New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn’t seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together, to find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done? In Palaces for the People, Eric K...
Dec 04, 2018•2 hr 35 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Mandarin Brazil; Race, Representation, and Memory By: Ana Paulina Lee In Mandarin Brazil, Ana Paulina Lee explores the centrality of Chinese exclusion to the Brazilian nation-building project, tracing the role of cultural representation in producing racialized national categories. Lee considers depictions of Chineseness in Brazilian popular music, literature...
Dec 04, 2018•29 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. A special edition of our series, hear the full event featuring Cory Doctorow from September 2018. Cory Doctorow and Dennis Tenen, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, have a conversation about science fiction, the changing material conditions of contemporary authorship, copyright, and surveillance.
Nov 28, 2018•1 hr 6 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition By: Souleymane Bachir Diagne What does it mean to be a Muslim philosopher, or to philosophize in Islam? In Open to Reason, Souleymane Bachir Diagne traces Muslims’ intellectual and spiritual history of examining and questioning beliefs and arguments to show how Islamic philosophy ...
Nov 28, 2018•36 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture: Text, Presence, and Imperial Knowledge in the Noctes Atticae By: Joseph Howley Long a source for quotations, fragments, and factoids, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius offers hundreds of brief but vivid glimpses of Roman intellectual life. In this book Joseph Howley demonstrates how the work may be read as a literar...
Nov 28, 2018•32 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. The Art of Love Poetry By: Erik Gray -The first volume to offer an integral theory of love poetry that explores why poetry is consistently associated with romantic love -Offers close readings of numerous love poems to guide readers to a deeper appreciation of some of the world's most beautiful love lyrics -Covers topics such as the poetic kiss, the lyric of ...
Oct 09, 2018•20 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain By: Caitlin Gillespie In AD 60/61, Rome almost lost the province of Britain to a woman. Boudica, wife of the client king Prasutagus, fomented a rebellion that proved catastrophic for Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium (London), and Verulamium (St Albans), destroyed part of a Roman legion, and caused the deaths of an u...
Oct 09, 2018•20 min
New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors. Living in the shadow of death may enhance the gift of life. In 2006, Taylor (Religion/Columbia Univ.; Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left, 2014, etc.) developed an infection after a biopsy, resulting in septic shock that took a month to stabilize; five months later, he underwent surgery for cancer. That life-threatening experience, h...
Oct 09, 2018•27 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by: Jack Halberstam In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an ...
Aug 15, 2018•57 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States–one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppres...
Aug 15, 2018•39 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart by: Andreas Wimmer Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and cont...
Aug 14, 2018•35 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. Reading Jane Austen by Jenny Davidson Whether you're new to Austen's work or know it backwards and forwards already, this book provides a clear, full and highly engaging account of how Austen's fiction works and why it matters. Exploring new pathways into the study of Jane Austen's writing, novelist and academic Jenny ...
Aug 14, 2018•33 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation by Dennis Tenen This book challenges the ways we read, write, store, and retrieve information in the digital age. Computers—from electronic books to smart phones—play an active role in our social lives. Our technological choices thus entail theoretical and political commitments. D...
Aug 14, 2018•52 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. The Beneficiary by Bruce Robbins From iPhones and clothing to jewelry and food, the products those of us in the developed world consume and enjoy exist only through the labor and suffering of countless others. In his new book, Bruce Robbins examines the implications of this dynamic for humanitarianism and social justic...
Aug 13, 2018•23 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. The Mediterranean Incarnate by Naor Ben-Yehoyada In The Mediterranean Incarnate, anthropologist Naor Ben-Yehoyada takes us aboard the Naumachos for a thirty-seven-day voyage in the fishing grounds between Sicily and Tunisia. He also takes us on a historical exploration of the past eighty years to show how the Mediterra...
Aug 01, 2018•31 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks by Irina Reyfman In the eighteenth century, as modern forms of literature began to emerge in Russia, most of the writers producing it were members of the nobility. But their literary pursuits competed with strictly enforced obligations to imperial...
Dec 12, 2017•27 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy’s Labyrinth of Plots by Liza Knapp With its complex structure, Anna Karenina places special demands on readers who must follow multiple plotlines and discern their hidden linkages. In her well-conceived and jargon-free analysis, Liza Knapp offers a fresh approach to understanding how t...
Dec 12, 2017•25 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. The Seasons Alter by Philip Kitcher and Evelyn Fox Keller A landmark work of environmental philosophy that seeks to transform the debate about climate change. As the icecaps melt and the sea levels rise around the globe―threatening human existence as we know it―climate change has become one of the most urgent and contr...
Sep 20, 2017•28 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. Europe’s Functional Constitution: A Theory of Constitutionalism beyond the State by Turkuler Isiksel Constitutionalism has become a byword for legitimate government, but is it fated to lose its relevance as constitutional states relinquish power to international institutions? This book evaluates the extent to which con...
May 12, 2017•29 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa by Souleymane Bachir Diagne Discussant: Gary Wilder What are the issues discussed today by African philosophers? Four important topics are identified here as important objects of philosophical reflection on the African continent. One is the question of ontolo...
May 12, 2017•46 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics by Josef Sorett This edition features Associate Professor of Religion and African-American Studies Josef Sorett's new book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. Anne discusses Professor Sorett's book with Courtney Bender, Professor of...
May 12, 2017•28 min
A series of unprecedented freedoms – on demand software, discrete audiences, portable devices, cheap production costs, the bypassing of broadcast infrastructure and with it content restrictions – liberates the podcast from mass media's customary limitations, and podcasters are now making the most of their new territory. This conference ranges wide in its exploration of what amounts to a burgeoning new art form captivating listeners worldwide: the "impact bar" has never been higher in a culture b...
Apr 13, 2017•1 hr 9 min
Jeff Emtman (Here Be Monsters), “The Cult of the Story” Bethany Jo Denton (Here Be Monsters), “A Case for the Minimalist Narrator” Jonathan Hirsch (ARRVLS), “Storytelling vs Stenography: Truth and Narrative in the Age of Alternative Facts” A series of unprecedented freedoms – on demand software, discrete audiences, portable devices, cheap production costs, the bypassing of broadcast infrastructure and with it content restrictions – liberates the podcast from mass media's customary limitations, a...
Apr 12, 2017•1 hr 20 min
Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson (The Kitchen Sisters), “Get Close. Now Get Closer… Creating Audio Movies for the Mind" A series of unprecedented freedoms – on demand software, discrete audiences, portable devices, cheap production costs, the bypassing of broadcast infrastructure and with it content restrictions – liberates the podcast from mass media's customary limitations, and podcasters are now making the most of their new territory. This conference ranges wide in its exploration of what amounts...
Apr 12, 2017•36 min
Hillary Frank (The Longest Shortest Time), “Podcasts Can Change the World (At Least a Little)” Devon Taylor (Millennial), “New Ears” Rachel Zucker (Commonplace), “Less and Less and Less Alone” A series of unprecedented freedoms – on demand software, discrete audiences, portable devices, cheap production costs, the bypassing of broadcast infrastructure and with it content restrictions – liberates the podcast from mass media's customary limitations, and podcasters are now making the most of their ...
Apr 12, 2017•2 hr 46 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, 30th Anniversary Edition, with a New Afterword by Lila Abu-Lughod & Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth Povinelli This edition features Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology Elizabeth Povinelli's new book, "Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Libe...
Mar 08, 2017•34 min
New Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors. A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia by Manan Ahmed The question of how Islam arrived in India remains markedly contentious in South Asian politics. Standard accounts center on the Umayyad Caliphate’s incursions into Sind and littoral western India in the eighth century CE. In this telling...
Mar 08, 2017•29 min
