When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the “real” world. Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that ...
Jan 28, 2022•53 min•Ep. 85
Midori Yamamura’s Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular (MIT Press, 2015) is an in-depth examination of the famed artist’s early years in Japan and the United States. Based on extensive research in Kusama’s archives as well as interviews with Kusama herself, Inventing the Singular both tracks the evolution of Kusama’s artistic practice and maps the artistic, social, and political contexts in which Kusama developed as an artist. The result is as much an analysis of the development of a globalized ...
Jan 28, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 67
Want to read a fantastic book about art, love, politics, and resistance during the Second World War? Jeffrey H. Jackson's Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis (Algonquin Books, 2020) is a riveting account of the lives of Lucy Schwob/Claude Cahun) and Suzanne Malherbe/Marcel Moore, two French artists whose remarkable creative and romantic relationship spanned many tumultuous decades. The story of their love and work activates important themes and questions regarding...
Jan 28, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 92
In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art. Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theo...
Jan 27, 2022•2 hr 37 min•Ep. 148
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and out...
Jan 26, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 119
A unique, illustrated book that aspires to bring medieval history closer to the general audience will change the way you see medieval history, The Middle Ages: A Graphic History (Icon Books, 2021) busts the myth of the ‘Dark Ages’, shedding light on the medieval period’s present-day relevance in a unique illustrated style. This history takes us through the rise and fall of empires, papacies, caliphates and kingdoms; through the violence and death of the Crusades, Viking raids, the Hundred Years ...
Jan 25, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 4
Jack Robinson made his name as a much-sought-after fashion and celebrity photographer during the 1960s and early 1970s, and his work is well documented in hundreds of pages of Vogue, the New York Times, and Life, as well as other publications. However, his personal life remains virtually unknown. In this study of Robinson and his photography, Howard Philips Smith takes an in-depth look at Robinson’s early life in New Orleans, where he discovered his passion for painting, photography, and the Dix...
Jan 24, 2022•36 min•Ep. 84
Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900 (U Chicago Press, 2021) pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textu...
Jan 21, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 117
In Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life (Duke UP, 2021), Dr. Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological ima...
Jan 21, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 274
In Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India's Long Decolonization (Stanford UP, 2020), Sanjukta Sunderason explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an...
Jan 18, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 83
Attempting to derive aesthetic systems from natural structures of human cognition, designers looked toward the “savage mind”—a way of thinking they associated with a racialized subaltern. In Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Ginger Nolan uncovers an enduring relationship between “the savage” and the development of technology and its wide-ranging impact on society, including in the fields of architecture and urbanism, the industr...
Jan 18, 2022•21 min•Ep. 62
If one were to devise a motto for the art school of today, the choice between 'you too are an artist' and 'abandon all hope you who enter here' would be difficult. Despite significant changes in mainstream art education in recent decades, many anglophone art schools have not abandoned the principal tools of the masterclass or the crit that stem from some stubborn 18th-century ideas and the belief that creativity is the preserve of the artistic genius. Considering these histories can shed light o...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 82
In Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke UP, 2021), Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of t...
Jan 12, 2022•53 min•Ep. 138
In this episode of QUEER VOICES OF THE SOUTH, I talk with ANDREW J. KUNKA, who is a professor of English and division chair at the University of South Carolina Sumter. He is the author of the book Autobiographical Comics and has also published articles and book chapters on Will Eisner, Kyle Baker, Doug Moench, Jack Katz, and Dell Comics. The Life and Comics of Howard Cruse: Taking Risks in the Service of Truth (Rutgers UP, 2021) tells the remarkable story of how a self-described “preacher’s kid”...
Jan 12, 2022•48 min•Ep. 30
How can we make creative industries fair and inclusive? In Reimagining the Creative Industries: Youth Creative Work, Communities of Care (Routledge, 2021), Miranda Campbell, an associate professor in the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University, explores this question theoretically and empirically to present a new vision for both young creative workers and creative production itself. Drawing on ideas of ordinariness and the everyday, along with the need for care and inclusivity, the b...
Jan 11, 2022•45 min•Ep. 256
Mary Sully was many things: a Dakota woman, an artist, and an American living through a heyday of early celebrity culture in the United States. All of these facets of her life and of her context are present in her art. In Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), Harvard University professor and OAH President (and direct Sully relative) Phil Deloria uncovers Sully's artwork, long tucked away in family attics, and explains why it matters. Delo...
Jan 10, 2022•59 min•Ep. 85
In 2021, a team of divers led by renowned maritime archaeologist Dr Michael Flecker and sponsored by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute surveyed two historic shipwrecks discovered in the Singapore Strait, working for several months to bring their submerged cargos to the surface. Chinese trade ceramics found in these cargos date their demise to the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries – pivotal moments in the history of the globe-spanning China Trade. The most intriguing aspect of this salvage operat...
Jan 07, 2022•22 min•Ep. 45
Architecture and the Senses in the Italian Renaissance: The Varieties of Architectural Experience (Cambridge UP, 2021) is the first study of Renaissance architecture as an immersive, multisensory experience that combines historical analysis with the evidence of first-hand accounts. Questioning the universalizing claims of contemporary architectural phenomenologists, David Karmon emphasizes the infinite variety of meanings produced through human interactions with the built environment. His book d...
Jan 07, 2022•26 min•Ep. 60
What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System: The Art of Parasitical Resistance (Duke UP, 2020), Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism, a tactic of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Anna Watkins Fisher speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about the underhand tacti...
Jan 06, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 81
Shajar al-Durr--known as "Tree of Pearls"--began her remarkable career as a child slave, given as property to Sultan Salih of Egypt. She became his concubine, was manumitted, became his wife, served as governing regent, and ultimately rose to become the legitimately appointed sultan of Egypt in 1250 after her husband's death. Shajar al-Durr used her wealth and power to add a tomb to his urban madrasa; with this innovation, madrasas and many other charitably endowed architectural complexes became...
Jan 05, 2022•58 min•Ep. 80
Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindröling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Its founders sought to systematize and institutionalize a worldview rooted in Buddhist philosophy, engaging with contemporaries from across Tibetan Buddhist schools while crystallizing what it meant to be part of their own Nyingma school. At the monastery, ritual performance, meditation, renunciation, and training in the skills of a bureauc...
Jan 03, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 83
Banksy is the world's most famous living artist, yet no one knows who he is. For more than twenty years, his wryly political and darkly humorous spray paintings have appeared mysteriously on urban walls around the globe, generating headlines and controversy. Art critics disdain him, but the public (and the art market) love him. With Banksy: Completed (MIT Press, 2021), artist and critic Carol Diehl is the first author to probe the depths of the Banksy mystery. Through her exploration of his pain...
Dec 30, 2021•51 min•Ep. 79
In Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930 (Park Publishing, 2020), Anna Bokov examines the history of the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie) in Moscow, known most commonly by its acronym Vkhutemas. Operating between 1920 and 1930, Vkhutemas was a centre for developing new pedagogical methods to support mass education in art and technology. In this richly illustrated study, Bokov traces how radical experiments in art,...
Dec 29, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 65
Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge UP, 2019) by Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a summa of his lifetime study of Russian culture. In doing so, Brooks provides a needed corrective to the prior standard work, now over 50 years old. Firebird and the Fox chronicles a century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it. Daniel Peris is Senior V...
Dec 22, 2021•40 min•Ep. 179
Part of the series CAHIM Connecting Art Histories in the Museum, Anna McSweeney's book From Granada to Berlin: The Alhambra Cupola (Kettler Verlag, 2020) is the story of an extraordinary survivor from the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain: the Alhambra cupola, now in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. The cupola, a ceiling crafted from carved and painted wood, was made to crown an exquisite mirador in one of the earliest palace buildings of the Alhambra. The book is the cupola's biography from...
Dec 21, 2021•52 min•Ep. 78
One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world’s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming (U Washington Press, 2020) is the first book-length study devoted to the architectural projects of a single Chinese emperor. Focusing on the imperial palaces in Beijing, a Daoist architectural comp...
Dec 20, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 428
Rayna Denison’s Anime: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2015) uses genre as a window into the evolving global phenomenon of Japanese animation. Denison’s wide-ranging analysis tackles the anime themselves – including classics such as Astro Boy, Akira, Urotsukidōji, Spirited Away, and Natsume’s Book of Friends – but also the mechanics behind anime production and distribution in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Tracking anime’s circulation through these locations over time rev...
Dec 16, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 60
Japanese comics, commonly known as manga, are a global sensation. Critics, scholars, and everyday readers have often viewed this artform through an Orientalist framework, treating manga as the exotic antithesis to American and European comics. In reality, the history of manga is deeply intertwined with Japan’s avid importation of Western technology and popular culture in the early twentieth century. Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (Rutgers UP, 2021) reveals how popular U.S...
Dec 15, 2021•46 min•Ep. 58
The object as solid, having three dimensions, is not just a different formal trend, but a paradigm shift; a reconceiving of how the architectural object is produced and experienced, changing the very concept of objectivity and meaning of architecture. This book celebrates the potential of the strange object, which finds its origin in the proto-space―the moment between the becoming of the idea and the ultimate shape it takes; the state of the still obscure and ‘uninhibited’ object outside the est...
Dec 09, 2021•32 min•Ep. 58
From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition--and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois's work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois's literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist's life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic prac...
Dec 08, 2021•55 min•Ep. 179
