Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchDenise Gigante, "Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America" (Yale UP, 2022)
Episode 243
In February 1848, a book auction took place in Astor House, No. 7, on the corner of Broadway and Vesey in lower Manhattan, New York. By all accounts,…
2 years, 9 months ago
Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" Part 3: The Language
Season 1 Episode 35
In Part 3, Professor Stephen Greenblatt offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll get an in-depth look at the power…
2 years, 10 months ago
David Waldstreicher, "The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence" (FSG, 2023)
Episode 670
Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak,
And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak.
At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in E…
2 years, 10 months ago
Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette, "Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls" (Lexington Books, 2022)
Episode 395
Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette's book Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls (Lexington Books, 2022) examines depictions of …
2 years, 10 months ago
Vanessa I. Corredera, "Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
Episode 242
Vanessa I. Corredera’s book Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh Univeristy Press, 2022) looks at how that seventeenth…
2 years, 10 months ago
Hollis Robbins, "Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition" (U Georgia Press, 2020)
Episode 241
As I learned from Hollis Robbins’s monograph Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (U Georgia Press, 2020), there …
2 years, 10 months ago
Lawrence Goldman, "Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Episode 93
A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth…
2 years, 10 months ago
Chesya Burke, "Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
Episode 394
First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters…
2 years, 10 months ago
On the (Still Bright) Future of Nostalgia
Episode 1
I am joined on “America and Beyond” by historian Peter Fritzsche for an appreciation of The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books), the landmark book publ…
2 years, 10 months ago
Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, "Noah's Arkive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Episode 240
At a moment when the world has tipped over into irreversible violence and corruption, a divinity contacts a righteous man. The man is directed to bui…
2 years, 10 months ago