The University of Chicago Press Podcast all Episodes with AI Transcript

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Interviews with authors of University of Chicago Press books.

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Matthew L. Basso, “Meet Joe Copper: Maculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

In the United States, World War II is now called “The Good War,” as opposed to bad ones, I suppose, like Vietnam. Moreover, the Americans who fought in World War II are now called “The Greatest Generation,” as opposed to lesser generations, I suppose. Now most of the Americans of “The Greatest Generation” who fought in “The Good War” were men. What made them the “greatest” was that they had proved not only their willingness pro patria mori, but also their masculinity. They were, well, “real men.” But what about those American men who, though of “The Greatest Generation,” did not actually fight in “The Good War?” There were millions of them. Early in the war Washington designated certain industries essential to the war effort and therefore exempted those who worked in them from the draft. These men “fought” on the Home Front, of course. But they knew very well that fighting on the “Home Front” was not the same as fighting on the actual front. As men of fighting age but not fighting, they were the object of a certain skepticism. “Why,” they imagined people asking, “weren’t they in uniform?” Maybe they weren’t “real men…” In his path-breaking new book Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Matthew L. Basso explores the ways in which American men on the “Home Front” protected their masculinity during the War, and the ways in which those efforts reverberated in the decades that followed it. It’s a fascinating story. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

54:0909/11/2013

Marga Vicedo, “The Nature and Nurture of Love” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emotional development. In Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Marga Vicedo explores the emergence of the science of children’s emotional needs in the twentieth century. Masterfully bringing together approaches from the history and philosophy of the biological sciences, Vicedo’s book focuses on British psychoanalyst and psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907-1990), whose ethological work became one of the most influential and controversial psychological theories of the 20th century. Vicedo uses the story of Bowlby’s science to explore a broader modern history of work on animal and human behavior that includes Konrad Lorenz, Anna Freud, Benjamin Spock, and Niko Tinbergen, among others. Along the way, The Nature & Nurture of Love chronicles the emergence of a kind of anthropomorphic material culture of the human sciences, inhabiting its story with a fascinating cast of robots, dolls, geese, monkeys, and stuffed animals, as well as humans. It is a fascinating and gripping trans-disciplinary story and an absolute pleasure to read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:13:2219/10/2013

Adam R. Shapiro, “Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

During the 1924-25 school year, John Scopes was filling in for the regular biology teacher at Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. The final exam was coming up, and he assigned reading from George W. Hunter’s 1914 textbook A Civic Biology to prepare students for the test. What followed has become one of the most well-known accounts in the history of science and one of the most famous trials of twentieth-century America. In Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Adam R. Shapiro urges us to look beyond the rubrics of “science” and “religion” to understand how the Scopes trial became such an important event in the histories of both. The story begins with a pair of Pinkerton detectives spying on a pair of textbook salesmen in the Edwards Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. Shapiro brings us from that hotel room into a series of classrooms, boardrooms, and courtrooms while exploring the battle over textbook reform in the twentieth-century US. Based on a close reading of high school curricular materials around the discipline of botany, with special attention to the emergence of “civic botany” as a pedagogical field, Shapiro’s book uses the debates over pedagogy, evolution, and the textbook industry to explore a number of issues that are of central importance to the history of science: the construction of authorship, the histories of reading practices, the co-emergence of economies and technologies, and the ways that urban and rural localities shape the nature of sciences and their publics. It is a gripping, moving, and enlightening story. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:12:5527/09/2013

Michael Ruse, “The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of professional and public engagements with science and technology in the 1960s. Based on an archive that spans texts, oral histories, and interviews with some of its major figures, The Gaia Hypothesis charts the development of the idea of the earth as a self-regulating organism. Ruse explores the development of the idea by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, and analyzes the nature and bases of the reactions to Margulis and Lovelock’s ideas from within different scientific and public communities. All of this is contextualized in a deep history of the different world concepts and philosophies of nature that informed the heated debate over Gaia, considering the idea of the earth as organism and nature as a self-regulating system in a range of texts that include Plato’s Timaeus, the work of German idealists, and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, among many others. (The attentive reader will also note a surprising connection between Gaia and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.) The book is full of empathetic, insightful, and often very funny portraits of Margulis, Lovelock, and a community of other figures associated with Gaia and its histories. It is also a wonderfully lively and readable narrative. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:11:1908/09/2013

Alisha Rankin, “Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany” (U. Chicago Press, 2013)

Dorothea was a widow who treated Martin Luther, the Duke of Saxony, and throngs of poor peasants with her medicinal waters. Anna was the powerful wife of the Elector of Saxony who favored testing medical remedies on others before using them on her friends and family. Elisabeth was an invalid patient whose preferred treatments included topical remedies and ministrations from the “almighty physician,” but never “the smear.” We meet these three lively women in the pages of Alisha Rankin‘s wonderful new book on the medical practices of noblewomen from the last decades of the sixteenth century. Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2013) considers the intellectual and social contexts of healing practices in early modern Germany, focusing on elite women who spent much of their adult lives devising and administering medicinal remedies. The book argues that noblewomen were celebrated as healers not despite their gender, but because of it, offering a useful corrective to the historiography of gender and the sciences in early modernity. Rankin situates three in-depth case studies within a careful exploration of some of the main factors that enabled the kind of success that noblewomen-healers like Dorothea of Mansfield and Anna of Saxony enjoyed in sixteenth-century Germany: more opportunities for information exchange through local communities and wider epistolary networks; an increasing focus on empirical knowledge in its many forms; and the foundation role of written medicinal recipes as a form of kunst. It is a thoughtfully written and very clearly argued work that informs many aspects of the history of gender, of science and medicine, and of practical epistemologies. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:05:1318/07/2013

Gretchen Soderlund, “Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism: 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the new book from the University of Oregon’s Gretchen Soderlund, is about far more than the title suggests. Using sex trafficking and scandal as a starting point, Soderlund delves into an era of journalism that features muckrakers and sensationalists, key political players and journalists with social and cultural agendas. It is a book about racial identity, journalists and their audiences, and Great Britain’s influence on journalistic practices and culture. “From an early twenty-first century vantage point,” Soderlund writes, “it is clear that issues of immigration, urbanization, heterosociability, and racial mixing were stitched into white slavery narratives.” Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism took Soderlund deep into the archives of journalism history. The result is a thorough, important discussion about one of the key periods in American journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

48:1727/06/2013

Mary Louise Roberts, “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Tracking soldiers from the villages and towns of Northern France, to the “Silver Foxhole” of Paris, to tribunals that convicted a disproportionate number of African-American soldiers of rape, Mary Louise Roberts‘ latest book reveals a side of the Liberation of 1944-45 that is typically obscured in histories of the D-Day landings and the months that followed. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013) draws on a wealth of material from French and American archives to show us that the war was an experience saturated with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. Battles were critical, of course, but so too was sex. The American GI in war-torn France was a soldier, a tourist, a liberator, and also a destroyer. Military propaganda represented the Normandy campaign as a soldier’s opportunity for sexual adventure, framing the invasion and occupation of France in terms of the rescue of damsels in distress by heroic tough guys from a manly nation. Convinced of the hyper-sexuality of French women and culture, many American soldiers courted, paid for sex with, and even assaulted women they met in French homes, streets, hotels, and brothels. This is a book about what American GIs thought about France; what they did while they were “over there”; how French women and men received and responded to the “advances” of American troops; and the lasting impact of this complex set of encounters on individual lives, communities, and politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:07:4224/05/2013

Helen Longino, “Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen Longino, Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, the “both” answer misses the fact that the nature/nurture divide is itself problematic. In her groundbreaking book, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (University of Chicago Press) Longino looks closely at a variety of scientific approaches to the study of human aggression and sexuality to argue that there is no one right way to divide nature from nurture within the scientific approaches to the study of behavior, and that the nature/nurture dichotomy reinforces and reflects an undue emphasis on explanations that focus on the dispositions of individuals rather than those that look at patterns of frequency and distribution of behavior within populations. She reveals the distinct and incompatible ways these different approaches define the factors that explain behavior, how these different explanatory approaches are related, and how the bias towards particular types of explanation is reflected in the way the scientific findings are publicly disseminated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:04:0315/05/2013

Thane Rosenbaum, “Payback: The Case for Revenge” (Chicago UP, 2013)

All humans have an emotionally-driven sense of fairness. We get treated unfairly and we get mad. It’s no wonder, then, that our laws–and those of almost everyone else–are intended to assure that people are treated fairly. When those laws fail and we are treated unfairly, we encounter another human universal–the desire for revenge. If someone pokes you in the eye, more likely than not your first inclination is going to be to poke them in the eye too. That “eye-for-an-eye” logic just feels intuitively fair to us. Yet, our laws–and those of most “civilized” places–explicitly deny victims the right to avenge their injuries. The state has a monopoly on justice, and the state’s justice (theoretically) has nothing to do with revenge. The courts asks victims to check their “irrational” desire for revenge and pursue what is (supposedly) a higher, more “rational” form of justice. In Payback: The Case for Revenge (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Thane Rosenbaum argues that we’ve gone way too far in our rejection of revenge. By denying the right to revenge, we have essentially asked people to do something that is impossible–squelch their very natural feeling that wrong-doers must pay in equal measure for the harms they brought. In order for the moral universe to be righted, scofflaws must pay–and be seen to have paid–for what they have done. Our laws recognize none of this, says Rosenbaum, and we should do something about it. We need to bring revenge, he argues, back in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:03:2008/05/2013

Stephen T. Asma, “Against Fairness” (University of Chicago, 2013)

Modern liberalism is built on the principle of equality and its corollary, the principle of fairness (treating equals equally). But have we taken the one and the other too far? Are we deceiving ourselves about our ability to treat each others equally, that is, to be “fair?” In his provocative new book Against Fairness (University of Chicago, 2013), Stephen T. Asma makes the case that we have indeed become kind of fairness-mad, and that this madness has led us all to be (at best) hypocrites and (at worst) harmful to ourselves and others. Asma says we should temper our (Western) notion of fairness with one that looks at the causes and benefits of favoritism realistically, and even sympathetically. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:00:5905/04/2013

Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he used the past to understand and offer counsel on the events of the present. Ralegh passed seven of his many years of incarceration in the Tower of London excerpting, rearranging, editing, and recopying passages from his 500+ volume library to produce a book that has been read and interpreted in many different (and sometimes conflicting) ways in the hundreds of years since its initial printing. Popper’s book uses a very focused account of the texture of this single book as a basis from which to offer a wonderfully expansive account of the practices of history in the Renaissance, and the ways that Ralegh’s work and associated practices of historical analysis ultimately transformed European politics, religion, and scholarship. Along the way, there are fascinating accounts of the origins of the modern archival mode of historiography, the differences between causal and narrative accounts of the past, and the many ways that early modern historical practices were inextricable from scriptural exegesis. Popper’s study is both inspired by the methods and insights of the historiography of science, and offers a way to think about the practices of knowledge-production that help identify what we’re talking about when we talk about early modern “science.” Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:10:4601/04/2013

Nathan Hesselink, “SamulNori: Contemporary Korean Drumming and the Rebirth of Itinerant Performance Culture” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

The name of the group is deceptively simple: Samul (“four objects”) + Nori (“folk entertainment”) = SamulNori. Nathan Hesselink‘s new book traces the transformations of this complex contemporary Korean drumming ensemble from its first concert in a cramped Seoul basement in 1978 through the 1990s, by which time they had... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:19:5628/03/2013

Sean Cocco, “Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for exploring the histories of natural history, travel, observation, imaging, astronomy, and many other aspects of the places and identities of early modern history. Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) pays special attention to the many resonances of emplacement and locality, and to the agency of the Vesuvian landscape, as it explores the continuities and transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century volcanic landscape. Volcanology emerged along with Neapolitan identity while volcanoes became emblematic of the south in the writings of European travelers: rumbling, unpredictable, given to heated eruptions. Cocco’s account shows us the beauty of these transformations as they were embodied in paintings, poems, letters, and other media. Scholars and enthusiasts of the urban and political history of Europe will find much of interest here, as will readers interested in the history of vernacular understandings of nature. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:09:3628/03/2013

Lawrence M. Principe, “The Secrets of Alchemy” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish? Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction to the history of western alchemy. The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the genealogy of alchemical practices from their early Greco-Egyptian foundations through early modern chymistry, pausing along the way to reflect on the reinterpretation and refashioning of alchemy from the eighteenth century to the present. Principe’s pages reveal histories of alchemy that are wonderfully rich and diverse, and we meet them in laboratories, recipes, images, dramatic plays, and poems. In the course of our conversation, we talked about aspects of the craft of the alchemist as well as that of the historian, including Principe’s fascinating attempts to recreate alchemical recipes and practices in his own laboratory. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:05:0118/03/2013

John E. Murray, “The Charleston Orphan House” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

There were always and will always be orphans. The question is what to do with them. In his terrific new book The Charleston Orphan House: Children’s Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013), economic historian John E. Murray tells us how one Southern American city did it in the 18th and 19th centuries. Charleston was a city divided between free whites and enslaved African Americans. The whites felt insecure and, according to Murray, this is one of the reasons they founded and funded America’s first public orphanage. The white-only institution not only helped indigent parents and their children, but it also brought the city’s white population together in a way no other body did. It was an expression of civic humanity, but it was also an expression of white unity against the black masses. Listen to John tell the tale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

59:1526/02/2013

E. C. Spary, “Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), controversies over digestion provided a space for the working out of power struggles between political, religious, medical, and culinary thinkers. Faced with a cuisine bursting with new materials and flavors, French society debated various ways of negotiating the opposing poles of indulgence and sobriety, luxury and reform. This is illustrated in several detailed case studies that include coffee and its implication in networks of expertise; cafes as social leveling-grounds, performance spaces, and chemical laboratories; and the production of new liqueurs. Spary’s work urges us to reconsider the way we write commodity histories, and is well worth reading. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:05:3218/02/2013

Amir Eshel, “Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

In his very recent work, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past(University of Chicago Press, 2013), Amir Eshel presents us with a very interesting examination of what he refers to as “futurity” or literature’s ability to provide us with a way to access the past, rethink it, and move forward. Eshel’s work here can best be understood as part of the larger effort in literary studies to move beyond the tired and exceedingly fruitless lens of the hermeneutics of suspicion and the despairing chasm of postmodernity. As foci, Eshel examines postwar German literature and Hebrew literature particularly focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Overall, the portion of Futurity that continues to linger with me is Eshel’s beautiful ruminations on W.G. Sebald’s masterpiece, Austerlitz. Eshel’s reflections on Austerlitz encouraged me to pick up that novel once more and for this alone I highly encourage anyone interested in postwar German literature, Hebrew literature, and or the future and meaning of literary studies to give Eshel’s work a read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

56:1122/01/2013

Michael D. Gordin, “The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

“No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist.” From the very first sentence, Michael D. Gordin’s new book introduces readers to the characters, plotlines, and crises that have shaped the narratives of fringe science since the early twentieth century. Focusing on Cold War America from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the transformations of science at the margins that were stimulated by Immanuel Velikovsky, “the first grand wizard of the Universal Order of Mass Pseudo-Scholarship” and a Russian-born psychoanalyst whose Worlds in Collision triggered an epistemic avalanche among members of the American scientific community. Gordin tracks the surprising relationships of Velikovsky and his work, from Zionism to Creationism, and from Freud to Einstein. It becomes a story of competing attitudes toward historical evidence, as the scientific orthodoxy reacted to threats from the margins and those on the margins sought to preserve their own orthodoxy on the fringes. Gordin’s book is a multi-layered modern history of problem of scientific demarcation as well as a fascinating read. We talked about many aspects of the book, as well as Gordin’s approach to the craft of research and writing for a book-length project. For a different take on The Pseudoscience Wars, see also the interview on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:11:1915/01/2013

Katy Price, “Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

You were amused to find you too could fear “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.” The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of the many media through which people explored the ramifications of Einstein’s ideas about the cosmos in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Masterfully incorporating a contextual sensibility of the historian of science with a sensitivity to textual texture of the literary scholar, Katy Price guides us through the ways that readers and writers of newspapers, popular fiction, poems, magazines, and essays translated and incorporated Einsteinian relativity. Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe (University of Chicago Press, 2012) situates this popular engagement with the physical sciences within the political transformations of early twentieth-century Britain, looking at how the scientific and publishing communities attempted (with different levels of success) to use media coverage of relativity to rally the support of a wider reading public. It is a rich study that has much to offer to those interested in the history of science, of literature, and of popular culture, while helpfully complicating all of those categories. “Fly with me then to all’s and the world’s end And plumb for safety down the gaps of stars Let the last gulf or topless cliff befriend, What tyrant there our variance debars?” *Both quotes above are from William Empson’s poems, and can be found on pages 167 and 162 of Price’s book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:00:3909/01/2013

Michael Gordin, “The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

When I agreed to host New Books and Science Fiction and Fantasy there were a number of authors I hoped to interview, including Michael Gordin. This might come as a surprise to listeners, because Michael is neither a science-fiction nor a fantasy author. He is, rather, a prominent historian of science at Princeton University. But his work intersects with the subject-matter of this podcast in a number of ways. Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War asked us to consider what might have been had Tokyo refused to surrender and the US had continued to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Mike will soon start co-teaching a class on invented languages which includes a unit on Klingon. And the main subject of this interview, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012), touches on both the history of science fiction, key themes within the genre, and where much of its source material comes from. Indeed, while this channel will continue to focus on new books within the SF and Fantasy genres, it will also interview scholars and practitioners whose expertise illuminates and enhances our understanding of those genres. I hope this interview does so for its listeners. For those of you interested in a different take on The Pseudoscience Wars, you should check out Michael’s forthcoming interview on the New Books in Science, Technology, and Society channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:01:4919/12/2012

Sally Smith Hughes, “Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (University of Chicago Press, 2011) tells many stories of many things. It is the story of a handful of people who figured out how to make recombinant DNA technology into a thriving business. It is the story of the emergence of a new hybrid organism, the entrepreneurial biologist, who lived with one leg in academia and one in corporate research. It is the story of a series of compounds that became big business in the American corporate world: human insulin, human growth hormone, and interferon among them. Drawing on a series of fascinating oral histories, Sally Smith Hughes recounts all of these tales as they unfolded in a volatile environment sparking with questions over the political and ethical implications of recombinant DNA technology: Could living organisms be patented? Did scientists own their research materials? When a team of scientists discovered something that was worth millions or billions of dollars, who should get credit and reap the rewards? Hughes’ story manages to address these major issues without sacrificing the human stories and colorful characters behind the rise of Genentech. For the Bancroft Library Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies Regional Oral History Office, see this website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:03:4603/12/2012

Daniela Bleichmar, “Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Daniela Bleichmar‘s new book is a story about 12,000 images. In Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Bleichmar uses this vast (and gorgeous) archive of botanical images assembled by Spanish natural history expeditions to explore the connections between natural history, visual culture, and empire in the eighteenth century Hispanic world. In beautifully argued chapters, Bleichmar explores that ways that eighteenth century natural history expeditions were grounded in a visual epistemology where observation and representation were powerful tools for negotiating both scientific and imperial spheres. The “botanical reconquista” spanned fields, shops, gardens, and cabinets across the New World and the Old. Botanists, artists, and others employed images for collaboration and competition, developing distinct styles and practices for observing and representing the natural world. The expeditions’ taxonomic botanizing was ultimately more successful than their efforts to exploit the cinnamon, cinchona, and other products that comprised the “green gold” of the colonial herbarium. Nonetheless, they made imperial nature visible…even as they made much of the empire invisible. Enjoy the book! And be sure to check out the fifth chapter, which juxtaposes Casta paintings from Mexico with some fascinating and little-known paintings from Quito and Peru to deepen and extend our understanding of the visuality of Spanish empire in the eighteenth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:07:0026/11/2012

David Sepkoski, “Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline” (University of Chicago, 2012)

In Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (University of Chicago Press, 1012), David Sepkoski tells a story that explains the many ways that paleontologists have interpreted the meaning and importance of fossils in the light of evolutionary theory. Starting with Darwin and his dilemma concerning the fossil record, Sepkoski tracks the relationships between paleontology and evolutionary theory over the course of the twentieth century. As it was formulated at mid-century the evolutionary synthesis did not really allow paleontology to contribute to evolutionary theory and it fell to a self-consciously revolutionary generation of paleontologists in the 1970s to argue that reading the fossil record could change the theory of evolution. Drawing on increasingly sophisticated ways of modeling and simulating evolutionary processes, as well as on increasingly available computational power, paleobiologists built institutions and articulated ideas, such as punctuated equilibrium, mass extinction, and macroevolution, that demonstrated how the history of life revealed by reading the fossil record can amend evolutionary theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:06:3820/11/2012

Jason Josephson, “The Invention of Religion in Japan” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

In 1853, the Japanese were required to consider what the word religion meant when western powers compelled the Tokugawa government to ensure freedom of religion to Christian missionaries. The challenge this request posed was based on the fact that prior to the nineteenth century Japanese language had no parallel terminology for the category of religion. In The Invention of Religion in Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Jason Josephson, Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College, delineates a genealogy of the Japanese construction of the category of religion, which was catalyzed by this political encounter between East and West. Josephson argues that opposed to the common notion that religion is an ethnographic or academic creation that we can place religion through diplomatic and legal discourses that invent or manufacture an identifiable, yet elastic, category. Prior to this political demand, contact between different Japanese and western social groups were discussed in bilateral descriptions of orthodoxy and heresy, either from a Christian or Buddhist perspective. Added to this developing understanding of terminology were the influences of western science, the negotiation of local practices, and the rise of nationalism. The Japanese depiction of Shinto poses the greatest challenge to customary notions of religion because it is described as a national or political science that is markedly nonreligious. Overall, Josephson demonstrates that in the defining of legal and social categories there was a trinary creation of religion, superstition, and the secular. In our conversation we discuss theocentric and heirocentric definitions of “religion,” the role of the demonic, heresy, varieties of Shinto, theories of secularization, superstition, civilizing projects, personal interior belief versus external behavior, and the institutional confirmation of these beliefs in legal contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:06:2313/10/2012

Laura Stark, “Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Laura Stark‘s lucid and engaging new book explores the making and enacting of the rules that govern human subjects research in the US. Using a thoughtfully conceived combination of ethnographic and archival work, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research (University of Chicago Press, 2012) locates the emergence of a system of “governing with experts” by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in the middle of the twentieth century. Stark shows how the features that now characterize the IRB deliberations that consider whether research on people can proceed in institutional contexts emerged in the particular context of the NIH Clinical Research Committee in 1950s and 1960s, and she explains how they managed to spread thereafter across the US and the globe. Behind Closed Doors draws from a wide and transdisciplinary set of methodological resources in articulating the power of performative language in shaping negotiations around human subjects research, suggesting innovative ways to read documentary evidence as a narrative of voices in time. True to its title, Stark’s story takes us behind the closed doors of occasionally heated IRB deliberations. It also introduces us to some of the spirited and disruptive “healthy patients” of the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), prisoners and conscientious objectors among them, as they were dosed with LSD or infected with malaria and influenza, making a kind of home in the Center or cleverly escaping from it. It’s a wonderfully stimulating book that should be widely read and included on the syllabi of many graduate seminars to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

58:3827/09/2012

Denise Phillips, “Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Denise Phillip’s meticulously researched and carefully argued new book deeply excavates a period in which many of the basic components that we take for granted as characterizing modern science were coming into being: the scientific method, the concept of a unified science, the increasing divergence of what we might translate as theoretical and practical scientific pursuits. Though these concepts will seem familiar to readers, Phillips’ careful study pays special attention to how science emerged and transformed in German-speaking Europe in very locally-specific ways. Following the transformation of Naturwissenschaft from an eighteenth century invention to a “rallying-cry” by the middle of the nineteenth century, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850 maps the relationships between the collective use of words, the development of concepts, and the creation and ramification of collective social sites. Phillips reveals a world of many distinct but overlapping publics, spanning private learned societies, technical academies, gardens, agricultural societies, and universities, among others. Phillips urges to move beyond simple binaries in our understanding of history, demonstrating that the conceptual and material foundations of modern science in German-speaking Europe, and the figures that populated its spaces, emerged out of border zones and juxtapositions. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

55:1419/09/2012

Ben Cawthra, “Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography in Jazz” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Ben Cawthra‘s Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago, 2011) discusses the way images of jazz and the musicians who played it both reflected and influenced our racial perceptions during the period between the 1930s and 1960s. Cawthra reveals the complex interactions between socially conscious photographers, magazine editors, record producers, jazz critics and the musicians themselves. From swing to bebop to cool, to West Coast Jazz to hard bop, Cawthra’s book gives the reader fascinating photographic and biographical portraits of Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane among others. The photographers, too, including Charles Peterson, Gijon Mili, Francis Wolff, William Claxton, Herman Leonard, William Gottlieb, and Roy DeCarava had nuanced and unique photographic styles. Cawtha also gives insight as to how African-American jazz musicians such as Gillespie, Davis, and Rollins attempted to control their own economic and image destinies within the ever-changing political economy of the record industry. Cawthra also explains how Life Magazine, the development of the Long Playing Record (LP), and the concurrent milestones in civil rights all influenced the photographic culture of jazz – and there is a fascinating section on the very conscious marketing of “West Coast Jazz” to emerging white suburban markets in the 50s and 60s. The complex confluences of such a wide depth and breadth of social history is bound to stimulate much thinking and raise many additional questions. Rich, thought-provoking, and with images and insights that stay with you: read it, look at the photos and think long and hard…there’s no end to the combination and permutations of analyses….like jazz itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

56:5918/09/2012

Helene Mialet, “Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

“By error or by chance, I think I have discovered an angel.” First things first: Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a masterful, inspiring book. Rather than producing a biography of Hawking, which this is decidedly not, Helene Mialet‘s book encourages us to question the very possibility of knowing who Hawking is without taking away the agency of the man himself, ultimately helping readers reconsider how we think about individuality, embodiment, and personhood in extremely productive ways. Taking a beautifully cinematic approach, Mialet guides us through a series of chapters that help us understand different aspects of the production of Hawking and HAWKING (the distinction becoming clear in the course of the book and the interview) by looking at the machines, bodies, inscriptions, images, and movements that constitute Stephen Hawking. Together, the chapters explore the productive tensions and co-creations of the collective and the individual. Inspired by Actor-Network Theory but pushing it into new territory, Mialet’s study uses a thick description of Hawking’s “extended body” to allow us a glimpse into the formation, movement, and circulation of identity in general, in the sciences and potentially well beyond. What does it mean to say “he thinks”? What’s the difference between dealing with texts and people? How do we define what is “original” and how does that translate into the archive? Mialet’s work explores these and other questions in a series of ethnographic accounts and stories that are both fascinating to read and extremely helpful to think with. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:06:0504/09/2012

J. Hillis Miller, “The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

In his recent book, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (University of Chicago Press, 2011), J. Hillis Miller sets outs to address Theodor Adorno’s famous proclamation that to write poetry after Auschwitz is impossible and barbaric. One should make clear from the outset that Miller’s central project in this regard is not to make some grand claim about the value or worth of literature in the face of dehumanization and atrocity. The value of literature for him and for us is a given. There is nothing to argue. Rather, Miller is most concerned with addressing the question of whether or not literature can truly bear witness to the Shoah. While this question has indeed been a central concern of literary scholars, philosophers, and artists since Celan and Adorno, Miller’s method of approaching this topic by way of the theoretical concept of “community,” and more specifically, “literary communities,” is rather intriguing. Here, Miller invokes the work of Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy in particular. As a way of illustrating his theoretical claims, Miller looks extensively at Kafka’s The Castle, The Man Who Disappeared, and The Trial In fact, Miller spends almost two-thirds of The Conflagration of Community examining these and several other Kafka works in order to reveal the extent to which literature can “imagine” the bureaucracies and social infrastructures of the Shoah. Miller’s love and deep admiration for Kafka shines through here and he does an amazing job of penetrating Kafka’s writing and making sense of it in light of his theoretical perspective. Beside the work of Kafka, Miller also looks extensively at novels that explicitly invoke the Shoah. Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus make this list and Miller does each justice. In addition to the central issue of literature and the Shoah, there also exist several parallel concerns throughout The Conflagration of Community. Among these are American slavery and the serious injustices and human rights violations committed during the Bush administration. In a refreshing way, Miller’s work in The Conflagration of Community ends up being about much more than the Shoah and in successfully completing the Benjaminian constellation he tells us is his intention to construct in the preface, Miller creates something that is both profound and that persists beyond the page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:33:5123/08/2012

Anne M. Blackburn, “Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka,” (The University of Chicago Press, 2010)

In this important contribution to both the study of South Asian Buddhism as well the burgeoning field of Buddhist modernity, Anne Blackburn‘s Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) discusses the life and times of the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Hikkaduve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:00:5523/08/2012

Andrew S. Berish, “Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s” (University of Chicago, 2012)

American history is all about movement: geographical, cultural, ideological. Economic depression and war make the 1930s and ’40s a dramatic example of this movement. In Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s (University of Chicago, 2012), Andrew S. Berish explores the flourishing big band dance music of these decades as it reflected and influenced movement with the United States. Conceptually, he examines the amorphous ideas of space and place, and the ways dance band jazz was defined by and helped create the places and spaces of mid-twentieth century America. Empirically, Berish’s focus is on the music of specific musicians and bands (Jan Garber, Charlie Barnet, Duke Ellington, Charlie Christian), the performances of their music (“Avalon,” “Make Believe Ballroom,” “Air-Conditioned Jungle”) and the places in which the performances took place (Casino Ballroom, Meadowbrook Inn, Chicago Civic Opera House, the road). America’s movement through war, depression, and racial integration are at the core of Berish’s analysis of big band jazz, and his detailed cultural and ethnomusicological analyses support his reasoning that music can tell us a lot about the social conditions of our times. Andrew S. Berish is assistant professor in the Humanities and Cultural Studies Department at the University of South Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:00:2223/08/2012

John Burnham, “After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case. In After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012)–part of what John Burnham calls “The New Freud Studies”–we encounter scholars looking closely at the way in which American culture interfaced with psychoanalytic thinking. During the mid-twentieth century, for myriad reasons, (the Cold War among them), psychoanalysis was a force to be reckoned with in the States. The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time–including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few. Given the contemporary context, aka today, in which psychoanalysis is not currying much favor as a mode of treatment or as a system of ideas, looking at the profession in its hey day will give one cause to pause. These historians argue that cultural shifts, among them the advent of psychopharmeceuticals coupled with new ideas about the self that do not consider the unconscious, have placed psychoanalysis on the sidelines. Dr. Burnham was a pleasure to interview and, as an historian, has been studying all things psychoanalytic since the 1950s. What we love to consider is that he has seen, in his lifetime, many of the changes that the book he has edited chronicles. That he has been writing about psychoanalysis, beginning with the completion of his doctorate in 1958 on the early origins of this profession, only makes this interview more compelling. Something prompted him to take notice then and it is an abiding interest that he has cultivated ever since. We were so pleased to have him with us as a result. In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

56:4331/07/2012

Wendy Steiner, “The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art” (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

As the last of what Wendy Steiner refers to as “a loose trilogy” with her earlier works, The Scandal of Pleasure (1995) and Venus in Exile (2001), The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (University of Chicago, 2010) sets out to establish the centrality of “the model” in art to our understanding of subjectivity and freedom and the ethical imperative that she suggests lies within it. For Steiner, “the model,” historically conceptualized and understood as female and objectified as such, assumes the level of ontological importance and acts as a symbolic structure that not only lays bare the hierarchies and mechanics of power, but possess the unique ability to reimagine and “introduce new hierarchies into the world” (20). “The model” along with politics and power in Steiner’s estimation are closely linked and in fact bound together. The intriguing and theoretical tension between the seeming contradiction that what on the level of the symbol can be read as object can also be accessed in order to influence the real is one that is thrilling to see the author trace and work out. To this point specifically, Steiner does an incredible job. Her theoretical argument invokes the work of Kant, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler to varying degrees. Neatly divided into three parts, The Real Real Thing moves from a theoretical exploration of “the model” to several fascinating studies of artists and art works that have employed the model as Steiner envisions it.Bringing “the model” from the realm of the theoretical to that of the real, Steiner closes the book by returning to her notion of the ethical imperative inherent to it. She makes a strong and impassioned case for modern art and what she sees as its “democratic” and “progressive” nature in its ability to not just call attention to itself as art, as an end in itself, but to invite the spectator into a symbiotic union that creates. It is within this union that traditionally rigid aesthetic notions of beauty and perfection can be overridden and redefined anew. I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art and I encourage anyone interested in aesthetics, the future of art, and the future of the arts especially to read this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

56:4216/07/2012

Ronit Ricci, “Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Muslims have been historically connected in various ways. Networks have fostered the spread of Islam through commerce and trade, Sufi brotherhoods and pilgrimage. Ideas too have traveled these paths and literary networks have facilitated cultural exchange across geographic and linguistic boundaries. The role of language in the process of making Islam intelligible to various local audiences serves as a shared thread for an excellent new book, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2011). This innovative study, which won the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions Award, explores the role of Arabic in South and Southeast Asia as it affected Javanese, Malay, and Tamil literatures. Ronit Ricci, Researcher at the Australian National University, determines the relationship between translation and religious conversion in the process Arabization and vernacularization in these three linguistic contexts. Translation serves as tool for self-fashioning Islam in particular contexts, which is witnessed in the numerous tellings of the Book of One Thousand Questions. This detailed and theoretically rich study offers new perspectives for understanding Muslim communities who formulate and maintain a collective identity through textual production in local languages. It should be required reading for anyone who is interested in non-Arabic speaking Muslims communities from now on. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:11:5328/06/2012

Bob Riesman, “I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Big Bill Broonzy was a master storyteller. From his name, he was born Lee Conly Bradley, to his age, he typically added a decade, to the facts of his growing up in the pre-civil rights segregated South (not that he didn’t, he simply embellished a lot) Bill could spin a yarn. As Bob Riesman tells it in I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy (University of Chicago, 2011) Bill mythologized his life in order to tell a story that was larger than his own, the story of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. For the most part, Bill told his story through songs–he recorded hundreds of them in his more than three decade career–some of which, like “Key to the Highway” and “Black, Brown, and White Blues,” remain popular and relevant to this day. But he also told his story through the many candid conversations he had with fellow blues travelers that were recorded by the likes of Studs Terkel, Alan Lomox, and Win Stracke. The Belgian husband and wife team of Yannick and Margo Bruynoghe compiled and edited a lengthy series of Bill’s own writings into an autobiography, Big Bill Blues. All-in-all, Big Bill Broonzy stands as one of the giants of American blues and jazz. He played with and/or influenced the blues of many musicians including, but not limited to: Roosevelt Sykes, Washboard Sam, Lil Green, Muddy Waters, Big Maceo Merriweather, Sonny Boy Williamson, Mahalia Jackson, Pete Seeger, Eric Clapton, Ray Davies, and Pete Townshend. Big Bill himself may not be lodged in the memories of most people these days, but his music and stories surely are. Bob Riesman is coeditor of Chicago Folk: Images of the Sixties Music Scene: The Photographs of Raeburn Flerlage. He produced and cowrote the television documentary American “Roots Music: Chicago” and was a contributor to Routledge’s Encyclopedia of the Blues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:04:5713/06/2012

Jim Endersby, “Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

I love reading, I love reading history, and I especially love reading history books written by authors who understand how to tell a good story. In addition to being beautifully written, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, 2008) does a wonderful job of keeping readers engaged with the story of Joseph Hooker – his travels, his personal and professional battles, his friendships – while offering a thoughtful account of the practices of Victorian science that sustained his life and work. You will not just find texts in this story. It is also full of paper and lenses, leather and wood, paint and pencils, arguing for the importance of a material history of science, and of botany in particular. Jim Endersby ranges with the characters in his book from the Antarctic to Kew Gardens, and helps us understand how the consequences of empire shaped the emergence of a scientific profession in Hooker’s lifetime. This will be required reading for scholars of Victorian science, of natural history, and of the history of imperial science, but it will also reward any reader interested in a compelling story written by a writer’s writer. It was a pleasure to read, and equally a pleasure to talk with Jim about it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:09:3823/05/2012

Barry Kernfeld, “Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Have you ever illegally downloaded a song from the internet? How about illicitly burned copies of a CD? Made a “party tape?” Bought a bootleg album? You may have done these things, but have you purchased a bootlegged song-sheet? In Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929 (University of Chicago, 2011) Barry Kernfeld fills us in on the history of disobedient music reproduction and distribution since, well, before the advent of recording technology. Along the way he discusses the above mentioned disobedient distribution techniques along with a few others: fake books, music photocopying, and pirate radio round out the book. Kernfeld suggests that the history of pop music piracy is never ending, with battles of different types of disobedience taking similar forms: the music “monopolists” (song owners) attempting to enact prohibitions on illegal production and distribution, the failed containment of said production and distribution systems and, finally, the assimilation of disobedient forms into the mainstream production and distribution industries. Barry Kernfeld is on the staff of the Special Collections Library of the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Story of Fake Books: Bootlegging Songs to Musicians and What to Listen for in Jazz, and he is the editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He is also a professional jazz saxophonist playing in Jazza-ma-phone and a clarinetist in local musical theater productions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:09:1817/05/2012

Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, “Intimacies” (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

In Intimacies and in this interview, Leo Bersani asks “does knowledge of the Other create a foundation for intimacy?” Troubling certain psychoanalytic models that survey the analysand’s past, gathering information about the vicissitudes of childhood, dreams, and other communications, he wonders if intimacy lies elsewhere. Reflecting on Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power, he suggests that intimacy is in trouble unless it is reformulated as a mode of being with, rather than a mode of knowing about. He wonders what might create a new mode of relationality altogether, and as he ponders this, he takes many fascinating detours that further illuminate his thinking. Since the confrontation with difference is what most often prompts violence, and since some schools of psychoanalytic thought place a premium on the ability to recognize the other, he suggests we embrace of a bit more narcissism of an “impersonal” variety. This part of his argument is fascinating and will give many in the field and those who are near it cause to pause. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

54:4919/03/2012

Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

“Guns don’t kill people; people do.” That’s a common refrain from the National Rifle Association, but it expresses a certain view of our relations to the things we make that also affects our thinking about the scope of ethics. On this traditional view, human persons are moral agents, and artifacts, or products of technology in general, are just tools; they have no moral significance in and of themselves. In his new book, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Peter-Paul Verbeek, professor of philosophy at the University of Twente and Delft University, The Netherlands, argues persuasively that this traditional view is no longer tenable. Instead, we need to understand the moral role of technology as one of active mediation, and of ourselves as technologically mediated moral agents. Ultrasound, for example, isn’t just a matter of peeking into the womb; the fetus becomes a potential patient, the womb becomes an environment for moral decisions, and the parents become responsible for making these newly relevant decisions. In general, if “ought” implies “can”, and if what we can do is expanded and conditioned by technology, then the range and nature of moral decisions and actions must also be expanded and conditioned by technology, and the designing of technology itself can be seen explicitly as having an important moral dimension. In Moralizing Technology, Verbeek spells out this new view of the moral relevance of artifacts and some of its implications for moral subjects, technological design, and ethical theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:04:2615/02/2012

Mark Rowe, “Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Mark Rowe‘s new book Bonds of the Dead: Temples, Burial, and the Transformation of Contemporary Japanese Buddhism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a fascinating study of the life of Buddhism in Japan by looking at the many facets of death in modern Japanese Buddhism. Rowe guides us from the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:18:3415/12/2011

Ellen Lewin, “Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America” (University of Chicago, 2009)

When anthropologist Ellen Lewin gave a preliminary report on her research on gay fathers, a member of the audience asked how she could write about such “yucky people.” Yes, that’s the technical anthropological term for same-sex attracted men who parent children. But here’s the punch line: the questioner was not a homophobe who believes that gay men who wish to share their lives with children must be pedophiles. Rather, the questioner was what Lewin terms a “queer fundamentalist”: someone who believes that gay men (or lesbians) who wish to parent are assimilationists, undermining the radical potential of queerness. In her award-winning book, Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Lewin explores the intersection of two worlds that many on both sides of the “culture wars” assume to be mutually exclusive: gay manhood and parenting. How do gay men become parents? How do they understand their relationships to extended family; to religious, racial, and ethnic communities? What meanings do they attribute to their choices in parenting? How do assumptions about the gendered nature of parenting – or should I say mothering – shape their struggles? And how do they reconcile a gay identity with their day-to-day lives as parents? A professor of Anthropology and of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, Lewin has written a readable and humane account of a group that’s charting new territory. I learned a lot from this book, and you will too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:03:5802/12/2011

David Gordon White, “Sinister Yogis” (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

A classic text, the Mahabharata, reports, “Yogis who are without restraints [and] endowed with the power of yoga are [so many] masters, who enter into [the bodies of] the Prajapatis, the sages, the gods, and the great beings.” Finding this passage was one of the inspirational moments that motivated David Gordon White, J. F. Rowny Professor of Comparative Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to pursue an investigation into the development of yogic practices. Wondering, “If these be yogis, then what is yoga?,” White tackled the history of yoga by focusing on those individuals who were called yogis in his latest book, Sinister Yogis (University of Chicago Press, 2009). This approach challenges many of the preconceived Western notions of yoga. There is little meditation, breathing, exercise, impossible contortionism, etc. that is often associated with the practice. Further, it offers an alterative reading of histories of the philosophical development of yogic teachings, which are based primarily on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. What we are presented with is possession, shape-shifting, and creation of multiple selves, among other things. Overall, yogis, were defined as such, when they entered into or took over the bodies of others. White examines this history in a variety of contexts and across a vast expanse of history. Sinister Yogis continues White’s earlier work, Kiss of the Yogini: ‘Tantric Sex’ in its South Asian Contexts and The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, and foreshadows his upcoming projects, Yoga in Practice and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A Biography. Altogether, White’s research is rich and detailed but thoroughly readable, as he is a skilled storyteller. One will discover this with delight already on the first pages, which recount White’s encounters with yogis (or maybe the same yogi) from the mountains of Kathmandu to the parking lot of Los Angeles’ Trader Joe’s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

57:1201/11/2011

Scott Brooks, “Black Men Can’t Shoot” (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

With the NBA in the midst of a labor disagreement, players from the world’s premier basketball league are scattering in different directions to maintain their skills (and get paid). This past summer, a number of NBA players returned to their roots, so to speak, by playing in summer leagues in... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:08:0219/09/2011

Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines!” What in the heck did that mean? I’d never seen a “Swed-ish mag-a-zine.” Thanks to Elizabeth Heineman‘s wonderful book Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (University of Chicago Press, 2011), now I understand. You see, the last and perhaps most significant Swedish contribution (if that’s what it was) to Western Civilization was legalized hardcore porn. In the early 1970s the Swedes (and their porn-allies, the Danes) flooded European markets with the stuff. The Scandinavians were making a killing. As Lisa explains, the “Swedish Invasion” put the queen of the German erotica industry, Beate Uhse, in something of a bind – but it also came at a moment of great opportunity. In the first two decades after World War II, the Luftwaffe pilot-turned erotica entrepreneur had built a sex empire legitimized by the idea that erotica helped married, heterosexual couples have more fulfilling relationships. After all, the bread and butter of the industry were condoms (for customers who could hardly afford babies, given wartime devastation) and basic how-to manuals (for customers suffered from dire sexual ignorance). And the demand was there: by the early 1960s, fully half of West German household had patronized a mail-order erotica firm. But by the end of that decade, pornography – both homegrown and imported – was the backbone of the industry. So what, exactly, was the social mission of the erotica industry in this brave new world? In the end, the market decided with more than a little help from liberalism: German men wanted porn and the West German courts and Parliament couldn’t think of a reason not to let them have it. And so it is that you can buy porn on every high street in Germany, often in a Beate Uhse Erotik-Shop (Warning: really NSFW). This is a terrifically interesting book. Read it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:06:1202/09/2011

Gregory Koger, “Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate” (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

In recent months, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk about filibustering in the Senate, about how Senate Democrats acquired a filibuster-proof majority in the 2008 elections only to lose it by the midterm elections of 2010 when Scott Brown was elected to replace Ted Kennedy. Filibustering has become the norm in the Senate, so much so that it is taken for granted that the Senate minority party will threaten filibustering more often than not. This has led Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to issue calls for reforming the filibuster process in order to make it more difficult for any minority party in the Senate to be obstructionist. In a timely new book, Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Gregory Koger explains the American filibuster, catalogs its use in the House and Senate, measures its impact, and finally theorizes why and how obstruction has been institutionalized in the Senate, particularly in the last 50 years. In this interview he explains, among other things, the long pedigree of obstruction in the Senate, how and why filibustering became routinized, and why reform will not be easy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:02:0414/06/2011

Carrie Pitzulo, “Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Playboy is having (another) moment. Since its fiftieth birthday in 2003, the brand’s relevance has risen after a period of decline. The Girls Next Door, a reality television show about the goings-on at Hugh Hefner’s Los Angeles mansion, was a breakout hit starting in 2005, and it eventually spawned two spin-offs and a lot of merchandise. Though The Girls Next Door and the second coming of Playboy clubs suggest that the brand has a place in the twenty-first century, reflections on its place in the twentieth are even more numerous. Hefner’s impact has been reconsidered in several documentaries, the most recent of which is Brigitte Berman’s acclaimed Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel (2009). More recently, NBC picked up The Playboy Club for Fall 2011, which is set in the Chicago club in the 1960s. Ads for the show proclaim the brand’s importance: “A provocative drama about a time and place in which a visionary created an empire, and an icon changed American culture.” Scholars too are reconsidering Hefner and Playboy‘s contribution to American literature, art, politics, and, of course, sexuality, in the twentieth century. On the heels of Elizabeth Fratterigo’s Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America and Steven Watts’s Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream, historian Carrie Pitzulo’s new Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy (University of Chicago Press, 2011) explores the pages of the magazine from its inception in 1953 to the end of its heyday in the 1970s. Pitzulo offers fresh and provocative readings of the notorious Playmates, but also discusses aspects of the magazine that have garnered less attention, including the popular Playboy Advisor column of the 1960s-70s. Bachelors and Bunnies is an exciting new feminist entry into the ever-broadening scholarship on Playboy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:10:3806/06/2011

Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through the life and work of Song Yingxing (1587-1666?). A minor... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

59:0431/05/2011

Ann Fabian, “The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead” (University of Chicago, 2010)

What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subject: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man ” (An Essay on Man, 1733). He was not alone in this opinion. The philosophers of the Enlightenment–of which we may count Pope–all believed that humans would benefit most from a proper comprehension of temporal things, and most particularly humanity itself. For them, understanding humanity meant, first and foremost, understanding the human body. Naturally, then, the philosophes and their successors paid close attention to the body. They cut it up, took it apart, measured it and attempted to see how it worked. They were most interested in one part in particular–the human head. It was the seat of the human characteristic the Enlightenment scientists admired most: intelligence. If one could get a handle on the human cranium, then one would understand what it meant to be human. Or at least so they thought. In her fascinating new book The Skull Collectors: Race, Science and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Ann Fabian introduces us to a group of American philosophes who began to collect and study human crania in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, they took most of their cues from their European counterparts. They did, however, adapt craniology to a peculiar American context. Living in a social order in part built on supposed racial difference, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Africans mattered. Their work could support the suppositions of slavery, or not. Moreover, living in a social order that was at the very time they were working involved in a quasi-genocidal campaign against indigenous peoples, the American skull collectors knew that what they said about Native Americans mattered as well. Their work might buttress the movement for Indian removal, or it might not. And being people of the “New World,” the American skull collectors knew that they were looked down upon by many of their European colleagues. They needed to collect skulls aggressively in order to establish craniology as an American science. As one might expect, the American skull collectors were, by our lights, a strange bunch. Racists, imperialists, and nationalists to be sure. But also scientists, curators, and founders of physical anthropology. Thanks to Ann for bringing them to us in all their contradictory richness. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:01:4217/12/2010

James Banner, Jr. and John Gillis, “Becoming Historians” (University of Chicago Press, 2009)

When I was young, I remember going to my high school library (not to study, mind you) and thinking “Who the hell reads all these books? And who writes them?” Just a few years later I found myself enrolling in a graduate program in history to do both. I’d always been interested in history, by which I mean things that go off, blow up, or otherwise maim and kill. Yes, I admit it, my entry point into history was, well, war. But really my historical career (if you can call it that) was more or less an accident caused by my arbitrary assignment to this man in college. I wanted to play basketball; he wanted me to study history. As it happened, I was better at the latter than the former (though I did school Barack Obama once upon a time). My stumble into academic history was far from unique, as you can read in James M. Banner, Jr. and John R. Gillis’s interesting book Becoming Historians (University of Chicago, 2009). Not surprisingly, almost no one grows up wanting to be a historian. Astronaut, baseball player, doctor, yes–historian, no. History–and especially hardcore academic history–is clearly an acquired taste. Banner and Gillis asked nine historians born around World War II to explain how they acquired it. The results are fascinating. Let me tell you, academic history ain’t what it used to be. If you want to know how and why, read this book. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

01:11:0628/05/2009