As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, ...
Nov 03, 2019•38 min•Ep. 45
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus ’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how ...
Oct 24, 2019•33 min•Ep. 81
What’s the first image that comes to mind when you hear the words “Paris” and “photography”? Is it a famous photo, perhaps an Atget, Brassai, or Doisneau? In her new book, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City in Photographs, 1860-1970 (Oxford UP, 2018), Catherine Clark explores the history of how and why photographic images have been central to understanding and imagining the city’s present and past, figuring profoundly in the representation and documentation of change over time in the Fren...
Oct 18, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 69
The images featured in Splashes (RVB Press, 2018) are characteristic of Gabriel Jones ’ approach to making images by capturing the “backdrop”, things behind the original subject. There is a performative element to this series in that Gabriel invited friends to pretend to pose at a party, he focused his camera towards them but not on them which allowed him to actually photography the situations taking place in the background of the scene. The photographs were taken with early cellphone cameras, a...
Sep 19, 2019•44 min•Ep. 40
How did American elites change the meaning of Art? In Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts (Princeton University Press, 2019), Jennifer C. Lena , associate professor of arts administration at Colombia University, charts the history of American arts and cultural policy, interrogating the institutions, practices, and technologies underpinning the development of American Art. The book has rich case study material of over 100 years of American cultural policy and practice, a...
Aug 29, 2019•36 min•Ep. 134
In her book, The Caesar of Paris: Napoleon Bonaparte, Rome, and the Artistic Obsession That Shaped An Empire (Pegasus Books, 2018), Susan Jaques offers up a richly detailed and researched account of Napoleon’s fascination with ancient Rome, and how this obsession shaped not only France in the early part of the nineteenth century, but also the city of Paris we know today. In this interview, she traces the cultural history and legacy of the Napoleonic era, discussing topics such as the looting of ...
Aug 22, 2019•45 min•Ep. 578
In Changing Saudi Arabia, Art, Culture and Society in the Kingdom (Lynne Rienner, 2019), Sean Foley offers eye-opening insights into a changing society that is under the international magnifying glass. Using the prism of an exploding arts scene populated by artists, comedians, actors, directors and masters of new media from diverse backgrounds, Foley paints a granular picture of a country that figures prominently in global geopolitics. Breaking with the traditional geopolitical, political and ec...
Aug 08, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 77
In this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto , Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Buffalo about her forthcoming work, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019). The MIT press release appropriately notes that Otto “liberates Bauhaus history” with this work, drawing the focus from the handful of mal...
Aug 06, 2019•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 566
A work of art about doing nothing; a work of art that invites people to take it apart; a work of art that consists of two people walking in a town in the Dominican Republic. These are just some examples Carlos Garrido Castellano takes up in Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere (Rutgers University Press, 2019), his provocative and complex exploration of conceptual art in the Caribbean as it has been presented over the last thirty years. He ar...
Jul 17, 2019•36 min•Ep. 45
The Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums is the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In The Tale of Genji. A Visual Companion , published by Princeton University Press in 2018, Melissa McCormick discusses all of the fifty-four paintings by Tosa Mitsunobu and calligraphies in the album, thus providing a unique companion to Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh century masterpiece of prose and poetry, The Tale of Genji . Ricarda Brosch is an Assistant Curator at the V&A’s Asi...
Jul 17, 2019•57 min•Ep. 39
If there’s one thing that conjures up the – rightly contested – idea of a ‘civilisation’, it is grand palatial or religious buildings, and many such structures are foremost in how China is imagined throughout the world. But as Nancy S. Steinhardt notes in Chinese Architecture: A History (Princeton University Press, 2019), many iconic edifices such Beijing’s Forbidden City or Shanxi’s temples share features in common with the humblest ordinary dwellings which people in what we now call China have...
Jul 16, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 283
The metaphor “object lesson” is a familiar one, still in everyday use. But what exactly does the metaphor refer to? In her book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press, 2018), my guest Sarah Anne Carter reveals that object lessons were a classroom exercise, in wide use during the nineteenth century. She traces them from the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi, through his English adherents, to seemingly unlikely outp...
Jul 10, 2019•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 528
“Fashion is universal,” writes my guest Kimberly Alexander in her book Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), “enabling historians across time, place, and culture to form an understanding of the people who made clothes and who wore them. But shoes are different. As shoe scholar June Swann opines, ‘No other garment or accessory maintains the imprint of its wearer–even over long spans of time.’ A shoe molds to the foot and captures a facet of the physical cha...
Jun 26, 2019•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 526
Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford University...
Jun 25, 2019•1 hr 58 min•Ep. 532
Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West. A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus on peaceful cooperation with foreign powers. A year after Stalin’s death, author and commentator Ilya Ehrenburg published the novel that would give a name to this era, “The Thaw,” which probed the limits of cultural expression, now expanded by Khrushchev’s political pivot. One of the critical hallmarks...
Jun 19, 2019•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 91
In Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Dr. John Etty explains how Krokodil magazine provided a venue in which the state, the the magazine’s editors, and readers all participated in defining what it was permissible to laugh at in the USSR. A standard view of Krokodil as propaganda would suggest that the magazine largely functioned as an arm of state ideology. In some cases, Krokodil did serve this function, but more often than...
May 30, 2019•44 min•Ep. 89
It was the passionate amateur painter, Winston Churchill, who introduced one of the Cold War’s key metaphors: The Iron Curtain. As John J. Curley argues in Global Art and the Cold War (Laurence King Publishers, 2019), this provocative image defined the binary logic of the Cold War and speaks to the larger importance of visuals in both the deployment of contemporary propaganda and in political resistance. A meticulously-researched and accessible monograph, Global Art and the Cold War demonstrates...
May 27, 2019•53 min•Ep. 38
Linda M. Grasso's Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) provides an in-depth look at O'Keeffe's ambivalent relationship with feminism from her early beginnings as a New Woman of the 1910s, to the support she received from women to become a national icon for feminism. Along the way, she distanced herself in multiple ways from women and feminism seeking to establish herself as an artist rather than as a woman artist with art m...
May 27, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 92
In a world where heritage, culture, creativity, and the capacity to imagine are themselves commodified and sold under the banner of neoliberal freedom, (how) can art be harnessed for anti-capitalist agendas? At a time when scholars along all points of the political spectrum seem to agree that expressing their creativity is good for oppressed groups, whether because creativity makes them entrepreneurial or because creativity is an inherent challenge to capitalism, Dia Da Costa offers a refreshing...
May 24, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 95
In her original and thought-provoking book Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Anne A. Cheng illustrates the longstanding relationship between the ‘oriental’ and the ‘ornamental’. So doing, she moves beyond a simple analysis of objectification to reveal the powerful role Ornamentalism plays in constituting modern ideas of personhood, racialized femininity and the figure of the Asian woman. Drawing on examples from the realms of law, popular culture and art from the 19th and 20th centu...
May 22, 2019•36 min
Installed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1921 to commemorate the tercentenary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Cyrus Dallin's statue Massasoit was intended to memorialize the Pokanoket Massasoit (leader) as a welcoming diplomat and participant in the mythical first Thanksgiving. But after the statue's unveiling, Massasoit began to move and proliferate in ways one would not expect of generally stationary monuments tethered to place. The plaster model was donated to the artist's home state of Utah ...
May 22, 2019•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 85
This is a magically journey about the mystery of the design process. Chip Sullivan 's Cartooning the Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is about using your drawing skills to exercise and stretch your imagination. He takes you step by step through a process of creativity to enhance your own design and challenge your limitations. Why not? Where does creativity come? This book will help guide you on your own path to go there...somewhere. You are your only limitation. Chip Sullivan is Pr...
May 16, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 9
Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Eilís Barrett , Associate Professor of Classics at Cornell University, draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals t...
May 07, 2019•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 11
Five decades ago, Native American leaders launched a crusade to force museums to return their sacred objects and allow them to rebury their kin. Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to help them recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated firsthand the questions of how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans a...
Apr 19, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 83
Harold Holzer has written a biography of one of America’s greatest public artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Daniel Chester French. In Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), Holzer chronicles the career of French, who became best known for his sculpture of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. French was born in 1850 and became one of the most sought after sculptors of portraits and thematic sculpt...
Apr 19, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 144
In one of history’s largest migrations, hundreds of thousands of Norwegians immigrated to North American during the 1800s and early 1900s. In addition to letters sent home, Norwegian-Americans often included photographs showcasing their new American lives. In her book, Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Dr. Sigrid Lien keenly evaluates the photographs Norwegian immigrants sent home—including one of her own grandfather. Thr...
Apr 08, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 485
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University--to discuss an inimitable work of critique: Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2017). Moving fluidly and with suspense through Baker’s performances, personal journals, museums, architectural designs, and the lyrics o...
Mar 25, 2019•42 min•Ep. 59
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick , whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press ) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments o...
Mar 19, 2019•32 min•Ep. 15
Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the development of the Mid-Republican city from 396 to 168 BCE. As Romans established imperial control over Italy and beyond, the city itself radically transformed from an ambitious central Italian settlement into the capital of the Mediterranean world. Seth Bernard describes this transformation in terms of both new urban architecture, much of it unprecedented ...
Mar 14, 2019•36 min•Ep. 9
What are the characteristics of the 21st Century arts leader? In From Imposter to Impact: Arts Leadership in the 21st Century (Dahlia Publishing, 2019), Farhana Shaikh , a writer, publisher, and journalist, details lessons from key arts thinkers. The book covers issues including funding, networking, audience development, the challenge of digital, and diversity in the arts. Crucially the book confronts the struggles and failures, as well as the successes, associated with developing an arts career...
Mar 05, 2019•35 min•Ep. 119
