You can find out more about MSU Press at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Catherine is on Twitter @catherine_msup and Caitlin is @ctredits . You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb . Resources mentioned in the episode include #ASKUP , the UP subject grid , Furnace and Fugue , located at https://furnaceandfugue.org/ , and Cut Copy Paste located at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/cut-copy-paste The MSU Press podcast is a j...
Jul 25, 2022•57 min•Season 5Ep. 12
Bkejwanong means “where the waters part,” but the waters of St. Clair River are not a point of separation. The same waters that sustain life on and around Bkejwanong—formerly known as Walpole Island, Ontario—flow down into Chippewas of the Thames, the community to which author Monty McGahey II belongs. While there are no living fluent speakers of Anishinaabemowin in this community, McGahey has fostered relationships with fluent speakers from nearby Bkejwanong. Bkejwanong Dbaajmowinan is a collec...
Jul 18, 2022•37 min•Season 5Ep. 11
An avid high school debater and enthusiastic student body president, Craig Smith seemed destined for a life in public service from an early age. As a sought-after speechwriter, Smith had a front-row seat at some of the most important events of the twentieth century, meeting with Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon, advising Governor Ronald Reagan, writing for President Ford, serving as a campaign manager for a major U.S. senator’s reelection campaign, and writing speeches for a contender for the Re...
Jul 11, 2022•57 min•Season 5Ep. 10
Andrés Espinoza Agurrrrto’s new book, Salsa Consciente: Politics, Poetics, and Latinidad in the Meta-Barrio , explores the Salsa consciente movement, a Latino movement of music, poetry, and political discourse that exploded in the 1970s. Largely linked to the development of Nuyo latino popular music, Salsa consciente was brought about, in part, by the mass Latino migration to New York City beginning in the 1950s and the subsequent social movements that were tied to the shifting political landsca...
May 02, 2022•44 min•Season 5Ep. 9
When Consumers Power’s plan to build a nuclear power plant in Midland, Michigan, was announced in 1967, it promised to free Michigan residents from expensive, dirty, coal-fired electricity and to keep Dow Chemical operating in the state. But before the plan could be completed, the facility was called an engineering nightmare, a financial disaster, a construction boondoggle, a political headache, and a regulatory muddle. Most locals had welcomed nuclear power eagerly. Why, after almost twenty yea...
Apr 25, 2022•46 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Remixing is essential to contemporary culture. We see it in song mashups, political remix videos, memes, and even on streaming television shows like Stranger Things . But remixing isn’t an exclusively digital practice, nor is it even a new one. Evidence of remixing even appears in the speeches of classical Greek and Roman orators. Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix , by my guest Scott Haden Church, is the first book to address the remix from a communicative perspective, examining its per...
Apr 19, 2022•40 min•Season 5Ep. 7
Louise Erdrich is one of the most important, prolific, and widely read contemporary Indigenous writers. In Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts , edited by my guests Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson, leading scholars analyze three critically acclaimed recent novels— The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016)—which make up what has become known as Erdrich’s “justice trilogy.” Set in small towns and reservations of northern North Dakota,...
Apr 04, 2022•52 min•Season 5Ep. 6
A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction. Weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly, one encounters a blind Jorge Luis Borges with his mother, a glass confessional in the Notre Dame Cathedral, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, ghosts, a neurosurgeon’s prognosis, and Marie Laveau in New Orleans. Whether in a field with Joan of Arc, encountering the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or having dinner...
Mar 28, 2022•38 min•Season 5Ep. 5
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is known for its natural beauty and severe winters, as well as the mines and forests where men labored to feed industrial factories elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there were factories in the Upper Peninsula, too, and women who worked in them. In We Kept Our Towns Going , Phyllis Michael Wong tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century all the way ...
Mar 15, 2022•45 min•Season 5Ep. 4
In Under a Bad Sun: Police, Politics, and Corruption in Australia my guest Paul Bleakley asks, Why do police officers turn against the people they are hired to protect? A question that remains urgent in the wake of recent global protests against police brutality. As a historical criminologist, Bleakley addresses this question by examining an intersecting series of cases of police corruption in Queensland, Australia. The protection and extortion of illegal gambling operators and sex workers were ...
Feb 28, 2022•47 min•Season 5Ep. 3
In The Call: Eloquence in Service of Truth, my guests Craig R. Smith and Michael J. Hyde offer a rare examination of a rhetorical phenomenon referred to as “the call,” which is closely linked to eloquence. They explore this linkage by examining various components of eloquence, including examples of its misuse by George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. The case studies here, include examples drawn from addresses by Barack Obama, Daniel Webster, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Chase Smith, Susan Collins, and ...
Feb 21, 2022•49 min•Season 5Ep. 2
As I said in the intro, this will be the fifth season of the MSU Press podcast, and I’m excited to share new interviews with MSU Press authors on subjects such as remix culture, nuclear energy, and life in a small town in Michigan’s upper peninsula. We’ll also have native American stories, Australian politics, eloquence in public speech, and plenty of poetry. I hope you’ll come along for the whole season. Today, we’re discussing Coffin Honey. Todd Davis’s seventh book of poems and his sixth with...
Feb 14, 2022•46 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Collaborative applications of a variety of modeling methodologies have multiplied in recent decades due to widespread recognition of the power of models to integrate information from multiple sources, test assumptions about policy and management choices, and forecast the future states of complex systems. However, information about these modeling efforts often is segregated by both discipline and modeling approach, preventing folks from learning from one another. Innovations in Collaborative Mode...
Dec 06, 2021•38 min•Season 4Ep. 9
Science fiction often operates as either an extended metaphor for human relationships or as a genuine attempt to encounter the alien Other. Both types of stories tend to rehearse the processes of colonialism, in which a sympathetic protagonist encounters and tames the unknown. Despite this logic, Native American writers have claimed the genre as a productive space in which they can critique historical colonialism and reassert the value of Indigenous worldviews. My guest Miriam C. Brown Spiers bo...
Nov 22, 2021•43 min•Season 4Ep. 8
From the day that French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle launched the Griffin in 1679 to the 1975 sinking of the celebrated Edmund Fitzgerald , thousands of commercial ships have sailed on the vast and perilous waters of the Great Lakes. In a harbinger of things to come, on the return leg of its first trip in late summer 1679, the Griffin disappeared and has never been seen again. Records from the centuries since show that an alarming number of shipwrecks have occurred on the Great Lakes. I...
Nov 15, 2021•44 min•Season 4Ep. 7
From 1940 to 1970, mid‐Michigan created an extensive and varied legacy of modernist architecture. Based on archival research and oral histories, Susan J. Bandes’s Mid-Michigan Modern explores that legacy in both the work of renowned architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Alden B. Dow, and the Keck brothers, and in the buildings of regional architects whose work was strongly influenced by international modern styles. In the growing optimism and increasing economic prosperity following WWII, the ...
Nov 08, 2021•46 min•Season 4Ep. 6
The city of Detroit was the epicenter of the fur trade era, an unparalleled leader of shipbuilding for one hundred years, the Silicon Valley of the industrial age, and an unquestioned leader in the march of democracy. John Hartig’s book Waterfront Porch: Reclaiming Detroit’s Industrial Waterfront as a Gathering Place for All offers a unique history of Detroit as a city of innovation, resilience, and leadership in times to change. Waterfront Porch examines how the city has begun responding to the...
Nov 01, 2021•43 min•Season 4Ep. 5
In a poem called “How to Be A Poet,” Wendell Berry insists, “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.” In many ways an exploration of what makes a place sacred to ourselves and our memories and what might ultimately desecrate a place, Daniel Lassell’s debut collection, Spit , examines the roles we play in the act of belonging. The first-ever poetry book set on a llama farm, Spit is a portrait of a boy living on a farm populated with chickens sung to s...
Oct 25, 2021•45 min•Season 4Ep. 4
The United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan have danced on the knife’s edge of war for more than seventy years. A work of sweeping historical vision, A World of Turmoil offers five case studies of critical moments in these relationships: the end of World War II and the start of the Long Cold War; the almost-nuclear war over the Quemoy Islands in 1954–55; the détente, deceptions, and denials surrounding the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué; the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995–96; and the r...
Oct 18, 2021•48 min•Season 4Ep. 3
In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes , Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world with a ferocious industrial history. Despite these pressures, the great lakes remain wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines ...
Oct 11, 2021•41 min•Season 4Ep. 2
The first and most prolific professional architect to live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, D. Fred Charlton used Lake Superior sandstone to craft distinctive buildings throughout the UP. Born in England and trained as a civil engineer, Charlton arrived in Detroit in the late 1870s. There he sought work as a draftsman. Like many of his peers, Charlton had no formal training as an architect, and he learned his trade at several prominent firms. In 1887, Scott & Company sent him to Marquette to o...
Oct 04, 2021•46 min•Season 4Ep. 1
During the German Occupation from 1940 to 1944, Resistance fighters, Parisian youth, and French prisoners of war mined a vast repertoire from a long national musical tradition and a burgeoning international entertainment industry, embracing music as a rhetorical resource with which to destabilize Nazi ideology and contest collaborationist Vichy propaganda. After the Liberation of 1944, popular music continued to mediate French political life, helping citizens to challenge American hegemony and r...
Jun 07, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Nothing is off-limits in Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security . This ultimately American text positions big ideas in public spaces, often discovering the absurdity and humor in such connections. Johnson makes poetry of the dizzying influences affecting the post-postmodern American, skipping whimsically from the Pixies to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” from the Confederate flag to unisex public toilets, from eggplant emojis to Vladimir Putin stealing Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring. Rich ...
May 31, 2021•44 min•Season 3Ep. 10
The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa is an original and provocative study of contemporary African film and literature. In the book, Vlad Dima investigates how football and cinema express individual and collective fantasies. Shedding new light on both well-known and less familiar films, The Beautiful Skin asks just whose fantasy is articulated in football and African cinema. Answering this question leads Dima to explore body and identity issues through the metapho...
May 03, 2021•45 min•Season 3Ep. 9
In China today, the party-state increasingly penetrates commercial social media while aspiring to turn its own media agencies into platforms. Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, Engaging Social Media in China , edited by my guest Guobin Yang and Wei WAng, shows the complexity behind the central role the party-state plays in shaping social media platforms. State-sponsored platformization, however, does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party’s desired outcomes....
Apr 19, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Ending a war, as Fred Charles Iklé wrote, poses a much greater challenge than beginning one. In addition to issues related to battle tactics, prisoners of war, diplomatic relations, and cease-fire negotiations, ending war involves domestic political calculations as well. Balancing tides of public opinion against policy needs poses a deep and enduring problem for presidents. In this first-of-its-kind study, Resowing the Seeds of War explains how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Obama man...
Apr 12, 2021•51 min•Season 3Ep. 7
The Resistance Network is the history of an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria who helped save the lives of thousands during the Armenian Genocide. The book challenges depictions of Armenians as passive victims of violence and subjects of humanitarianism, demonstrating the key role they played in organizing a humanitarian resistance against the destruction of their people. Piecing together hundreds of accounts, official documents, and missionary re...
Apr 05, 2021•53 min•Season 3Ep. 6
A landmark in our understanding of international community-engaged learning programs, Community Engagement Abroad invites educators to rethink everything from disciplinary assumptions to the role of higher education in a globalizing world. Tapping the many such programs developed at Michigan State University during the last half-century, the volume develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing study-abroad programs with a community-engagement focus. More than a how-to guide, it also offers se...
Mar 29, 2021•39 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Writing That Breaks Stones: African Child Soldier Narratives is a critical examination of six memoirs and six novels written by and about young adults from Africa who were once child soldiers. It analyzes both how such narratives document human rights violations and how they connect and disconnect from their readers in the global public sphere. It draws on literary scholarship about novels and memoirs, as well as on fieldwork conducted by social scientists about African children in combat situat...
Mar 22, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Selected by Mark Doty for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Books prize, Derek Sheffield’s Not for Luck ushers us into the beauty and grace that comes from giving attention to the interconnections that make up our lives. Through encounters with a herd of deer, a circle of salmon in a mountain creek, and a shiny-eyed wood rat, these poems offer moments of wonder that celebrate our place as one species among many on our only earth. Sheffield is also the author of Through the Second Skin , and he is coeditor of...
Mar 15, 2021•55 min•Season 3Ep. 3
