Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchElizabeth T. Craft, "Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Episode 272
George M. Cohan was one of those rare Broadway figures who was a composer, lyricist, playwright, performer, director, theater owner, and star actor. …
1 year, 7 months ago
Paul Lisicky, "Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell" (HarperOne, 2025)
Episode 271
Paul Lisicky remembers when he first heard Joni Mitchell on the radio, and when he found one of her records in a bin at Korvettes. He was inspired by…
1 year, 7 months ago
Michael Visontay, "Noble Fragments: The Gripping Story of the Antiquarian Bookseller Who Broke Up a Gutenberg Bible" (Scribe, 2024)
Episode 1547
One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg …
1 year, 7 months ago
John Coakley ed et al., "The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World: Maritime Predation, Empire, and the Construction of Authority at Sea" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
Episode 96
In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerb…
1 year, 7 months ago
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, "Bong Joon Ho" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
Episode 230
Successful cult films like The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho's enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. In Bong J…
1 year, 7 months ago
Isabel Moreira, "Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Episode 39
This book tells the remarkable life of Balthild of Francia (c. 633-80), a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon slave who became a queen of France. Described i…
1 year, 7 months ago
Florence Martin, "Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Episode 142
Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) unfolds and analyzes the work of Moroccan director, producer, and scriptwriter Farida…
1 year, 8 months ago
Blanche Bendahan, "Mazaltob: A Novel" (Brandeis UP, 2024)
Episode 612
Raised in the Judería or Jewish quarter of Tetouan, Morocco, at the turn of the 20th-century, sixteen-year-old Mazaltob finds herself betrothed to Jo…
1 year, 8 months ago
Mary Flannery, "Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
Episode 273
For over six centuries, Chaucer has epitomized poetic greatness, though more recent treatments of The Canterbury Tales’ lively and often risqué style…
1 year, 8 months ago
Susan Tate Ankeny, "American Flygirl" (Citadel Press, 2024)
Episode 112
In 1931, Hazel Ying Lee, a nineteen-year-old American daughter of Chinese immigrants, sat in on a friend’s flight lesson. It changed her life. In les…
1 year, 8 months ago