Nostromo (1904)

Read Here:

38 Beth Blum on Self-Help from Carnegie to Today

When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries-long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernization profoundly destabilized cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era.

Satoru Hashimoto offers a novel way of understanding the origins of modern literature in a transregional context, drawing on Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language texts in both classical and vernacular forms. He argues that modern literature came into being in East Asia through writerly attempts at reconstructing the present’s historical relationship to the past across the cultural transformations caused by modernization. Hashimoto examines writers’ anachronistic engagement with past cultures that were deemed obsolete or antithetical to new systems of values, showing that this transnational process was integral to the emergence of modern literature.

A groundbreaking cross-cultural excavation of the origins of modern literature in East Asia featuring remarkable linguistic scope, Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea (Columbia UP, 2023) bridges Asian studies and comparative literature and delivers a remapping of world literature.

Satoru Hashimoto is assistant professor of comparative thought and literature at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published in English, Japanese, Chinese, and French on topics in comparative literature, aesthetics, and thought engaging East Asian and European traditions. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of World Literature.

Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

Why do armed groups employ terrorism in markedly different ways during civil wars? Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Dr. Andreas E. Feldmann examines the disparate behaviour of actors including guerrilla groups, state security forces, and paramilitaries during Colombia’s long and bloody civil war. Analysing the varieties of violence in this conflict, he develops a new theory of the dynamics of terrorism in civil wars.

In Repertoires of Terrorism: Organizational Identity and Violence in Colombia's Civil War (Columbia University Press, 2024) Dr. Feldmann argues that armed groups’ distinct uses—repertoires—of terrorism arise from their particular organisational identities, the central and enduring attributes that distinguish one faction from other warring parties. He investigates a range of groups that took part in the Colombian conflict over the course of its evolution from ideological to criminal warfare, demonstrating that organisational identity plays a critical role in producing and rationalising violence. Armed parties employ their unique repertoires as a means of communication to assert their relevance and territorial presence and to differentiate themselves from enemies and rivals. Repertoires of Terrorism is based on an extensive data set covering thousands of incidents, as well as interviews, archival research, and testimony. It sheds new light on both armed groups’ use of violence in Colombia’s civil war and the factors that shape terrorist activity in other conflicts.

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.

Today’s book is: Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions (Columbia UP, 2024), by Ernesto Castaneda and Carina Cione, which is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions. Presenting the latest findings and decades of interdisciplinary research in an accessible way, Dr. Castañeda and Carina Cione emphasize the expert consensus that immigration is vital to the United States and many other countries around the world. Featuring original insights from research conducted in El Paso, Texas, Immigration Realities considers a wide range of places, ethnic groups, and historical eras. It provides the key data and context to understand how immigration affects economies, crime rates, and social welfare systems, and it sheds light on contentious issues such as the safety of the U.S.-Mexico border and the consequences of Brexit. This book is an indispensable guide for all readers who want to counter false claims about immigration and are interested in what the research shows.

Our guest is: Dr. Ernesto Castañeda, who is the director of the Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. His books include A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Exclusion and Urban Belonging in New York, Paris, and Barcelona (2018); Building Walls: Excluding Latin People in the United States (2019); and Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration (2024).

The Immigration Realities co-author is: Carina Cione, who is a sociologist and writer based out of Baltimore. Their work has been featured by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Trauma Care, El Paso News, and American University’s Center for Latin American & Latino Studies Working Paper Series.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

• We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States
• We Take Our Cities With Us
• Secret Harvests
• The Ungrateful Refugee
• The Translator's Daughter
• Where Is Home?
• Who Gets Believed: When the Truth Isn't Enough

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. These are iconic elements of film noir visual style. Long after its 1940s heyday, noir hallmarks continue to appear in a variety of new media forms and styles. What has made the noir aesthetic at once enduring and adaptable? Sheri Chinen Biesen's Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style (Columbia UP, 2024) explores how the dark cinematic noir style has evolved across eras, from classic Hollywood to present-day streaming services. Examining both aesthetics and material production conditions, she demonstrates how technological and industrial changes have influenced the imagery of film noir. 

Biesen considers the persistence of the noir legacy, discussing how neo-noirs reimagine iconic imagery and why noir style has become a touchstone in the streaming era. Drawing on a wealth of archival research, she provides insightful analyses of a wide range of works, from masterpieces directed by Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock to New Hollywood neo-noirs, the Coen brothers' revisionist films, and recent HBO and Netflix series.

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.

Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2023) explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system--from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.

Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker.

In this third episode, he talks to Wyatt Wells – author of Economist in an Uncertain World – Arthur F. Burns and The Federal Reserve, 1970–1978 (Columbia University Press, 1994). Burns has had a bad press - so bad that Chris Hughes, one of Facebook's founders, was moved to rehabilitate him. Leading the Fed from 1970 to 1978 when inflation averaged 9%, Burns was an accomplished business-cycle economist but also a politically partisan Chair intensely loyal to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Going far beyond his remit as a central banker, Burns oversaw government efforts to control prices and wages as an alternative to monetary policy.

“If you couple an incomes policy with a tight fiscal and monetary policy, it can work. The problem is that it often becomes an excuse for not doing that,” says Wells. “Burns found himself trapped in this position where he felt he couldn't raise interest rates without wrecking the controls programme and possibly his own career – his own position at the Fed. It's clear in ‘73, he knows interest rates need to go up. They're trying to raise them but he's got these political concessions and he's doing this sort of dance, trying to square the circle … And of course: ‘I'm the smartest guy in the room. Therefore, I should play a key role in this effort to balance everything’. I think there are very few Federal Reserve chairmen who have elbowed their way into other areas in the way that Burns did. Maybe none”.

An economic historian, Wyatt Wells has been Professor of History at Auburn University, Montgomery, since 1997.

A number of converts to Buddhism report paranormal experiences. Their accounts describe psychic abilities like clairvoyance and precognition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and encounters with other beings such as ghosts and deities, and they often interpret these events through a specifically Buddhist lens. Paranormal States: Psychic Abilities in Buddhist Convert Communities (Columbia UP, 2024) is a groundbreaking exploration of these phenomena and their implications for both humanistic and scientific study of the paranormal.

D. E. Osto examines accounts of paranormal phenomena experienced by convert Buddhists from around the world collected through an online survey and interviews, placing them in the context of Indian Buddhist sources and recent scientific research. They focus in detail on the life stories of two interviewees and the important role the paranormal has played in their lives. These contemporary first-person narratives demonstrate the continued importance of the psychic and paranormal within the Buddhist tradition, and they can be interpreted as a living Buddhist folklore. Osto considers the limitations of both traditional religious views and Western scientific studies of the paranormal and proposes instead a new Buddhist phenomenological approach. Ultimately, Paranormal States contends, these deeply mysterious and extraordinary experiences exceed current understandings--and they can help bridge the gap between religious and scientific worldviews.

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, they harness the longstanding practices and values of cooperatives: self-determination, democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and respect for the environment.

Bernard E. Harcourt develops a transformative theory and practice that builds on worldwide models of successful cooperation. He identifies the most promising forms of cooperative initiatives and then distills their lessons into an integrated framework: Coöperism. This is a political theory grounded on recognition of our interdependence. It is an economic theory that can ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, it is a social theory that replaces the punishment paradigm with a cooperation paradigm.

A creative work of normative critical theory, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023) provides a positive vision for addressing our most urgent challenges today. Harcourt shows that by drawing on the core values of cooperation and the power of people working together, a new world of cooperation democracy is within our grasp.

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. An editor of Michel Foucault’s work in French and English, Harcourt is the author of several books, including Critique and Praxis (Columbia, 2020). He is a social-justice litigator and the recipient of the 2019 Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Bar Association for his longtime representation of death row prisoners.

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.

The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024) is a fascinating study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. This book takes as its core subject matter six court cases from Qing China that involve people who moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth. Focusing on this movement, Matthew H. Sommer looks at the transgender paradigms and literary tropes through which gender-transing was understood, ultimately revealing how acts of gender-crossing and gender boundaries were perceived. This book is an effortless blend of social, legal, and cultural history, and it is filled with captivating legal cases involving forgery and impersonation, fox-spirit mediums, midwives, and those living on the margins of late imperial China. This is definitely a must-read for those interested in Chinese history and gender history, as well as any scholars who need inspiration for what can be done with interesting sources that don't quite fit in existing projects. 

To find out more about Matthew Sommer’s work, head to his website, or you can listen to his previous appearance on the New Books Network here.

After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act loosened discriminatory restrictions, people from Northeast Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and eventually China immigrated to the United States in large numbers. Highly skilled Asian immigrants flocked to professional-managerial occupations, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math. Asian American literature is now overwhelmingly defined by this generation’s children, who often struggled with parental and social expectations that they would pursue lucrative careers on their way to becoming writers.

In Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility (Columbia UP, 2024), Christopher T. Fan offers a new way to understand Asian American fiction through the lens of the class and race formations that shaped its authors both in the United States and in Northeast Asia. In readings of writers including Ted Chiang, Chang-rae Lee, Ken Liu, Ling Ma, Ruth Ozeki, Kathy Wang, and Charles Yu, he examines how Asian American fiction maps the immigrant narrative of intergenerational conflict onto the “two cultures” conflict between the arts and sciences. Fan argues that the self-consciousness found in these writers’ works is a legacy of Japanese and American modernization projects that emphasized technical and scientific skills in service of rapid industrialization. He considers Asian American writers’ attraction to science fiction, the figure of the engineer and notions of the “postracial,” modernization theory and time travel, and what happens when the dream of a stable professional identity encounters the realities of deprofessionalization and proletarianization. Through a transnational and historical-materialist approach, this groundbreaking book illuminates what makes texts and authors “Asian American.”

Christopher T. Fan is an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the Departments of English, Asian American Studies, and East Asian Studies. He is a cofounder and senior editor of Hyphen magazine.

How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or resist? Based on an original survey from Baghdad alongside key interviews in the field Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq (Columbia University Press, 2024) offers an insightful account of how Iraqis in different areas of the country responded to the rise and fall of the Islamic State.

Dr. Austin J. Knuppe argues that people adopt survival repertoires—a variety of social practices, tools, organized routines, symbols, and rhetorical strategies—to navigate wartime violence and detect threats. He traces how repertoires varied among different communities over the course of the conflict. In areas insulated from insurgent control, such as cosmopolitan Baghdad, local residents had the flexibility to support coalition forces while also voicing opposition to government policies. For Iraqis in rural communities confronting insurgent control, collaboration and resistance entailed significant risks. In Sunni-majority communities in the western desert, passive acquiescence and active cooperation temporarily insulated Iraqis from insurgent victimization. For ethnic and religious minorities in the north, however, flight or resistance proved the only viable options. In many communities, local residents mobilized neighborhood self-defense groups and militias loosely aligned with coalition forces once the tides turned against the Islamic State.

Beyond contributing to academic and policy debates about civilian protection during wartime, Surviving the Islamic State foregrounds everyday people’s experiences while modeling an ethical approach for conducting field research in conflict-affected communities.

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.

Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, Hannah Freed-Thall's Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (Columbia University Press, 2023) makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusive confluence of human and more-than-human forces, the seashore is also a space of performance--a stage for loosely scripted, improvisatory forms of embodiment and togetherness. The beach, Hannah Freed-Thall argues, was to the modernist imagination what mountains were to Romanticism: a space not merely of anthropogenic conquest but of vital elemental and creaturely connection. 

With an eye to the peripheries of capitalist leisure, Freed-Thall recasts familiar seaside practices--including tide-pooling, beachcombing, gambling, and sunbathing--as radical experiments in perception and sociability. Close readings of works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, Rachel Carson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, explore the modernist beach as a queer refuge, a precarious commons, a scene of collective exhaustion and endurance, and a visionary threshold at the end of the world. Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, Modernism at the Beach offers new ways of understanding twentieth-century literature and its relation to ecological thought.

About the guest: Hannah Freed-Thall is an Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU

About the host: Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. 

In an unsettling time in American history, the outbreak of right-wing violence is among the most disturbing developments. In recent years, attacks originating from the far right of American politics have targeted religious and ethnic minorities, with a series of antigovernment militants, religious extremists, and lone-wolf mass shooters inspired by right-wing ideologies. The need to understand the nature and danger of far-right violence is greater than ever.

In American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism by Arie Perliger (Columbia University Press, 2020), Arie Perliger provides a wide-ranging and rigorously researched overview of right-wing domestic terrorism. He analyzes its historical roots, characteristics, tactics, rhetoric, and organization, assessing the current and future trajectory of the use of violence by the far right. Perliger draws on a comprehensive dataset of more than 5,000 attacks and their perpetrators from 1990 through 2017 in order to explore key trends in American right-wing terrorism. He describes the entire ideological spectrum of the American far right, including today’s white supremacists, antigovernment groups, and antiabortion fundamentalists, as well as the histories of the KKK, skinheads, and neo-Nazis. Based on these findings, Perliger suggests counterterrorism policies that can respond effectively to the far-right threat. A groundbreaking examination of violence spawned from right-wing ideologies, American Zealots is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the transformation of domestic terrorism.

Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–79) were two of the great poets of nineteenth-century Japan. They practiced the art of traditional Sinitic poetry—works written in literary Sinitic, or classical Chinese, a language of enduring importance far beyond China’s borders. Together, they led itinerant lives, traveling around Japan teaching poetry and selling calligraphy. Seigan established Edo-period Japan’s largest poetry society and attained nationwide renown as a literary figure, as well as taking part in stealthy political activities in the years before the Meiji Restoration. Kōran was one of the most accomplished female composers of Sinitic poetry in Japanese history. After her husband’s death, she was arrested and imprisoned for six months as part of a crackdown on political reform. Seigan and Kōran’s works at once display mastery of a poetic tradition and depict Japan on the brink of monumental change.

The Same Moon Shines on All: The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran (Columbia UP, 2024) explores the world of Seigan and Kōran, pairing an in-depth account of their lives and times with an inviting selection of their poetry. The book features eminent Sinologist Jonathan Chaves’s translations of more than 130 poems by Seigan and more than 50 by Kōran, each annotated and followed by the original Chinese text. An introduction by Matthew Fraleigh, a specialist in Japan’s Sinitic literature, offers insight into the historical and literary context as well as the poems themselves. Approachable and delightful, this book makes the riches of Japanese Sinitic poetry available to a range of readers.

A new kind of city park has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Postindustrial parks transform the derelict remnants of an urban past into distinctive public spaces that meld repurposed infrastructure, wild-looking green space, and landscape architecture. For their proponents, they present an opportunity to turn disused areas into neighborhood anchors, with a host of environmental and community benefits. Yet there are clear economic motives as well—successful parks have helped generate billions of dollars of city tax revenues and real estate development.

In Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City (Columbia University Press, 2022) Dr. Kevin Loughran explores the High Line in New York, the Bloomingdale Trail/606 in Chicago, and Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston to offer a critical perspective on the rise of the postindustrial park. He reveals how elites deploy the popularity and seemingly benign nature of parks to achieve their cultural, political, and economic goals. As urban economies have become restructured around finance, real estate, tourism, and cultural consumption, parks serve as civic shields for elite-oriented investment. Tracing changing ideas about cities and nature and underscoring the centrality of race and class, Dr. Loughran argues that postindustrial parks aestheticize past disinvestment while serving as green engines of gentrification.

A wide-ranging investigation of the political, cultural, and economic forces shaping park development, Parks for Profit reveals the social inequalities at the heart of today’s new urban landscape.

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.

Welcome to another episode of New Books in Chinese Studies. Today, I will be talking to Columbia University professor Ying Qian about her new book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia UP, 2023). 

The volume enriches our understanding of media’s role in China’s revolutionary history by turning to documentary. Qian guides readers through early documentary practice, left- and right-wing Republican documentary, and documentary as it functioned in the socialist and early postsocialist periods. In reference to socialist documentary, she writes, “As the vanguard of cinema, documentary in the Mao era meant, in principle, to facilitate the dialectical relationship between the masses and the party, not only to aid in their mutual constitution, but also to facilitate a collective formation of knowledge and priorities to direct the unfolding of the revolution” (249). In our interview, we will discover how crucial this understudied genre has been in the 20th century and learn how the mutually constitutive dialectic between documentary form and revolution worked in practice.

The notion of beauty is inherently elusive: aesthetic judgments are at once subjective and felt to be universally valid. In Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890-1930 (Columbia UP, 2024), Anri Yasuda demonstrates that by exploring the often conflicting yet powerful pull of aesthetic sentiments, major authors of the late Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) periods illuminated themes and perspectives that resonated broadly in modern Japanese society. This approach presents an alternative to conventional accounts in which Japanese literature before the modernist turn of the 1920s has tended to be defined by an insular focus on subjective representation and autobiographical realism.

Yasuda investigates how Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ogai, Mushanokōji Saneatsu and his peers at Shirakaba magazine, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke sought to identify the aesthetic properties of literature through comparisons with the visual arts. They also considered the position of Japanese cultural sensibilities within the Eurocentric imperial world order. Their stories featuring painters and paintings weigh the fundamental challenge of representing anything when the conditions of knowledge are in flux, and their stories about cross-cultural encounters display both hope and ambivalence about the prospect of cosmopolitanism. Yasuda shows how thinking about beauty and art enabled these authors to surpass purely “literary” concerns. By tracing the wide-reaching significance of aesthetic affect in literary thought, Beauty Matters destabilizes received conceptions of literature’s parameters and affirms literature’s continued potential to intervene in cultural discourses in Japan and beyond.

Movements that take issue with conventional understandings of autism spectrum disorder, a developmental disability, have become increasingly visible. Drawing on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with participants, Dr. Catherine Tan investigates two autism-focused movements, shedding new light on how members contest expert authority. Examining their separate struggles to gain legitimacy and represent autistic people, she develops a new account of the importance of social movements as spaces for constructing knowledge that aims to challenge dominant frameworks.

Spaces on the Spectrum: How Autism Movements Resist Experts and Create Knowledge (Columbia University Press, 2024) examines the autistic rights and alternative biomedical movements, which reimagine autism in different and conflicting ways: as a difference to be accepted or as a sickness to treat. Both, however, provide a window into how ideas that conflict with dominant beliefs develop, take hold, and persist. The autistic rights movement is composed primarily of autistic adults who contend that autism is a natural human variation, not a disorder, and advocate for social and cultural inclusion and policy changes. The alternative biomedical movement, in contrast, is dominated by parents and practitioners who believe in the disproven idea that vaccines trigger autism and seek to reverse it with scientifically unsupported treatments. Both movements position themselves in opposition to researchers, professionals, and parents outside their communities. Spaces on the Spectrum offers timely insights into the roles of shared identity and communal networks in movements that question scientific and medical authority.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic left millions grieving their loved ones without the consolation of traditional ways of mourning. Patients were admitted to hospitals and never seen again. Social distancing often meant conventional funerals could not be held. Religious communities of all kinds were disrupted at the exact moment mourners turned to them for support. These unprecedented circumstances caused dramatic transformations of not only communal rituals but also how people make meaning after the losses of loved ones.

Shattered Grief: How the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America (Columbia UP, 2024) is an intimate portrait of how COVID-19 changed the ways Americans approach, understand, and mourn death. Based on extensive interviews incorporating a multitude of perspectives—including funerary and medical professionals, religious leaders, grief counselors, death doulas, spirit mediums, community organizers, and those who lost loved ones—it provides a snapshot of how people renegotiated spiritual and religious traditions, worldviews, identities, and communities during the deadliest pandemic in a century. Through these diverse and powerful voices, Natasha L. Mikles tells the story of spiritual innovation, religious change, and the struggle to achieve personal and national self-understanding against the backdrop of mass casualties. Compelling and accessible, Shattered Grief is an essential book for a range of readers interested in how we make sense of death and dying.

Natasha L. Mikles is an assistant professor at Texas State University. Her research interests revolve around lived interpretations of death, mourning, and the afterlife in diverse religious traditions ranging from contemporary American spirituality to nineteenth-century Tibetan Buddhism. She has written on topics like the Tibetan Gesar epics, contemporary Tibetan religion, spiritual mediums during the pandemic, and pedagogical reflections on teaching religion. She is also the editor of Journal of Gods and Monsters, and the co-editor of The Religion Matters Reader.

Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between mediaeval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today?

Considering these questions and many more, Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism (Columbia University Press, 2024) by Dr. Jonathan Judaken is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Dr. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment.

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.

Around the turn of the millennium, Pentecostal churches began to pepper majority-Buddhist Sri Lanka, setting off a sense of alarm among Buddhists who saw Christianity as a neocolonial threat to the nation. Rumors of foul play in the death of a Buddhist monk, as well as allegations of proselytizing in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and during the final stages of civil war, spurred nationalist anxieties, moral panics, and even episodes of violence by Buddhists against Christians suspected of facilitating “unethical” conversions.

Through vivid ethnography and keen observations of media events, Karma and Grace: Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka (Columbia UP, 2023) illuminates disputes over religious freedom and pluralism amid the rise of charismatic Christianity in Sri Lanka. Neena Mahadev explores the dueling efforts of Buddhist nationalists and Christian evangelists to reshape Sri Lanka’s religious, economic, and political landscapes. She considers theological and political impasses between Buddhism’s vast timescales of karma and Christians’ promises of the immediacy of their God’s salvific grace. While Christian missions spread “the Good News,” subsets of Buddhists produced bad press, sting operations, and disparaging media to impede born-again churches from taking root. In gripping detail, Mahadev recounts how modernist and traditionalist Theravāda Buddhists, Pentecostal newcomers, long-established Christian denominations, local deity and spirit cults, and the innovations of mavericks intermingle in a multireligious public sphere. Even amid trenchant conflicts, Karma and Grace demonstrates that social proximity between rivals is also conducive to religious experimentation and the ambiguities of identity that allow Sri Lankans to live with difference.

Neena Mahadev is an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale-NUS College and holds a courtesy appointment with the National University of Singapore.

Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux?

Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, Amanda McMillan Lequieu traces the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places. Building from on-the-ground observations of community life, archival research, and interviews with long-term residents, she shows how inhabitants of deindustrialized communities balance material constraints with deeply felt identities. McMillan Lequieu maps how the concept of home has been constructed and the ways it has been reshaped as these communities have changed. She considers how long-term residents navigate the tensions around belonging and making ends meet long after the departure of their community’s founding industry.

In Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt (Columbia UP, 2024), Amanda McMillan Lequieu links the past and the present, rural and urban, to shed new light on life in postindustrial communities. Beyond a story of Midwestern deindustrialization, this timely book provides broader insight into the capacious idea of home—how and where it is made, threatened, and renegotiated in a world fraught with change.

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 [email protected].

On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks and court astronomers recorded the appearance of these dark shapes, interpreting them as omens of things to come. In Western Europe, by contrast, where a cosmology originating with Aristotle prevailed, the Sun was regarded as part of the unchanging celestial realm, and it took observations through telescopes by Galileo and others to establish the reality of solar imperfections. In the nineteenth century, amateur astronomers discovered that sunspots ebb and flow about every eleven years—spurring speculation about their influence on the weather and even the stock market.

Exploring these and many other crucial developments, Pierre Sokolsky provides a history of knowledge of the Sun through the lens of sunspots and the solar cycle. He ranges widely across cultures and throughout history, from the earliest recorded observations of sunspots in Chinese annals to satellites orbiting the Sun today, and from worship of the Sun as a deity in ancient times to present-day scientific understandings of stars and their magnetic fields. Considering how various thinkers sought to solve the puzzle of sunspots, Sokolsky sheds new light on key discoveries and the people who made them, as well as their historical and cultural contexts. Fast-paced, comprehensive, and learned, Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star (Columbia UP, 2024) shows readers our closest star from many new angles.

Garima Garg is a New Delhi based journalist and author.

In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sally Kassab, Walid Khalidi, and Rasha Salam, some of whom would go on to become acclaimed authors, scholars, and critics—came together across religious lines in a fleeting moment of possibility within a troubled history. What brought these Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends together, and what became of them in the aftermath of 1948, the year of the creation of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba?

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi tells the story of this unlikely friendship and in so doing offers an intimate cultural and social history of Palestine in the critical postwar period. She vividly reconstructs the vanished social world of these protagonists, tracing the connections between the specificity of individual lives and the larger contexts in which they are embedded. In exploring this ecumenical friendship and its artistic, literary, and intellectual legacies, Mejcher-Atassi demonstrates how social biography can provide a picture of the past that is at once more inclusive and more personal. This group portrait, she argues, allows us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine. Bringing a remarkable era to life through archival research and nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948 (Columbia UP, 2024) unearths prospects for historical reconciliation, solidarity, and justice.

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of Reading Across Modern Arabic Literature and Art (2012), as well as coeditor of The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous: A Critical Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual (2021), Rafa Nasiri: Artist Books (2016), and Archives, Museums, and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (2012).

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Trish Kahle, Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University-Qatar, about Kahle's new project, "Power Up: A Social History of American Electricity," which focuses especially on the labor history of both constructing and maintaining the electricity grid. They also talk about Kahle's forthcoming book, Energy Citizenship: Coal and Democracy in the American Century (Columbia UP, 2024), which "traces how modern U.S. social citizenship has been shaped by coal miners and the fuel they extracted." The pair also discuss the emerging field of the "energy humanities" and what it means to take a labor-centered approach to energy history.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, the most common job for women in the United States was clerical work. Even as college-educated women obtained greater opportunities for career advancement, occupational segregation by gender remained entrenched. How did feminism in corporate America come to represent the individual success of the executive woman and not the collective success of the secretary?

Allison Elias argues that feminist goals of advancing equal opportunity and promoting meritocracy unintentionally undercut the status and prospects of so-called "pink-collar" workers. In the 1960s, ideas about sex equality spurred some clerical workers to organize, demanding "raises and respect," while others pushed for professionalization through credentialing. This cross-class alliance pushed a feminist agenda that included unionizing some clerical workers and advancing others who had college degrees into management. But these efforts diverged in the 1980s, when corporations adopted measures to move qualified women into their upper ranks. By the 1990s, corporate support for professional women resulted in an individualistic feminism that focused on the needs of those at the top. Meanwhile, as many white, college-educated women advanced up the corporate ladder, clerical work became a job for lower-socioeconomic-status women of all races.

The Rise of Corporate Feminism: Women in the American Office, 1960-1990 (Columbia UP, 2022) considers changes in the workplace surrounding affirmative action, human resource management, automation, and unionization by groups such as 9to5. At the intersection of history, gender, and management studies, this book spotlights the secretaries, clerks, receptionists, typists, and bookkeepers whose career trajectories remained remarkably similar despite sweeping social and legal change.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

Marxism and psychoanalysis have a rich and complicated relationship to one another, with countless figures and books written on the possible intersection of the two. Our guest today, Adrian Johnston, returns to NBN to discuss his own latest entry into the genre, Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital (Columbia UP, 2024). While the book does retread some already-covered territory, Johnston’s book stands out as a unique entry in a crowded field by emphasizing the theoretical overlap of psychoanalytic concepts with the economic core of Marx’s thinking. Libidinal economics are turned into, well, economics and vice-versa in this detailed and rigorously written study that deserves to become one of the canonical texts in the Freudo-Marxist tradition.

Adrian Johnston is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and a faculty member of the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of numerous books, including three previously discussed on this podcast; A New German Idealism: Hegel, Zizek and Dialectical Materialism, and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism volumes one and two. He is also the coeditor, with Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan of the book series Diaeresis.

Is involuntary psychiatric treatment the solution to the intertwined crises of untreated mental illness, homelessness, and addiction? In recent years, politicians and advocates have sought to expand the use of conservatorships, a legal tool used to force someone deemed “gravely disabled,” or unable to meet their needs for food, clothing, or shelter as a result of mental illness, to take medication and be placed in a locked facility. At the same time, civil liberties and disability rights groups have seized on cases like that of Britney Spears to argue that conservatorships are inherently abusive.

Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia UP, 2023) is an incisive and compelling portrait of the functioning—and failings—of California’s conservatorship system. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with professionals, policy makers, families, and conservatees, Alex V. Barnard takes readers to the streets where police encounter homeless people in crisis, the locked wards where people receiving treatment are confined, and the courtrooms where judges decide on conservatorship petitions. As he shows, California’s state government has abdicated authority over this system, leaving the question of who receives compassionate care and who faces coercion dependent on the financial incentives of for-profit facilities, the constraints of underresourced clinicians, and the desperate struggles of families to obtain treatment for their loved ones.

This book offers a timely warning: reforms to expand conservatorship will lead to more coercion but little transformative care until government assumes accountability for ensuring the health and dignity of its most vulnerable citizens.

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 [email protected].

Women working in the sciences face obstacles at virtually every step along their career paths. From subtle slights to blatant biases, deep systemic problems block women from advancing or push them out of science and technology entirely.

Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity (Columbia UP, 2023) examines solutions to this persistent gender gap, offering new perspectives on how to make science more equitable and inclusive for all. This book shares stories and insights of women from a range of backgrounds working in various disciplines, illustrating the journeys that brought them to the sciences, the challenges they faced along the way, and the important contributions they have made to their fields. Lisa M. P. Munoz combines these narratives with a wealth of data to illuminate the size and scope of the challenges women scientists face, while highlighting research-based solutions to help overcome these obstacles. She presents groundbreaking studies in social psychology and organizational behavior that are informing novel approaches for combating historic and ongoing inequities.

Through a combined focus on personal experiences and social-science research, this timely book provides both a path toward greater gender equity and an inspiring vision of science and scientists.

At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024) takes readers on a journey from California tidepools to Antarctic poles, showcasing myriad efforts to research and protect marine environments. Through insightful interviews, oceanographer Tessa Hill and science journalist Eric Simons offer a compelling exploration of humanity's relationship with the ocean. They shed light on research methodologies, the ocean's importance, and the vital role of indigenous peoples in ocean stewardship. 

Tune in to their interview with the New Books Network, where they share stories from how the research came together, how COVID affected their investigation, and what people can do today to build closer relationships with the ocean.

Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.

In Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2024) Dr. Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and centre. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a full-colour journey into the contemporary underworld—and offers a surprising vision of salvation.

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.

What roles did Americans play in the expanding global empires of the nineteenth century? In The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society (Columbia University Press, 2024), Thomas M. Larkin examines the Hong Kong–based Augustine Heard & Company, the most prominent American trading firm in treaty-port China, to explore the ways American elites at once made and were made by British colonial society. Following the Heard brothers throughout their firm’s rise and decline, The China Firm reveals how nineteenth-century China’s American elite adapted to colonial culture, helped entrench social and racial hierarchies, and exploited the British imperial project for their own profit as they became increasingly invested in its political affairs and commercial networks.

Through the central narrative of Augustine Heard & Co., Larkin disentangles the ties that bound the United States to China and the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a vast range of archival material from Hong Kong, China, Boston, and London, he weaves the local and the global together to trace how Americans gained acceptance into and contributed to the making of colonial societies and world-spanning empires. Uncovering the transimperial lives of these American traders and the complex ways extraimperial communities interacted with British colonialism, The China Firm makes a vital contribution to global histories of nineteenth-century Asia and provides an alternative narrative of British empire.

Thomas Larkin in Assistant Professor of History at the University of Prince Edward Island. Twitter. Website.

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

John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916) transformed how people around the world view the purposes of schooling. This new edition makes Dewey's ideas come alive for a new generation of readers.

Nicholas Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University. He is the author of Teaching Political Theory: A Pluralistic Approach (2022) and Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (2018).  

Max Jacobs is a PhD student in education at Rutgers University. He currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society.

The scientific method that aspiring social scientists are taught in graduate school seems pretty straightforward: you start with a hypothesis, figure our how you’re going to operationalize and measure your variables, pick cases that provide a tough test of your hypothesis, then collect your data, analyze it, and report your findings. However, for comparative-historical social scientists, things are rarely so cut-and-dried: it takes a lot of ‘soaking and poking’ before you can answer relatively straightforward questions like “what is this a case of?” and “what is your dependent variable?”

Moreover, the entire idea of trying to impose a template developed for experimental studies on comparative and historical data by arbitrarily slicing an integrated reality up into variables and trying to isolate one-directional causal effects doesn’t seem appropriate for the dynamism and complexity of social reality.

Today, I’m talking to the Nicholas Hoover Wilson and Damon Mayrl, the editors of a new edited volume that charts a different path. The contributors to After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology (Columbia UP, 2024) provide new ways of thinking about the purposes of comparison in historical social science, what the ‘units’ of historical analysis are, and how historically-oriented social scientists should go about conducting comparisons.

Nicholas Wilson is an associate professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, and the author of Modernity’s Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India (Columbia 2023). Damon Mayrl is associate professor of sociology at Colby College, and the author of Secular Conversions: Political Institutions and Religious Education in the United States and Australia, 1800-2000.

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history.

In Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia UP, 2024), Laura E. Helton tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Drawing on overlooked sources such as book lists and card catalogs, she reveals the risks collectors took to create Black archives. This book also explores the social life of collecting, highlighting the communities that used these collections from the South Side of Chicago to Roanoke, Virginia. In each case, Helton argues, archiving was alive in the present, a site of intellectual experiment, creative abundance, and political possibility. Offering new ways to understand Black intellectual and literary history, Scattered and Fugitive Things reveals Black collecting as a radical critical tradition that reimagines past, present, and future.

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.

Lahore's Hall Road is the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the center of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specializes in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road's traders, conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom large. To reconcile their secular trade with their responsibilities as devoted Muslims, they often look to adjudicate the good or bad moral "atmosphere" (mahaul) that can cling to film and media.

In Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace (Columbia UP, 2024),Timothy P. A. Cooper examines the diverse and coexisting moral atmospheres that surround media in Pakistan, tracing public understandings of ethical life and showing how they influence economic behavior. Drawing on extensive ethnographic work among traders, consumers, collectors, archivists, cinephiles, and cinephobes, Moral Atmospheres explores varied views on what the relationship between film and faith should look, sound, and feel like for Pakistan's Muslim-majority public. Cooper considers the preservation and censorship of film in and outside of the state bureaucracy, contestations surrounding heritage and urban infrastructure, and the production and circulation of sound and video recordings among the country's religious minorities. He argues that a focus on atmosphere provides ways of seeing moral thresholds as mutable and affective, rather than as fixed ethical standpoints. At once a vivid ethnography of a market street and a generative theorization of atmosphere, this book offers fresh perspectives on moral experience and the relationship between religion and media.

During the Republican period (1912–1949) and after, many Chinese Buddhists sought inspiration from non-Chinese Buddhist traditions, showing a particular interest in esoteric teachings. What made these Buddhists dissatisfied with Chinese Buddhism, and what did they think other Buddhist traditions could offer? Which elements did they choose to follow, and which ones did they disregard? And how do their experiences recast the wider story of twentieth-century pan-Asian Buddhist reform movements?

Based on a wide range of previously unexplored Chinese sources, Esoteric Buddhism in China: Engaging Japanese and Tibetan Traditions, 1912–1949 (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how esoteric Buddhist traditions have shaped the Chinese religious landscape. Wei Wu examines cross-cultural religious transmission of ideas from Japanese and Tibetan traditions, considering the various esoteric currents within Chinese Buddhist communities and how Chinese individuals and groups engaged with newly translated ideas and practices. She argues that Chinese Buddhists’ assimilation of doctrinal, ritual, and institutional elements of Tibetan and Japanese esoteric Buddhism was not a simple replication but an active process of creating new meanings. Their visions of Buddhism in the modern world, as well as early twentieth-century discourses of nation building and religious reform, shaped the reception of esoteric traditions. By analyzing the Chinese interpretation and strategic adaptations of esoteric Buddhism, this book sheds new light on the intellectual development, ritual performances, and institutional formations of Chinese Buddhism in the twentieth century.

To understand the broader forces that shaped the debates about esoteric Buddhism in modern China, please also check Wu Wei's article, "Buddhism and Superstition: Buddhist Apologetics in the Anti-Superstition Campaigns in Modern China," which is open access and can be found here.

Today’s book is: At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia UP, 2024), by Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, which takes readers beneath the waves and along the coasts, to explore how climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. The world’s oceans are changing at a drastic pace. In response, the people who know the ocean most intimately are taking action for the sake of our shared future. Community scientists track species in California tidepools. Researchers dive into the waters around Sydney to replant kelp forests. Scientists and First Nations communities collaborate to restore clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest. In At Every Depth, the oceanographer Dr. Tessa Hill and the science journalist Eric Simons profile these and other efforts to understand and protect marine environments, taking readers to habitats from shallow tidepools to the deep sea. By sharing the stories of scientists, coastal community members, Indigenous people, shellfish farmers, and fisheries workers, At Every Depth brings together varied viewpoints, showing how scientists’ research and local and Indigenous knowledge can all complement each other to inform a more sustainable future.

Our guest is: Dr. Tessa Hill, who is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at the University of California, Davis. She teaches and researches oceanography and climate change. She is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she was awarded the Rachel Carson Lecture by the American Geophysical Union.

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 what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also enjoy these episodes with women in science:

• Climate Change Explained
• Women in Shark Sciences
• This conversation with Dr. Ware about dragonflies
• The surprising world of wasps
• When Dr. Martin was considering whether to stay or drop out

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world.

The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2023) explores how an incredible group of Black women writers, including Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and writers and intellectuals convened an informal group called “The Sisterhood” and how they transformed American writing and cultural and educational institutions in the decades that followed. Thorsson traces the personal, professional, and political connections that led to the group’s emergence and explores the remarkable legacy. While focusing on the organizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women’s writing, The Sisterhood provides an impactful model of Black feminist collaboration.

How are notions of justice and equality constructed in Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)? How are Islamic virtue ethics gendered, despite their venture into perennial concerns of how best to live a good and ethical life? These are the questions that Zahra Ayubi, an assistant professor of religion at Dartmouth college, examines in her new book Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). Using akhlaq literature by al-Ghazali, Davani and Tusi, Ayubi closely studies the ways in which these male Muslim scholars constructed ideas of the self (nafs), particularly in relation to the family and the society. Despite the ethicists’ differing sectarian and theological orientations in Islam, they still concluded that the status of a perfect ethical human was only achievable by a male elite. Meaning that the capacity to utilize rational faculty, which is central to self-refinement, was deemed not accessible to females, slaves, and non-elite males. In unpacking these gendered and hierarchical dynamics around ethics and comportment, Aybui masterfully applies feminist and gender analysis to deconstruct ethical texts. In light of her findings, she calls for a “philosophical turn” that must employ critical gender analysis when reading these texts not only in the context of Islamic philosophy, but broadly in the study of Islam. The book is a must read for scholars and students interested in Islamic philosophy and gender and Islamic studies.

M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism(Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found on here and here. She may be reached at [email protected].

The #MeToo movement inspired millions to testify to the widespread experience of sexual violence. More broadly, it shifted the deeply ingrained response to women’s accounts of sexual violence from doubting all of them to believing some of them. What changed?

In The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (Columbia UP, 2023), Leigh Gilmore provides a new account of #MeToo that reveals how storytelling by survivors propelled the call for sexual justice beyond courts and high-profile cases. At a time when the cultural conversation was fixated on appeals to legal and bureaucratic systems, narrative activism— storytelling in the service of social change—elevated survivors as authorities. Their testimony fused credibility and accountability into the #MeToo effect: uniting millions of separate accounts into an existential demand for sexual justice and the right to be heard.

Gilmore reframes #MeToo as a breakthrough moment within a longer history of feminist thought and activism. She analyzes the centrality of autobiographical storytelling in intersectional and antirape activism and traces how literary representations of sexual violence dating from antiquity intertwine with cultural notions of doubt, obligation, and agency. By focusing on the intersectional prehistory of #MeToo, Gilmore sheds light on how survivors have used narrative to frame sexual violence as an urgent problem requiring structural solutions in diverse global contexts. Considering the roles of literature and literary criticism in movements for social change, The #MeToo Effect demonstrates how “reading like a survivor” provides resources for activism.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1

Journalists have a long history of covering race and racism in the United States, telling stories that shed light on protest, activism, institutional turmoil, and policy change. Especially in recent years, though, the racial politics of journalism has very often become the story itself. Newsrooms across the country have had to grapple with big questions about diversity, inclusion, power, and professional standards in the media industry. What have these debates looked like up close? In what ways have newsrooms evolved? And what does this all mean for the stories we tell about our communities, our country, and the world at large? 

In Antiracist Journalism: The Challenge of Creating Equitable Local News (Columbia UP, 2023), Andrea Wenzel provides a critical look at how local media organizations in the Philadelphia area are attempting to address structural racism. She focuses on two established, majority-white newsrooms, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the public radio station WHYY, and two start-ups where at least half the staff identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC), Resolve Philly and Kensington Voice. Drawing on more than five years of field research, Wenzel charts how these outlets have pursued a range of interventions—such as tracking the diversity of sources, examining reporting and editing practices, and working with community members to gain input—to varying degrees of success. Wenzel argues that institutional and systemic transformation will be possible only through the establishment of structures that facilitate holding those with more power responsible for listening to and addressing the needs and concerns of those with less.

Andrea Wenzel is an associate professor in Temple University’s Department of Journalism and a member of the Klein College of Media and Communication graduate faculty. Her research focuses on initiatives to create more connected and equitable communities and newsrooms. She is the author of Community-Centered Journalism: Engaging People, Exploring Solutions, and Building Trust (University of Illinois Press, 2020) and of Antiracist Journalism: The Challenge of Creating Equitable Local News (Columbia University Press, 2024). Prior to academia, Andrea worked for 15 years as a public radio producer, editor, and media development consultant. She managed projects and trained media makers in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq and India for media development organizations such as BBC Media

Garrett Broad is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in Rowan University’s Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, where he also serves as Provost’s Fellow in the Catalysts for Sustainability Initiative. His research and teaching explores the connections between contemporary social movements, food systems, and digital media technology. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals.

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023) explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness.

Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies.

By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.

Robin Visser is professor and associate chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (2010).

Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

Adam Kabat’s The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan (Columbia UP, 2023) is an in-depth introduction to the rich and ribald world of kibyōshi, a short-lived (1778-1807) subgenre of books combining text and illustration on the same page, much like comic books and manga today. This book presents a selection of five kibyōshi in which monsters play central roles. Each of these short books is reproduced in its entirety, accompanied by Kabat’s translations and commentary. Kabat’s selection of tales communicates the entertainment value and thematic variety of these stories, as well as their deep web of interconnections with contemporary culture and the urban economy. The book will be of interest not only to scholars of premodern history and literature, but also to a larger audience including the growing ranks of manga and anime fans.

Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?

In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorised and demonised, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomised the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression.

Dr. Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.

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.

Friendship—particularly interreligious friendship—offers both promise and peril. After the end of Muslim political sovereignty in South Asia, how did Muslim scholars grapple with the possibilities and dangers of Hindu-Muslim friendship? How did they negotiate the incongruities between foundational texts and attitudes toward non-Muslims that were informed by the premodern context of Muslim empire and the realities of British colonialism, which rendered South Asian Muslims a political minority? 

In Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023), SherAli Tareen, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, explores how leading South Asian Muslim thinkers imagined and contested the boundaries of Hindu-Muslim friendship from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. He argues that often what was at stake in Muslim scholarly debates on Hindu-Muslim friendship were unresolved tensions over the meaning of Islam in the modern world. Tareen’s framework also provides a timely perspective on the historical roots of present-day Hindu-Muslim relations, considering how to overcome thorny legacies and open new horizons for interreligious friendship. In our conversation we discussed Muslim scholarly translations of Hinduism, Hindu-Muslim theological polemics, intra-Muslim debates on cow sacrifice, and debates on emulating Hindu customs and habits.

The American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Paeth shows how the state has been the silent centre of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. It is also a history of how these state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War.

Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Dr. Paeth describes the interactions of federal bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with literary organisations and with private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly. The consolidation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of state verse culture, recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, which followed Robert Frost’s “Mission to Moscow,” and which became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The American Poet Laureate contributes to a growing body of institutional and sociological approaches to U.S. literary production in the postwar era and demonstrates how poetry has played a uniquely important, and largely underacknowledged, role in the cultural front of the Cold War.

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.

Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020. 

Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York (Columbia UP, 2024) explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call “topside.” He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams’s distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community.

“The things that are happening to North Korea are happening to all of us…they are part of the human community. To say that this is just a problem for North Korea is to say that North Koreans are not part of the human community.” In her new book, Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record (Columbia University Press, 2019), Sandra Fahy gives a thorough and compelling analysis of testimonies and reports on North Korea. Fahy explores the United Nation’s report as well as North Korea’s response to the report. The book also tackles issues of famine and hunger, information control, movement within the country and outside it, in addition to other pertinent issues. The book is full of detailed reporting on the issues but is still written in an accessible way in order to help readers understand more about North Korea and its people.

Sarah E. Patterson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.

During presidential campaigns, candidates crisscross the country nonstop—visiting swing states, their home turf, and enemy territory. But do all those campaign visits make a difference when Election Day comes? If so, how and under what conditions? Do they mobilise the partisan faithful or persuade undecided voters? What do campaigns try to achieve through campaign visits—and when do they succeed?

I’m Here to Ask for Your Vote: How Presidential Campaign Visits Influence Voters (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Christopher J. Devine is a comprehensive and compelling examination of the strategy and effectiveness of presidential campaign visits. Dr. Devine uses an original database of presidential and vice-presidential campaign visits from 2008 through 2020 to estimate the effects of visits on vote choice and turnout, both among individual voters and within counties. He finds that campaign visits do not usually influence voting behaviour, but when they do, most often it is by persuading undecided voters—as was the case for John McCain in 2008 and even Donald Trump in 2020. Challenging the recent emphasis on candidates playing to their base, this book suggests that persuasion is still a viable campaign strategy, in which candidate visits may play a major role.

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.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of folk culture as efforts to reclaim an authentic past. Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators’ relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations and experiments in self-invention that reach beyond the local to the world.

Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean (Columbia UP, 2023) explores how Black writers and performers reimagined folk forms through the lens of the unruly―that which cannot be easily governed, disciplined, or managed. Drawing on a transnational and multilingual archive―from Harlem to Havana, from the Panama Canal Zone to Port-au-Prince―Owens considers the short stories of Eric Walrond and Jean Toomer; the ethnographies of Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Price-Mars; the recited poetry of Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Eusebia Cosme; and the essays, dance work, and radio plays of Sylvia Wynter. Owens shows how these figures depict folk culture―and Blackness itself―as a site of disruption, ambiguity, and flux. Their works reveal how Black people contribute to the stirrings of modernity while being excluded from its promises. Ultimately, these works do not seek to render folk culture more knowable or worthy of assimilation, but instead provide new forms of radical world-making.

Omari Averette-Phillips is a doctoral student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at [email protected].

In 1864, on a midsummer’s day, Kawai Koume, a 60-year old matriarch of a samurai family in Wakayama, makes a note in her diary, which she had dutifully written in for over three decades.

There are reports of armed clashes in Kyoto. It’s said that the emperor has ordered the expulsion of the foreigners, and it’s also said that a large band of vagabond soldiers has gathered in Senju in Edo. It’s said that in Edo people are wearing their [winter] kimono linings, and in Nikko it has been snowing. I don’t know if it’s true. But really, every day we hear nothing but disturbing rumors.

The Meiji Restoration, which ousts the shogun and restores the emperor’s power, happens four years later.

Koume’s diary is the central document in Simon Partner’s latest book Koume’s World: The Life and Work of a Samurai Woman Before and After the Meiji Restoration (Columbia University Press, 2023)

In this interview, Simon and I talk about Kawai Koume, her diary, and everything she witnessed in the decades covered by her journal.

Simon Partner is professor of history at Duke University. He is the author of three previous books that chronicle modern Japanese history through the lives of ordinary people such as farmers, shopkeepers, and housewives, including most recently The Merchant’s Tale: Yokohama and the Transformation of Japan (Columbia University Press: 2018).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Koume’s World. 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.

An Interview with Todd McGowan about his recent Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2019). The book advocates for the relevance of Hegel’s dialectical method to questions of contemporary theory and politics. It seeks to disabuse readers of common misapprehensions concerning Hegel’s philosophy, such as the familiar thesis-antithesis-synthesis schema to which the dialectic has so often been reduced, and to show that the concept of contradiction understood in Hegelian fashion is intrinsically subversive of authority. By championing contradiction over ‘difference’ it defies the rhetoric of much leftist theory as it has been formulated in the wake of so-called ‘post-structuralism’. Emancipation After Hegel also combines sophisticated discussion of matters like the limits of formal logic and the history of German Idealism with playful allusions to Star Trek characters and classic films like Casablanca and Bridge on the River Kwai.

Bill Schaffer is a semi-retired academic and writer. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney and held positions teaching Film Studies, Philosophy, and Literature at campuses in Australia and the UK. He has published widely in Film and Animation Studies. He is currently a scholar of No Fixed Institution.

Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. In the international literary space, which privileges the West, Malaysia is considered remote. The institutions of modern Chinese literature favor mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Within Malaysia, only texts in Malay, the national language, are considered national literature by the state. However, Mahua authors have produced creative and thought-provoking works that have won growing critical recognition, showing Malaysia to be a laboratory for imaginative Chinese writing.

Highlighting Mahua literature’s distinctive mode of evolution, Cheow Thia Chan demonstrates that authors’ grasp of their marginality in the world-Chinese literary space has been the impetus for—rather than a barrier to—aesthetic inventiveness. He foregrounds the historical links between Malaysia and other Chinese-speaking regions, tracing how Mahua writers engage in the “worlding” of modern Chinese literature by navigating interconnected literary spaces. Focusing on writers including Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, whose works craft signature literary languages, Chan examines narrative representations of multilingual social realities and authorial reflections on colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia as valid literary terrain. Delineating the inter-Asian “crossings” of Mahua literary production—physical journeys, interactions among social groups, and mindset shifts—from the 1930s to the 2000s, he contends that new perspectives from the periphery are essential to understanding the globalization of modern Chinese literature. By emphasizing the inner diversities and connected histories in the margins, Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature (Columbia UP, 2022) offers a powerful argument for remapping global Chinese literature and world literature.

Cheow Thia Chan is assistant professor of Chinese studies at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, Singapore and Malaysian Chinese Literature, Southeast Asian Chinese Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Urban Studies.

Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

What makes a person want to become a terrorist? Who becomes involved in terrorism, and why? In what ways does participating in violent extremism change someone? And how can people become deradicalized?

John Horgan―one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of terrorism―takes readers on a globe-spanning journey into the terrorist mindset. Drawing on groundbreaking personal interviews as well as decades of research from psychologists and others, he traces the pathways that lead people into violent extremism and explores what happens to them as their involvement deepens. Horgan provides an up-to-date, evidence-based understanding of the patterns, motives, and mentalities of violent extremists from the Islamic State and al-Shabaab to white supremacists and incels. He argues that there is not a straightforward psychological profile of a terrorist, in part because of the great variety of today’s extremists, who are able to attract a more diverse pool of recruits than ever before. But even though there is no one-size-fits-all profile, psychological study can provide crucial insight into why and how people become terrorists.

Accessible and nuanced, Terrorist Minds: The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al-Qaeda to the Far Right (Columbia UP, 2023) is an essential book for readers interested in what psychology can explain about extremist behavior.

On mainstream social media platforms, far-right women make extremism relatable. They share Instagram stories about organic foods that help pregnant women propagate the “pure” white race and post behind-the-scenes selfies at antivaccination rallies. These social media personalities model a feminine lifestyle, at once promoting their personal brands and radicalizing their followers. Amid discussions of issues like dating, marriage, and family life, they call on women to become housewives to counteract the corrosive effects of feminism and champion the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which motivated massacres in Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo.

Eviane Leidig offers an in-depth look into the world of far-right women influencers, exploring the digital lives they cultivate as they seek new recruits for white nationalism. Going beyond stereotypes of the typical male white supremacist, she uncovers how young, attractive women are playing key roles as propagandists, organizers, fundraisers, and entrepreneurs. Leidig argues that far-right women are marketing themselves as authentic and accessible in order to reach new followers and spread a hateful ideology. This insidious—and highly gendered—strategy takes advantage of the structure of social media platforms, where far-right women influencers’ content is shared with and promoted to mainstream audiences. Providing much-needed expertise on gender and the far right, this timely and accessible book also details online and offline approaches to countering extremism.

Rameen Mohammed is a community organizer based in Texas, a fellow for Muslim Counterpublics Lab and a soon-to-be law student.

Listen to this interview of Natalie Aviles, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia. We talk about how organizations shape people, and how people shape science.

Natalie Aviles : "I think, in general, the more self-conscious that scientists can be about what motivates them, about what makes them happy, about what drives them — the more, then, they can try to imagine a future that satisfies not only their intellectual curiosity but helps them navigate, too, the very sort of prosaic conditions that they find themselves in on a day-to-day basis."

Works referred to in the interview:

• Natalie Aviles. An Ungovernable Foe: Science and Policy Innovation in the U.S. National Cancer Institute (Columbia University Press 2023)
• Natalie Aviles. "Environing innovation: Toward an ecological pragmatism of scientific practice." (Sociological Perspectives 2023)
• Robin Scheffler and Natalie Aviles. "State planning, cancer vaccine infrastructure, and the origins of the oncogene theory." (Social Studies of Science 2022)
• Natalie Aviles. "Scientific innovation as environed social learning." (In: Inquiry, Agency, and Democracy. Edited by Gross, Reed, and Winship. Columbia University Press 2022)
• Natalie Aviles. "Situated practice and the emergence of ethical research." (Science, Technology, & Human Values 2018)

Angel Park is a Mormon fundamentalist polygamous community where plural marriages between one man and multiple women are common. Based on many years of in-depth ethnographic research, in Illicit Monogamy: Inside a Fundamentalist Mormon Community (Columbia UP, 2023), William Jankowiak considers the plural family from the points of view of husbands, wives, and children, giving a balanced account of its complications and conflicts. Through an extensive case study, the book not only gives the readers a real feeling for the society, but also invites us to rethink something essential about being human.

William R. Jankowiak is professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of Sex, Death, and Hierarchy in a Chinese City: An Anthropological Account (1993) as well as the editor of Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (1995) and Intimacies: Love and Sex Across Cultures (2008), among other books.

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

We've known for decades that climate change is an existential crisis. For just as long, we've seen the complete failure of our institutions to rise to the challenge. Governments have struggled to meet even modest goals. Fossil fuel interests maintain a stranglehold on political and economic power. Even though we have seen growing concern from everyday people, civil society has succeeded only in pressuring decision makers to adopt watered-down policies. All the while, the climate crisis worsens. Is there any hope of achieving the systemic change we need?

In Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (Columbia UP, 2024), Dana R. Fisher argues that there is a realistic path forward for climate action—but only through mass mobilization that responds to the growing severity and frequency of disastrous events. She assesses the current state of affairs and shows why public policy and private-sector efforts have been ineffective. Spurred by this lack of progress, climate activism has become increasingly confrontational. Fisher examines the radical flank of the climate movement: its emergence and growth, its use of direct action, and how it might evolve as the climate crisis worsens. She considers when and how activism is most successful, identifying the importance of creating community, capitalizing on shocking moments, and cultivating resilience. Clear-eyed yet optimistic, Saving Ourselves offers timely insights on how social movements can take power back from deeply entrenched interests and open windows of opportunity for transformative climate action.

Dana R. Fisher is the director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University. Her books include Activism Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America (2006) and American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave (Columbia, 2019).

Patricia Houser, PhD, AICP, is a researcher and writer on environmental issues. After several decades as a professor of geography and urban planning, she has turned to public education and outreach.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, people across the former socialist world saw their lives transformed. In just a few years, labor markets were completely disrupted, and the meanings attached to work were drastically altered. How did people who found themselves living under state socialism one day and capitalist democracy the next adjust to the changing social order and its new system of values?

Till Hilmar examines memories of the postsocialist transition in East Germany and the Czech Republic to offer new insights into the power of narratives about economic change. Despite the structural nature of economic shifts, people often interpret life outcomes in individual terms. Many are deeply attached to the belief that success and failure must be deserved. Emphasizing individual effort, responsibility, and character, they pass moral judgments based on a person’s fortunes in the job market. Hilmar argues that such frameworks represent ways of making sense of the profound economic and social dislocations after 1989. People craft narratives of deservingness about themselves and others to solve the problem of belonging in a new social order.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with engineers and care workers as well as historical and comparative analysis of the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe, Deserved: Economic Memories After the Fall of the Iron Curtain (Columbia UP, 2023) sheds new light on the moral imagination of capitalism and the experience of economic change. This book also offers crucial perspective on present-day politics, showing how notions of deservingness and moral worth have propelled right-wing populism.

Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life.

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as pests, threats, and scavengers on the detritus of human life. But among the vast variety of crows, there are also critically endangered species that are barely hanging on to existence, some of them the subjects of passionate conservation efforts.

The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP, 2019) is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urbanization, and climate change. Moving among these diverse contexts, this book tells stories of extermination and extinction alongside fragile efforts to better understand and make room for other species. Grounded in the careful work of paying attention to particular crows and their people, The Wake of Crows is an effort to imagine and put into practice a multispecies ethics. In so doing, van Dooren explores some of the possibilities that still exist for living and dying well on this damaged planet.

Thom van Dooren is associate professor at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia, 2014) and coeditor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (Columbia, 2017).

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia UP, 2023). The book describes the Chinese media revolution, namely the enormous media project undertaken by the communist state to “solder” a dispersed and heterogenous populace into the revolutionary masses. Li shows how in the face of postwar material constraints and technological shortages, cultural workers (and audiences) became human components of audiovisual media networks that connected and built the new nation. Through a careful reading of archival sources and oral interviews, Li excavates two historically grounded terms, the guerrilla and the spirit medium, to develop a theoretical framework that explains how cinema and propaganda functioned in the socialist state. Her chapters explore the top-down visions of the cinematic image economy (the directives laid down by Mao and Jiang Qing), the grassroots labor of mobile projectionists, and the memories of film workers and audiences who, respectively, struggled to contain and enjoyed the polysemy inherent in socialist film experience. I’m very eager to hear Jie Li tell us more about this fascinating text! NOTE: I apologize for sound issues in the recording and hope you can enjoy our conversation despite them!

Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written. 

Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and technologies of writing. Facing profound social upheavals, from volatility in the marketplace to the violence of dynastic transition, writers turned to inscriptions to reflect on their investments in and dependence on the permanence of the written word. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China (Columbia UP, 2023) broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material.

Huijun Mai is an Assistant Professor in Medieval Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

People with disabilities are underrepresented in STEM fields, and all too often, they face isolation and ableism in academia. Uncharted: How Scientists Navigate Their Own Health, Research, and Experiences of Bias (Columbia UP, 2023) is a collection of powerful first-person stories by current and former scientists with disabilities or chronic conditions who have faced changes in their careers, including both successes and challenges, because of their health. It gives voice to common experiences that are frequently overlooked or left unspoken. These deeply personal accounts describe not only health challenges but also the joys, sorrows, humor, and wonder of science and scientists.

With a breadth of perspectives on being disabled or chronically ill, these stories highlight the intersectionality of minoritized identities with the disability community. Uncharted features essays by contributors who are d/Deaf, blind, neurodivergent, wheelchair users, have experienced traumatic brain injuries, have blood sugar disorders, have rare medical diagnoses, or have received psychiatric diagnoses, among many others. In many cases, the scientific field is not fully accessible to them, and they frankly describe struggling as well as thriving alongside their conditions.

Skylar Bayer is a marine ecologist and science communicator. Currently a marine habitat resource specialist in the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Regional Office, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Maine’s School of Marine Sciences for research on the sex lives of scallops and is a producer for the Story Collider.

Gabi Serrato Marks is a geochemist turned writer. She received her PhD in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and is now a partner at the scientist-focused PR firm Stellate Communications. Her work has been published in Scientific American and Audubon and on the PBS Eons YouTube Channel

Whenever a person engages with music--when a piano student practices a scale, a jazz saxophonist riffs on a melody, a teenager sobs to a sad song, or a wedding guest gets down on the dance floor--countless neurons are firing. Playing an instrument requires all of the resources of the nervous system, including cognitive, sensory, and motor functions. Composition and improvisation are remarkable demonstrations of the brain's capacity for creativity. Something as seemingly simple as listening to a tune involves mental faculties most of us don't even realize we have.

Larry S. Sherman, a neuroscientist and lifelong musician, and Dennis Plies, a professional musician and teacher, collaborate to show how our brains and music work in harmony. They consider music in all the ways we encounter it--teaching, learning, practicing, listening, composing, improvising, and performing--in terms of neuroscience as well as music pedagogy, showing how the brain functions and even changes in the process. Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music (Columbia UP, 2023) draws on leading behavioral, cellular, and molecular neuroscience research as well as surveys of more than a hundred musical people. It provides new perspectives on learning to play, teaching, how to practice and perform, the ways we react to music, and why the brain benefits from musical experiences.

Written for both musical and nonmusical people, including newcomers to brain science, Every Brain Needs Music is a lively and easy-to-read exploration of the neuroscience of music and its significance in our lives.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Environmental organising in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities. After rapid population growth and housing construction led to a ballooning trash problem and overflowing landfills, many first-time homeowners found their new neighbourhoods facing an unappetizing prospect—waste incinerator projects slated for their backyards.

Delving into the online and offline conversations of communities affected by the proposed incinerators, A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jean Yen-chun Lin demonstrates how a rising middle class acquires the capacity for organising in an authoritarian context. Dr. Lin examines how urban residents create civic life through everyday associational activities—learning to defend property rights, fostering participation, and mobilising to address housing-related grievances. She shows that homeowners cultivated petitioning skills, informational networks, and community leadership, which they would later deploy against incinerator projects. To interact with government agencies, they developed citizen science–based tactics, a middle-class alternative to disruptive protests. Homeowners drew on their professional connections, expertise, and fundraising capabilities to produce reports that boosted their legitimacy in city-level dialogue. Although only one of the three incinerator projects Dr. Lin follows was ultimately cancelled, some communities established durable organisations that went on to tackle other environmental problems.

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, A Spark in the Smokestacks casts urban Chinese communities as “schools of democracy,” in which residents learn civic skills and build capacity for collective organising. Through compelling case studies of local activism, this book sheds new light on the formation of civil society and social movements more broadly.

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.

Long before the 1979 Soviet invasion, the United States was closely concerned with Afghanistan. For much of the twentieth century, American diplomats, policy makers, businesspeople, and experts took part in the Afghan struggle to modernize, delivered vital aid, and involved themselves in Kabul’s conflicts with its neighbors. For their own part, many Afghans embraced the potential benefits of political and commercial ties with the United States. Yet these relationships ultimately helped make the country a Cold War battleground.

Robert B. Rakove sheds new light on the little-known and often surprising history of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan from the 1920s to the Soviet invasion, tracing its evolution and exploring its lasting consequences. Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan Before the Soviet Invasion (Columbia UP, 2023) chronicles the battle for influence in Kabul, as Americans contended with vigorous communist bloc competition and the independent ambitions of successive Afghan governments. Rakove examines the phases of peaceful Cold War competition, including development assistance, cultural diplomacy, and disaster relief. He demonstrates that Americans feared the “loss” of Afghanistan to Soviet influence—and were never simply bystanders, playing pivotal roles in the country’s political life. The ensuing collision of U.S., Soviet, and Afghan ambitions transformed the country—and ultimately led it, and the world, toward calamity.

Harnessing extensive research in U.S. and international archives, Days of Opportunity unveils the remarkable and tragic history of American involvement in Afghanistan.

Robert B. Rakove is a lecturer in international relations at Stanford University. He is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World (2012).

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

Humans have been so dominant on Earth in large part because of their capacity to innovate – but how does that work exactly? Why can they innovate so much? That issue has been studied by Professor Min W. Jung from the Center for Synaptic Brain Dysfunctions at the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea. He is the author of A Brain for Innovation: The Neuroscience of Imagination and Abstract Thinking (Columbia UP, 2023). Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

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.

The widening gulf between rural and urban America is becoming the most serious political divide of our day. Support for Democrats, up and down the ballot, has plummeted throughout the countryside, and the entire governing system is threatened by one-party dominance. After Donald Trump's surprising victories throughout rural America, pundits and journalists went searching for answers, popping into roadside diners and opining from afar. Rural Americans are supposedly bigots, culturally backwards, lazy, scared of the future, and radical. But is it that simple? Is the country splintering between two very different Americas--one rural, one urban? 

This pathbreaking book pinpoints forces behind the rise of the "rural voter"--a new political identity that combines a deeply felt sense of place with an increasingly nationalized set of concerns. Combining a historical perspective with the largest-ever national survey of rural voters, Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea uncover how this overwhelmingly crucial voting bloc emerged and how it has roiled American politics. They show how perceptions of economic and social change, racial anxieties, and a traditional way of life under assault have converged into a belief in rural uniqueness and separateness. Rural America believes it rises and falls together, and that the Democratic Party stands in the way. An unparalleled exploration of rural partisanship, this book offers a timely warning that the chasm separating urban and rural Americans cannot be papered over with policies or rhetoric. Instead, The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America (Columbia University Press, 2023) demonstrates, this division strikes at the heart of enduring conflicts over American identity.

Nicholas F. Jacobs is assistant professor of government at Colby College.

Daniel M. Shea is professor and chair of government at Colby College. 

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Why is cows' milk, which few nonwhite people can digest, promoted as a science-backed dietary necessity in countries where the majority of the population is lactose-intolerant? Why are gigantic new dairy farms permitted to deplete the sparse water resources of desert ecosystems? Why do thousands of U.S. dairy farmers every year give up after struggling to recoup production costs against plummeting wholesale prices?

Exploring these questions and many more, Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood (Columbia UP, 2023) is an unflinching and meticulous critique of the glorification of fluid milk and its alleged universal benefits. Anne Mendelson's groundbreaking book chronicles the story of milk from the Stone Age peoples who first domesticated cows, goats, and sheep to today's troubled dairy industry. Spoiled shows that drinking fresh milk was rare until Western scientific experts who were unaware of genetic differences in the ability to digest lactose deemed it superior to traditional fermented dairy products. Their flawed beliefs fueled the growth of a massive and environmentally devastating industry that turned milk into a cheap, ubiquitous commodity.

Mendelson's wide-ranging account also examines the consequences of homogenization and refrigeration technologies, the toll that modern farming takes on dairy cows, and changing perceptions of raw milk since the advent of pasteurization. Unraveling the myths and misconceptions that prop up the dairy industry, Spoiled calls for more sustainable, healthful futures in our relationship with milk and the animals that provide it.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

The town/countryside split has always been a feature of democratic Western politics and has impacted party choice. The advent of rust belts may have added a layer of complexity and may help explain why the differences between rural and urban voters seem to be deepening in the US. Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea are the authors of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America (Columbia UP, 2023). Listen to them discuss the rural-urban divide with Owen Bennett-Jones. 

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.

I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song’s account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview.

Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

Will the COVID-19 pandemic be remembered as a turning point in how universities deliver teaching and learning? How might the widespread use of digital tools change higher education?

Leveling the Learning Curve: Creating a More Inclusive and Connected University (Columbia UP, 2023) explores the role of digital education at this crucial crossroads. Built on interviews with more than fifty leading practitioners from major universities and ed-tech firms, Leveling the Learning Curve is an indispensable guide to the inner workings of digital education. Written for university managers and leaders, it explores how new tools can allow universities to reach new audiences and address long-standing imbalances. The authors examine challenges to implementing digital education programs and provide insight into how universities have managed to balance the needs of faculty and on- and off-campus students. The book traces the history of digital education initiatives from Khan Academy, TED Talks, and MOOCs through the pandemic, examining both successes and failures. It offers compelling examples of what a "connected university" looks like in practice, sharing ways digital tools can bring in wider audiences, expand interdisciplinary teaching and learning, connect students to real-life issues, help meet equity goals, and open new revenue streams.

Designed as both a manual and an in-depth study, Leveling the Learning Curve is required reading for educational leaders looking to navigate the complex waters of postpandemic digital education.

Is it really harder to pay attention to something than it used to be? No doubt the world is getting faster, and social media platforms are so good at grabbing attention. But how real is the problem and in particular, does it impact our creativity? Carolyn Dicey Jennings is based at the University of California, Merced, and has just co-written a chapter called “Attention, Technology, and Creativity” in a book called Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses published by Columbia UP (2023) Listen to her in conversation with Owen Bennett Jones.

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.

During the Last Ice Age, Europe was a cold, dry place teeming with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, bison, cave bears, cave hyenas, and cave lions. It was also the home of people physically indistinguishable from humans today, commonly known as the Cro-Magnons. Our knowledge of them comes from either their skeletons or the tools, art, and debris they left behind.

Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe (Columbia UP, 2023) tells the story of these dynamic and resilient people in light of recent scientific advances. Trenton Holliday-a paleoanthropologist who has studied the Cro-Magnons for decades-explores questions such as: Where and when did anatomically modern humans first emerge? When did they reach Europe, and via what routes? How extensive or frequent were their interactions with Neandertals? What did Cro-Magnons look like? What did they eat, and how did they acquire their food? What can we learn about their lives from studying their skeletons? How did they deal with the glacial cold? What does their art tell us about them?

Holliday offers new insights into these ancient people from anthropological, archaeological, genetic, and geological perspectives. He also considers how the Cro-Magnons responded to Earth's postglacial warming almost 12,000 years ago, showing that how they dealt with climate change holds valuable lessons for us as we negotiate life on a rapidly warming planet.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand the politics of this body of literature remains contested, in part because the defining characteristics of much early modern fiction—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic and intertextual play, and heavy allusion to literary canon—can seem to hold social and political realities at arm’s length.

David C. Atherton offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern popular literature and the world beyond its pages. Focusing on depictions of violence—one of the most fraught topics for a peaceful polity ruled over by warriors—he connects concepts of form and formalization across the aesthetic and social spheres. Atherton shows how the formal features of early modern literature had the potential to alter the perception of time and space, make social and economic forces visible, defamiliarize conventions, give voice to the socially peripheral, and reshape the contours of community. Through careful readings of works by the major writers Asai Ryōi, Ihara Saikaku, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ueda Akinari, and Santō Kyōden, Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia UP, 2023) reveals the essential role of literary form in constructing the world—and in seeing it anew.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Today we have a  group session (read: an hour and a half) with the authors Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michal Levin discussing their new book Here I’m Alive: The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2023). Acknowledging that “We’re not the first to think about music in the clinical situation” the authors focused on the analytic project “as a kind of music in its own right.” With an interest in sensory, non-representational experiences. “We settled on music as a primordial operating system that all human beings are brought into.”

We begin the interview with each author sharing their ideas on a key tenet of the book which is that “Before we can become fully functioning emotional, rational, linguistic, cultural, social, or political animals, human beings first become musical animals.” From here we explore the questions posed in the book. “What does the frame, frame?” What is meant by “Music is never the creation of an individual in isolation… there is no such thing as private music”, “What is the process of human musicalization”, “What happens to us when the rhythm changes?”

This was a rich discussion and each author sharpened my thinking. One of the more meaningful exchanges came around my reaction to this line in the book, "the analytic frame may be usable as rhythm from the get-go; the analyst drops the beat, and the dance begins."  In my reading I disagreed sharply. It is the patient who comes in an drops the beat!  Peter's clarifying response to me may be the highlight of many highlights in this enchanting jam session of an interview. 

Near the end of our discussion in which the vicissitudes of induction as enchantment have made repeated appearances, I quote a passage that synthesizes much of the previous 90 minutes and speaks to the emotional resonance of the book.

“There is a good reason why psychoanalysis has been ambivalent about, if not terrified, of enchantment, which is that it’s overwhelmingly powerful and potentially extremely hazardous. Why? Because at bottom the human being seeks and needs induction. We are thus radically suggestible and susceptible to influence and in-form-ation (and possibly ex-form-ation) by the environment, a “dethroning of the ego” that Freud could never accept. Our need for enchantment renders us essentially and permanently vulnerable to being taken over, and the crucial distinction between whether we are malevolently exploited or benevolently induced into culture is harrowingly historical, a matter of what world into which one is born.” (p.70)

Christopher Russell, LP is a psychoanalyst in Chelsea, Manhattan.

Margaret Hillenbrand’s On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia UP, 2023) examines the negative cultural forms that have emerged in response to China’s exclusionary contemporary socioeconomic system. Hillenbrand considers the social strain exerted on members of the “underclass,” the 300 million migrant workers whose toil has underwritten China’s economic rise since the passing of the command economy. She describes the socio-legal condition of disenfranchisement, an internal displacement or “civic-half life” experienced by marginalized workers, as “zombie citizenship,” a purposefully inflammatory definition that evokes both the workers’ experience of civic suspension and their class others’ fears of falling into similar abjection. In this compelling narrative, contemporary Chinese social, legal, and cultural life is wrapped in an ambient mood of jeopardy. 

Through close readings of diverse texts, performances, and films that both amplify and diffuse the violent conflicts of dispossession and dislocation, she makes the case for culture’s capacity to “intervene palpably in social experience.” The cultural forms Hillenbrand introduces and analyzes themselves teeter on the edge, on one hand, the edge of exploitation and aesthetic empowerment. The ugly feelings these works evoke affectively concretize the “ever-impending dissolution of that apparent boundary” between those already on the cliff’s edge and those who may yet come to share this precarious space. I look forward to probing the complexities of this freighted and violent cultural work with our guest.

Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

In the heyday of American labor, the influence of local unions extended far beyond the workplace. Unions fostered tight-knit communities, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of members--mostly men--and their families and neighbors. They conveyed fundamental worldviews, making blue-collar unionists into loyal Democrats who saw the party as on the side of the working man. Today, unions play a much less significant role in American life. In industrial and formerly industrial Rust Belt towns, Republican-leaning groups and outlooks have burgeoned among the kinds of voters who once would have been part of union communities. 

In Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party (Columbia UP, 2023), Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol provide timely insight into the relationship between the decline of unions and the shift of working-class voters away from Democrats. Drawing on interviews, union newsletters, and ethnographic analysis, they pinpoint the significance of eroding local community ties and identities. Using western Pennsylvania as a case study, Newman and Skocpol argue that union members' loyalty to Democratic candidates was as much a product of the group identity that unions fostered as it was a response to the Democratic Party's economic policies. As the social world around organized labor dissipated, conservative institutions like gun clubs, megachurches, and other Republican-leaning groups took its place. Rust Belt Union Blues sheds new light on why so many union members have dramatically changed their party politics. It makes a compelling case that Democrats are unlikely to rebuild credibility in places like western Pennsylvania unless they find new ways to weave themselves into the daily lives of workers and their families.

Stephen Pimpare is a Senior Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

What makes fad diets so appealing to so many people? And how did these fads become so central to conversations about food and nutrition?

Anxious Eaters: Why We Fall for Fad Diets (Columbia University Press, 2022) shows that fad diets are popular because they fulfill crucial social and psychological needs―which is also why they tend to fail. Authors Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill bring together anthropology, psychology, and nutrition to explore what these programs promise yet rarely fulfill for dieters. They demonstrate how fad diets help people cope with widespread anxieties and offer tantalizing glimpses of attainable self-transformation. Chrzan and Cargill emphasize the social contexts of diets, arguing that beliefs about nutrition are deeply rooted in pervasive cultural narratives.

Considering dietary beliefs and practices in terms of culture, nutrition, and individual psychological needs, Anxious Eaters refrains from moralizing or promoting a “right” way to eat. Instead, it offers new ways of understanding the popularity of a wide range of eating trends, including the Atkins Diet and other low- or no-carb diets; beliefs that ingredients like wheat products and sugars are toxic, allergenic, or addictive; food avoidance and “Clean Eating” practices; and paleo or primal diets. Anxious Eaters sheds new light on why people adopt such diets and why these diets remain so attractive even though they often fail.

Janet Chrzan teaches nutritional anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Alcohol: Social Drinking in Cultural Context (2013) as well as coeditor of Research Methods for the Anthropological Study of Food and Nutrition (2017) and Organic Food, Farming, and Culture (2019).

Garrett Broad is Associate Professor of Communication Studies in Rowan University’s Edelman College of Communication & Creative Arts, where he also serves as Provost’s Fellow in the Catalysts for Sustainability Initiative. His research and teaching explores the connections between contemporary social movements, food systems, and digital media technology. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals.

The conventional story of Hong Kong celebrates the people who fled the mainland in the wake of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In this telling, migrants thrived under British colonial rule, transforming Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city and an industrial and financial hub. Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War (Columbia UP, 2023) recasts identity formation in Hong Kong, demonstrating that the complexities of crossing borders shaped the city’s uneasy place in the Sinophone world.

Angelina Y. Chin foregrounds the experiences of the many people who passed through Hong Kong without settling down or finding a sense of belonging, including refugees, deportees, “undesirable” residents, and members of sea communities. She emphasizes that flows of people did not stop at Hong Kong’s borders but also bled into neighboring territories such as Taiwan and Macau. Chin develops the concept of the “Southern Periphery”—the region along the southern frontier of the PRC, outside its administrative control yet closely tied to its political space. Both the PRC and governments in the Southern Periphery implemented strict migration and deportation policies in pursuit of border control, with profound consequences for people in transit. Chin argues that Hong Kong identity emerged from the collective trauma of exile and dislocation, as well as a sense of being on the margins of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese regimes during the Cold War. Drawing on wide-ranging research, Unsettling Exiles sheds new light on Hong Kong’s ambivalent relationship to the mainland, its role in the global Cold War, and the origins of today’s political currents.

Angelina Y. Chin is associate professor of history at Pomona College. She is the author of Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (2012).

Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

Adoniram Judson was the 19th-century version of an American celebrity. Americans flocked to listen to his tales of being one of the first missionaries to enter the Kingdom of Burma. Americans wanted to hear of his mission in the Buddhist kingdom; Judson was reportedly uncomfortable with the attention.

These missions to Burma flopped among the Buddhist majority, but won converts among its minorities: the Karen, the Kachin, and others. Alexandra Kaloyonides covers these missions in Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom (Columbia University Press: 2023), her latest book.

Alexandra Kaloyonides is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where her teaching focuses on Buddhism. Dr. Kaloyanides serves as Associate Editor of Material Religion, served as Managing Editor of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and served as editor of the Asian Traditions section of Marginalia Review of Books, a Los Angeles Review of Books Channel.

Today, Alex and I talk about the missions to Burma, their success among the country’s minority groups, and how Christian faith became wrapped in the country’s identity formation.

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

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

While early Buddhists hailed their religion's founder for opening a path to enlightenment, they also exalted him as the paragon of masculinity. According to Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha's body boasts thirty-two physical features, including lionlike jaws, thighs like a royal stag, broad shoulders, and a deep, resonant voice, that distinguish him from ordinary men. As Buddhism spread throughout Asia and around the world, the Buddha remained an exemplary man, but Buddhists in other times and places developed their own understandings of what it meant to be masculine.

This transdisciplinary book brings together essays that explore the variety and diversity of Buddhist masculinities, from early India to the contemporary United States, and from bodhisattva-kings to martial monks. Buddhist Masculinities (Columbia UP, 2023) adopts the methods of religious studies, anthropology, art history, textual-historical studies, and cultural studies to explore texts, images, films, media, and embodiments of masculinity across the Buddhist world, past and present. It turns scholarly attention to normative forms of masculinity that usually go unmarked and unstudied precisely because they are "normal," illuminating the religious and cultural processes that construct Buddhist masculinities. Engaging with contemporary issues of gender identity, intersectionality, and sexual ethics, Buddhist Masculinities ushers in a new era for the study of Buddhism and gender.

MEGAN BRYSON is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and chair of the Asian Studies program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her B.A. in Religious Studies and Chinese from University of Oregon, and her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University. Her research focuses primarily on themes of gender and ethnicity in Chinese religions, especially in the Dali region of Yunnan Province. The geographical specificity of her work is balanced by its temporal breadth, which ranges from the Nanzhao (649-903) and Dali (937-1253) kingdoms to the present, as reflected in her monograph, Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China (Stanford University Press, 2016, an interview with her about this book is also on the New Books Network), which traces the worship of a local deity in Dali from the 12th to 21st centuries.

KEVIN BUCKELEW is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. He received his B.A. in the liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University's Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. His research focuses on Buddhism in premodern China, with special attention to the rise of the Chan (Zen) Buddhist tradition and to interactions between Chinese Buddhists and Daoists. Thematically, his work explores how religious identities take shape and assume social authority; how materiality, embodiment, and gender figure into Buddhist soteriology; and how Buddhists have grappled with the problem of human agency.

Jue Liang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University. She is currently completing her first book, entitled Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshé Tsogyel. She is also working on a second project, tentatively titled i. As a scholar of Buddhist literature, history, and culture in South and East Asia, she reflects in her research and teaching continuities as well as innovations in the gender discourses of Buddhist communities. She is also interested in the theory and practice of translation in general, and translating Tibetan literature in particular.

Today I talked to Ravi Gupta and Kenneth Valpey about The Bhagavata Purana: Sacred Text and Living Tradition (Columbia UP, 2013)

A vibrant example of living literature, the Bhagavata Purana is a versatile Hindu sacred text written in Sanskrit verse. Finding its present form by the tenth century C.E., the work inspired several major north Indian devotional (bhakti) traditions as well as schools of dance and drama, and continues to permeate popular Hindu art and ritual in both India and the diaspora.

Introducing the Bhagavata Purana's key themes while also examining its extensive influence on Hindu thought and practice, this collection conducts the first multidimensional reading of the entire text. Each essay focuses on a key theme of the Bhagavata Purana and its subsequent presence in Hindu theology, performing arts, ritual recitation, and commentary. The authors consider the relationship between the sacred text and the divine image, the text's metaphysical and cosmological underpinnings, its shaping of Indian culture, and its ongoing relevance to contemporary Indian concerns.

Also see:

• The Bhāgavata Purāna: Selected Readings
• The BhP Research Project
• The Bhagavata documentary

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.

In this interview, I speak with Marion Holmes Katz about her latest book Wives and Work: Islamic Law and Ethics Before Modernity (Columbia UP, 2022). This fascinating book explores the question of wives’ domestic responsibilities from a Sunni Islamic legal perspective, covering scholarship from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. The book addresses questions such as, does the wife have the obligation to provide housework? What counts as housework? And if it is true that the wife is not obligated to perform any household labor, as many western Muslims believe, how did the Muslim tradition reconcile this ruling with the anecdote involving Fatima’s request to the Prophet Muhammad for help with household work because she is overworked? And how did Muslim scholars reconcile this idea with what they understood to be morally, culturally, or religiously correct behavior from a woman? If the wife does choose to perform housework, is she entitled to compensation from her husband? 

For most Muslim scholars historically, answers to these questions involved distinguishing between ethical ideals and legal claims. Katz shows, for instance, that the discourse on women’s household labor evolves with time, context, geographical location, such that, for example, in the formative period, it was widely accepted that wives are not obligated to perform any household chores, but by the time we get to the 14th century, this doctrine is challenged. Overall, then, not only do scholarly views expectedly disagree with each other, but also, scholars are less interested in providing a set of generic rules about wifely duties and more in encouraging the fulfillment of duties as they’re understood in one’s own social location.

In our conversation today, we discuss the book’s main contributions and its origins; a hadith report describing an incident about Fatima’s request to Muhammad for domestic help; what exactly domestic service means and who is required or obligated to provide it—and what that obligation means; what exactly is so ethical about household work, since this discourse is rooted in ethics for Muslim scholars; and how male scholars have historically treated domestic service. We end with some thoughts on discussions about Islamic law and domestic service from a class perspective; for example, where do poor men and poor wives fit into this discussion? What are their rights?

The “war on cancer” was launched during the Nixon Administration in 1971, but the term was part of the national dialog on cancer at least early as 1913. Pink ribbons have been ubiquitous symbols of breast cancer awareness and fund-raising promotions since the mid-1980s, but “cancer weeks” fostering awareness of the disease and gala fund-raisers staged by wealthy socialites were popular beginning at least 100 years earlier. Early detection was touted as a cure at the beginning of the 20th century, long before any treatments other than primitive surgery were available, not to mention tests like mammography to detect the disease.

Elaine Schattner provides these and myriad other surprising insights from our long and tortuous relationship with cancer in From Whispers to Shouts: The Ways We Talk about Cancer (Columbia UP, 2023). It is a fascinating book that traces how public perception and portrayal of cancer in our conversations, media and culture has evolved over the past century and a half. Whispers reflect the fear and shame that have led many to hide a cancer diagnosis; shouts mark the advocacy and activism that is giving patients voice in both the doctor’s office and the public stage.

Dr. Schattner, a medical oncologist, breast cancer survivor, and journalist enlists an intriguing cast of characters to tell the story: U.S. presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and Joe Biden; Babe Ruth; Nat King Cole; the writer Susan Sontag; AIDS activist Larry Kramer; Gilda Radner and Nora Ephron are just a few of those she features whose stories have helped shape our changing attitudes toward a disease that has long been viewed as a death sentence, but one that for increasing numbers of patients is now a manageable illness with prospects for meaningful survival.

In the past 25 years, effective new, but costly drugs that target molecular drivers of tumors or unleash the immune system against the disease have transformed treatment for many patients. The rise of the internet and social media has vastly changed how we learn and talk about cancer. Dr. Schattner describes both good and bad ramifications of these disruptive events and says what is needed is greater understanding of the treatability of the disease.

Ron Winslow, a former long-time medical reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a freelance medical and science journalist.

When Robert Clive, the man who established Company rule in India was hauled in front of Parliament to answer for crimes of corruption, he allegedly responded by saying, essentially, he could have been worse.

Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!

The strange thing is that Clive’s argument was actually acceptable according to how many at the time understood corruption, as Nicholas Hoover Wilson writes in Modernity's Corruption: Empire and Morality in the Making of British India (Columbia University Press: 2023). Nick uses Company rule in India as a way to examine how society’s view of corruption changed–from something governed by one’s situation, to a behavior that violates some universal code of ethics.

In this interview, the two of us talk about Clive, Company rule, and why this period is a good period through which to understand the idea of “corruption.”

Nicholas Hoover Wilson is associate professor of sociology at Stony Brook University. Nick’s research focuses on the historical sociology of empires and colonialism, through the case of the English East India Trading Company's presence in South Asia.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Modernity’s Corruption. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

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

Certain cities—most famously New York, London, and Tokyo—have been identified as “global cities,” whose function in the world economy transcends national borders. Without the same fanfare, formerly peripheral and secondary cities have been growing in importance, emerging as global cities in their own right. The striking similarity of the skylines of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore is no coincidence: despite following different historical paths, all three have achieved newfound prominence through parallel trends.

In this groundbreaking book, Alejandro Portes and Ariel C. Armony demonstrate how the rapid and unexpected rise of these three cities recasts global urban studies. They identify the constellation of factors that allow certain urban places to become “emerging global cities”—centers of commerce, finance, art, and culture for entire regions. The book traces the transformations of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore, identifying key features common to these emerging global cities. It contrasts them with “global hopefuls,” cities that, at one point or another, aspired to become global, and analyzes how Hong Kong is threatened with the loss of this status. Portes and Armony highlight the importance of climate change to the prospects of emerging global cities, showing how the same economic system that propelled their rise now imperils their future. Emerging Global Cities: Origin, Structure, and Significance (Columbia University Press, 2022) provides a powerful new framework for understanding the role of peripheral cities in the world economy and how they compete for and sometimes achieve global standing.

Alejandro Portes is professor of law and distinguished scholar of arts and sciences at the University of Miami. He is the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle S. Beck Professor of Sociology (emeritus) and the founding director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. Portes is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the former president of the American Sociological Association. His books include City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (University of California Press, 1993) and Immigrant America: A Portrait (University of California Press, 2014).

Ariel C. Armony is vice chancellor for global affairs and director of the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Fulbright scholar at Nankai University, and a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. His publications include The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization (Stanford University Press, 2004) and, with Portes, The Global Edge: Miami in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2018).

Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter.

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Jing Wang discusses the book The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy (Columbia UP, 2023) by Lin Zhang.

You’ll hear about:

• A history of the book and Zhang’s entry into the fieldwork through family stories;
• How to understand entrepreneurialism as a dominant ideology in the global neoliberal labor economy and China’s positionality in the world;
• Why and how the book is organized based on three types of spaces – rural, urban, and transnational – across China and beyond;
• The similarities and differences between the elite and the grassroot entrepreneurs in Beijing;
• The e-commerce entrepreneurship as “platformized family production” in rural China and the roles played by government and large tech companies like Alibaba play in shaping the new rural production model;
• The limit and possibility of reinvention through “shanzhai” (copycat) e-commerce production;
• The gendered inequalities of entrepreneurial labor in rural and transnational spaces;
• What is “daigou” (personal shopping agents) in transnational e-commerce and the structural challenges entrepreneurs – especially women – face across national borders and digital platforms;
• What conversations in global studies of media and communication this book engages with.

About the book

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity. Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. You can find more about the book here by the Columbia University Press.

Author: Lin Zhang is an associate professor of communication and media studies at the University of New Hampshire.

Host: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, with an affiliation at the Center of the Study of Contemporary China (CSCC).

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

Sleep was taking over Anna's life. Despite multiple alarm clocks and powerful stimulants, the young Atlanta lawyer could sleep for thirty or even fifty hours at a stretch. She stopped working and began losing weight because she couldn't stay awake long enough to eat. Anna's doctors didn't know how to help her until they tried an oddball drug, connected with a hunch that something produced by her body was putting her to sleep.

The Woman Who Couldn't Wake Up: Hypersomnia and the Science of Sleepiness (Columbia UP, 2023) tells Anna's story-and the broader story of her diagnosis, idiopathic hypersomnia (IH), a shadowy sibling of narcolepsy that has emerged as a focus of sleep research and patient advocacy. Quinn Eastman explores the science around sleepiness, recounting how researchers have been searching for more than a century for the substances that tip the brain into slumber. He argues that investigation of IH could unlock new understandings of how sleep is regulated and controlled. Eastman foregrounds the experiences of people with IH, relating how publicity around Anna's successful treatment helped others form a community. He shows how a group of patients who felt neglected or dismissed united to steer research toward their little-known disorder.

Sharing emerging science and powerful stories, this book testifies to the significance of underrecognized diseases and sheds new light on how our brains function, day and night. It is essential reading for anyone interested in sleep and sleep disorders, including those affected by or seeking to treat them.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

In the decades after World War II, the United Nations established a global refugee regime that became central to the lives of displaced people around the world. This regime has exerted particular authority over Palestinian refugees, who are served by a specialized UN body, the Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Formed shortly after the 1948 war, UNRWA continues to provide quasi-state services such as education and health care to Palestinian refugee communities in the Middle East today.

Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the International Refugee System (Columbia UP, 2023) is a groundbreaking international history of Palestinian refugee politics. Anne Irfan traces the history and politics of UNRWA’s interactions with Palestinian communities, particularly in the refugee camps where it functioned as a surrogate state. She shows how Palestinian refugees invoked internationalist norms to demand their political rights while resisting the UN’s categorization of their plight as an apolitical humanitarian issue. Refuge and Resistance foregrounds how nonelite activism shaped the Palestinian campaign for international recognition, showing that engagement with world politics was driven as much by the refugee grass roots as by the upper echelons of the Palestine Liberation Organization. It demonstrates that refugee groups are important actors in global politics, not simply aid recipients.

Recasting modern Palestinian history through the lens of refugee camps and communities, Refuge and Resistance offers vital new perspectives for understanding politics beyond the nation-state.

Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer 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 [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org

In July 1813, a young American couple from Boston arrived in the Buddhist kingdom of Burma to preach the gospel. Although Burmese Buddhists largely resisted Christian evangelism, members of minority religious communities embraced Baptist teachings and practices, reimagining both Buddhism and Christianity in the process. In her new book, Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom (Columbia UP, 2023), religious studies scholar Alex Kaloyanides explores this history of power and conversion through the lens of sacred objects. Previously Tricycle’s managing editor, Kaloyanides now serves as an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Kaloyanides to discuss the religious material culture of 19th-century Burma, what we miss when we study religions solely through their texts, and how her research has shaped how she thinks about religious conflict today.

Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines. Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.

When the Soviet K-129 submarine sank in the Pacific Ocean in 1968, the CIA saw a possible treasure trove of intelligence information on Soviet military codes. The race was on to devise how exactly to retrieve this potential information from the bottom of the ocean. After years of careful planning, the result was one of the most audacious espionage missions of the Cold War. The wreck of the K-129 would be recovered intact under the cover of a deep-sea mining operation, funded by business tycoon Howard Hughes. Unfortunately for the CIA, the winds of public opinion about its secret operations were changing in wake of the Watergate scandals that helped expose the operation to a wider audience. Out of the attempt to maintain secrecy that the so-called "Glomar response" of "neither confirm nor deny" was used for the first time in a legal setting. 

This story and its Cold War context is the subject of M. Todd Bennett's Neither Confirm Nor Deny: How the Glomar Mission Shielded the CIA from Transparency (Columbia University Press, 2023).

M. Todd Bennett is associate professor of history at East Carolina University. He is the author of One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II (2012). Bennett was formerly a historian at the U.S. Department of State; there, he edited the Foreign Relations of the United States volume that includes declassified records documenting the Glomar incident.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history.

Today, gun control is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. However, before the 1960s, positions on firearms rights did not necessarily map onto partisan affiliation. What explains this drastic shift? Patrick J. Charles charts the rise of gun rights activism from the early twentieth century through the 1980 presidential election, pinpointing the role of the 1968 Gun Control Act. Gun rights advocates including the National Rifle Association had lobbied legislators for decades, but they had cast firearms control as a local issue. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 spurred congressional proposals to regulate firearms, gun rights advocates found common cause with states' rights proponents opposed to civil rights legislation. Following the enactment of the Gun Control Act, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle began to stake out firm positions. Politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan recognized the potential of gun control as a wedge issue, and gun rights became increasingly tied to the Republican Party. Drawing on a vast range of archival evidence, Charles offers new insight into the evolution of the gun rights movement and how politicians responded to anti-gun control hardliners. He examines in detail how the National Rifle Association reinvented itself as well as how other advocacy groups challenged the NRA's political monopoly. 

Offering a deep dive into the politicization of gun rights, Vote Gun: How Gun Rights Became Politicized in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2023) reveals the origins of the acrimonious divisions that persist to this day.

Patrick J. Charles is senior historian and archivist for the United States Air Force.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Where would we be without the knee? This down-to-earth joint connecting the thigh and the lower leg doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. Yet, as The Curious Human Knee (Columbia UP, 2023) reveals, it is crucial to countless facets of science, medicine, culture, and history—and even what makes us human.

The science writer Han Yu provides an informative, surprising, and entertaining exploration of the human knee across time and place. She begins with our earliest ancestors, emphasizing that walking upright separates us from the apes and bipedal knees appeared long before big brains and sophisticated tools. Yu considers the intricate anatomy of the knee, its evolutionary history, and the complexity of treating knee pain, including her own. She examines why women’s knees might be more prone to damage than men’s and addresses the roles of race and class in ailments such as osteoarthritis. This book gets knee-deep into an astonishing range of topics—fashion from flappers to miniskirts and ripped jeans, cultural practices spanning Japanese knee walking and Thai boxing, and more. Yu reflects on the symbolic power of kneeling from the imperial court in China to the football field in the United States and shows why the knee figures into so many social and political phenomena.

Distilling a vast amount of research in a style that is engaging, conversational, and even personal and witty, this book opens readers’ eyes to the complexity and significance of the humble knee.

Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England.

Xiaomei Chen's book Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture (Columbia UP, 2023) looks at three "founding fathers" of Chinese spoken drama: Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian. Dr. Chen argues that these three theatre artists laid the groundwork for Mao-era Chinese drama during the earlier Republic period, and that there is more continuity between the two periods than has typically been supposed. She also argues that these artists were not mere victims of heavy-handed political ideologues, but were passionate and sophisticated political thinkers in their own right. By telling the stories of these three figures and their effect on later Chinese drama, Dr. Chen helps us understand why the performing arts have such notable political consequence in the history of 20th century China.

Note: our interview with Dr. Chen on her 2016 book Staging Chinese Revolution can be found here.

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.

Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders them invisible or casts them as racialized and undeserving "welfare queens" who exploit social safety nets. Even when Black women voters are celebrated, the voices of the poorest too often go unheard. How do Afro-descendant women in former slave-holding societies survive amid multifaceted oppression? 

In The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States (Columbia University Press, 2023), Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour offers a comparative analysis of how Black women social welfare beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States defy systems of domination. She argues that poor Black women act as political subjects in the struggle to survive, to provide food for their children and themselves, and challenge daily discrimination even in dire circumstances. Mitchell-Walthour examines the effects of social welfare programs, showing that mutual aid networks and informal labor play greater roles in beneficiaries' lives. She also details how Afro-descendant women perceive stereotypes and discrimination based on race, class, gender, and skin color. Mitchell-Walthour considers their formal political participation, demonstrating that low-income Black women support progressive politics and that religious affiliation does not lead to conservative attitudes. Drawing on Black feminist frameworks, The Politics of Survival confronts the persistent invisibility of poor Black women by foregrounding their experiences and voices. Providing a wealth of empirical evidence on these women's views and survival strategies, this book not only highlights how systemic structures marginalize them but also offers insight into how they resist such forces.

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour is Dan T. Blue Endowed Chair of Political Science at North Carolina Central University. She is the author of The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil (2018). Mitchell-Walthour is a national co-coordinator of the U.S. Network for Democracy in Brazil and former president of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA). 

Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

Buddhist cosmological history of the universe, history of Chinggis Khan, history of China, and history of the Mongols — The Precious Summary, written in 1662 by Sagang Sechen, is many things. As a whole, it is the most important work of Mongolian history on the period before the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty.

The Precious Summary: A History of the Mongols from Chinggis Khan to the Qing Dynasty (Columbia University Press 2023), translated by Johan Elverskog, is not only a fluid and lucid translation, but by adding extensive annotations and helpful introductions, Elverskog has made this epic history approachable to readers today. Whether you are well-versed in the Mongol-Oirat wars or if the name Altan Khan doesn’t (yet) mean anything to you, this is a fabulous introduction to Mongolian historiography that should be of interest to anyone looking to learn more about Mongolian sources, Inner Asian history, and the history of Buddhism in Asia.

Johan Elverskog is Dedman Family Distinguished Professor, Professor of Religious Studies, and, by courtesy, Professor of History at Southern Methodist University. This is his second time on New Books, and you can hear a conversation about one of his other books, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020) here.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected]

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.

In this episode, our host Ignatius Suglo discusses the book Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2022) by Thomas Chen.

You’ll hear about:

• Author’s intellectual and professional trajectory that led him to the book;
• How to study Tiananmen Movement as a media event through a careful selection of literature and film materials;
• How to think of the productivity of silence and absence;
• The use of “positive energy” in mobilizing censorship;
• Human labor and the idea of “workshop” in the work of censorship;
• How iconic images such as “Tank Man” have been interpreted and appropriated;
• The role played by women in social movements and their representations in post-1989 China;
• The emergence of Internet in the 1990s and the paradoxical nature of “Internet sovereignty”;
• Author’s positionality and reflection on writing the book.

About the book

The violent suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations is thought to be contemporary China’s most taboo subject. Yet despite sweeping censorship, Chinese culture continues to engage with the history, meaning, and memory of the Tiananmen movement. Made in Censorship examines the surprisingly rich corpus of Tiananmen literature and film produced in mainland China since 1989, both officially sanctioned and unauthorized, contending that censorship does not simply forbid—it also shapes what is created. You can find more about the book here by Columbia University Press.

Author: Thomas Chen graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and English from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. With a focus on modern Chinese literature and cinema, his research interests include world literature/cinema, translation studies, and historiography. His book Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film is available from Columbia University Press.

Host: Ignatius Suglo is Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. He completed his Ph.D. in China Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He also has a secondary specialization in African Studies. His research interests

Long considered the most important of all organs, the human heart has fascinated artists and scientists alike. Listen to cardiologist Vincent Figueredo discuss knowledge of and attitudes towards the heart in societies ancient and modern. Figueredo is the author of The Curious History of the Heart: A Cultural and Scientific Journey (Columbia UP, 2023).

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.

One morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus―and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded―is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps and the ways we will have to adjust.

His well-research and multi-faceted book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience (Columbia UP, 2023) is a tour de force that is engaging, informative and a book that is hard to put down. Topics range from the potential loss of the Joshua Tree to the dangers our coral reefs face. Learning from “Lucy,” our three million year old ancestor who can be found in the Hall of Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC, is a lesson Verchick tells us, can open new windows into “a saga of resilience and adaptation.” He also illustrates how intersectionality can help us listen, learn and understand how interconnected networks of oppression are woven into the fabric of global warming and climate change.

Rob Verchick examines how we can manage the risks that we can no longer avoid, laying out our options as we face climate breakdown. Although reducing carbon dioxide emissions is essential, we need to adapt to address the damage we have already caused. Verchick explores what resilience looks like on the ground, from early humans on the savannas to today’s shop owners and city planners. He takes the reader on a journey into the field: paddling through Louisiana’s bayous, hiking in one of the last refuges of Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert, and diving off Key Largo with citizen scientists working to restore coral reefs. The book emphasizes disadvantaged communities, which bear the brunt of environmental risk, arguing that building climate resilience is a necessary step toward justice.

Engaging and accessible for nonexpert concerned citizens, The Octopus in the Parking Garage empowers readers to face the climate crisis and shows what we can do to adapt and thrive.

Robert Verchick just became a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Fellow and will be working on the impact our current environment has on oceans and coasts this year. He is one of the leading scholars in disaster and climate change law and designed climate-resilience policies in the Obama administration.

Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022).

Jacqueline Mondros and Joan Minieri's book Organizing for Power and Empowerment: The Fight for Democracy (Columbia UP, 2023) draws on extensive research to portray how social-action organizations have evolved over the past twenty-five years, building power in the struggle for social and economic justice. It explores how organizers increasingly target corporate influence and attacks on democracy. Their strategies and theories of change confront racial, gender, and economic inequity and fight pervasive intersectional injustice. The book tells the stories of a variety of geographically and racially diverse organizations and features the voices and experiences of more than forty organizers working across a range of issues. The organizers describe campaigns that activate people around issues that matter in their daily lives--work schedules, bail reform, schools, voting, and affordable housing--and connect them to broader topics such as racial justice, immigration, climate change, criminal justice, and workers' rights. They share their thoughts on building community organizations and empowering ordinary citizens to become leaders. 

The book underscores the leadership of Black Americans, other people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people as they lead campaigns to address the disparate effects of inequality faced by their communities. It provides detailed analysis of new organizational structures and change strategies, including electoral activism, statewide organizing, and community-labor coalitions. This book sheds important new light on foundational organizing practices and the challenges and opportunities for progressive social action today.

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.

Sacred kingship has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence (Columbia UP, 2022) recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring this institution in long-term and global comparative perspective. Editors A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern present a theoretical framework for understanding sacred kingship, which leading scholars reflect on and respond to in a series of essays. They distinguish between two separate but complementary religious tendencies, immanentism and transcendentalism, which mold kings into divinized or righteous rulers, respectively. Whereas immanence demands priestly and cosmic rites from kings to sustain the flourishing of life, transcendence turns the focus to salvation and subordinates rulers to higher ethical objectives. Secular modernity does not end the struggle between immanence and transcendence—flourishing and righteousness—but only displaces it from kings onto nations and individuals. After an essay by Marshall Sahlins that ranges from the Pacific to the Arctic, the book contains chapters on religion and kingship in settings as far-flung as ancient Egypt, classical Greece, medieval Islam, Mughal India, modern European drama, and ISIS. Sacred Kingship in World History sheds new light on how religion has constructed rulership, with implications spanning global history, religious studies, political theory, and anthropology.

Alan Strathern teaches European and Global History as an Associate Professor in the Faculty of History at Oxford and as a Fellow at Brasenose College; he also lectures at St. John's College. He works on the global history of religious encounter and conversion, particularly in the early modern period (1500-1800), while additionally writing on the nature of religious change and its relationship with politics across world history.

A. Azfar Moin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies the early modern Islamic world from comparative perspectives with a focus on concepts and practices of sovereignty.

Justin N. Smolin is a PhD candidate in the History of Religions specializing in at the Divinity School in the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the question of the translatability of religious difference, with a particular view to the early modern Islamicate world: his broader interests include literary history, translation, and political theology.

From right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracket the domestic and foreign, despite the fact that assumptions about the differences between ourselves and others deeply shape American religious categories and identities.

At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia UP, 2021) bridges the divide in the study of American religion, law, and politics between domestic and international, bringing together diverse and distinguished authors from religious studies, law, American studies, sociology, history, and political science to explore interrelations across conceptual and political boundaries. They bring into sharp focus the ideas, people, and institutions that provide links between domestic and foreign religious politics and policies. Contributors break down the categories of domestic and foreign and inquire into how these taxonomies are related to other axes of discrimination, asking questions such as: What and who counts as “home” or “abroad,” how and by whom are these determinations made, and with what consequences?

Offering a new approach to theorizing the politics of religion in the context of the American nation-state, At Home and Abroad also interrogates American religious exceptionalism and illuminates imperial dynamics beyond the United States. Find the sister-project, Theologies of American Exceptionalism, here.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is professor of political science and the Crown Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (2008) and Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (2015).

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, director of the Center for Religion and the Human, and affiliated professor of law at Indiana University Bloomington. Her books include The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005) and Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in U.S. Law (2020).

This episode’s host, Jacob Barrett, is currently a PhD student 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

99.9% of aspiring rappers never make it in the music industry. So why do we only hear the stories of the ones who do?

DVS Mindz might be the greatest rap group you've never heard of. Formed in Topeka, Kansas, in the mid-1990s, they developed a reputation for ferocious rhyming and frenetic live performances. In their heyday, DVS Mindz released a critically acclaimed CD, received nominations for prestigious awards, and opened for legends such as Wu-Tang Clan, Run-DMC, and De La Soul as well as KC icon Tech N9ne. But the group struggled with creative differences, substance abuse, ego battles, and money issues, and they split up in 2003.

Geoff Harkness takes readers on a unique two-decade journey alongside the members of DVS Mindz, chronicling their childhoods, their brush with success, and what became of them in the years that followed. Based on more than one hundred hours of video and audio recordings from 1999 to 2022, this fly-on-the-wall account offers a backstage pass into the recording studios and radio stations, video shoots and house parties, nightclubs and concert halls of the Kansas City-Lawrence-Topeka music scene circa 2000.

DVS Mindz: The Twenty-Year Saga of the Greatest Rap Group to Almost Make It Outta Kansas (Columbia UP, 2023) is at once a compulsively readable group biography of four talented MCs, a vibrant voyage through the forgotten history of local hip hop, and a breathtakingly real story of struggling to achieve big dreams.

Alex Kuchma is an MA student in history at York University. He has have researching hip-hop actively and collecting oral histories for more than a decade.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s evolution from a brash, self-anointed “Indiewood” auteur to one of his generation’s most distinctive voices has been one of the most remarkable career trajectories in recent film history. From early efforts to emulate his cinematic heroes to his increasingly singular late films, Anderson has created a body of work that balances the familiar and the strange, history and myth: viewers feel perpetually off balance, unsure of whether to expect a pitch-black joke or a moment of piercing emotional resonance.

The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha (Columbia UP, 2023) provides the most complete account of Anderson’s career to date, encompassing his varied side projects and unproduced material; his personal and professional relationships with directors such as Jonathan Demme, Robert Altman, and Robert Downey Sr.; and his work as a director of music videos for Fiona Apple, Joanna Newsom, and Haim. Ethan Warren explores Anderson’s recurring thematic preoccupations―the fraught dynamics of gender and religious faith, biological and found families, and his native San Fernando Valley―as well as his screenwriting methods and his relationship to his influences. Warren argues that Anderson’s films conjure up an alternate American history that exaggerates and elides verifiable facts in search of a heightened truth marked by a deeper level of emotional hyperrealism. This book is at once an unconventional primer on Anderson’s films and a provocative reframing of what makes his work so essential.

Ethan Warren is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and is the writer and director of the film West of Her.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics (Twitter @15MinFilm).

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University (Columbia UP, 2021) reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld.

Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason.

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.

If you have ever gotten excited over buying a new object only to feel let down once you acquire it, then today’s discussion will be relevant to you. My guest is Todd McGowan, author of the book Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016, Columbia University Press). We discuss his critique of capitalism as a system that encourages us to forever chase satisfactions that never come. And we explore his suggestion that true satisfaction lies in the wanting, not the acquiring. It’s a fascinating conversation that will radically change the way you approach everyday consumption and how you think about your own satisfaction.

Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. He is the author of several other books, including Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013, University of Nebraska Press), Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy (2017, Northwestern University Press), and Universality and Identity Politics (2020, Columbia University Press). He is also co-host, along with Ryan Engley, of the podcast Why Theory.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is a contributing author to the books Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and Patriarchy and its Discontents: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (2023, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse.

In her layered and theoretically astute new book The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia UP, 2021), Audrey Truschke documents and analyzes a range of Sanskrit texts in premodern India invested in narrating and making sense of Indo-Persian political rule and governance. In a study at once ambitious and razor sharp in execution, Truschke demonstrates the importance of taking seriously the enterprise of Sanskrit historical writing in the premodern period. Historically and geographically expansive, Truschke takes her readers through a delightful tour of Sanskrit texts from a variety of genres to show their incongruity with modern conceptions of religious difference and antagonism between Hindus and Muslims. Through her close readings of Sanskrit historical texts often saturated with poetry and a keen poetic sensibility, Truschke achieves no less than a fundamental reorientation of how we imagine and approach the discipline of history. This meticulously researched and lyrically written book will be of tremendous interest to scholars of South Asia, Religion, and the wider Humanities.

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 and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome.

Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way.

In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywood’s marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences, it was also frequently tone-deaf to new social, cultural, racial, and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywood’s global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead, it is one of negotiation, booms and busts, successes and failures, adoptions and rejections, and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account, Hollywood's Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia UP, 2022) shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.

Ross Melnick is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908–1935 (Columbia, 2012) and co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (2018).

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.

From news about World War II to the broadcasting of music from popular movies, radio played a crucial role in an increasingly divided South Asia for more than half a century. Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Isabel Huacuja Alonso examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s, showing how it created transnational communities of listeners.

Huacuja Alonso argues that despite British, Indian, and Pakistani politicians’ efforts to usurp the medium for state purposes, radio largely escaped their grasp. She demonstrates that the medium enabled listeners and broadcasters to resist the cultural, linguistic, and political agendas of the British colonial administration and the subsequent independent Indian and Pakistani governments. Rather than being merely a tool of nation building in South Asia, radio created affective links that defied state agendas, policies, and borders. It forged an enduring transnational soundscape, even after the 1947 Partition had made a united India a political impossibility.

The book traces how people engaged with radio across news, music, and drama broadcasts, arguing for a more expansive definition of what it means to listen. She develops the concept of “radio resonance” to understand how radio relied on circuits of oral communication such as rumor and gossip and to account for the affective bonds this “talk” created. By analyzing Hindi film-song radio programs, she demonstrates how radio spurred new ways of listening to cinema. Drawing on a rich collection of sources, including newly recovered recordings, listeners’ letters to radio stations, original interviews with broadcasters, and archival documents from across three continents, Radio for the Millions rethinks assumptions about how the medium connects with audiences.

Isabel Huacuja Alonso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asia, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She is a historian of sound media and modern South Asia.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

Cities are central to prosperity: they are hubs of innovation and growth. However, the economic vitality of wealthy cities is marred by persistent and pervasive inequality—and deeply entrenched anti-urban policies and politics limit the options to address it. Structural racism, suburban subsidies, regional government fragmentation, the hostility of state legislatures, and federal policy all contribute to an unequal status quo that underfunds cities while preventing them from pursuing fairer outcomes. 

Economist Richard McGahey explores how cities can foster equitable economic growth despite the obstacles in their way. Drawing on economic and historical analysis as well as his extensive experience in government and philanthropy, he examines the failures of public policy and conventional economic wisdom that have led to the neglect of American cities and highlights opportunities for reform. Unequal Cities: Overcoming Anti-Urban Bias to Reduce Inequality in the United States (Columbia UP, 2023) features detailed case studies of New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles, tracing how their attempts to achieve greater equity foundered because of the fiscal and political constraints imposed on them. McGahey identifies key lessons about the political coalitions that can overcome anti-urban biases, arguing that alliances among unions, environmentalists, and communities of color can help cities thrive. But he warns that cities cannot solve inequality on their own: political action at state and federal levels is necessary to achieve systemic change. Shedding light on the forces that produced today’s dysfunction and disparities, Unequal Cities provides timely policy prescriptions to promote both growth and equity.

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.

What is the nature of language? This is the question that Nathan Vedal’s book, The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge (Columbia University Press; 2022), explores. And ‘explore’ is indeed the best word to describe what this beautifully rich book does, for it looks at how language was conceived, discussed, and debated in a wide range of little-known texts from the Ming and Qing, including works of philosophy, philology, literature, and music.

Through this exploration, The Culture of Language in Ming China looks at how a community interested in philology formed in the sixteenth century. More importantly, this book examines Ming philology on its own terms, making the point that constrained disciplinary boundaries around philology and around what constitutes the study of language simply didn’t apply in this period; such restrictions would come later. As such, this book should be of interest to anyone curious in learning more about Chinese intellectual history, the history of the Ming and Qing, and the study of language in East Asia — but also anyone interested in thinking critically about the formation and history of disciplinary boundaries.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected]

One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik.

In Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik (Columbia UP, 2022), Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay’s time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him.

Articles referenced in the show:

• Winston James, “Letters from London in Black and Red: Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and the Negro World,” History Workshop Journal, Issue 85 (Spring 2018), pp. 281-293.
• Winston James, "To the East Turn: The Russian Revolution and the Black Radical Imagination in the United States, 1917–1924," The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 3, September 2021, Pages 1001–1045.

@amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies.

In Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (Columbia UP, 2022), Kevin Munger marshals novel data and survey evidence to argue that generational conflict will define the politics of the next decade. He shows that a common "cohort consciousness" binds aging Boomer voters into a bloc--but a shared identity and purpose among Millennials and Gen Z could topple Boomer power.

Kevin Munger is an assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Social psychiatry was a mid-twentieth-century approach to mental health that stressed the prevention of mental illness rather than its treatment. Its proponents developed environmental explanations of mental health, arguing that socioeconomic problems such as poverty, inequality, and social isolation were the underlying causes of mental illness. The influence of social psychiatry contributed to the closure of psychiatric hospitals and the emergence of community mental health care during the 1960s. By the 1980s, however, social psychiatry was in decline, having lost ground to biological psychiatry and its emphasis on genetics, neurology, and psychopharmacology.

The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States (Columbia UP, 2022) is a history of the rise and fall of social psychiatry that also explores the lessons this largely forgotten movement has to offer today. Matthew Smith examines four ambitious projects that investigated the relationship between socioeconomic factors and mental illness in Chicago, New Haven, New York City, and Nova Scotia. He contends that social psychiatry waned not because of flaws in its preventive approach to mental health but rather because the economic and political crises of the 1970s and the shift to the right during the 1980s foreclosed the social changes required to create a more mentally healthy society. Smith also argues that social psychiatry provides timely insights about how progressive social policies, such as a universal basic income, can help stem rising rates of mental illness in the present day.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine.

The late Qing was a time of great turmoil and upheaval but also a time of great possibility, as scholars, officials, the press, and revolutionaries all sought to find ways to shape China’s future. For many, as explored in Daniel Barish’s new book, Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861-1912 (Columbia UP, 2022), the solution lay not outside the Qing but within it — with the emperor himself.

Learning to Rule explores the education of the final three Qing emperors, looking at how debates about Western learning, foreign language education, the Manchu Way, and constitutionalism played out in the classrooms of the Qing emperors. Not only is this an intimate and deeply human look at the emperor and court life, it also shows just how involved the Qing was in global conversations about the role and education of a monarch, with many drawing on the examples of rulers in Russia and Japan when proposing their own plans for the Qing. Vividly written, this book will be of interest to any readers looking to learn about the late Qing, modern Chinese history, and the history of global empires — as well as those who might be curious about what it was like to try to teach the Son of Heaven.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected]

In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948--The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek among them--all from screenplays he alone had written. 

Stuart Klawans' Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges (Columbia UP, 2023) pays close attention to Sturges' celebrated dialogue, but also to his films surprisingly intricate structures, marvelous use of a standard roster of character actors, and effective composition of shots. Klawans goes deeper than this, though, providing compelling readings of the underlying personal philosophy depicted in these films, which for all their seen-it-all cynicism nonetheless express firmly-held values, among them a fear for conformity and crowd-mentality, a dread of stasis, and a respect for intelligence, whether of a billionaire or of a Pullman porter. This is a book that will return you to these great films with new eyes.

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.

Today, states' ability to borrow private capital depends on stringent evaluations of their creditworthiness. While many presume that this has long been the case, Quentin Bruneau argues that it is a surprisingly recent phenomenon--the outcome of a pivotal shift in the social composition of financial markets. Investigating the financiers involved in lending capital to sovereigns over the past two centuries, Bruneau identifies profound changes in their identities, goals, and forms of knowledge. 

In States and the Masters of Capital (Columbia University Press, 2022), he shows how an old world made up of merchant banking families pursuing both profit and status gradually gave way to a new one dominated by large companies, such as joint stock banks and credit rating agencies, exclusively pursuing profit. Lacking the web of personal ties to sovereigns across the world that their established rivals possessed, these financial institutions began relying on a different form of knowledge created to describe and compare states through quantifiable data: statistics. Over the course of this epochal shift, which only came to an end a few decades ago, financial markets thus reconceptualized states. Instead of a set of individuals to be known in person, they became numbers on a page. Raising new questions about the history of sovereign lending, this book illuminates the nature of the relationship between states and financial markets today--and suggests that it may be on the cusp of another major transformation.

Quentin Bruneau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests. 

Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China. 

Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world.

Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424

The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films―including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment―Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent his films a sense of the peril that could engulf any society.

In this critical study, Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder's work, stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer-director. In contrast to the widespread view of Wilder as a hardened cynic, McBride reveals him to be a disappointed romantic. Wilder's experiences as an exile led him to mask his sensitivity beneath a veneer of wisecracking that made him a celebrated caustic wit. Amid the satirical barbs and exposure of social hypocrisies, Wilder’s films are marked by intense compassion and a profound understanding of the human condition.

Mixing biographical insight with in-depth analysis of films from throughout Wilder's career as a screenwriter and director of comedy and drama, and drawing on McBride's interviews with the director and his collaborators, this book casts new light on the full range of Wilder's rich, complex, and distinctive vision.

Joseph McBride is a film historian and professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. His many books include the critical study How Did Lubitsch Do It? (Columbia, 2018) as well as acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg and three books on Orson Welles.

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.

The Modern Presidency: Six Debates That Define the Institution (Columbia University Press, 2022) is a concisely written book that helps makes sense of the most powerful office in America. Michael frames each chapter through a key conundrum about the nature of the presidency. He presents the strongest cases for the sides of every major debate, along with his own view. In addition to providing insight into the modern American presidency, Michael demonstrates how to think about tough issues with remarkable clarity.

Michael A. Genovese is professor of political science and president of the global policy institute at Loyola Marymount University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin).

As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum.

Against the backdrop of the Sinophone Pacific, Chiang argues that the concept of transgender identity must be rethought beyond a purely Western frame. At the same time, he challenges China-centrism in the study of East Asian gender and sexual configurations. Chiang brings Sinophone studies to bear on trans theory to deconstruct the ways in which sexual normativity and Chinese imperialism have been produced through one another. Grounded in an eclectic range of sources—from the archives of sexology to press reports of intersexuality, films about castration, and records of social activism—this book reorients anti-transphobic inquiry at the crossroads of area studies, medical humanities, and queer theory. Timely and provocative, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia UP, 2021) highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary knowledge in debates over the promise and future of human diversity.

Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum.

Please join Howard in conversation with Thomas Baudinette to learn more about this book's exciting theoretical interventions into the fields of trans studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Sinophone studies.

Thomas Baudinette is Lecturer in International Studies at Macquarie University, Australia.

Virginia C. Gildersleeve was the most influential dean of Barnard College, which she led from 1911 to 1947. An organizer of the Seven College Conference, or “Seven Sisters,” she defended women's intellectual abilities and the value of the liberal arts. She also amassed a strong set of foreign policy credentials and, at the peak of her prominence in 1945, served as the sole woman member of the U.S. delegation to the drafting of the United Nations Charter. But her accomplishments are undercut by other factors: she had a reputation for bias against Jewish applicants for admission to Barnard and early in the 1930s voiced an indulgent view of the Nazi regime.

In this biography, historian Nancy Woloch explores Gildersleeve’s complicated career in academia and public life. At once a privileged insider, prone to elitism and insularity, and a perpetual outsider to the sexist establishment in whose ranks she sought to ascend, Gildersleeve stands out as richly contradictory. The book examines her initiatives in higher education, her savvy administration, her strategies for gaining influence in academic life, the ways that she acquired and deployed expertise, and her drive to take part in the world of foreign affairs. Woloch draws out her ambivalent stance in the women’s movement, concerned with women’s status but opposed to demands for equal rights. Tracing resonant themes of ambition, competition, and rivalry, The Insider: A Life of Virginia C. Gildersleeve (Columbia UP, 2022) masterfully weaves Gildersleeve’s life into the histories of education, international relations, and feminism.

Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College.

In the face of a Korean cultural world preoccupied with newness, literary output from the more measured and regulated Choson period (1392-1910) can seem difficult to engage with for readers both inside and outside the country. But as Ksenia Chizhova’s Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday (Columbia UP, 2021) shows, a particular genre of late-Chsoson lineage novels reflect not only the staid norms of Confucian patriarchy and heredity, but also a more textured world of unruly emotions, gendered family disputes, calligraphic creativity and scandal simmering under the surface of mundane domestic life.

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.

Michael Francis Laffan’s Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022) traces a tapestry of historical actors, empires, and ideas across the Indian Ocean world. Starting with an imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 to build a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and even the men tasked with supervising his detention. To nineteenth-century colonial chroniclers who invent the legend of the “loyal Malay” warrior, whose anger can be tamed through the “mildness” of British rule. And a Tunisian-born teacher who arrived in Java from Istanbul in the early twentieth century becomes an enterprising Arabic-language journalist caught between competing nationalisms. Telling these stories and many more, Michael Laffan offers a sweeping exploration of two centuries of interactions among Muslim subjects of empires and future nation-states around the Indian Ocean world. Under Empire follows interlinked lives and journeys, examining engagements with Western, Islamic, and pan-Asian imperial formations to consider the possibilities for Muslims in an imperial age. It ranges from the dying era of the trading companies in the late eighteenth century through the period of Dutch and British colonial rule up to the rise of nationalist and cosmopolitan movements for social reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Laffan emphasizes how Indian Ocean Muslims by turn asserted loyalty to colonial states in pursuit of a measure of religious freedom or looked to the Ottoman Empire or Egypt in search of spiritual unity. Bringing the history of Southeast Asian Islam to African and South Asian shores, Under Empire is an expansive and inventive account of Muslim communal belonging on the world stage.

Michael Francis Laffan is professor of history and Paula Chow Chair in International and Regional Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia (2003) and The Makings of Indonesian Islam (2011) as well as the editor of Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal (2017).

Kelvin Ng co-hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit.

Tamara Fernando co-hosted the episode. She is a Past & Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical Research, London, and an incoming assistant professor in the history of the global south at SUNY Stony Brook University. Her present book project, Of Mollusks and Men, is a history of pearl diving across the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar and the Mergui archipelago. She is interested in histories of science, environment, and labour across the Indian Ocean.

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at PrincetonUniversity, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome

What would an “anti-field history” of Buddhist Studies look like? What does the social history of knowledge look like when it both includes and exceeds the West/Nonwest binary, the ethnonational subject, the secular humanist gaze, and the moral narratives and metaphysical content of modernism? Matt W. King explores these critical questions and models innovative approaches in his second monograph, In the Forest of the Blind (Columbia University Press 2022), which uses Faxian’s Record of Buddhist Kingdoms to expose “ecologies of interpretation” in both nineteenth-century European Orientalist scholarship and Inner Asian monastic cultures.

Although Faxian’s The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Foguoji) is a fifth-century CE travelogue about the Chinese Buddhist monk’s journey into Central and South Asia, it later became the subject of Europe’s first study of “Buddhist Asia” in the nineteenth century in Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Relation des Royaumes Bouddhiques, which was then translated from French into Mongolian by the Buryat scholar Dorji Banzarov, and then by the Mongolian monk Zava Damdin Lubsangdamdin from Mongolian into Tibetan.

Tracing this fascinating history of trans-Eurasian circulation of knowledge production, King argues that “the circulatory history of Faxian’s Record is not simply about Buddhist Asia forged in Europe into other places that were not Europe,” rather, the story is organized “by a chain of site-specific and differing orientations to knowledge itself – of treatments for traces of the past, of methodology.”

In six creatively organized chapters, King discusses first discusses how Faxian’s Record “orders time by means of space” in its early Chinese context, and then delves into the history of Orientalist Buddhist Studies showing how Abel-Rémusat’s “poaching” of Qing sources facilitated the disciplining of Buddhist Asia into an object of a transregional science. In Chapters 3 and 5, we see an inversion of the Orientalist gaze and learn about the reception and reinterpretation of Orientalist scholarship among the “Oriental” subjects themselves, who attempted to make sense of Buddhist history, geography, and Asia’s place and time in the world through Faxian’s Record, via Abel-Rémusat’s translation and scholarship. Here, King shows us that Abel-Rémusat’s science of Buddhist Asia was turned, or rather silenced, into chö-jung (history of the Dharma).

Unlike models from world history and transcultural studies that tend to focus on movement, contact, and exchange, In the Forest of the Blind instead focuses innovatively on connected but place-bound interpreters who hardly knew of each other and “who began anew from the silence of analytical practices staged elsewhere.” As an example of an “anti-field history,” this book, in King’s words, attempts “not to look past the fetish of the subject, but to find the disciplinary implications of centerless, overlapping, and mutually incomprehensible relations of knowledge-power that are coproductive but unbeholden to any specific relation of force (such as colonizer/colonized).” The aim of the book, King explains, is “to imagine new disciplinary futures in Buddhist and Asian studies by implicating the disciplinary present in a more diverse, global, subversive, and dispersed disciplinary past that is more attentive to negative space and absence than to impact or influence.”

Ending the book with a complete, annotated English translation of the Tibetan version of Faxian’s Record, which was translated from a Mongolian translation of the French translation of the Chinese original, In the Forest of the Blind provides the readers with rich notes about continuities and discrepancies across all four trans-Eurasian versions.

Matthew King is an Associate Professor in Transnational Buddhism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen's existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned go by different names-"enemies of the people;" the "missing," the "disappeared," "ghost" detainees in "black sites"-but they are subject to the same fate of political erasure. 

Arthur Bradley explores the power to render life unlived from ancient Rome through the War on Terror. He argues that sovereignty is the power to decide what counts as being alive and what does not: to make life "unbearable," unrecognized as having lived or died. In readings of Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Robespierre, Schmitt, and Benjamin, Bradley asks: What is the "life" of this unbearable life? How does it change and endure across sovereign time and space, from empires to republics, from kings to presidents? To what extent can it be resisted or lived otherwise? A profoundly interdisciplinary and ambitious work, Unbearable Life rethinks sovereignty, biopolitics, and political theology to find the radical potential of a life that neither lives or dies.

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.

The author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) is one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most controversial. Before settling in England, Naipaul grew up in Trinidad in an Indian immigrant community, and his depiction of colonized peoples has often been harshly judged by critics as unsympathetic, misguided, racist, and sexist. Yet other readers praise his work as containing uncommonly perceptive historical and psychological insight.

In V. S. Naipaul's Journeys: From Periphery to Center (Columbia UP, 2020), Sanjay Krishnan offers new perspectives on the distinctiveness and power of Naipaul’s writing, as well as his shortcomings, trajectory, and complicated legacy. While recognizing the flaws and prejudices that shaped and limited Naipaul’s life and art, this book challenges the binaries that have dominated discussions of his writing. Krishnan reads Naipaul as self-subverting and self-critical, engaged in describing his own implication in what he saw as the malaise of the postcolonial world. Krishnan brings together close readings of major novels with considerations of Naipaul’s work as a united project, as well as nuanced assessments of Naipaul’s political commentary on ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Krishnan provides a Naipaul for contemporary times, illuminating how his life and work shed light on debates regarding migration, diversity, sectarianism, displacement, and other global challenges.

Professor Sanjay Krishnan is teaches English at Boston University.

Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen.

A standard way of proceeding in political philosophy is to start with some form of conceptual inquiry: we first try to figure out what justice, equality, and freedom are and only then we may eventually begin thinking about how these goods might be pursued and achieved. On this approach, although social activism is perhaps necessary to counteract the worst kinds of social deprivation, it is also premature from the philosophical standpoint: as we still are debating what justice is, present efforts to bring about justice are risky at best.

In her new book, Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope (Columbia University Press, 2022), Michele Moody-Adams travels a different path. She begins by looking at social movements and argues that they not only can teach us about what justice is, but that they often play a necessary role in clarifying our normative concepts.

Most people tend to mark the beginning of Indian international relations thought to Nehru, and his self-proclaimed attempt to build a true non-aligned movement and more enlightened international system.

But Indian thought didn’t emerge sui generis after Indian independence, as Rahul Sagar notes in his edited anthology, To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics (Juggernaut / Columbia University Press: 2022).

Rahul collects writings from Indian thinkers on a variety of topics: the threat posed by Russia, the value of free trade, discrimination faced by Indians at home and overseas, showing the diversity of views present in Indian political debate long before 1945.

In this interview, Rahul and I talk about these collected writings, and what they tell us about India then and, perhaps India today.

Rahul Sagar is Global Network Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. His other books include Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy (Princeton University Press: 2013) and The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government (Oxford University Press: 2022). He can be followed on Twitter at @rahulsagar.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of To Raise A Fallen People. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

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

Ideology drives American foreign policy in ways seen and unseen. Racialized notions of subjecthood and civilization underlay the political revolution of eighteenth-century white colonizers; neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and unilateralism propelled the post–Cold War United States to unleash catastrophe in the Middle East. Ideologies order and explain the world, project the illusion of controllable outcomes, and often explain success and failure. How does the history of U.S. foreign relations appear differently when viewed through the lens of ideology?

Christopher Nichols and David Milne's Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the ideological landscape of international relations from the colonial era to the present. Contributors examine ideologies developed to justify—or resist—white settler colonialism and free-trade imperialism, and they discuss the role of nationalism in immigration policy. The book reveals new insights on the role of ideas at the intersection of U.S. foreign and domestic policy and politics. It shows how the ideals coded as “civilization,” “freedom,” and “democracy” legitimized U.S. military interventions and enabled foreign leaders to turn American power to their benefit. The book traces the ideological struggle over competing visions of democracy and of American democracy’s place in the world and in history. It highlights sources beyond the realm of traditional diplomatic history, including nonstate actors and historically marginalized voices. Featuring the foremost specialists as well as rising stars, this book offers a foundational statement on the intellectual history of U.S. foreign policy.

Grant Golub is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in U.S. and international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His research examines the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. Follow him on Twitter @ghgolub.

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history.

In Vineland Reread (Columbia UP, 2021), Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents stranded in the Reaganite summer of 1984 as a delirious stoner comedy that is simultaneously a work of heartsick fury and political grief: a portrait of the hard afterlives of failed revolution in a period of stifling reaction. Offering a roving meditation on the uses of criticism and the practice of friendship, the fashioning of publics and counterpublics, the sentence and the police, Coviello argues that Vineland is among the most abundant and far-sighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility. Departing from visions of Pynchon as the arch-postmodernist, erudite and obscure, he discloses an author far more companionable and humane. In Pynchon’s harmonizing of joyousness and outrage, comedy and sorrow, Coviello finds a model for thinking through our catastrophic present.

Interview by Christian B. Long.

How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and research areas since the introduction of a metrics and quantification regime during the 1980s. Highlighting the complexity and ambivalences of metrics and quantification, as well as the uneven distribution of positive and negative impacts, the book offers essential reading for every academic, irrespective of the nation or institution in which they work. It also will be important for those seeing to better understand the role of metrics and markets in contemporary life.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

Since the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they attempted to determine as precisely as possible the dates of events in the Buddha's life, seeking to iron out discrepancies in varying accounts and pinpoint when he delivered which sermons. Buddhist writers chronicled the history of the Dharma in China as well, compiling biographies of eminent monks and nuns and detailing the rise and decline in the religion's fortunes under various rulers. They searched for evidence of karma in the historical record and drew on prophecy to explain the past. John Kieschnick provides an innovative, expansive account of how Chinese Buddhists have sought to understand their history through a Buddhist lens. Exploring a series of themes in mainstream Buddhist historiographical works from the fifth to the twentieth century, he looks not so much for what they reveal about the people and events they describe as for what they tell us about their compilers' understanding of history. Kieschnick examines how Buddhist doctrines influenced the search for the underlying principles driving history, the significance of genealogy in Buddhist writing, and the transformation of Buddhist historiography in the twentieth century. This book casts new light on the intellectual history of Chinese Buddhism and on Buddhists' understanding of the past.

As I say in the interview, Buddhist Historiography in China (Columbia University Press, 2022) is one of those that you hope exists out there somewhere, and are delighted when you find out it does! This book is highly recommended not only for those with a keen interest in Buddhism and Chinese history, but also those fascinated by questions of historiography and temporarily more broadly. 

Lance Pursey is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aberdeen where they work on the history and archaeology of the Liao dynasty. They are interested in questions of identity, and the complexities of working with different kinds of sources textually and materially.

Art After Liberalism (Columbia UP, 2022) is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be described as a crisis of liberalism. The apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others.

What happens when the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising individual, and the premise of limitless development can no longer be counted on to produce a world worth living in? It is increasingly clear that these commonplace liberal conceptions have failed to improve life in any lasting way. In fact, they conceal fundamental connections to enslavement, colonization, moral debt, and ecological devastation.

Nicholas Gamso speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the ills of liberalism and art’s role in deciding on what may come after the impasse.

Nicholas Gamso is a writer and academic who works across theory, visual culture, performance, and space/place. He’s an editor at Places.

• Kara Walker, A Subtlety, 2014
• Manaf Halbouni, Monument, 2017
• Warren Kanders controversy at the Whitney
• Triple Chaser by Forensic Architecture
• My conversations with and on Forensic Architecture
• Wolfgang Tillmans and his anti-Brexit campaign
• Ren Hang

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

It is widely believed that the political problems of the Middle East date back to the era of World War I, when European colonial powers unilaterally imposed artificial borders on the post-Ottoman world in postwar agreements. This book offers a new account of how the Great War unmade and then remade the political order of the region. Ranging from Morocco to Iran and spanning the eve of the Great War into the 1930s, it demonstrates that the modern Middle East was shaped through complex and violent power struggles among local and international actors.

Jonathan Wyrtzen shows how the cataclysm of the war opened new possibilities for both European and local actors to reimagine post-Ottoman futures. After the 1914–1918 phase of the war, violent conflicts between competing political visions continued across the region. In these extended struggles, the greater Middle East was reforged. Wyrtzen emphasizes the intersections of local and colonial projects and the entwined processes through which states were made, identities transformed, and boundaries drawn. This book’s vast scope encompasses successful state-building projects such as the Turkish Republic and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as short-lived political units—including the Rif Republic in Morocco, the Sanusi state in eastern Libya, a Greater Syria, and attempted Kurdish states—that nonetheless left traces on the map of the region. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (Columbia UP, 2022) retells the origin story of the modern Middle East.

Ronay Bakan is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.

Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process.

In Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022) Dr. Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance.

Examining initiatives in Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the Congo, and New York, Dr. Muschik shows how the UN pioneered a new understanding and practice of state building, presented as a technical challenge for international experts rather than a political process. UN officials increasingly took on public-policy functions, despite the organization’s mandate not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its member states. These initiatives, Dr. Muschik suggests, had lasting effects on international development practice, peacekeeping, and post-conflict territorial administration. Casting new light on how international organizations became major players in the governance of developing countries, Building States has significant implications for the histories of decolonization, the Cold War, and international development.

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.

What is the purpose of a novel? What purpose or logic do literary critics assign to a novel? How has the novel changed? What does that mean for its readers and literary criticism in the contemporary era? What does novel share with cinema and what does that mean for contemporary thought?

Timothy Bewes provides brilliant insights on these questions in his book, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia UP, 2022).

Everywhere today, we are urged to “connect.” Literary critics celebrate a new "honesty" in contemporary fiction or call for a return to "realism." Yet such rhetoric is strikingly reminiscent of earlier theorizations. Two of the most famous injunctions of twentieth-century writing - E. M. Forster's “Only connect . . .” and Fredric Jameson’s “Always historicize!” - helped establish connection as the purpose of the novel and its reconstruction as the task of criticism. But what if connection was not the novel’s modus operandi but the defining aesthetic ideology of our era-and its most monetizable commodity? What kind of thought is left for the novel when all ideas are acceptable as long as they can be fitted to a consumer profile?

This book develops a new theory of the novel for the twenty-first century. In the works of writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Rachel Cusk, James Kelman, W. G. Sebald, and Zadie Smith, Timothy Bewes identifies a mode of thought that he calls "free indirect," in which the novel's refusal of prevailing ideologies can be found. It is not situated in a character or a narrator and does not take a subjective or perceptual form. Far from heralding the arrival of a new literary genre, this development represents the rediscovery of a quality that has been largely ignored by theorists: thought at the limits of form. Free Indirect contends that this self-awakening of contemporary fiction represents the most promising solution to the problem of thought today.

Iqra Shagufta Cheema is writer, researcher, and chronic procrastinator. When she does write, she writes in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. Check out her latest book chapter Queer Love: He is also Made in Heaven. She can be reached via email at [email protected] or Twitter.

Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and many identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. He was a gay man who never called himself gay but fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus during his decades of exile.

In German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus (Columbia University Press, 2020), Marc David Baer uses Marcus’s life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. Baer explores how Marcus created a unique synthesis of German, gay, and Muslim identity that positioned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an intellectual and spiritual model. Marcus’s life offers a new perspective on sexuality and on competing conceptions of gay identity in the multilayered world of interwar and postwar Europe. His unconventional story reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. An intellectual biography of an exceptional yet little-known figure, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay illuminates the complexities of twentieth-century Europe’s religious, sexual, and cultural politics.

Marc David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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.

One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism.

To illuminate why and how the Islamicate world became the locus for such fantasies and desires, Boone deploys a supple mode of analysis that reveals how the cultural exchanges between Middle East and West have always been reciprocal and often mutual, amatory as well as bellicose. Whether examining European accounts of Istanbul and Egypt as hotbeds of forbidden desire, juxtaposing Ottoman homoerotic genres and their European imitators, or unlocking the homoerotic encoding in Persian miniatures and Orientalist paintings, this remarkable study models an ethics of crosscultural reading that exposes, with nuance and economy, the crucial role played by the homoerotics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today.

A contribution to studies in visual culture as well as literary and social history, The Homoerotics of Orientalism (Columbia UP, 2014) draws on primary sources ranging from untranslated Middle Eastern manuscripts and European belles-lettres to miniature paintings and photographic erotica that are presented here for the first time.

Joseph Allen Boone is a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism and Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington, the Stanford Humanity Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has been in residency at the Liguria Center at Bogliasco, the Rockefeller-Bellagio Center, and the Valparaiso Foundation.

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.

Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship.

The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia University Press, 2022) by Eli D. Friedman reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services.

Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant,” was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, placemaking, and media representations of social life at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on a book titled Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River. You can learn more about Dr. Johnston on his website, Google Scholar, on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

On October 27, 1930, members of six Taiwanese indigenous groups ambushed the Japanese attendees of an athletic competition at the Musha Elementary School, killing 134. The uprising came as a shock to Japanese colonial authorities, whose response was swift and brutal. Heavy artillery and battalions of troops assaulted the region, spraying a wide area with banned poison gas. The Seediq from Mhebu, who led the uprising, were brought to the brink of genocide.

Over the ensuing decades, the Musha Incident became seen as a central moment in Taiwan’s colonial history, and different political regimes and movements have seized on it for various purposes. Under the Japanese, it was used to attest to the “barbarity” of Taiwan’s indigenous tribes; the Nationalist regime cited the uprising as proof of the Taiwanese peoples’ heroism and solidarity with the Chinese in resisting the Japanese; and pro-independence groups in Taiwan have portrayed the Seediq people and their history as exemplars of Taiwan’s “authentic” cultural traditions, which stand apart from that of mainland China.

This book brings together leading scholars to provide new perspectives on one of the most traumatic episodes in Taiwan’s modern history and its fraught legacies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines revisit the Musha Incident and its afterlife in history, literature, film, art, and popular culture. They unravel the complexities surrounding it by confronting a history of exploitation, contradictions, and misunderstandings. The book also features conversations with influential cultural figures in Taiwan who have attempted to tell the story of the uprising.

Michael Berry is professor of modern Chinese literature and film at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2005) and A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), and he is the translator of several novels, including Chang Ta-chun’s Wild Kids: Two Novels About Growing Up (2000) and Wu He’s Remains of Life (2017).

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.

Long before the current preoccupation with “fake news,” American newspapers routinely ran stories that were not quite, strictly speaking, true. Today, a firm boundary between fact and fakery is a hallmark of journalistic practice, yet for many readers and publishers across more than three centuries, this distinction has seemed slippery or even irrelevant. We see this play in pink slime local news sites and in the proliferation of truthers claiming to do their own research because of a deep distrust in the mainstream media.

In Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia UP, 2022) Tucher argues that the creation of outward forms of factuality unleashed new opportunities for falsehood: News doesn’t have to be true as long as it looks true. Propaganda, disinformation, and advocacy—whether in print, on the radio, on television, or online—could be crafted to resemble the real thing. Dressed up in legitimate journalistic conventions, this “fake journalism” became inextricably bound up with right-wing politics, to the point where it has become an essential driver of political polarization. 

In the book and in this conversation, Tucher explores how American audiences have argued over what’s real and what’s not—and why that matters for democracy.

Andie Tucher the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor and the director of the Communications Ph.D. Program at the Columbia Journalism School.

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She's also the communications specialist for the university's McCourtney Institute for Democracy, where she hosts and produces the Democracy Works podcast.

In Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2021), film scholar Rosalind Galt offers a cinematic exploration of the pontianak, a female vampire ghost whose origins stem back to pre-Islamic animist tradition but who is continues to be feared and revered in Malay cultures to this day. In the 1950s, the pontianak haunted the screens of late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combined appeals to indigenous animism with the affective force of the horror genre. Although the pontianak would disappear from view following the breakdown of the studio system, she would once again wreak havoc in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society from the early 2000s onwards. In this book, Galt explores the enduring appeal of the Pontianak, framing her as an ambivalent agent of gender subversion, a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, and a haunting presence that sheds light on a range of questions—surrounding race, religion, nationalism, and modernity—in Malaysia and Singapore. As Alluring Monsters demonstrates, the Pontianak has much to tell us about intersecting issues of decolonisation: femininity and modernity; globalisation and indigeneity; racial identities and nation; Islam and animism; and heritage and environmental destruction.

Jules O’Dwyer is Research Fellow in Film Studies and French at the University of Cambridge.

When people describe the brain they often compare it to a computer. In fact, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has defined the field for decades now. And in many ways, it works – the are many respects in which the brain is like a computer. But there are other aspects of the brain which are not captured by the computer metaphor which is why the neuroscientist Daniel Graham is suggesting another paradigm for understanding the brain. In his book An Internet in Your Head: A New Paradigm for How the Brain Works (Columbia UP, 2021), he argues that the brain is a communication system, like the internet.

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.

The great political ideas and movements of the modern world were founded on a promise of universal emancipation. But in recent decades, much of the Left has grown suspicious of such aspirations. Critics see the invocation of universality as a form of domination or a way of speaking for others, and have come to favor a politics of particularism—often derided as “identity politics.” Others, both centrists and conservatives, associate universalism with twentieth-century totalitarianism and hold that it is bound to lead to catastrophe.

This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Todd McGowan argues that universals such as equality and freedom are not imposed on us. They emerge from our shared experience of their absence and our struggle to attain them. McGowan reconsiders the history of Nazism and Stalinism and reclaims the universalism of movements fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia. He demonstrates that the divide between Right and Left comes down to particularity versus universality. Despite the accusation of identity politics directed against leftists, every emancipatory political project is fundamentally a universal one—and the real proponents of identity politics are the right wing. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics (Columbia UP, 2020) offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle.

Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Impossible David Lynch (2007), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), and Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). He is the coeditor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. He is also cohost of the Why Theory podcast, which brings continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine cultural phenomena.

Corey Byrnes’ Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (Columbia University Press, 2019) is a work of considerable historical and disciplinary depth. Byrnes brings together the Tang dynasty poetry of Du Fu, Song travel writing about the same, late Qing cartographic ventures, texts written by Western travelers in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as contemporary Chinese film and landscape art (among many other sources) to analyze how the Three Gorges region has been written and rewritten. The books’ title, and its critical intervention, turns on the dual meaning of “fixing.” A “fixed” landscape is both a (constructed) space of cultural coherence and a terrain continuously altered to hew to social, political, economic, and even moral demands. By investigating aesthetic forms that seek to represent and mold the Three Gorges, Byrnes investigates how “landscape ideas act materially in the production of space.” The text is rich with sustained close readings of visual and textual landscape aesthetics; such formal analysis is in turn deftly woven into elegant arguments that speak not only to Chinese studies, but disciplines such as media theory and the environmental humanities. I greatly enjoyed our conversation, and the chance to speak to Corey about a book whose first iteration as a graduate project I witnessed in the early days of my own doctorate, an editing process about which you will hear more in the following episode.

Julia Keblinska is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison (Columbia UP, 2022) combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to prisoners and what prisoners do to time.

Carceral and Flaherty consider the connection between the subjective dimensions of time and the existential circumstances of imprisonment. Convicts find that their experience of time has become deeply distorted by the rhythm and routines of prison and by how authorities ensure that an inmate’s time is under their control. They become obsessed with the passage of time and preoccupied with regaining temporal autonomy, creating elaborate strategies for modifying their perception of time. To escape the feeling that their lives lack forward momentum, prisoners devise distinctive ways to mark the passage of time, but these tactics can backfire by intensifying their awareness of temporality. Providing rich and nuanced analysis grounded in the distinctive voices of diverse prisoners, The Cage of Days examines how prisons regulate time and how prisoners resist the temporal regime.

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.

The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the “loud” (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants.

The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China (Columbia UP, 2021) draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation. Guangtian Ha examines how the use of voice in liturgy helps the Jahriyya to sustain their faith and the ways it has enabled them to endure political persecution over the past two and a half centuries. He situates the Jahriyya in a global multilingual network of Sufis and shows how their characteristic soundscapes result from transcultural interactions among Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Chinese Muslim communities. Ha argues that the resilience of Jahriyya Sufism stems from the diversity and multiplicity of liturgical practice, which he shows to be rooted in notions of Sufi sainthood. He considers the movement of Jahriyya vocal recitation to new media forms and foregrounds the gendered opposition of male voices and female silence that structures the group’s rituals.

Spanning diverse disciplines—including anthropology, ethnomusicology, Islamic studies, sound studies, and media studies—and using Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources, The Sound of Salvation offers new perspectives on the importance of sound to religious practice, the role of gender in Chinese Islam, and the links connecting Chinese Muslims to the broader Islamic world.

It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality.

First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes—heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies—into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader’s own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation brings Chi’s hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.

Chi Ta-wei is a renowned writer and scholar from Taiwan. Chi’s scholarly work focuses on LGBT studies, disability studies, and Sinophone literary history, while his award-winning creative writing ranges from science fiction to queer short stories. He is an associate professor of Taiwanese literature at the National Chengchi University.

Ari Larissa Heinrich is a professor of Chinese literature and media at the Australian National University. They are the author of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (2018) and other books, and the translator of Qiu Miaojin’s novel Last Words from Montmartre (2014).

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.

From Frank Sinatra’s early pro-Zionist rallying to Steven Spielberg’s present-day peacemaking, Hollywood has long enjoyed a “special relationship” with Israel. This book offers a groundbreaking account of this relationship, both on and off the screen. Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman investigate the many ways in which Hollywood’s moguls, directors, and actors have supported or challenged Israel for more than seven decades. They explore the complex story of Israel’s relationship with American Jewry and illuminate how media and soft power have shaped the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In Hollywood and Israel: A History (Columbia University Press, 2022), Shaw and Goodman draw on a vast range of archival sources to demonstrate how show business has played a pivotal role in crafting the U.S.-Israel alliance. They probe the influence of Israeli diplomacy on Hollywood’s output and lobbying activities but also highlight the limits of ideological devotion in high-risk entertainment industries. The book details the political involvement with Israel—and Palestine—of household names such as Eddie Cantor, Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Vanessa Redgrave, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert De Niro, and Natalie Portman. It also spotlights the role of key behind-the-scenes players like Dore Schary, Arthur Krim, Arnon Milchan, and Haim Saban.

Bringing the story up to the moment, Shaw and Goodman contend that the Hollywood-Israel relationship might now be at a turning point. Shedding new light on the political power that images and celebrity can wield, Hollywood and Israel shows the world’s entertainment capital to be an important player in international affairs.

Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales [https://research.bangor.ac.uk/...(b8c6d91f-14c5-4862-8745-0f5d0e938a28).html]. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick [https://oxford.universitypress...]. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at [email protected]. Twitter: @ndabrams

Too often, vaudeville is seen from the perspective of its decline: it is the corny, messy art form that predated the book musical, or that gave us Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers. Rarely is it seen as the populist avant-garde form it was at its height. David Hajdu and John Carey's graphic history, A Revolution in Three Acts: The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge (Columbia University Press, 2021), corrects this misconception, giving us illustrated biographies of three of the genre's most outré and successful stars. Eva Tanguay challenged contemporary gender roles through her outrageous behavior and sexually suggestive songs. Julian Eltinge also subverted gendered expectations of femininity by performing them to the hilt -- but as a man. And Bert Williams, a black man who performed in black face, tried to use his fame to soften the hard edges of Jim Crow bigotry but eventually became exhausted by the racism he encountered within the entertainment industry. These three performers truly were revolutionary, and their stories should be known to any theatre fan or historian.

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.

In Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas (Columbia University Press, 2022), Ellen C. Jones centers not just translation but multilingualism as both an artistic practice and scholarly lens through which to examine the production and reception of literature across the Americas. Focusing on writers who use mixed language forms such as “Spanglish,” “Portunhol,” and “Frenglish,” she shows how these authors and their translators use multilingualism to disrupt binaries and hierarchies in language, gender, and literary production itself.  

In this episode of NBN, Ellen Jones discusses the complex relationship and perceived tensions between translation and multilingualism, the sociopolitical forces that have shaped the status of multilingualism within the United States, her experience translating Susana Chávez-Silverman’s multilingual writing, multilingualism as queer practice in Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing! and Tess O’Dwyer’s English-only translation of Yo-Yo Boing!, indigenous multilingualism in Wilson Bueno’s Mar Paraguayo and its public life as an art exhibition by Andrew Forster in collaboration with translator Erín Moure, the collaborative joy of editing special issues on multilingualism for the literary journal Asymptote, and more. Tune in to learn about all this and more!

Ellen C. Jones is a literary translator, writer, and editor based in Mexico City.

Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and data analyst based in New York City.

In The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China (Columbia UP, 2020), Peter Lavelle offers a fascinating narrative history of natural resource development in China during the tumultuous 19th-century. Faced with an unprecedented confluence of natural disasters, wars, rebellions, foreign incursions and social problems, Qing Dynasty officials and elites looked to the natural world as a source of wealth, security and power. Lavelle grounds his narrative in the life and career of Zuo Zongtang (1812-1885), who was an avid student of geography and agricultural sciences, in addition to being one the leading statesmen of his generation. In efforts to rebuild livelihoods, relieve demographic pressures, secure government revenues and expand control over borderland regions, Zuo and his contemporaries harnessed long-standing traditions of knowledge and established new connections between China's borderlands and its eastern regions. What emerges from The Profits of Nature is a fresh and richly detailed chapter in late Qing history, written through the nexus of crisis, Qing colonialism and the environment.

Zachary Lowell holds an MA in global studies from Humboldt-Universtität zu Berlin.

A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide (Columbia UP, 2021), co-authored by Susan Chan Egan and Pai Hsien-yung (Columbia University Press, 2021), is a straightforward guide to the Chinese literary classic, The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber), that was written at a time when readers had plenty of leisure to sort through the hundreds of characters and half a dozen subplots that weave in and out of the book’s 120 chapters.

The Story of the Stone is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature, beloved by readers ever since it was first published in 1791. The story revolves around the young scion of a mighty clan who, instead of studying for the civil service examinations, frolics with his maidservants and girl cousins. The narrative is cast within a mythic framework in which the protagonist’s rebellion against Confucian strictures is guided by a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest. Embedded in the novel is a biting critique of imperial China’s political and social system.

Each chapter of A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide summarizes and comments on each chapter of the novel. The companion provides English-speaking readers—whether they are simply dipping into this novel or intent on a deep analysis of this masterpiece—with the cultural context to enjoy the story and understand its world. The book is keyed to David Hawkes and John Minford’s English translation of The Story of the Stone and includes an index that gives the original Chinese names and terms.

Susan Chan Egan is an independent scholar. She is the author of A Latterday Confucian: Reminiscences of William Hung (1893–1980) (1987), coauthor of A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit: The Half-Century Romance of Hu Shi and Edith Clifford Williams (2009), and cotranslator of Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (Columbia, 2008), among other books.

Pai Hsien-yung (Bai Xianyong) is an acclaimed fiction writer and a professor emeritus of East Asian languages and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Taipei People (1971) and Crystal Boys (1983). He has taught The Story of the Stone for decades and is the author of a popular three-volume guide in Chinese on which this book is based.

Linshan Jiang is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies.

Can subalterns speak? Now an iconic question from a prominent postcolonial studies scholar Gayatri Spivak, the question interrogates the in-built assumption about the locatable agency in an individual. Postcolonial studies have grappled with the question of legibility and limitations of archives. In her pathbreaking work, An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia UP, 2019), Poulomi Saha disrupts the binaries of nation/individual and agency/silence by arguing that women’s labor is a political one that articulate their relational aspirations through the tactile. In this contemporary moment with neoliberalism’s co-optation of ethnonationalism and an increasing disciplinary turn towards ethnicity as culture, Saha emphasizes the urgency of postcolonialism to prioritize political project in literary critiques and understand the connections between global capital and intimate, material life of women’s labor.

The book is divided into three parts: “Reading the Body Politic,” “The Fetish of Nationalism,” and “International Basket Case.” In the first section, Saha provides a theoretical framework through her reading of Pritilata Waddedar’s body to disrupt the individualistic idea of agency and signify gendered refusal. In the second part, Saha brings Tagore’s understanding of fetish to rethink non-sovereignty as not a loss but rather an enthrallment that allowed women to express their attachment to desh (home). In the third part, Saha problematizes the power of a name by analyzing the production of discourses around birangona (war heroines) and connect the devaluation of clothes to the larger history of development where women’s labor simultaneously turned into an object of empowerment and erasure. Saha’s rich and insightful book will be an important read for scholars who are interested in development, history of labor, and feminist theories.

Poulomi Saha is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, An Empire of Touch, was awarded the 2020 Harry Levin Prize for Outstanding First Book from the American Comparative Literature Association.

Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at [email protected].

The science on race is clear. Common categories like “Black,” “white,” and “Asian” do not represent genetic differences among groups. But if race is a pernicious fiction according to natural science, it is all too significant in the day-to-day lives of racialized people across the globe. Inequities in health, wealth, and an array of other life outcomes cannot be explained without referring to “race”—but their true source is racism. What do we need to know about the pseudoscience of race in order to fight racism and fulfill human potential?

In Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (Columbia UP, 2021), two distinguished scientists tackle common misconceptions about race, human biology, and racism. Using an accessible question-and-answer format, Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Alan H. Goodman explain the differences between social and biological notions of race. Although there are many meaningful human genetic variations, they do not map onto socially constructed racial categories. Drawing on evidence from both natural and social science, Graves and Goodman dismantle the malignant myth of gene-based racial difference. They demonstrate that the ideology of racism created races and show why the inequalities ascribed to race are in fact caused by racism.

Graves and Goodman provide persuasive and timely answers to key questions about race and racism for a moment when people of all backgrounds are striving for social justice. Racism, Not Race shows readers why antiracist principles are both just and backed by sound science.

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.

I am joined for my interview with Edward Tyerman by Ed Pulford, another host on our channel. Together, we discuss Edward’s new book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021). Internationalist Aesthetics examines how knowledge of China is produced in the early Soviet period through the aesthetic idiom of internationalism. Tyerman shows how artist intellectuals, especially Sergei Tretyakov, the book’s protagonist, make China affectively sensible for Russian audiences. Each chapter takes on a separate medium: travelogue, stage, film, and “bio-narrative,” to think through how Soviet aesthetes negotiate old and new forms to demystify China, a nation that even in the revolutionary environment of 1920s Russia, was still understood through recourse to orientalist tropes. The book ultimately spans a very short period, a slither of the 1920s, a moment of opportunity before the Guomindang’s persecution of the communists in China in 1927 and a moment of aesthetic possibility before the purges of the 1930s in Russia. Join us in our conversation about how a certain mode of “Chinese studies” emerges in the media aesthetics of this turbulent period.

Julia Keblinska is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations.

Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the seventeenth-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it. He highlights how influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures developed a statistical methodology they claimed was purely objective in order to silence critics of their political agendas, including eugenics.

Clayton provides a clear account of the mathematics and logic of probability, conveying complex concepts accessibly for readers interested in the statistical methods that frame our understanding of the world. He contends that we need to take a Bayesian approach--that is, to incorporate prior knowledge when reasoning with incomplete information--in order to resolve the crisis. Ranging across math, philosophy, and culture, Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science (Columbia UP, 2021) explains why something has gone wrong with how we use data--and how to fix it.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland.

Despite the virtually unanimous agreement about his importance, describing Hirschman’s legacy and influence on others is not an easy task— arguably because he was indeed in a league of his own. His search for fresh perspectives was so eclectic that, as many have noted, no recognizable school has ever developed in his footsteps …

– Michele Alacevich, Albert O. Hirschman – An Intellectual Biography (2021)

These thoughts from the concluding chapter of Michele Alacevich’s latest book Albert O. Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography (Columbia University Press, 2021), speaks to the remarkable life and scholarship as analyzed and described in the professor’s concise and stimulating book of 330 pages including notes and index. In this episode Professor Alacevich explains the significance and ongoing relevance of the interesting work of the political economist and social scientist Hirschman who was a product of the Weimar Republic, and who later became a founding member of The Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. As many listeners know, Hirschman authored books such as Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, The Passions and The Interests, and The Rhetoric of Reaction – just a few of his more recognizable titles as Michele discusses many others in this interview.

For instance, Professor Alacevich describes the 1977, The Passions and The Interests, as a history of ideas wherein Hirschman tried to make sense of political developments of the time in Latin America by examining the link between economic growth and dictatorship. He also talks about the 1967, Development Projects Observed, as insightful analysis that the original publisher reissued in 2015 with a Foreword by Cass Sunstein and an Afterword written by Michele even though he modestly does not mention his own contribution in this conversation.

This new book examines the ideas and scholarly debate surrounding Hirschman’s scholarly work and is a nice complement to the 2013, The Worldly Philosopher, a Hirschman biography by Jeremy Adelman. Professor Alacevich shares many interesting insights about the relevance of Hirschman’s approach today – from how the problem of democracy was a unifying theme in his scholarship including the more formal economic analysis, as well as his emphasis on how ‘doubt’ must be at the heart of a working democracy. Michele’s thoughtful analysis of Hirschman’s important ideas and works is well-worth a listen as is a reading of his engaging intellectual biography.

Michele Alacevich is a professor of Economic History and Thought at the University of Bologna, and is currently working on a history of development economics in relation to the three questions of economic growth, democracy, and environmental sustainability.

Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School in Shanghai University.

In Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2020), Sunny Xiang reads the archives of US intelligence agencies alongside Asian American literature to develop a method of reading for tone rather than content, and shows us how doing so allows us to rethink both the nature of war itself and the construction of race during the long cold war.

On this episode of New Books in Asian American Studies, Sunny Xiang chats about militarization and war as a way of life, race and rumor in Kazuo Ishiguro's work, Induk Pahk and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s differing approaches to incorporating the story of Korean independence activist Yu Guan Soon into their work, Ha Jin as an entryway to thinking about the boundaries between Asian American studies and Asian studies approaches to Asian/American literature, her hope for a multilingual future for Asian American studies, the limits of representation as a political goal, the nature of Asian American student groups on college campuses, and how Tonal Intelligence helps us understand (and respond to!) some Goodreads readers’ disappointment that Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs isn’t the superhero novel they expected. Listen for more!

Sunny Xiang is an associate professor in the English Department at Yale University.

Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and data analyst based in New York City.

How do researchers navigate the complexities of the field? In Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Columbia UP, 2020), political scientists from a diverse range of biographical and academic backgrounds describe their research experiences in North and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, ranging from archival work to interviews with combatants. In sharing their stories, the book's forty-four contributors provide accessible illustrations of methods like conducting surveys and interviews, practical questions of health and safety, and general principles such as the importance of flexibility, creativity, and interpersonal connections.

Peter Krause is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College and Research Affiliate with the MIT Security Studies Program. He is the author of Rebel Power: Why National Movements Compete, Fight, and Win (Cornell University Press, 2017), co-editor with Kelly Greenhill of Coercion: The Power to Hurt in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), and co-editor with Ora Szekely of Stories from the Field: An Unorthodox Guide to Fieldwork (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). His research focuses on Middle East politics, terrorism and political violence, and nationalism and revolution. His current book project analyzes which rebel groups take power 'the day after' regime change.

Ora Szekely is Associate Professor of Political Science at Clark University. Her research focuses on the politics, behavior, and ideologies of armed groups in the Middle East, including ideologies of gender and the relationship between propaganda and violence against civilians. In addition to co-editing Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (2020), she is the co-author of Insurgent Women (2019), and the author of The Politics of Militant Group Survival in the Middle East (2016) and a forthcoming book about the civil war in Syria. Her research is based on fieldwork across the Middle East.

Aditya Srinivasan assisted with this episode.

Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @LAbdelaaty.

Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindröling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Its founders sought to systematize and institutionalize a worldview rooted in Buddhist philosophy, engaging with contemporaries from across Tibetan Buddhist schools while crystallizing what it meant to be part of their own Nyingma school. At the monastery, ritual performance, meditation, renunciation, and training in the skills of a bureaucrat or member of the literati went hand in hand. Studying at Mindröling entailed training the senses and cultivating the objects of the senses through poetry, ritual music, monastic dance, visual arts, and incense production, as well as medicine and astrology.

Dominique Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindröling to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics. Considering laypeople as well as monastics and women as well as men, A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet's Mindröling Monastery (Columbia UP, 2021) sheds new light on the forms of knowledge valued in early modern Tibetan societies, especially among the ruling classes. Townsend traces how tastes, values, and sensibilities were cultivated and spread, showing what it meant for a person, lay or monastic, to be deemed well educated. Combining historical and literary analysis with fieldwork in Tibetan Buddhist communities, this book reveals how monastic institutions work as centers of cultural production beyond the boundaries of what is conventionally deemed Buddhist.

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.

Why does a clarinet play at lower pitches than a flute? What does it mean for sounds to be in or out of tune? How are emotions carried by music? Do other animals perceive sound like we do? How might a musician use math to come up with new ideas?

This book offers a lively exploration of the mathematics, physics, and neuroscience that underlie music in a way that readers without scientific background can follow. David Sulzer, also known in the musical world as Dave Soldier, explains why the perception of music encompasses the physics of sound, the functions of the ear and deep-brain auditory pathways, and the physiology of emotion. He delves into topics such as the math by which musical scales, rhythms, tuning, and harmonies are derived, from the days of Pythagoras to technological manipulation of sound waves. Sulzer ranges from styles from around the world to canonical composers to hip-hop, the history of experimental music, and animal sound by songbirds, cetaceans, bats, and insects. He makes accessible a vast range of material, helping readers discover the universal principles behind the music they find meaningful.

Written for musicians and music lovers with any level of science and math proficiency, including none, Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music (Columbia UP, 2021) demystifies how music works while testifying to its beauty and wonder.

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 [email protected].

In Humanist Reason: A History, an Argument, a Plan (Columbia UP, 2021), Eric Hayot develops the concept of “humanist reason” to understand the nature and purpose of humanist intellectual work and lays out a serious of principles that undergird this core idea. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our world.

Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State University, where he is also Director of the Center for Humanities and Information. His books include Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quell (U of Michigan P), The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford UP), On Literary Worlds (Oxford UP), The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (Columbia UP), and, most recently, Humanist Reason (Columbia UP), published in 2021. He edited and co-edited numerous books and in 2018 he published with Lea Pao a translation of Peter Janich’s What is Information? (U of Minnesota P).

Bryant Scott is a professor in the Liberal Arts department at Texas A & M University at Qatar.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a revered classic today fifty five years after it was first published in 1967. Today I talked to Alvaro Santana Acuña a sociologist and historian who describes the ingredients that went into manufacturing the success of this book. In Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (Columbia UP, 2020), Alvaro Santana-Acuña first deconstructs the “fake news” surrounding García Márquez and then describes the cultural brokers, the literary cognoscenti of the Boom, the gatekeepers, the Spanish publishing industry and the Casa de las Americas who made the One Hundred Years of Solitude a bestseller across generations. The multitudinous references in this book are part of the archives that Alvaro Santana-Acuña has curated for an exhibition “Gabriel Garcia Márquez – The Making of a Global Writer” by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin which will run till January 2022.

Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi

Political Scientists Amy Fried (University of Maine) and Douglas B. Harris (Loyola University Maryland) have a new book, At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (Columbia UP, 2021), that looks at the question of distrust within American politics and how that distrust has moved from healthy skepticism to a weapon to be used to divide citizens and undermine the entire governmental system in the United States. Part of this is an historical examination, starting with the basic skepticism about power that was present in North America even before the Founding period. But the thrust of the book traces this distrust of government over the past half century, and highlights how it has become more overt, and more of a rhetorical tool used, in particular, by members of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Fried and Harris explain how this narrative of distrust in government has been used as an organizing umbrella for the contemporary Republican Party, as the strategic glue that holds together social conservatives, economic conservatives and libertarians, and national security hawks. This is the same organizing umbrella that was also implemented by politicians, especially in the use of the Southern Strategy, to pull the southern states into the Republican coalition over the past half century. This weaponization of distrust has been used, as the authors, note, in four different areas that can be seen again and again across historical periods during the last fifty years; these four areas include building organization, winning elections, securing policy gains, and moving functional power into the political institutions when they are controlled by the GOP. This use of distrust has also been woven into the conservative political identity, pulling in racial components and advocacy against the government itself to continue to build this political coalition. Fried and Harris make use of a lot of different archival sources to examine and explain how conservative elites have used this distrust strategically to help turn out voters, build the political organization, and construct a rhetorical narrative that indicts the American political system. At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump helps to explain not only the rise of Donald Trump, but also the asymmetrical polarization in which voters now find themselves in the U.S. system, and how Trump and those who preceded him capitalized on American distrust of and skepticism towards government.

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 [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

The concept of revolution marks the ultimate horizon of modern politics. It is instantiated by sites of both hope and horror. Within progressive thought, “revolution” often perpetuates entrenched philosophical problems: a teleological philosophy of history, economic reductionism, and normative paternalism. At a time of resurgent uprisings, how can revolution be re-conceptualized to grasp the dynamics of social transformation and disentangle revolutionary practice from authoritarian usurpation?

Eva von Redecker reconsiders critical theory’s understanding of radical change in order to offer a bold new account of how revolution occurs. She argues that revolutions are not singular events but extended processes: beginning from the interstices of society, they succeed by gradually re-articulating social structures toward a new paradigm. Developing a theoretical account of social transformation, Praxis and Revolution incorporates a wide range of insights, from the Frankfurt School to queer theory and intersectionality. Its revised materialism furnishes prefigurative politics with their social conditions and performative critique with its collective force.

Von Redecker revisits the French Revolution to show how change arises from struggle in everyday social practice. She illustrates the argument through rich literary examples—a ménage à trois inside a prison, a radical knitting circle, a queer affinity group, and petitioners pleading with the executioner—that forge a feminist, open-ended model of revolution.

Praxis and Revolution: A Theory of Social Transformation (Columbia UP, 2021) urges readers not only to understand revolutions differently but also to situate them elsewhere: in collective contexts that aim to storm manifold Bastilles—but from within.

Eva von Redecker is a German critical theorist and public philosopher, currently based at the University of Verona as the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. She was previously a research associate at Humboldt University of Berlin and she has also taught at Goethe University Frankfurt and the New School.

Lucy Duggan is a writer and translator. She is the author of the novel Tendrils (2014).

Fulya Pinar is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her work focuses on alternative economies, refugee care, and migration in Turkey.

What happened to the Buddhist scholars who stayed behind in Tibet and China after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans fled from the People’s Liberation Army in 1959?

In Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China (Columbia University Press 2021), Nicole Willock discovers through the stories and writings of the “Three Polymaths” (Tib. mkhas pa mi gsum) of socialist China that contrary to common assumptions, Tibetan Buddhist leaders active in the People’s Republic of China were not mere political “collaborators.” Willocks reveals in the book that the three Buddhist polymaths, Tséten Zhabdrung (1910 – 1985), Mugé Samten (1914 – 1993), and Dungkar Rinpoché (1927 – 1997) alternately safeguarded, taught, adapted, celebrated, and discarded religious epistemes, practices, and institutions in a post-Cultural Revolution PRC.

The title of the “Three Polymaths” is often used to refer to Mar Shakyamuni, Yo Géjung, and Tsang Rabsel, who according to Tibetan Buddhist historiography, preserved the Buddhist monastic lineage from the tyrannical king Langdarma (d. 842) one millennium ago. Willock points out that since the early 1980s, the title of the “Three Polymaths” has been passed on to the twentieth-century Buddhist scholars Tséten Zhabdrung, Mugé Samten, and Dungkar Rinpoché, who became not only heroes to many Tibetans in China but also cultural icons symbolizing both the survival and the continuance of Tibetan culture in the post-Mao era.

In Lineages of the Literary, Willock explores the Three Polymaths’ writings from a wide range of literary genres, including more traditional ones such as autobiographical life writing (Tib. byung ba brjod pa) and Buddhist poetry, as well as modern innovations such as encyclopedia entries (Tib. tshig mdzod) and academic essays (Tib. dpyad rtsom). Willock argues that the writings of the Three Polymaths highlight the way they adapt and disregard religious epistemes for the purposes of revitalizing Tibetan culture in their own fashion.

Interestingly, the Three Polymaths’ writings do not engage explicitly with the social-political contexts of their lives. What is revealed instead, Willock argues, is how these three Tibetan Buddhist leaders acted as moral agents who strategically deployed Buddhist epistemes to impart varying visions of Tibetan culture in the post-Mao era. Taking Saba Mahmood’s idea of “moral agency,” Willock finds that “[T]he culturally specific disciplines and religious epistemes that [the Three Polymaths] accessed in their unique subject positions as male Géluk Buddhist elites allowed them, unlike many other leaders in post-Mao China, to cross state-imposed divides between secular and religious institutions that might otherwise have been impossible to bridge.”

Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. student at the Religious Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is a digital humanities project mapping transnational and transregional Buddhist networks connecting twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Republican China, Tibet, and the Japanese Empire.

What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons, stimulating and sometimes exploiting the ways people make friends, gossip with neighbors, and grow intimate with lovers. Sex robots present the humanoid face of this technological revolution―yet although it is easy to gawk at their uncanniness, more familiar technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are insinuating themselves into human interactions. Digital lovers, virtual friends, and algorithmic matchmakers help us manage our feelings in a world of cognitive overload. Will these machines, fueled by masses of user data and powered by algorithms that learn all the time, transform the quality of human life?

Robert Brooks, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers (Columbia UP, 2021) offers an innovative perspective on the possibilities of the present and near future. The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider the interaction of new technologies and fundamental human behaviors. He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs―and are getting better at what they do. Brooks combines an understanding of core human traits from evolutionary biology with analysis of how cultural, economic, and technological contexts shape the ways people express them. Beyond the technology, he asks what the implications of artificial intimacy will be for how we understand ourselves.

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 [email protected].

In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai for whom she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Machiko assisted Yoshiyasu in his ascent to the rank of chief adjutant to the Tokugawa shogun. She kept him in good graces with the imperial court, enabled him to study poetry with aristocratic teachers and have his compositions read by the retired emperor, and gave birth to two of his sons. Writing after Yoshiyasu’s retirement, she recalled it all—from the glittering formal visits of the shogun and his entourage to the passage of the seasons as seen from her apartments in the Yanagisawa mansion.

In the Shelter of the Pine is the most significant work of literature by a woman of Japan’s early modern era. Featuring Machiko’s keen eye for detail, strong narrative voice, and polished prose studded with allusions to Chinese and Japanese classics, this memoir sheds light on everything from the social world of the Tokugawa elite to the role of literature in women’s lives. Machiko modeled her story on The Tale of Genji, illustrating how the eleventh-century classic continued to inspire its female readers and provide them with the means to make sense of their experiences. Elegant, poetic, and revealing, In the Shelter of the Pine is a vivid portrait of a distant world and a vital addition to the canon of Japanese literature available in English.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Robert Hellyer’s Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups (Columbia UP, 2021) is a tale of American and Japanese teaways, skillfully weaving together stories of Midwesterners drinking green tea (with milk and sugar, to be sure), the recent and complex origins of Japan's love of now-ubiquitous sencha, Ceylon tea merchants exploiting American racism, Chinese tea production expertise, and the author’s own family history in the Japan-America tea trade going back to the nineteenth century. Transnational histories and commodities histories are notoriously delicate dances, but Hellyer has produced a very readable and eye-opening look at the modern history and culture of tea. Green with Milk and Sugar will be of interest to a diverse group of historians—scholars of North America, East Asia, commerce and trade, food, etc.—but also to a general audience who will be pulled in by the author’s personal connections as well as the delightfully jargon-free narrative.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

To call the hundred years that straddle the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries as a radical period of change for China is an understatement, moving from the Imperial period, through the Republican era, and ending in the rise of the PRC.

Dr. Elizabeth LaCouture’s Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960, published by Columbia University Pres explores this history by looking at Tianjin: a city divided into nine foreign concessions, and perhaps, at the time, the world’s most cosmopolitan—and colonized—cities. With a focus on family and the home, Dr. Lacouture explores the interplay between these massive political changes and the lives of ordinary people.

In this interview, Dr LaCouture.and I talk about Tianjin, changing Chinese politics, and how that affected views of gender, the family, and the home. We also investigate the thorny distinction between modernization and Westernization.

Dr. Elizabeth LaCouture is the founding director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Hong Kong, where she is an assistant professor of gender studies and history.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Dwelling in the World. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

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

Race, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, an identifiable present, and an uncertain future. The concept of race has been at the center of both triumphs and tragedies in American history and has had a profound effect on the human experience. Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2018)revisits the origins of commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences, examines the roots of the modern idea of race, and explains why race continues to generate controversy as a tool of classification even in our genomic age. Surveying the work of some of the twentieth century's most notable scientists, Race Unmasked reveals how genetics and related biological disciplines formed and preserved ideas of race and, at times, racism. A gripping history of science and scientists, Race Unmasked elucidates the limitations of a racial worldview and throws the contours of our current and evolving understanding of human diversity into sharp relief.

About the author: Michael Yudell is a public health ethicist, award-winning historian, and professor and Vice Dean at the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. He is the co-editor of the Columbia University Press Series Race, Inequality, and Health and the author of several books, including Race Unmasked, for which he won the Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association.

About the interviewer: Hussein Mohsen is a PhD/MA Candidate in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics/History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. His research interests include machine learning, cancer genomics, and the history of human genetics. For more about his work, visit http://www.husseinmohsen.com.

Neoclassical economic theory shows that under the right conditions, prices alone can guide markets to efficient outcomes. But what if it it’s hard to find the right price? In many important markets, a buyer’s willingness to pay for one good (say, the right to use a certain part of the radio spectrum range in San Francisco) will depend on the price of another complementary good (the right to use that same spectrum in Los Angeles). The number of possible combinations can rapidly become incalculably complex. Such complex markets require new collaborations between economists and computer scientists to create designs that are both incentive compatible and computationally tractable.

In Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints (Columbia UP, 2017), 2020 Economics Nobel Memorial Prize winner Paul Milgrom discusses some of the new economics theory he has developed to help address these challenging contexts, in which neither unfettered market forces nor top-down planning will work well. In our interview we explore these ideas in the context of the most complex auction ever created, the FCC’s broadcast incentive auction. This auction, designed and planned by a team led by Professor Milgrom with his company Auctionomics, purchased underutilized broadcast spectrum from television stations and sold it onward to telecoms providers. This reallocation helped improve wireless network performance and pave the way for 5G wireless services, while also generating over $7 billion for the US treasury.

Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics.

Unnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed (Columbia UP, 2021) offers a new perspective on our most pressing environmental and social challenges, revealing the gaps between abstract concepts like sustainability, resilience, and innovation and the real-world experiences of people living at risk. Gonzalo Lizarralde explains how the causes of disasters are not natural but all too human: inequality, segregation, marginalization, colonialism, neoliberalism, racism, and unrestrained capitalism. He tells the stories of Latin American migrants, Haitian earthquake survivors, Canadian climate activists, African slum dwellers, and other people resisting social and environmental injustices around the world. Lizarralde shows that most reconstruction and risk-reduction efforts exacerbate social inequalities. Some responses do produce meaningful changes, but they are rarely the ones powerful leaders have in mind.

How can ideas from sociology help us understand history and economics? In Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought (Columbia UP, 2021), Emily Erikson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale and Academic Director of the Fox International Fellowship, explores the major shift, which occurred during the seventeenth century, in the history and philosophy of economics. The book combines computational methods from sociology with a detailed and close engagement with historical sources and the philosophy of economics. It demonstrates how a key set of merchants proved highly influential in setting the terms of economics, in the context of the specific conditions and institutional settings in England during the period. The book also offers comparative analysis, adding depth to the numerous methods of testing its core hypothesis about what really drove the changes in economics. Clearly written, and deeply engaging, the book is essential reading for scholars in economics and the social sciences, as well as in history and the humanities.

Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art.

After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today.

Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Columbia UP, 2021) presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean.

Jessica Namakkal is assistant professor of the practice in international comparative studies at Duke University.

Samee Siddiqui is 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.

In The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2021), Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application together with reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate.

Hoyt Long is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature, and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

Katie McDonough is Senior Research Associate, The Alan Turing Institute.

Is it just a coincidence that three books by the major Russian writer Maria Stepanova have appeared in English in 2021? Why does Maria Stepanova deploy such a rich variety of voices and forms? What are the challenges of translating her poetry? Who are the pantheon of deceased writers who seem to haunt her every line? 

In this conversation, the editor of The Voice Over: Poems and Essays (Columbia UP, 2021), Irina Shevelenko talks about Stepanova's poetry and prose with Duncan McCargo. Irina elaborates on her wonderful introduction to the collection and explains how she assembled an outstanding team of translators to help bring this work to an international audience. Both Duncan and Irina read extracts from Stepanova's work.

(Maria Stepanova is the author of over ten poetry collections as well as three books of essays and the documentary novel In Memory of Memory.)

(US: New Directions, Canada: Book*hug Press, UK: Fitzcarraldo), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker International Prize. 

Her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals was published by Bloodaxe Books, also in 2021. She is the recipient of several Russian and international literary awards.

Irina Shevelenko is professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Translations are by: Alexandra Berlina, Sasha Dugdale, Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Zachary Murphy King, Dmitry Manin, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Andrew Reynolds, and Maria Vassileva.

For a video of the May 2021 launch event for The Voice Over, featuring Maria Stepanova and several of the translators, see 

Book Launch of Maria Stepanova’s The Voice Over: Poems and Essays – A Reading and Conversation – CREECA – UW–Madison (wisc.edu)

Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers.

Tunisia became one of the largest sources of foreign fighters for the Islamic State—even though the country stands out as a democratic bright spot of the Arab uprisings and despite the fact that it had very little history of terrorist violence within its borders prior to 2011. In Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad (Columbia UP, 2020), Aaron Y. Zelin uncovers the longer history of Tunisian involvement in the jihadi movement and offers an in-depth examination of the reasons why so many Tunisians became drawn to jihadism following the 2011 revolution. Zelin highlights the longer-term causes that affected jihadi recruitment in Tunisia, including the prior history of Tunisians joining jihadi organizations and playing key roles in far-flung parts of the world over the past four decades. He contends that the jihadi group Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia was able to take advantage of the universal prisoner amnesty, increased openness, and the lack of governmental policy toward it after the revolution. In turn, this provided space for greater recruitment and subsequent mobilization to fight abroad once the Tunisian government cracked down on the group in 2013. Zelin marshals cutting-edge empirical findings, extensive primary source research, and on-the-ground fieldwork, including a variety of documents in Arabic going as far back as the 1980s and interviews with Ansar al-Sharia members and Tunisian fighters returning from Syria. The first book on the history of the Tunisian jihadi movement, Your Sons Are at Your Service is a meticulously researched account that challenges simplified views of jihadism’s appeal and success.

Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner.

Do you trust corporations? Do you trust politicians? Do you trust the science? Does anyone trust anyone anymore?

In Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties That Bind Us (Columbia UP, 2021), Professor Ben Ho reveals the surprising importance of trust to how we understand our day-to-day economic lives. Starting with the earliest societies and proceeding through the evolution of the modern economy, he explores its role across an astonishing range of institutions and practices, surveying and synthesizing research across economics, political science, psychology, and other disciplines, and presents his own cutting-edge behavioral economics research on the role of apologies in restoring trust. He argues that we trust far more than we may realize, and that mostly this is a good thing.

Check out the New Yorker's review of the book.

Ben Ho is an associate professor at Vassar College. Ho applies economic tools like game theory and experimental design to topics like apologies, trust, identity, inequality and climate change. Before Vassar, he taught MBA students at Cornell, served as lead energy economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and worked/consulted for Morgan Stanley and several tech startups. Professor Ho also teaches at Columbia University where he is a faculty affiliate for the Center for Global Energy Policy. His work has been featured in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Ho holds seven degrees from Stanford and MIT in economics, education, political science, math, computer science and electrical engineering.

Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy.

Lynne Huffer, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Womens and Gender Studies at Emory University to speaks widely about the body of her work, including her her new book, Foucault’s Strange Eros, out in 2020 with Columbia University Press. 

What is the strange eros that haunts Foucault’s writing? In this deeply original consideration of Foucault’s erotic ethics, Lynne Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of the thinking subject. Focusing on the ethical implications of this mode of thought, Huffer shows how Foucault’s poetic archival method offers a way to counter the disciplining of speech.

At the heart of this method is a conception of the archive as Sapphic: the past’s remains are, like Sappho’s verses, hole-ridden, scattered, and dissolved by time. Listening for eros across fragmented texts, Huffer stages a series of encounters within an archive of literary and theoretical readings: the eroticization of violence in works by Freud and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the historicity of madness in the Foucault-Derrida debate, the afterlives of Foucault’s antiprison activism, and Monique Wittig’s Sapphic materialism. Through these encounters, Foucault’s Strange Eros conceives of ethics as experiments in living that work poetically to make the present strange. Crafting fragments that dissolve into Sapphic brackets, Huffer performs the ethics she describes in her own practice of experimental writing. Foucault’s Strange Eros hints at the self-hollowing speech of an eros that opens a space for the strange.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

Since the end of World War II, Japan has not sought to remilitarize, and its postwar constitution commits to renouncing aggressive warfare. Yet many inside and outside Japan have asked whether the country should or will return to commanding armed forces amid an increasingly challenging regional and global context and as domestic politics have shifted in favor of demonstrations of national strength.

Tom Phuong Le offers a novel explanation of Japan’s reluctance to remilitarize that foregrounds the relationship between demographics and security. Japan's Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia UP, 2021) demonstrates how changing perceptions of security across generations have culminated in a culture of antimilitarism that constrains the government’s efforts to pursue a more martial foreign policy. Le challenges a simple opposition between militarism and pacifism, arguing that Japanese security discourse should be understood in terms of “multiple militarisms,” which can legitimate choices such as the mobilization of the Japan Self-Defense Forces for peacekeeping operations and humanitarian relief missions. Le highlights how factors that are not typically linked to security policy, such as aging and declining populations and gender inequality, have played crucial roles. He contends that the case of Japan challenges the presumption in international relations scholarship that states must pursue the use of force or be punished, showing how widespread normative beliefs have restrained Japanese policy makers. Drawing on interviews with policy makers, military personnel, atomic bomb survivors, museum coordinators, grassroots activists, and other stakeholders, as well as analysis of peace museums and social movements, Japan’s Aging Peace provides new insights for scholars of Asian politics, international relations, and Japanese foreign policy.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

What was Harlem before its Renaissance, and how did it come to be? In Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia University Press, 2021), historian Kevin McGruder, Associate Professor at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, explores the life of the remarkable Philip Anthony Payton Jr., a real estate entrepreneur who bought building after building at the turn of the 20th century in the core of Harlem, defined as 125th St. to 135th St. between 5th and 8th Avenues. In doing so, McGruder uncovers much about Black life in New York during the period between the Civil War and the Great Migration and makes an important contribution to the history of housing segregation in the United States.

David Hamilton Golland is professor of history, coordinator of humanities, and president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland.

Margarita Balmaceda’s Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union (Columbia University Press, 2021) is a meticulous exploration of a complex system of energy supplies involving Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union. While originating in Russia, energy supplies, as the author asserts, undergo changes and transformations when being delivered to various destinations. What do these changes inform about the nature of both energy resources and power? Offering an insightful framework in which the two concepts can be understood, Russian Energy Chains complicates the issue of energy supplies that are inextricable from the dynamics of power relations on the interstate level. In addition to acute commentaries on the current role and status of Russia in the energy market, Margarita Balmaceda offers references to various time periods to illustrate how politically and geographically entangled energy systems are. Russian Energy Chains provides a detailed account of the development of the energy power that Russia seems to both offer and usurp; the book guides the reader through the complexity of power relations that include Ukraine and the European Union and helps better understand the current debate about Nord Stream-2. On a larger level, Margarita Balmaceda invites the discussion of the future of the energy market in terms of domestic and international policies.

Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

Historic preservation is typically regarded as an elitist practice. In this view, designating a neighborhood as historic is a project by and for affluent residents concerned with aesthetics, not affordability. It leads to gentrification and rising property values for wealthy homeowners, while displacement afflicts longer-term, lower-income residents of the neighborhood, often people of color.

Through rich case studies of Baltimore and Brooklyn, Aaron Passell complicates this story, exploring how community activists and local governments use historic preservation to accelerate or slow down neighborhood change. He argues that this form of regulation is one of the few remaining urban policy interventions that enable communities to exercise some control over the changing built environments of their neighborhoods. In Baltimore, it is part of a primarily top-down strategy for channeling investment into historic neighborhoods, many of them plagued by vacancy and abandonment. In central Brooklyn, neighborhood groups have discovered the utility of landmark district designation as they seek to mitigate rapid change with whatever legal tools they can. The contrast between Baltimore and Brooklyn reveals that the relationship between historic preservation and neighborhood change varies not only from city to city, but even from neighborhood to neighborhood. In speaking with local activists, Passell finds that historic district designation and enforcement efforts can be a part of neighborhood community building and bottom-up revitalization.

Featuring compelling narrative interviews alongside quantitative data, Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn (Columbia UP, 2021) is a nuanced mixed-methods study of an important local-level urban policy and its surprisingly varied consequences.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

We are conscious of only a small fraction of our lives. Because the brain constantly receives an enormous quantity of information, we need to be able to do things without thinking about them—to act in “autopilot” mode. Automatic behaviors—the vast majority of our activities—occur without our conscious awareness, or subconsciously. Yet the physiological basis of subconsciousness remains poorly understood, despite its vast importance for physical and mental health.

The neurodegenerative disease expert Yves Agid offers a groundbreaking and accessible account of subconsciousness and its significance. He pinpoints the basal ganglia—the ancient “basement of the brain”—as the main physiological hub of the subconscious. Agid examines its roles in the control and production of automatic behavior, including motor, intellectual, and emotional processes. He highlights the consequences for various brain pathologies, showing how malfunctions of the subconscious have clinical repercussions including not only abnormal involuntary movements, as seen in Parkinson’s disease, but also psychiatric disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorders and depression. Based on this understanding, Agid considers how seeing the basal ganglia as a therapeutic target can aid development of potential new treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Shedding new light on the physiological bases of our behavior and mental states, Subconsciousness: Automatic Behavior and the Brain (Columbia UP, 2021) provides an innovative exploration of the complexities of the mind, with implications ranging from clinical applications to philosophy’s thorniest problems.

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 [email protected].

Ideas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2021) tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly.

Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

Today I talked to Kevin McGruder about his new book Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem (Columbia UP, 2021)

In a moment of hope, even faith, African-Americans inspired by Booker T. Washington believed at the start of the 21st century that prospering financially would lead them to fair and even-standing with their fellow white citizens in America. In that vein, Philip Payton launched the Afro-American Realty Company in 1904 and in doing so took on the big-money crowd. Up against him, for instance, was the Hudson Realty Company that numbered among its backers the Bloomingdale family. To an amazing extent, Payton managed in his short life to engineer real estate deals that made Harlem the home base for many of the African-Americans coming north in the Great Migration of the World War One era. Was it an entirely smooth journey for Payton? No, it wasn’t—as McGruder points out in this episode that brings into account “racial capitalism” and the looming shadow of Woodrow Wilson’s divisive approach to race relations.

Kevin McGruder is an associate professor of history at Antioch College. He’s also the author of Race and Real Estate and in the 1990s was the director of real estate development for the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit church-based organization in Harlem.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

In a world that purports to know more about the future than any before it, why do we still need speculation? Insubstantial speculations – from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles – often provoke backlash, even when they prove prophetic. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy?

Gayle Rogers, author of Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia UP, 2021), speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about the intellectual history of speculation: from the mirror and the watch tower, the Calvinist reformation, the scientific revolution, through Jane Austen, to the founding of the United States, and the shape of contemporary capitalism – with booms, manias, busts, and bubbles along the way. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future.

Gayle Rogers is professor and chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.

In 1928 linguist Yuen Ren Chao had reason to celebrate. The Nationalist government had just recognized his system for writing Chinese, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, so he gleefully wrote (using the system) in his diary: "G.R. yii yu jeou yueh 26 ry gong buh le. Hooray!!!" (G.R. was officially announced on September 26. Hooray!!!). He was not the only one excited about the prospect of scraping Chinese characters either. In the global context of phonocentric dominance both the Nationalists and the Communists waged war on Chinese characters, seeking new, scientific, modern, and entirely phonetic writing system.

Ultimately, however, Chao's three exclamation marks were somewhat in vain. China's "script revolution" ended, and the Chinese Communist Party opted to simplify Chinese characters instead — a process and history deftly traced by Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (Columbia University Press, 2019). In Chinese Grammatology Yurou Zhong explores the history of the script revolution, tracing where it came from, how it changed over time, and how it was finally contained. Sharply written, beautifully constructed and filled with fascinated case studies, this is a real treat for those interested in modern Chinese history and literature, as well as anyone curious about global script reforms in the twentieth century.  

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected]

Between 1949 and 1997, Hong Kong transformed from a struggling British colonial outpost into a global financial capital. Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 2021) delivers a new narrative of this metamorphosis, revealing Hong Kong both as a critical engine in the expansion and remaking of postwar global capitalism and as the linchpin of Sino-U.S. trade since the 1970s.

In Made in Hong Kong, Peter E. Hamilton explores the role of an overlooked transnational Chinese elite who fled to Hong Kong amid war and revolution. Despite losing material possessions, these industrialists, bankers, academics, and other professionals retained crucial connections to the United States. They used these relationships to enmesh themselves and Hong Kong with the U.S. through commercial ties and higher education. By the 1960s, Hong Kong had become a manufacturing powerhouse supplying American consumers, and by the 1970s it was the world’s largest sender of foreign students to American colleges and universities. Hong Kong’s reorientation toward U.S. international leadership enabled its transplanted Chinese elites to benefit from expanding American influence in Asia and positioned them to act as shepherds to China’s reengagement with global capitalism. After China’s reforms accelerated under Deng Xiaoping, Hong Kong became a crucial node for China’s export-driven development, connecting Chinese labor with the U.S. market.

Peter E. Hamilton is a historian of China and the World. From fall 2021, he will be Assistant Professor in World History at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. His research has been published in Twentieth-Century China, The International History of Review, The Journal of Historical Sociology, and numerous media outlets.

Ghassan Moazzin is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the economic and business history of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular focus on the history of foreign banking, international finance and electricity in modern China. His first book, tentatively titled Banking on the Chinese Frontier: Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China, 1870–1919, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing.

Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people’s politics and resistance.

The future of local news and the connection between local news and democracy are two of the hottest topics in philanthropy, education, and media these days. Nikki Usher addresses both head-on in her new book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2021). 

In the book and in this conversation, Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. She questions longstanding beliefs about the relationship between local news and civic engagement and separates observed behavior from myths about American democracy and the media's role within it. 

Drawing on more than a decade of field research in newsrooms across the United States, Usher illuminates how news organizations strategize about the future and offers ideas for how they can meet community information needs in an inclusive, equitable way.

Nikki Usher is an associate professor in the College of Media at the University of Illinois .

Jenna Spinelle is a journalism instructor in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and host of the Democracy Works podcast.

Notre-Dame of Amiens is one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Its construction began in 1220, and artistic production in the Gothic mode lasted well into the sixteenth century. In Notre-Dame of Amiens: Life of the Gothic Cathedral (Columbia UP, 2020), Stephen Murray invites readers to see the cathedral as more than just a thing of the past: it is a living document of medieval Christian society that endures in our own time.

Murray tells the cathedral’s story from the overlapping perspectives of the social groups connected to it, exploring the ways that the layfolk who visit the cathedral occasionally, the clergy who use it daily, and the artisans who created it have interacted with the building over the centuries. He considers the cycles of human activity around the cathedral and shows how groups of makers and users have been inextricably intertwined in collaboration and, occasionally, conflict. The book travels around and through the spaces of the cathedral, allowing us to re-create similar passages by our medieval predecessors. Murray reveals the many worlds of the cathedral and brings them together in the architectural triumph of its central space.

A beautifully illustrated account of a grand, historically and religiously important building from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of time periods, this book offers readers a memorable tour of Notre-Dame of Amiens that celebrates the cathedral’s eight hundredth anniversary.

Notre-Dame of Amiens is enhanced by high-resolution images, liturgical music, and animations embedded in an innovative website.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

In 2014 and 2015, students at dozens of colleges and universities held protests demanding increased representation of Black and Latino students and calling for a campus climate that was less hostile to students of color. Their activism recalled an earlier era: in the 1960s and 1970s, widespread campus protest by Black and Latino students contributed to the development of affirmative action and open admissions policies. Yet in the decades since, affirmative action has become a magnet for conservative backlash and in many cases has been completely dismantled.

In To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press, 2019), Amaka Okechukwu offers a historically informed sociological account of the struggles over affirmative action and open admissions in higher education. Through case studies of policy retrenchment at public universities, she documents the protracted―but not always successful―rollback of inclusive policies in the context of shifting race and class politics. To Fulfill These Rights provides a new analysis of the politics of higher education, centering the changing understandings and practices of race and class in the United States.

Amaka Okechukwu is an Assistant Professor of sociology at George Mason University.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

In an era of rampant Islamophobia, literary representations of Muslims and anti Muslim bigotry tell us a lot about changing concepts of cultural difference. In Islamophobia and the Novel (Columbia University Press, 2018), Peter Morey, Professor at the University of Birmingham, analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice, showing how their portrayals of Muslims both reflect and refute the ideological preoccupations of media and politicians in the post-9/11 West. Morey discusses novels embodying a range of positions—from the avowedly secular to the religious, and from texts that appear to underwrite Western assumptions of cultural superiority to those that recognize and critique neoimperial impulses. Contemporary literature’s capacity to unveil the conflicted nature of anti-Muslim bigotry expands our range of resources to combat Islamophobia. This, in turn, might contribute to Islamophobia’s eventual dismantling. In our conversation we discussed anti-Muslim prejudice, the tension between narrative and power, literature and its relationship to Islamophobia, the “market for the Muslim,” stereotyping, authenticity and the burden of representation, aesthetic expectations, economic constraints, multiculturalism, securitization, effects of 9/11, the global novel, and Critical Muslim Literary Studies.

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 [email protected].

Eric Schluessel’s Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia (Columbia UP, 2020) looks at what happened when, at the end of the Qing, Chinese Confucian revivalists gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang and sought to transform it. Yet this is not a book about high politics or discourse — far from it. This is a book about what this civilizing project looked like on the ground, how it played out in “everyday politics,” and how Turkic-speaking Muslims felt about and responded to attempts to transform them into Chinese-speaking Confucians. Centering on the voices and experiences of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan, Land of Strangers is filled with stories of prostitution, human trafficking, venereal disease, families divided by war, and so much more. Reading across the Turpan archive this book combines records in both Chinese and Chaghatay, laying bare the difficulties revivalists encountered in educating children and showing how interpreters went about 'translating' oral Chaghatay, and throughout it emphasizes how the negotiation of place, difference, and identity was continual and fraught.

This beautifully written and meticulously researched book is a must read for anyone interested in Chinese history, the history of Central Asia, colonialism, and empire, as well as any historians who might get a particular thrill in seeing the “ragged” sources Eric is dealing with so expertly pieced together.

Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected]

Critical philosophy has always challenged the division between theory and practice. At its best, it aims to turn contemplation into emancipation, seeking to transform society in pursuit of equality, autonomy, and human flourishing. Yet today’s critical theory often seems to engage only in critique. These times of crisis demand more. In Critique and Praxis: A Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Action (Columbia University Press, 2020), Bernard E. Harcourt challenges us to move beyond decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. In a time of increasing awareness of economic and social inequality, Harcourt calls on us to make society more equal and just. Charting a vision for political action and social transformation, Harcourt argues that instead of posing the question, “What is to be done?” we must now turn it back onto ourselves and ask, and answer, “What more am I to do?”. The book advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each and every one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice.

Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education.

In this episode, J.J. Mull interviews Gavin Arnall, author of Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (Columbia University Press, 2020). Arnall traces an internal division throughout Fanon’s work between two distinct modes of thinking about change. He contends that there are two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive underground theory of transformation. In this conversation, Arnall touches on various Fanonian traditions and what they have to tell us about contemporary psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice.

J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at [email protected].

Justene Hill Edwards is the author of Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (Columbia University Press, 2021). Unfree Markets focuses in on an area of slavery’s history that has seldom been explore: the economic lives of enslaved people, and its meaning for them, enslavers, non-enslavers, and the institution of slavery itself. Hill Edwards explores how the complicated history of the slaves’ economy from the colonial period to the Civil War, showing the relationship between it and the development of capitalism in the nation. Through a history of enterprise, cultivation, markets, and people, Hill Edwards shows just how much the tenuous the connection between economic activity and freedom for the enslaved became throughout this time period, and what that meant for everyone involved.

Justene Hill Edwards is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia.

Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park.

How should we understand creative work? In Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries (Columbia UP, 2021), Michael Siciliano, an assistant professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, explores this question through a comparison of a recording studio and a digital content creation company. The book considers the meaning and practice of ‘creative’ labour, considering its ambivalences, the passions and commitments, as well as the compromises and alienations associated with this area of economy and society. It represents a crucial intervention to the literature on cultural production, as well as offering an important understanding of the impact of digital modes of distribution and production on creative industries. A rich and fascinating comparative ethnography, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary culture.

Political Scientist Heath Brown’s new book, Homeschooling the Right: How Conservative Education Activism Erodes the State (Columbia UP, 2021) is an excellent overview of the homeschooling movement in the United States, but it is much more than an exploration of that movement, since it centers on the way that this movement developed into a parallel political structure within states and localities with substantial capacity to influence policy and politics. Brown notes that initially the homeschool movement was ideologically diverse, but that over the past forty years it has become much more directly connected to conservative politics and the Religious Right. As parents chose to opt out of public education and provide education for their children at home, an entire industry grew up around this undertaking, providing, in the pre-internet days, support, content, approaches, and the means to help parents negotiate this at home. Along the way, as this movement continued to grow and expand, even though it was composed of only a fraction of school-age children, it also became a politically vocal movement, with lobbyists who worked on behalf of homeschoolers to keep government intrusion and regulation at bay. 

These threads came together and helped to mobilize the members of the homeschool movement. Brown argues that the ideology and the political dimensions of the homeschool movement ultimately migrated over to the Tea Party Movement that takes root in the first decade of the 21st century, since the homeschool ideas are pulling together conservative libertarianism in the anti-government, anti-regulatory vein, and the reintegration of Christian beliefs within academic settings. As we discussed the book, Brown noted that every Republican presidential candidate over the past two decades has paid attention to the homeschool movement, and that President George W. Bush made a point of thanking the homeschool parents and children who had worked so diligently on his campaign and with the GOP Get Out The Vote efforts, since the homeschool students were able to fold these experiences into their curriculum and assignments. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which developed to provide legal support for home school advocates across the states, had initially become a key player in conservative politics, but has now refocused much more narrowly, specifically on homeschool policy. 

Homeschooling the Right also gets at the complicated position of the homeschool movement within a democracy, since the movement itself is a way of removing the individual or the family from the public sphere. What is ironic, and important to understand, as Brown notes, is that this political movement has a louder, heightened political voice because of the capacity to mobilize many of its adherents, thus it is both actively inside and outside the political sphere.

This is a wonderfully written book and so accessible to readers—and it will be of interest to many across a broad spectrum of disciplines.

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 [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj.

All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Making of New York by Frederick M. Binder, David M. Reimers, and Robert W. Snyder (Columbia University Press, 2019) covers almost 500 years of New York City’s still unfolding story of cultural diversity and political conflict, economic dynamism and unmatched human diversity. This briskly paced volume – which updates a first edition originally published in the mid-1990s – reminds us that today’s hot button debates about immigration, inequality, and globalization have, in various earlier forms, long played roles in the evolution and development of one of the world’s great cities.

Bruce Cory is editorial advisor at The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School.

Through discussion of his famous 1970s experiment alongside new research, in Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can (Columbia University Press, 2019), Herbert Terrace argues that, despite the failure of famous attempts to teach primates to speak, from these efforts we can learn something important: the missing link between non-linguistic and linguistic creatures is the ability to use words, not to form sentences. Situating language-learning as a capacity gained through conversation, not primarily representing internal thought, Terrace takes naming as the first step towards language. By drawing on research in developmental psychology, paleoanthropology, and linguistics, Terrace builds a case for understanding human language as grounded in social interaction between mother and child, rather than an inevitable, asocial result of a person’s development.

Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff).