How did exhibitions become a vital tool for public communication in early twentieth century Britain? Showing resistance reveals how exhibitions were taken up by activists and politicians from 1933 to 1953, becoming manifestos, weapons of war and a means of signalling political solidarities. Drawing on dozens of examples mounted in empty shops, workers’ canteens, station ticket halls and beyond, this richly illustrated book shows how this overlooked form was created by significant makers includin...
Mar 12, 2025•36 min•Ep 167•Transcript available on Metacast Tahrir Hamdi is a Professor of Resistance Literature at the Arab Open University in Jordan. She is the author of the award-winning Imagining Palestine and serves as an assistant editor of Arab Studies Quarterly. National identities are inherently fluid, shaped as much by collective beliefs and cultural practices as by official borders and territory. For Palestinians, whose national status remains contested, the articulation and imagination of national identity take on particular urgency. Imagini...
Mar 12, 2025•53 min•Ep 338•Transcript available on Metacast Today I began my discussion with Dr. Adrian Perkel about his new book Unlocking The Nature of Human Aggression: A Psychoanalytic and Neuroscientific Approach (Routledge, 2024) “Aggression is to the mind what the immune system is to the body. It doesn’t seek the fight.” With this perfect mind-body analogy Dr. Perkel proposes a clear way to think theoretically and work clinically with aggression. Throughout the book he links Freud’s formulations of the psyche with contemporary physics and biochemi...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep 262•Transcript available on Metacast In the first part of our two-part conversation on Madison’s Notes, we speak with Frances Lee, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, about her co-authored book In COVID’s Wake (Princeton UP, 2025). The book offers a comprehensive and candid political assessment of how institutions performed during the pandemic. It explores how governments, influenced by Wuhan’s lockdown, deviated from existing pandemic plans, leading to policies that often favored the “laptop class” wh...
Mar 12, 2025•46 min•Ep 141•Transcript available on Metacast How does nuclear technology influence international relations? While many books focus on countries armed with nuclear weapons, this volume puts the spotlight on those who have the technology to build nuclear bombs but choose not to. These weapons-capable countries, such as Brazil, Germany, and Japan, have what is known as nuclear latency, and they shape world politics in important ways. Matthew Fuhrmann navigates a critical yet poorly understood issue by offering a definitive account of nuclear ...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr•Ep 124•Transcript available on Metacast The 1832 Reform Act was a landmark moment in the development of modern British politics. By overhauling the country’s ancient representative system, the legislation reshaped constitutional arrangements at Westminster, reinvigorated political relationships between the center and the provinces, and established the political structures and precedents that both shaped and hindered Britain’s slow lurch towards democracy by 1928. Mapping the State: English Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act (U London ...
Mar 12, 2025•52 min•Ep 161•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of NBN host, Hollay Ghadery speaks with the incomparable Toronto poet Kirby in an exclusive sampler of spectacular Kirby poetry. Kirby and Hollay talk about community and about Kirby’s work including their most recent poetry collection, She (Knife|Fork|Book, 2024) as well as Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021). Kirby also read from some of their new work. "She is a capacious city of rich human habitation, where elation is every day’s caring infusion. Her cityscapes are paint...
Mar 12, 2025•48 min•Ep 151•Transcript available on Metacast The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. Melissa Vise, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, Dr. Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe’s monarchies but rather in Italy’s republics. Exploring the cultural process through w...
Mar 12, 2025•52 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity. Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected ...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep 515•Transcript available on Metacast Cinema under National Reconstruction (Rutgers UP, 2024) calls for a revisionist understanding of state film censorship during successive Cold War military regimes in South Korea (1961-1988). Drawing upon primary documents from the Korean Film Archive's digitized database and framing South Korean film censorship from a transnational perspective, Hye Seung Chung makes the case that, while political oppression/repression existed inside and outside the film industry during this period, film censorsh...
Mar 12, 2025•49 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast Shallow and quickly outdated Christian worship practices have left many searching for something with deeper roots. Many churches have rediscovered the importance of the sacraments, particularly the Lord's Supper. The number of churches that are observing more frequent communion continues to grow. What's lacking is guidance from the past on this issue. How did infrequent communion become a "tradition" in so many churches? What historical, political, and theological factors were involved? As one o...
Mar 11, 2025•35 min•Ep 295•Transcript available on Metacast For centuries before its "rebirth" as a spoken language, Hebrew writing was like a magical ship in a bottle that gradually changed design but never voyaged out into the world. Isolated, the ancient Hebrew ship was torpid because the language of the Bible was inadequate to represent modern life in Europe. Early modern speakers of Yiddish and German gave Hebrew the breath of life when they translated dialogues, descriptions, and thought processes from their vernaculars into Hebrew. By narrating ta...
Mar 11, 2025•2 hr 34 min•Ep 617•Transcript available on Metacast Brynn Quick speaks with Dr Amy McHugh, an Academic Facilitator at the National Centre for Cultural Competence at the University of Sydney. Dr McHugh’s research focuses on the roles of technology and motivation in the continuous pursuit of cultural competence, and she facilitates workshops for both staff and students at the University of Sydney on these topics while working as the unit coordinator for the centre’s OLE: The Fundamentals of Cultural Competence. She also teaches online courses to un...
Mar 11, 2025•35 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman’s journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home. NBN host Hollay Ghadery and Catherine enjoy a lively conversation about poetry, community, and this new collection of poems. In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home...
Mar 11, 2025•49 min•Ep 150•Transcript available on Metacast Everyday items found at the sites of atrocities possess a striking emotional force. Victims’ garments, broken glasses, wallets, shoes, and other such personal property that are recovered from places of death including concentration camps, mass graves, and prisons have become staples of memorial museums, exhibited to the public as material testimony in order to evoke sympathy and promote human rights. How do these objects take on such power, and what are the benefits and pitfalls of deploying the...
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast The people of early England (c. 450–1100 CE) enjoyed numerous kinds of entertainment, recreation and pleasure, but the scattered records of such things have made the larger picture challenging to assemble. Entertainment, Pleasure, and Meaning in Early England (Cambridge University Press, 2025) by Dr. Martha Bayless illuminates the merrier aspects of early English life, extending our understanding of the full range of early medieval English culture. It shows why entertainment and festivity were n...
Mar 11, 2025•38 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston's literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston's two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a...
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep 351•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with David Gordon White, a distinguished indologist and scholar of Tantra. Our conversation focuses on David’s most recent project tracing the transregional histories of spirits, gods, demons, and their associated rituals across Eurasia. Along the way, we dive into an intellectual conversation about dog-headed men, angry goddesses, alchemical mercury, body-snatching yogis, the origins of Dracula, and much, much more. If you want to hear scholars and...
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep 583•Transcript available on Metacast The author of Siddur from Its Sources has combed through the history of the Jewish prayer book to identify when each prayer was added. The results are presented with captivating visuals, including a digitally enhanced presentation of the first known manuscript for each prayer, some dating back thousands of years! There is intimate access to the source material that is the basis for the modern Jewish prayer book both in the book and the supplemental website. This first volume includes the prayers...
Mar 11, 2025•57 min•Ep 616•Transcript available on Metacast “Almost every storyline we’re familiar with suggests that we should banish [darkness] as quickly as possible—because darkness is often presented as a void of doom rather than a force of nature that nourishes lives, including our own.” According to Dark Sky International, 99% of people in the US live under the influence of skyglow. With each artificial light we install, we grow more unfamiliar with darkness and its riches. But what if darkness, instead of being a source of danger and discomfort, ...
Mar 11, 2025•45 min•Ep 383•Transcript available on Metacast Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. She uses her position as a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai to find books, has one friend she can trust, and is tormented by her older brother. After being involved in the violence of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, she loses hope in China and raises Lin, her daughter, to pursue a life in the West. Both Lemai and Lin suffer from unnamed mental anguish at various points in...
Mar 11, 2025•27 min•Ep 471•Transcript available on Metacast Despite the flames of record-breaking temperatures licking at our feet, most people fail to fully grasp the gravity of environmental overheating. What acquired habits and conveniences allow us to turn a blind eye with an air of detachment? Using examples from the hottest places on earth, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet (U California Press, 2024) shows how scientific methods of accounting for heat and modern forms of acclimatization have desensitized us to clima...
Mar 10, 2025•43 min•Ep 138•Transcript available on Metacast In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients. From this early example of tattooing as work, in Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) Dr. Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Ca...
Mar 10, 2025•55 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Karyne Messina, host of this series, and Dr. Felecia Powell-Williams, the co-host, talked about what happens when people can’t listen. They discussed events that occurred at the Annual Conference of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) that took place in San Francisco earlier this month and the half time show at Super Bowl 59. Dr. Powell-Williams, who attend the conference, said she left the APsA meeting holding a multitude of emotions. “On one level it was a satisfying reunificati...
Mar 10, 2025•51 min•Ep 261•Transcript available on Metacast The Library of Mistakes is a library located in Edinburgh, Scotland dedicated to financial and economic history. Russell Napier, the founder and keeper of the library is a professor at The Edinburgh Business School and investment manager. In this wide-ranging discussion, Russell discusses his work as a practitioner and a scholar of financial crises. He also discusses how and why he started a library, in addition to his writing on financial history. Professor Russell Napier is the author of The S...
Mar 10, 2025•55 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast Today I’m speaking with Chryl Laird, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. We are discussing her co-authored book with Ismail White, Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. Published in 2020, this book remains highly relevant for understanding American political behavior. While Trump did make significant gains among black voters in 2024, particularly male voters, African American voters still overwhelmingly suppo...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep 115•Transcript available on Metacast It’s the UConn Popcast, and we've been experiencing a revolution in the past few years, as artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly common part of everyday life. Powerful AI tools are now integrated into our work, our schools, our creative industries, and our experiences of dating and companionship. This is a disorientating experience, one that changes not only our views of technology, but of ourselves. Can we look to a past technological revolution for help? We revisit Sherry Turkle's cl...
Mar 10, 2025•58 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Eleni Kalantidou, Assistant Professor at the Queensland College of Art and Design, about the volume of essays, Design/Repair: Place, Practice, and Community (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), which Eleni co-edited with Abby Mellick Lopes, Alison Gill, Guy Keulemans, and Niklavs Rubenis. The volume examines both the relationship of design practices to repair and repairability and the kinds of cultures needed to develop sustainable repair practices the world ...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast Every Western since Stagecoach seems to have been touted as “about the western.” To what degree is that true for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, George Roy Hill’s 1969 contribution to the genre? Join Mike and Dan for a conversation about how the film wonderfully reminds its viewers why they love westerns as it also offers its more hip viewers a vision of an alternative lifestyle–think Easy Rider with horses. Tom Clavin’s Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the ...
Mar 10, 2025•33 min•Ep 247•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode, rural sociologist Dr. Irna Hofman explores how Tajikistan’s cotton fields illuminate shifting power dynamics in Central Asia, historically and in the present. She discusses how the Soviet Union once showcased cotton production to visiting delegations—particularly from Muslim-majority countries—as evidence of its development model. Now, as global powers, including Russia, China, and the EU, vie for influence in the region, cotton has again become a strategic commodity—used to for...
Mar 10, 2025•46 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast 
