Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchBernard J. Dobski, "Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
Episode 754
Political Theorist B.J. (Bernard J.) Dobski has a new book focusing on Mark Twain’s final published novel, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc. As Do…
1 year, 5 months ago
Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobac…
1 year, 5 months ago
S4E20 Cosmic Connections: A Conversation with Charles Taylor
This week on Madison’s Notes, we sit down with philosopher and author Charles Taylor to discuss his latest work, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Ag…
1 year, 5 months ago
Jennie Lightweis-Goff, "Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Episode 340
Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Citie…
1 year, 5 months ago
Alastair Gornall, "Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270" (UCL Press, 2020)
Episode 79
Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri …
1 year, 5 months ago
Adam Zucker, "Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Episode 138
Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity (Oxford UP, 2024) dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in earl…
1 year, 5 months ago
I. Augustus Durham, "Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius" (Duke UP, 2023)
Episode 488
In Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke UP, 2023), I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, and med…
1 year, 5 months ago
Carl Rollyson, "The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897-1934" (UVA Press, 2020)
Episode 167
As a novelist, short story author, screenwriter, and Nobel laureate, William Faulkner looms large in modern American literature. Yet the very range o…
1 year, 5 months ago
James Baldwin’s Use of Mechanisms of Defense in this Story “Going to Meet the Man”
Episode 248
James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” is a powerful short story that describes the life of Jesse, a 42-year-old white police officer whose experien…
1 year, 6 months ago
Nicholas R. Jones, "Cervantine Blackness" (Penn State UP, 2024)
Episode 329
There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling …
1 year, 6 months ago