episode 252: Jinping Wang, "In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China 1200-1600" (Harvard Asia Center, 2018)
On the background of widespread portrayals of China as a monolithic geographical and political entity...
episode 17: Patrick B. Mullen, "Right to the Juke Joint: A Personal History of American Music" (U Illinois Press, 2018)
On its back cover, Patrick B. Mullen’s Right to the Juke Joint: A Personal History of American Music (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is aptly described as “part scholar's musings and part fan's memoir."
episode 49: R. David Cox, "The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee" (Eerdmans, 2017)
Professor Cox’s book presents his perennially controversial subject was a consistently religious thinker, working from the deist and evangelical influences of Lee’s parents towards the religious convictions and commitments of his maturity...
episode 176: Samuel Schindler, "Theoretical Virtues in Science: Discovering Reality Through Theory" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
A fundamental problem in science, and in philosophy of science, is that of theory choice...
episode 42: Annabel Cooper, "Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen" (Otago UP, 2018)
Annabel Cooper, an Associate Professor in the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Otago, explores how filmmakers have portrayed the New Zealand wars of the 19th century and how those productions serve as a snapshot of the complex cultural moment of their creation....
episode 82: Samantha Silva, "Mr. Dickens and His Carol" (Flatiron Books, 2018)
Christmas is not looking bright for Charles Dickens...
episode 48: James R. Rush, "Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer’s Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2016)
From Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 up until today, the relationship between Indonesian nationalism, Islam, and modernity has been a key subject of debate...
episode 56: Noah Benezra Strote, "Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany" (Yale UP, 2017)
It has long been assumed that stability was imposed on Germany after World War II; that the United States in particular taught Germans, among other things, how to be “good democrats” and to value cultural pluralism....
episode 79: Brenden W. Rensink, "Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands" (Texas A&M UP, 2018)
Brenden Rensink asks the question "How do national borders affect and react to Native identity?"
episode 33: Ana Paulina Lee, "Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory" (Stanford UP, 2018)
In her new book, Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory (Stanford University Press, 2018), Ana Paulina Lee (Columbia University) analyzes representations of the Chinese in Brazilian culture...