Podcast Episodes

Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)

Episode 113

Plastic is ubiquitous. It is in the Arctic, in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and in the high mountaintops of the Pyrenees. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Nanoplastics penetra…

Published on 3 weeks, 3 days ago

Adam Jones, "Sites of Genocide" (Routledge, 2022)

Episode 166

Adam Jones will be familiar to anyone interested in the field of genocide studies. He's published one of the leading textbooks in the field. He's been influential in drawing attention to the intersec…

Published on 3 weeks, 3 days ago

Jim Cullen, "1980: America's Pivotal Year" (Rutgers UP, 2022)

Episode 196

1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco s…

Published on 3 weeks, 3 days ago

Democracy and Freedom: The Role of Philanthropy and Education

This week, we feature an episode with Dr. Alvaro Salas-Castro, President and CEO of the Reynolds Foundation, and Founder and Chairman of the Democracy Lab Foundation, which fosters civic innovation. …

Published on 3 weeks, 3 days ago

Faisal Devji, "Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam" (Yale UP, 2025)

Faisal Devji's Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale UP, 2025) is a compelling examination of the rise of Islam as a global historical actor. Until the nineteenth century, Islam wa…

Published on 3 weeks, 4 days ago

John Bodnar, "Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11" (UNC Press, 2021)

September 11th, 2001 marked the beginning of the so-called war on terror, but the attacks of that day also re-ignited battles over the nature of American patriotism. In Divided by Terror: American Pa…

Published on 3 weeks, 4 days ago

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, "Videotape" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion.…

Published on 3 weeks, 4 days ago

Arpitha Kodiveri, "Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests" (Melbourne UP, 2024)

In Governing Forests: State, Law and Citizenship in India’s Forests (Melbourne UP, 2024), Arpitha Kodiveri unpacks the fraught and shifting relationship between the Indian State, forest-dwelling comm…

Published on 3 weeks, 4 days ago

David Chanoff, "Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist" (U Georgia Press, 2025)

Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world were galvanized by the moral power o…

Published on 3 weeks, 4 days ago

Michael Brown, "Eyeliner’s Buy Now" (Bloomsbury 2025)

Michael Brown undertakes a thorough study of Eyeliner's Eyeliner's Buy Now (Bloomsbury 2025) a vaporwave homage to the kitsch electronic sounds of the 1980s and 1990s.

Eyeliner's BUY NOW (2015) belo…

Published on 3 weeks, 4 days ago