In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Lexi Eikelboom. Dr Lexi Eikelboom is both a visual artist and a scholar of philosophical theology. Her academic work analyses aesthetic concepts such as rhythm and form as way to illuminate the human implications of the philosophical arguments in which the concepts appear. She also leads collaborative projects investigating art as a form of thinking and the effects of engagement with art on theoretical work. They discuss rhythm and time in cubist painting, lett...
Jul 07, 2025•36 min
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Tracy Wai de Boer about her debut poetry collection, Nostos (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther 2025). Taking its title from Ancient Greek, Tracy Wai de Boer’s Nostos is a hero’s journey rooted in the quest for selfhood from elemental beginnings to an unknowable end. “Nostos” translates to homecoming and is one of the root words of nostalgia; the other, “algos,” means pain, making nostalgia a painful return home. This etymology acts as guide for de B...
Jul 07, 2025•36 min
Since the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely...
Jul 07, 2025•37 min•Ep. 217
In 1998, Bill Clinton hosted a town hall on race and sports. 'If you've got a special gift,' the president said of athletes, 'you owe more back.' Gift and Grit shows how the sports industry has incubated racial ideas about advantage and social debt since the civil rights era by sorting athletes into two broad categories. The gifted athlete received something for nothing, we're told, and owes the team, the fan, the city, God, nation. The gritty athlete received nothing and owes no one. The distin...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr 13 min
What comes to mind when we think about the Sahara? Rippling sand dunes, sun-blasted expanses, camel drivers and their caravans perhaps. Or famine, climate change, civil war, desperate migrants stuck in a hostile environment. The Sahara stretches across 3.2 million square miles, hosting several million inhabitants and a corresponding variety of languages, cultures, and livelihoods. But beyond ready-made images of exoticism and squalor, we know surprisingly little about its history and the people ...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 216
Andrew Tobolowsky's Israel and Its Heirs in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2025) explores constructions of Israelite identity among Jewish, Samaritan Israelites, and Christian authors in Late Antiquity, especially early Late Antiquity. It identifies three major strategies for claiming an Israelite identity between these three groups: a 'biological' strategy, a 'biology plus' strategy, and an 'abiological' strategy, referring to the difference between Jewish claims to Israel premised on exclusive ...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 56
Love and Mercy A film by Bill Pohlad Love and Mercy (2014) is a film that shows how the sausage is made, in terms of both the music and the man. We get to see Brian Wilson’s Kubrick-like devotion to getting Pet Sounds exactly like he wants it, as well as his becoming a whole person through the force of his future wife. The film is a nightmare version of Peter Pan, examining a boy who won’t grow up until he finds the two things mentioned in the title. We all know from history that he does, but th...
Jul 07, 2025•23 min
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Alpha Nkuranga about her deeply powerful and unforgettable memoir, Born to Walk: My Journey of Trials and Resilience (Goose Lane Editions, 2024). “My grandparents used to tell me Rwanda is a country unlike any other, and I knew they spoke the truth. Blessed with majestic mountains and breathtaking valleys, it is a sacred and spiritual land. And yet Rwandan men drenched the land in blood in acts of hate so horrific that the stains of those thre...
Jul 07, 2025•43 min
In this episode, host Alex Batesmith sits down with Dr Rachel Killean and Dr Lauren Dempster to discuss their groundbreaking new book, Green Transitional Justice (Routledge, 2025). The conversation explores the urgent need to rethink transitional justice (TJ) in light of the environmental crises facing post-conflict societies. Dr Killean and Dr Dempster begin by explaining what drew them to the intersection of TJ and environmental harm. Their book emerges from a shared concern that traditional T...
Jul 07, 2025•1 hr 10 min
In a unique and personal exploration of the game and fish laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, Julia Brock offers an innovative history of hunting in the New South. The implementation of conservation laws made significant strides in protecting endangered wildlife species, but it also disrupted traditional hunting practices and livelihoods, particularly among African Americans and poor whites. Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern ...
Jul 06, 2025•55 min
This book provides background, strategies, and tips for higher education faculty and instructors interested in incorporating meditation in their classrooms. The work is based on research involving introducing brief meditation practices to college students and developing a detailed guide. Readers will learn how to develop their own meditation practice as an academic, to set the stage of introducing practice to students, to create ideal conditions for meditation in the classroom, specific, classro...
Jul 06, 2025•45 min
In the sixth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with John Holmstrom a comic illustrator and founder of Punk magazine. In the early 1970s, Holmstrom moved from suburban Connecticut to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts where he studied under the celebrated comic illustrator Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman creator of MAD magazine. In 1975, Holmstrom conceived the idea for Punk Magazine by collaborating with Ged Dunn and Eddie “Legs” McNeil as an independent zine to ...
Jul 06, 2025•43 min•Season 1Ep. 6
In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemporary devotion to souls is not confined to Catholic adherents or fixed to specific locations. The practice is also linked to popular tours of haunted ...
Jul 06, 2025•1 hr 13 min
This book provides insight into the impact of climate change on human mobility - including both migration and displacement - by synthesizing key concepts, research, methodology, policy, and emerging issues surrounding the topic. It illuminates the connections between climate change and its implications for voluntary migration, involuntary displacement, and immobility by providing examples from around the world. The chapters use the latest findings from the natural and social sciences to identify...
Jul 06, 2025•47 min
How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.How to Dodge a Cannonball (Henry Holt, 2025) is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future―as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violentl...
Jul 06, 2025•1 hr 4 min
An engaging history of motherhood, demography, and infertility in twentieth-century France, Fertile expectations: The politics of involuntary childlessness in twentieth-century France (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Margaret Andersen explores fraught political and cultural meanings attached to the notion of an "ideal" family size. When statistics revealed a sustained drop in France's birthrate, pronatalist activists pushed for financial benefits, propaganda, and punitive measures to c...
Jul 06, 2025•46 min
The year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature's centrality. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature's rivals for cultural attention were on the rise-film was becoming a more significant part of people's media diet, radio was just taking off, television technologies were advancing--but literature was still king. Even mediocre books got dozens of reviews, and the reviews were (most often) thoughtful and ...
Jul 06, 2025•1 hr 15 min
How can I help my students not only learn my course material but also retain and transfer that information? This is a question that has plagued and intrigued teachers for centuries. In Smart Teaching Stronger Learning: Practical Tips for 10 Cognitive Scientists, the authors provide their readers with evidence-based practices for immediate classroom implementation. Their premise is that small changes can lead to powerful results. In this approachable book, each chapter is written by a cognitive s...
Jul 06, 2025•1 hr 14 min
In this important body of theology, key writings from the Chinese house church movement have been compiled, translated, and made accessible to English speakers. The documents in Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement (IVP Academic, 2022) give readers an inside look at how the unregistered churches of China have endured despite government pressure and cultural marginalization. Wang Yi, the primary writer, is the pastor of a house church in Chengdu...
Jul 05, 2025•1 hr 15 min
In the fifth episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with British music critic Jon Savage about how LGBTQ resistance shaped American popular music from the 1950s to the 1980s. Savage discusses the curious and queer roots of the word punk stretching back to the time of Shakespeare when it was used to connote ambiguous and transgressive gender and sexuality. Those meanings carried through to the 1970s though their origins may have been obscured by popular culture. Jon Savage is the ...
Jul 05, 2025•50 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Kevin Guyan reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalities in the UK is shaped – and constrained – by the classifications we encounter every day. Looking across six systems – the police and the recording of hate crimes; dating apps and digital desire; outness in the film and television industry; borders and LGBTQ asylum seekers; health and fitness activities; and DEI initiatives in the workplace – Rainb...
Jul 05, 2025•55 min
The first literary biography of Tim O'Brien, the preeminent American writer of the war in Vietnam and one of the best writers of his generation, drawing on never-before-seen materials and original interviews. "Vietnam made me a writer." —Tim O'Brien Featuring over one hundred interviews with family, friends, peers, and others—not to mention countless exchanges with Tim O'Brien himself—Peace is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O'Brien (St. Martin's Press, 2025) provides a nearly day-by-day, g...
Jul 05, 2025•52 min
The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (UNC Press, 2024) reveals that Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholder...
Jul 05, 2025•49 min
As the crisis of democratic capitalism sweeps the globe, The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don't (Oxford University Press, 2025) makes the controversial argument that what democracies require most are stronger political parties that serve as intermediaries between citizens and governments. Once a centralizing force of the democratic process, political parties have eroded over the past fifty years. Parties now rank among the most unpopular institutions in society...
Jul 04, 2025•53 min
In the fourth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell and music historian Jesse Rifkin tour a constellation of seedy bars and venues in the 1970s that nurtured bands during the early days of punk rock. These spaces include well-known clubs like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City and lesser-known haunts like the Mercer Arts Center and Mother’s that shed light on hidden meanings behind punk rock. These stories illuminate echoes of the trans liberation struggle, and how punk rock embodied the sounds...
Jul 04, 2025•50 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Jesse Browner is the author of the novels Sing to Me (Little Brown, 2025) The Uncertain Hour and Everything Happens Today, among others, as well as of the memoir How Did I Get Here? He is also the translator of works by Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Matthieu Ricard and other French literary masters. He lives in New York City. Recommended Books: Cormac McCarthy, The Road Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires Susanna Clarke, Piranesi Dezso Kosztolanyi, Skylark Chris Holmes is Cha...
Jul 04, 2025•57 min
In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast I sat down with Dr Doina Anca Cretu to talk about her first book, Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania: In Quest of an Ideal, published by Stanford University Press. In the podcast we talk about Anca’s academic background, how she came to research foreign aid in Romania, any surprises she encountered during her research, the nature of foreign aid in interwar Romania, and how to approach publishing a first monograph. The CEU Review ...
Jul 04, 2025•32 min
How to sustain an international system of cooperation in the midst of geopolitical struggle? Can the international economic and legal system survive today’s fractured geopolitics? Democracies are facing a drawn-out contest with authoritarian states that is entangling much of public policy with global security issues. In Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order (Princeton University Press, 2024), Paul Tucker lays out principles for a sustainable system of international cooperat...
Jul 03, 2025•50 min
Since the earliest encounters between tantric traditions and Western scholars of religion, tantra has posed a challenge. The representation of tantra, whether in Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Tibet, or Japan, has tended to emphasize the antinomian, decadent aspects, which, as attention-grabbing as they were for audiences in the West, created a one-dimensional understanding, and hampered the academic study of the field for more than a century. Additionally, the Western perspective on religion has been domi...
Jul 03, 2025•39 min
The attack in democracy under President Donald Trump in the United States is both broader and deeper than you think. In this timely conversation with Carl LeVan, Professor and Chair of Politics, Governance, and Economics at American University – but speaking only in his personal capacity – we hear about the way that the government has attempted to silence critical voices by intimidating a remarkably wide range of institutions from law firms to universities and on to civil society groups and the ...
Jul 03, 2025•37 min
