Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAbdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, "Decolonizing Human Rights" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Episode 55
In his extensive body of work, Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim challenges both historical interpretations of Islamic Sharia and neo-colonial unders…
2 years, 5 months ago
Robert R. Janes, "Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat" (Routledge, 2023)
Episode 1
Who do you turn to at the brink of the apocalypse? What might help us to mitigate the financial, commercial, political, social, and cultural collapse…
2 years, 5 months ago
Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
Episode 73
Suspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a …
2 years, 5 months ago
Laura Briggs, "Taking Children: A History of American Terror" (U California Press, 2020)
Episode 168
Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press 2020) is a forceful and captivating book that readers wo…
2 years, 5 months ago
Jason Read, "The Politics of Transindividuality" (Haymarket Books, 2017)
Episode 144
Many major political questions today revolve around questions of human nature; what sort of people we are and what sort of people we're capable of be…
2 years, 5 months ago
Hongwei Bao, “Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China” (NIAS Press, 2018)
Episode 226
Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which…
2 years, 5 months ago
Nicole Seymour, "Glitter" (Bloombury, 2022)
Episode 177
Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Nicole Seymour reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Dr. Seymour describes how glitter'…
2 years, 5 months ago
Annie McClanahan, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture" (Stanford UP, 2016)
Episode 125
When teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings …
2 years, 5 months ago
D. B. Maroon, "Black Lives, American Love: Essays on Race and Resilience" (Lawrence Hill Books, 2023)
Episode 430
In this hard-hitting collection of essays, D.B. Maroon presents a personal biography of America, Blackness, and racial politics with unflinching styl…
2 years, 5 months ago
David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Episode 2
We are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Co…
2 years, 5 months ago