episode 210: Neil Maher, "Apollo in the Age of Aquarius" (Harvard UP, 2017)
Neil Maher talks about the social forces that shaped NASA in the 1960s and 70s, connecting the space race with the radical upheavals of the counterculture...
episode 18: Nancy D. Campbell, "OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose" (MIT Press, 2020)
Over the last several years, overdose prevention has become the unlikely object of a social movement, powered by the miracle drug naloxone...
episode 684: Carol Dyhouse, "Hearthrobs: A History of Women and Desire" (Oxford UP, 2017)
What can a cultural history of the heartthrob teach us about women, desire, and social change?
episode 164: Anna M. Gade, “Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations” (Columbia UP, 2019)
The relationship between Islam and the environment has a long and rich history across various Muslim societies...
episode 148: William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, "Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture" (Fordham UP, 2020)
The neoliberal consensus, once thought to be undefeatable, seems to have been broken both in the wake of the fiscal crisis of 2008, as well as a series of surprise movements and elections throughout the world in the last several years...
episode 17: Adrienne Petty, "Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War" (Oxford UP, 2013)
Petty discusses the black and white farmers in the South who were part of the "small farming class," and their evolving strategies for holding onto their land through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries...
episode 23: Jeremy Black, "Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688-1815" (Indiana UP, 2018)
A great deal of recent discussion among humanities scholars has focused on the possibility or even necessity of “de-colonising the curriculum.” But what does this project mean?
episode 229: Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, "Re-Engineering Humanity" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us.,,
episode 22: Emily Colbert Cairns, "Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
Colbert Cairns traces the biblical figure of Esther, the secret Jewish Queen, as she is reinvented as the patron saint for the early modern Sephardic community....
episode 109: Wulf Gruner, "The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia: Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses" (Berghahn Books, 2019)
The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia bore some similarities to that in other places, but also differed in ways that lead to new questions and approaches...