Podcasts by New Books in Communications
Interviews with Scholars of Media and Communications about their New Books
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Further podcasts by Marshall Poe
Podcast on the topic Sozialwissenschaften
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Virtually Violent: Are Online Attacks "Violence?" from 2023-01-26T09:00
During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, vulnerable communities have been hit especially hard by disruptive online attacks. But calling these attacks "violent" could jeopardize the future of disruptiv...
ListenSeriously Funny: Politics and Comedy from 2023-01-03T09:00
What happens when politics becomes comedy and the jester becomes the king? GuestsEmily Nussbaum, television critic for The New Yorker Avi Steinberg, writerKwesi Mensah, comedian Learn more about...
ListenSeriously Funny: Politics and Comedy from 2023-01-03T09:00
What happens when politics becomes comedy and the jester becomes the king? GuestsEmily Nussbaum, television critic for The New Yorker Avi Steinberg, writerKwesi Mensah, comedian Learn more about...
ListenOn Walter Lippmann's "Public Opinion" from 2022-08-10T08:00
What is the role of the press in a democracy? For nearly a century, scholars, media critics, and politicians have debated this question—in a large part thanks to Walter Lippmann. Lippmann’s 1922 bo...
ListenDisintermediation from 2022-07-14T20:00
Mark McGurl talks about disintermediation, a key term for internet commerce, and his new book about fiction in the age of digital self-publication. The fantasy of disintermediation lies at the hear...
ListenTeletherapy from 2022-06-30T08:00
Hannah Zeavin talks about teletherapy, from Freud’s letters to suicide hotlines to therapy apps. If therapy is always mediated, teletherapy is any form of therapy in which that mediation is more cl...
ListenMark A. McCutcheon, “The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology” (Athabasca UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. McCutcheon seeks to answer in his new book, The M...
ListenB.J. Mendelson, “Privacy: And How to Get It Back” (Curious Reads, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The use of our data and the privacy, or lack thereof, that we have when we go online has become a topic of increasing importance as technology becomes ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Governments...
ListenYutao Sun and Seamus Grimes, “China and Global Value Chains” (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today I was joined by Seamus Grimes from Ireland where he is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. With Yutao Sun (Dalian University of Technology), he just published a ...
ListenThe Other Side of the Desk with a UP Editor: A Discussion with Kim Guinta from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish...
ListenBhoomi Thakore, “South Asians on the U.S. Screen: Just Like Everyone Else?” (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the portrayal of a character like Apu matter? What does the representation of South Asian TV characters tell us about society at large? In her new book, South Asians on the U.S. Screen: J...
ListenKim T. Gallon, "Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press" (U Illinois Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Dr. Kim Gallon examines how Black newspaper editors and journalists creat...
ListenAnamik Saha, “Race and the Cultural Industries” (Polity, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do the media make race? This question is at the heart of Race and the Cultural Industries (Polity, 2018), the new book by Anamik Saha, Lecturer in Media, Communications and Promotion at Goldsmi...
ListenRichard Ovenden, "Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Living in an age awash with information can sometimes obscure its extraordinary fragility. Indeed, as Richard Ovenden demonstrates in Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of K...
ListenJeanine Kraybill, “Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Unconventional, Partisan, and Polarizing Rhetoric: How the 2016 Election Shaped the Way Candidates Strategize, Engage, and Communicate (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Jeanine Kraybill, assistant...
ListenSharon Marcus, "The Drama of Celebrity" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sharon Marcus’s new book, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton UP, 2020), sets out to help us understand celebrity culture and how it has shifted and evolved since its contemporary inception in the ea...
ListenNatalia Roudakova, “Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Natalia Roudakova’s book Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores changes in the world of journalism in Russia in the last fifty years. D...
ListenWaleed F. Mahdi, "Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood and Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation" (Syracuse UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It comes as little surprise that Hollywood films have traditionally stereotyped Arab Americans, but how are Arab Americans portrayed in Arab films, and just as importantly, how are they portrayed i...
ListenThe Work and Value of University Presses from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do university presses do? And how do they contributed to public discourse? November 9 is the beginning of University Press Week, and today I had the honor of talking to Niko Pfund, the preside...
ListenDahlia Schweitzer, “Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World” (Rutgers UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory as we prep for the zombie apocalypse. In her new book Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Dahlia Schwei...
ListenEdward Wilson-Lee, "The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library" (Scribner, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Edward Wilson-Lee's book A Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (Scribner, 2018) details the life of Hernando Colón as ...
ListenJohn Durham Peters, "Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google, once compared the perfect search engine to “the mind of God.” As the modern face of promiscuous knowledge, however, Google’s divine omniscience traffics in news,...
ListenDaniel J. Kapust, “Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Daniel Kapust‘s book, Flattery and the History of Political Thought: That Glib and Oily Art (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is a rich and fascinating exploration of political thought through th...
ListenGemma Milne, "Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It" (Robinson, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Bombastic headlines about science and technology are nothing new. To cut through the constant stream of information and misinformation on social media, or grab the attention of investors, or convin...
ListenScholarly Communication: Kit Nicholls on the Writing Center and the University from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Listen to this interview of Kit Nicholls, Director of Cooper Union Center for Writing. We talk about writing, thinking, the university, and what everyone cares about. Interviewer : "That's the key,...
ListenVanda Krefft, “The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox” (Harper, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When you hear “Twentieth Century Fox,” I doubt you know where the source of “Fox” in the name. In her book, The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (Harper, 20...
ListenMarissa J. Moorman, "Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002" (Ohio UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Marissa J. Moorman's book Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002 (Ohio University Press, 2019) narrates Angolan history with the radio at its center. From i...
ListenVictor Pickard, "Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"Few freedoms in the United States are as cherished as freedom of the press." So begins Chapter One of Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press...
ListenDorothy Noyes, “Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Humble Theory: Folklore’s Grasp on Social Life (Indiana University Press, 2016) is an anthology of essays from Dorothy Noyes, professor of English and Comparative Studies at the Ohio State Universi...
ListenLeela Prasad, "The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India" (Cornell UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Can a subject be sovereign in a hegemony? Can creativity be reined in by forces of empire? The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India (Cornell UP, 2020) argues that eve...
ListenLissette Lopez Szwydky, "Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century" (Ohio State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode of New Books in Literary Studies we speak with Lissette Lopez Szwydky, author of the new book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State UP, 2020) A comprehensive s...
ListenBruce Clarke, “Neocybernetics and Narrative” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of...
ListenScholarly Communications: A Discussion with Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of "Nature Communications" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Listen to this interview of Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of Nature Communications. We talk about knowing the research you have done, but communicating the message you want said. Interviewer: "...
ListenWilliam Germano, "Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books" (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When I put down Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (University of Chicago Press, 2016), I looked up and began to wonder. I wondered about the boo...
ListenHoda Yousef, “Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930” (Stanford UP, from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Literacy is often portrayed as a social good. Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Hoda Yousef has a different take ...
ListenCatharine Abell, "Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2020), Catharine Abell draws our attention to the character of Emma Woodhouse. She is handsome, clever, and rich. Or, at least, that's...
ListenFrancesca Sobande, "The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain" (Palgrave, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the possibilities and what are the inequalities of the digital world? In The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave, 2020), Francesca Sobande, a lecturer in Digital Media Studie...
ListenChristine E. Evans, “Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television” (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (Yale University Press, 2016), Christine E. Evans reveals that Soviet television in the Brezhnev era was anything but boring. Wheth...
ListenRichard Seymour, "The Twittering Machine" (Verso, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it ...
ListenDylon Robbins, "Audible Geographies in Latin America: Sounds of Race and Place" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the relationship between race, technology and sound? How can we access the ways that Latin Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries thought about, and importantly, heard, race? In his...
ListenAidan Smith, “Gender, Heteronormativity, and the American Presidency” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Aidan Smith has written a timely and important analysis of the way that we understand images, masculinity, and femininity, especially through the lens of presidential campaigns and political advert...
ListenLeigh Thompson, "Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table" (HarperCollins, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Leigh Thompson is a Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. An acclaimed researcher, author, and speaker, she has developed s...
ListenRory Sutherland, "Alchemy: the Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the limitations of relying on logic as an upfront filter in pursuing ideas? Find out as I talk to Rory Sutherland about his new books Alchemy: the Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating ...
ListenKathryn Woolard, “Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in Twenty-First Century Catalonia” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kathryn Woolard is Professor Emerita and Research Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She has authored seminal works on language ideology and the sociolinguistic s...
ListenSamantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody, "Monstrous Women in Comics" (UP of Mississippi, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In their new collection, Monstrous Women in Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody put together a critical volume on the ways women are made mons...
ListenScholarly Communication: An Interview with Joerg Heber of PLOS from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Open Access is spelled with a capital O and a capital A at the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, for short), a nonprofit Open Access publisher. Among PLOS's suite of journals, PLOS One is the non...
ListenJon Kraszewski, “Reality TV” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his book Reality TV (Routledge, 2017), author Jon Kraszewski explores reality television’s relationship to the American cityscape. Starting with show such as Candid Camera and An American Family...
ListenKeith A. Livers, "Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination" (U Toronto Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Conspiracy theories prove to be popular and widely-spread. As a rule, we do not tend to take them seriously, but it would be wrong to suggest that audiences are not intrigued by them. What can cons...
ListenFernando Domínguez Rubio, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt...
ListenJeffrey Shandler, “Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do technological advances and changing archival practices alter historical memory? In what ways have developments in the preservation and dissemination of historical material already impacted h...
ListenD. G. Young, "Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young (s/h) about why liberals love satire and conservative love outrage and how the two are merging and dive...
ListenChris Heffer, "All Bullshit and Lies?: Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The implied answer to the titular question of All Bullshit and Lies? (Oxford University Press 2020) is no, it’s not. In this book, subtitled Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untru...
ListenChristopher Grobe, “The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Christopher Grobe’s The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (New York University Press, 2017) traces the ways the performance of confession permeated and tra...
ListenChris Richardson, "Batman and the Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender, identity, and sexuality are negotiated in the ri...
ListenRavinder Kaur, "Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in 21st-Century India" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is 21st century commonsense that India is an “emerging” economy. But how did this common sense itself emerge? How did India’s global image shift from that of a poverty-infested Third World count...
ListenDmitry Novikov, “Cybernetics: Past to Future” (Springer Verlag, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of communication and control in the animal and the ma...
ListenTravis Vogan, "ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television" (U California Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Travis Vogan, Associate Professor of Journalism and American Studies at the University of Iowa, and the author of ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television (...
ListenEQ Spotlight Special: Roundtable on the 2020 Presidential Race from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are we to make of the year’s first presidential debate? Listen in as John R. Hibbing, Jonathan Weiler and I discuss this question and others surrounding the 2020 presidential race. Hibbing is ...
ListenAndrew Keen, “How To Fix The Future” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As a historian I find myself constantly asking the question “Is that really new, or is it rather something that looks new but isn’t?” If you read the headlines, particularly those concerning the on...
ListenAni Maitra, "Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital" (Northwestern UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The politics of identity have played center stage in many political debates in the last few years, and is often seen somewhat pejoratively as an epiphenomenal manifestation of the dynamics of capit...
ListenScholarly Communications: An Interview with Helen Pearson of 'Nature' from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nature is the premier weekly journal of science, the journal where specialists go to read and publish primary research in their fields. But Nature is also a science magazine, a combination unusual ...
ListenKevin Patrick, “The Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero” (U Iowa Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Kevin Patrick examines the history of The Phantom—an American comic strip superhero that made his debut in 1936....
ListenShyam Sharma, "Writing Support for International Graduate Students" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, author of Writing Support for International Graduate Students: Enhancing Transition and Success (Routledge, 2020). We talk about international students and...
ListenYves Citton, "Mediarchy" (Polity Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social a...
ListenNick Montfort, “The Future” (MIT, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Popular culture provides many visions of the future. From The Jetsons to Futurama, Black Mirror to Minority Report, Western culture has predicted a future predicated on innovations in technology. I...
ListenSocial Media, Grassroots Activism and Disinformation in Southeast Asia: A Discussion with Dr Aim Sinpeng and Dr Ross Tapsell from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social media has become a crucial avenue for political discourse in Southeast Asia, given its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democratising and authoritarian states. Yet the growing ...
ListenBethany Klein, "Selling Out: Culture, Commerce and Popular Music" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the music industry work in the modern world? In Selling Out: Culture, Commerce and Popular Music (Bloomsbury, 2020), Bethany Klein, a Professor of Media and Communication at the University...
ListenJacob Smith, “Eco-Sonic Media” (University of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Can we have sound media that is ecologically sound? Can we fine tune our media production and consumption habits to a greener key? How can an environmental perspective on sound media contribute to ...
ListenEmily J. H. Contois, "Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (UNC Press, 2020), Emily Contois argues that the figure of The Dude was invented (or perhaps only capitalized on)...
ListenTeresa A. Goddu, "Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press) is a richly illustrated history of the American Anti-Slavery Society and its print, material, ...
ListenLiam Cole Young, “List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed” (Amsterdam UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The list is the origin of culture. At least, that’s according to Umberto Eco, whose words open Liam Cole Young‘s new book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed (Amster...
ListenVanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Du...
ListenJonathan Haber, "Critical Thinking" (The MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, I speak with fellow New Books in Education host, Jonathan Haber, about his book, Critical Thinking (The MIT Press, 2020). This book explains the widely-discussed but often ill-defi...
ListenThomas Mullaney, “The Chinese Typewriter: A History” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Tom Mullaney’s new book The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) provides a fascinating first look at the development of modern Chinese information technology. Spanning 150 years from th...
ListenConspiracy Theories are More Dangerous Than Ever: A Discussion with Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new—conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of gove...
ListenS. J. Potter, "Wireless Internationalism and Distant Listening: Britain, Propaganda, and the Invention of Global Radio, 1920-1939" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the aftermath of the First World War, many people sought to use the new mass medium of radio as a tool for world peace, believing that it could promote understanding across national boundaries. ...
ListenMark Fenster, “The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information” (Stanford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrollable Government Information (Stanford University Press, 2017) dispels the myth that transparency of information will result in a perfect governme...
ListenEithne Quinn, "A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the history of equal rights in Hollywood? In A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood (Columbia UP, 2019), Eithne Quinn, a senior lecturer in American Studies at...
ListenNick Morgan, "Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World" (HBRP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How is communicating virtually Is like eating Pringles forever? Find out as I talk to Nick Morgan about his new book Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World (Harvard Business...
ListenRodney Tiffen, “Disposable Leaders: Media and Leadership Coups from Menzies to Abbott” (NewSouth Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Disposable Leaders: Media and Leadership Coups from Menzies to Abbott (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), Rodney Tiffen, Emeritus Professor in Government and International Relations at th...
ListenDana Renga, "Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond" (Palgrave MacMillan, 20 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Watching Sympathetic Perpetrators on Italian Television: Gomorrah and Beyond (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), Dana Renga offers the first comprehensive study of recent, popular Italian television. Bu...
ListenJulien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: Welcome to the Internet” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When discussing Internet history, many within the United States believe the creation myth of an Internet born in Silicon Valley. But aspects of the Internet that we use for shopping, financial tran...
ListenE. F. Bloomfield, "Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Not all Christians are anti-science or climate change deniers; on the contrary, the intersection of climate change and Christianity ranges from deniers to bargainers to harmonizers. On this episode...
ListenAlfie Bown, “The Playstation Dreamworld” (Polity, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can Lacan help us to understand the subversive potential of video games? In The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), Alfie Bown, Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong, explores...
ListenAllison L. Rowland, "Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood" (Ohio State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The way that we talk about living beings can raise or lower their perceived value. On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Allison L. Rowland (s) about zoetrop...
ListenMario Luis Small, “Someone to Talk To” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who do people turn to when they want to talk about serious issues in their life? Do they end up confiding in people they list as confidants? In his new book, Someone to Talk To (Oxford University P...
ListenTing Zhang, "Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China" (U Washington Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How could a peasant in Shandong in the Qing dynasty come to know enough about a specific law that he felt confident enough to kill his own wife and his lover’s husband and think that he could get a...
ListenZek Valkyrie, “Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline” (Praeger, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Zek Valkyrie teaches at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. His new book, Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline (Praeger, 2017), takes readers into the w...
ListenArt Markman, "Bring Your Brain to Work: Using Cognitive Science to Get a Job, Do It Well, and Advance Your Career" (HBR Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it take to both fit in and yet also prosper and grow as a person in the workplace? In today's interview, I discuss this question and others with noted psychologist Arthur B. Markman. Mark...
ListenBrett L. Abrams, “Terry Bradshaw: From Super Bowl Champion to Television Personality” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Brett L. Abrams, author of the book Terry Bradshaw: From Super Bowl Champion to Television Personality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). It is part of a series called Sports Icon...
ListenKyle Barnett, "Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry" (U Michigan Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created ...
ListenRebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Personal Stereo” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow‘s book, Personal Stereo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , which is part of the Object Lessons series, offers a compelling and expertly researched study of the Sony Walkman, taking ...
ListenMack Hagood, "Hush: Media and Sonic Self-Control" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How have we used twentieth- and twenty-first-century sound technologies to carve out sonic space out of the hustle and bustle of contemporary life? In search for an answer, in this episode I speak ...
ListenBob Batchelor, “Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), cultural historian and biographer Bob Batchelor examines the life of Marvel’s Stan Lee one of the most iconic figur...
ListenTanya Kant, "Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How are algorithms shaping our experience of the internet? In Making it Personal: Algorithmic Personalization, Identity, and Everyday Life (Oxford University Press), Tanya Kant, a lecturer in Media...
ListenJo Littler, “Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power, and Myths of Mobility” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the idea of ‘meritocracy’ serve to reinforce social inequality? In Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (Routledge, 2017) Dr Jo Littler, Reader in Culture and Creativ...
ListenM. Hennefeld and N. Sammond, "Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century...
ListenJessica M. Fishman, “Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead” (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead (NYU Press, 2017), Jessica M. Fishman examines how death is presented in the media. Researching how media outlets presen...
ListenJoshua Nall, "News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re hearing an awful lot about the fraught relationship between science and media. In his book, News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronom...
ListenStephanie Brookes, “Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australia’s Identity Anxiety” (Anthem Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Politics, Media and Campaign Language: Australia’s Identity Anxiety (Anthem Press, 2017), Stephanie Brookes, a Lecturer in Journalism at Monash University, explores the power of el...
ListenCary Cooper, "The Apology Impulse: How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Saying It" (Kogan Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are best-practices for alleviating stress in the workplace? Today I talked to Cary Cooper about his new book The Apology Impulse: How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Sayi...
ListenJohn Powers, “The Buddha Party: How the People’s Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his recent book, The Buddha Party: How the People’s Republic of China Works to Define and Control Tibetan Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2016), John Powers presents a comprehensive overview ...
ListenT. Paulus and A. Wise, "Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk " (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Trena Paulus of Eastern Tennessee State University and Dr. Alyssa Wise of New York University on their new book, Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning ...
ListenNicholas O’Shaughnessy, “Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging, and Propaganda” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One of the defining characteristics of the Nazi regime that ruled Germany from 1933 until 1945 was its attention to presentation as a means of winning support. In Marketing the Third Reich: Persuas...
ListenKevin J. Bryne, "Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Blackface minstrel show is typically thought of a form tied to the 19th century. While the style was indeed developed during the Antebellum period, its history stretches well into 20th- and eve...
ListenMarvin Scott, “As I Saw It: A Reporter’s Intrepid Journey” (Beaufort Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Marvin Scott’s new book, As I Saw It: A Reporter’s Intrepid Journey (Beaufort Books, 2017) tells 26 stories of memorable people and events that the veteran TV journalist gathered during a career sp...
ListenBenjamin T. Smith, "The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street" (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression. As Benjamin T. Smith demonstrates in his his...
ListenLisa M. Corrigan, “Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation” (U. Press of Mississippi, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the black liberation movement, imprisonment emerged as a key rhetorical, theoretical, and media resource. Imprisoned activists developed tactics and ideology to counter white supremacy. Prison P...
ListenBrian F. Harrison, "A Change is Gonna Come: How to Have Effective Political Conversations in a Divided America" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The United States takes pride in its democratic model and the idea that citizens deliberate in a process to form political opinions. However, in recent years, division and partisanship have increas...
ListenDeborah Parker and Mark L. Parker, “Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy” (U. of Virginia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle...
ListenLizzie O’Shea, "Future Histories" (Verso, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When we talk about technology we always talk about the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to get there. In Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach ...
ListenClayton Childress, “Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does a book come into being? In Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton University Press, 2017), Clayton Childress, Assistant Professor in the Department...
ListenMelissa K. Merry, "Warped Narratives: Distortion in the Framing of Gun Policy" (U Michigan Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If gun violence kills so many Americans, why don’t we see more effective solutions? How much does the way we frame an issue impact how we feel about it? How often are hot button issues deeply polar...
ListenStephen Pimpare, “Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Stephen Pimpare‘s new book, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017), the reader is encouraged to think about how we portray poverty...
ListenMia Fischer, "Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State, Mia Fischer traces how media and state actors collude in the violent disciplining of trans w...
ListenAndrea L. Stanton, “This is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine” (U of Texas Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Despite the recent booms in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, technology studies still remain scarce: one of the recent attempts to fill the void is Andrea L. Stanton‘s ‘This is Jerusa...
ListenGreg Mitchell, "The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (The New Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
dSoon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dra...
ListenAllison Perlman, “Public Interests: Media Advocacy and Struggles Over U.S. Television” (Rutgers UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Since its infancy, television has played an important role in shaping U.S. values and the American sense of self. Social activists recognized this power immediately and, consequently, set about try...
ListenCreshema R. Murray, "Leadership Through the Lens: Interrogating Production, Presentation, and Power" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Television informs our perceptions and expectations of leaders and offers a guide to understanding how we, as organizational actors, should communicate, act, and relate. Join NBN host Lee Pierce (s...
ListenRosemary Lucy Hill, “Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music” (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do women experience and participate in Metal? This question forms the core of Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), the new bo...
ListenGreg Burris, "The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination" (Temple UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple University Press, 2019) ...
ListenNoel Brown, “The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative” (Wallflower Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Noel Brown is a film and television scholar at Liverpool Hope University. His research has focused on Hollywood and British cinema (classical and contemporary), family entertainment, children’s cul...
ListenAhmed El-Shamsy, "Rediscovering the Islamic Classics" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ahmed El-Shamsy’s Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2020) is an astonishing scholarly feat that pr...
ListenGeoff Martin and Erin Steuter, “Pop Culture Goes to War: Enlisting an Resisting Militarism in the War on Terror” (Lexington Books, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Two professors from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada have published a book about how American popular culture reinforces militarism in the United States. In Pop Culture Goes to War...
ListenDoron Galili, "Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With the burst of new technologies in the 1870s, many inventors and visionaries believed that the transmission of moving images was just around the corner. As Doron Galili details in his book Seein...
ListenBrooke Erin Duffy “(Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is life like in the aspirational economy? In (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017) Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant ...
ListenJustin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, "Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
College courses in Ethics tend to focus on theories of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions. This emphasis sometimes obscures the fact that morality is a social project: part of what makes a...
ListenJennifer Fleeger, “Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jennifer Fleeger‘s Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine (Oxford University Press, 2014) tells the story of women in film and their representation as aberrations, but also as momen...
ListenD. Conley and J. Eckstein, "Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production" (U Alabama Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews editors Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein about their new book Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production (University o...
ListenDavid Beer, “Metric Power” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do metrics rule the social world? In Metric Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) David Beer, Reader in Sociology at the University of York, outlines the rise of the metric and the role of metrics i...
ListenJames M. Lundberg, "Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of American Nationhood" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
During his nearly four decades as a newspaper editor and politician, Horace Greeley embraced a range of controversial causes. In his book Horace Greeley: Print, Politics, and the Failure of America...
ListenRiki Wilchins, “TRANS/gressive: How Transgender Activists Took on Gay Rights, Feminism, the Media, and Congress…and Won!” (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Before Transgender actors entered popular culture, and before the “T” was included in LGBT, Transgender activism was a small and marginalized movement. However, though courage and perseverance, Tra...
ListenAlejandra Bronfman, "Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Caribbean has figuratively and literally been entangled in processes of global integration earlier than other parts of the Americas. In Isles of Noise: Sonic Media in the Caribbean (UNC Press, ...
ListenPatty Farmer, “Playboy Laughs: The Comedy, Comedians, and Cartoons of Playboy” (Beaufort Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Playboy Laughs: The Comedy, Comedians, and Cartoons of Playboy (Beaufort Books, 2017), Patty Farmer examines the relationship between Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire and some of the m...
ListenB. L. Johnson and M. M. Quinlan, "You’re Doing it Wrong!?Mothering, Media and Medical Expertise" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
New mothers face a barrage of confounding decisions during the life-cycle of early motherhood which includes... Should they change their diet or mindset to conceive? Exercise while pregnant? Should...
ListenEileen Le Han, “Micro-Blogging Memories: Weibo and Collective Remembering in Contemporary China” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Since its invention, the Internet has become a fundamental part of our lives. Since the invention of social media, communicative technologies have changed our lives and influenced journalism and po...
ListenLeticia Bode et al., "Words That Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign" (Brookings, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Words That Matter: How the News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Campaign (Brookings Institution Press, 2020) comes out of a broader collaboration between social scientists at the Univ...
ListenSimone Muller, “Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Simone Muller’s Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks (Columbia University Press, 2016) is a superb account of the laying of submarine telegraph cables in ...
ListenRobert Samet, "Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, has been ranked as one of the most violent cities in the world. In Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Robert Samet...
ListenPaul C. Jasen, “Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience” (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As audio technology has advanced, so has our love-affair with deep bass. Dr. Paul Jasen‘s book, Low End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2016), probes the m...
ListenTeresa Bergman, "The Commemoration of Women in the United States" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Teresa Bergman of the University of the Pacific on The Commemoration of Women in the United States: Remembering Women in Public...
ListenThomas Hazlett, “The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology” (Yale UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What better way to explore the history of media regulation than to go on a journey with the former chief economist of the FCC? Prior to introduction of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, the rad...
ListenR. Farrugia and K. D. Hay, "Women Rapping Revolution: Hip Hop and Community Building in Detroit" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie D. Hay of Oakland University on their new book Women Rapping Revolution.(University of California P...
ListenMitchell Stephens, “The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th Century Journalism” (St. Martin’s, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mitchell Stephens‘s new book, The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th Century Journalism (St. Martins Press, 2017), could be described, in part, as an entertaining book of sto...
ListenElizabeth Horodowich, "The Venetian Discovery of America" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode Jana Byars speaks with Elizabeth Horodowich, Professor of History at New Mexico State University, about her new book, The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and P...
ListenBlake Atwood, “Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Iranian cinema has close connections to the 1979 Islamic revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini , explicitly pointed to the uses of cinema for religious and revolutionary political purposes. But Iranian fi...
ListenDavid R. Grimes, "The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are some of the prevalent ways in which we lie to ourselves and limit our flexibility? Today I discussed this and other questions with David R. Grimes, the author of The Irrational Ape: Why F...
ListenMark Banks, “Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can we address inequity and injustice in cultural and creative industries? In Creative Justice: Cultural Industries, Work and Inequality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Mark Banks, a professor ...
ListenCristina Soriano, "Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela" (UNM Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), Cristina Soriano examines the links between the spread of rad...
ListenGillian McIver, “Art History for Filmmakers: The Art of Visual Storytelling” (Bloomsbury, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Gillian McIver‘s Art History for Filmmakers: The Art of Visual Storytelling (Bloomsbury, 2016) is a ground-breaking book that illustrates the relationships among the histories of painting and cinem...
ListenLuke Winslow, "American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights, and the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump" (Ohio State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee M Pierce (s/t) interviews Luke Winslow of Baylor University on the book Luke Winslow, American Catastrophe: Fundamentalism, Climate Change, Gun Rights,...
ListenClyde Farnsworth, “Tangled Bylines: A Father and Son Cover the Twentieth Century” (U. Missouri Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Journalists intentionally leave themselves out of the stories they cover. In Clyde H. Farnsworth‘s book Tangled Bylines: A Father and Son Cover the Twentieth Century (University of Missouri Press, ...
ListenWesley C. Robertson, "Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content within? Generally, discussions of how language ...
ListenKurt Braddock, "Weaponized Words" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kurt Braddock's new book Weaponized Words: The Strategic Role of Persuasion in Violent Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020) applies existing theories of pers...
ListenJames Poyner, “Trump Tweets: His Social Media Phenomenon” (Wilkinson Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The title of James Poyner’s book, Trump Tweets: His Social Media Phenomenon (Wilkinson Publishing, 2017), tells you everything you need to know about the world you about to enter. In temperament, a...
ListenLenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, "Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond" (Faber and Faber, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can we create a more equal media industry? In Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond, Marcus Ryder and Sir Lenny Henry, both founder members of the The Sir Lenny Henry Cent...
ListenJon Wilkman, "Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a widescreen view of how American “truth” has been discovered, defined, projected, televised, and streamed dur...
ListenMatt Pearl, “The Solo Video Journalist: Doing It All and Doing it Well in TV Multimedia Journalism” (Focal Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While the title of Matt Pearl‘s book, The Solo Video Journalist: Doing it All and Doing It Well in TV Multimedia Journalism (Focal Press, 2016), hints at a solitary existence, he shares experiences...
ListenXenia Zeiler, "Digital Hinduism" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Digital Religion does not simply refer to religion as it is carried out online, but more broadly studies how digital media interrelate with religious practice and belief. Xenia Zeiler's book Digita...
ListenScott Henderson, "Comics and Pop Culture: Adaptation from Panel to Frame" (U Texas Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is hard to discuss the current film industry without acknowledging the impact of comic book adaptations, especially considering the blockbuster success of recent superhero movies. Yet transmedia...
ListenJeremy C. Young, “The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Follwoers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870-1940” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the age of the railroad, social movements, revivals, and campaigns for political office spread like wildfire across the United States. Leaders and their surrogates could go travel faster than ev...
ListenR. A. Woldoff and R. C. Litchfield, "Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy" (Oxford UP, 2021) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the space of a few weeks this spring, organizations around the world learned that many traditional, in-person jobs could, in fact, be performed remotely. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, however, s...
ListenDonald A. Barclay, "Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain ...
ListenKathleen Collins, “Dr. Joyce Brothers: The Founding Mother of TV Psychology” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, Dr. Joyce Brothers: The Founding Mother of TV Psychology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Kathleen Collins presents an extensive history of the woman who is arguably the most famous tel...
ListenBecky L. Schulthies, "Channeling Moroccanness: Language and the Media of Sociality" (Fordham UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to connect as a people through mass media? This book approaches that question by exploring how Moroccans engage communicative failure as they seek to shape social and political re...
ListenSam Han, "(Inter)Facing Death: Life in Global Uncertainty" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In modern times, death is understood to have undergone a transformation not unlike religion. Whereas in the past it was out in the open, it now resides mostly in specialized spaces of sequestration...
ListenDonna Freitas, “The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost (Oxford University Press, 2017), Donna Freitas investigates the darker side of social media use and e...
ListenL. Ferlier and B. Miyamoto, "Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832" (Brill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832 (Brill, 2020) explores the printscape – the mental mapping of knowledge in all its printed shapes – to c...
ListenBrian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...
ListenRebecca Scales, “Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921-1939” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What did sound mean to French people as radio and other listening technologies began to proliferate in the early twentieth century? What was the nature and significance of French auditory culture i...
ListenOn Writing Well for Trade: A Conversation with author and scholar Donna Freitas from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish...
ListenAlexander L. Fattal, "Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2019) investigates the Colombian government’s campaign to turn Marxist guerrilla fighters in the FARC...
ListenSteven M. Avella, “Charles K. McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism” (U. Missouri Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Charles K. (CK) McClatchy was a towering figure in the making of Sacramento and the inland empire he liked to call Superior California. As editor of the Sacramento Bee from 1883 to 1936, McClatchy ...
ListenJennifer Burek Pierce, "Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media" (U Iowa Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nerdfighteria started over a decade ago by brothers Hank and John Green who decided to provide literacy themed programming on their website and YouTube channel. With almost three million members, N...
ListenElinor Carmi, "Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media" (Peter Lang, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is spam? In Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media, Dr Elinor Carmi, a postdoctoral research associate in digital culture and society at the Uni...
ListenSteve Aldous, “The World of Shaft: A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films and Television Series” (McFarland, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who’s the black private dick That’s a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft) Ya damn right Who is the man that would risk his neck For his brother man? (Shaft) Can you dig it? Who’s the cat t...
ListenCharles R. Acland, "American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ben-Hur (1959), Jaws (1975), Avatar (2009), Wonder Woman (2017): the blockbuster movie has held a dominant position in American popular culture for decades. In American Blockbuster: Movies, Technol...
ListenDiana Senechal, "Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Diana Senechal examines words, concepts, and phrases that demand reappraisal. Targ...
ListenKate Murphy, “Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the early days of the BBC in 1922, women were everywhere in the broadcasting company’s offices. They were absent, however, argues Dr. Kate Murphy from most of the historiography devoted to thi...
ListenMatilde Córdoba Azcárate, "Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The name Cancún brings to mind tourism, resorts, beaches, sun, and fun. In her book, Stuck With Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan (University of California Press, 2020), Mati...
ListenPaul Matzko, "The Radio Right" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today’s right wing media has a long history that is largely unknown to its current listeners. In The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Cons...
ListenJames McGrath Morris, “Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press” (Amistad, Reprint Edition, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his acclaimed biography Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad, Reprint Edition, 2017), James McGrath Morris explores the fascinating life of pioneering bla...
ListenCailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? In The Misinformation Age:...
ListenTravis Linnemann, “Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power” (NYU Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If all you knew about methamphetamines came from popular culture (“Breaking Bad”) or government anti-drug campaigns (“Faces of Meth”), then you’d probably think that the typical meth user was a une...
ListenE. Michele Ramsey, "Major Decisions: College, Career, and the Case for the Humanities" (U Penn Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews E. Michele Ramsey of PennState Berks on Major Decisions: College, Career, and the Case for the Humanities (University of P...
ListenGlyne Griffith, “The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The BBC radio program “Caribbean Voices” aired for fifteen years and introduced writers like George Lamming, Louise Bennett, Sam Selvon and others to listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. Glyne...
ListenForrest Stuart, "Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do young men use drill music and social media to gain power? In his new book, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy (Princeton University Press, 2020), Forres...
ListenBrian T. Edwards, “After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
American culture is ubiquitous across the globe. It travels to different social contexts and is consumed by international populations. But the relationship between American culture and the meanings...
ListenJohn R. Gallagher, "Update Culture and the Afterlife of Writing" (Utah State UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they interviews John R. Gallagher of University of Illinois about Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing (Utah State University Press, 2020) a dynamic ...
ListenDave Karpf, “Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For the start of 2017, Dave Karpf is back on the podcast with his new book, Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Karpf is associate p...
ListenJ. Packer and E. Stoneman, "A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture" (Penn State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Joe Packer of Central Michigan University about A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture (Penn State UP, 2019...
ListenNicholas A. John, “The Age of Sharing” (Polity Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book The Age of Sharing (Polity Press, 2016), the sociologist and media scholar Nicholas A. John documents the history and current meanings of the word sharing, which he argues, is a cen...
ListenM. R. Michelson and B. F. Harrison, "Transforming Prejudice: Identity, Fear, and Transgender Rights" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Since the mid-1990s, there has been a seismic shift in attitudes toward gay and lesbian people, with a majority of Americans now supporting same-sex marriage and relations between same-sex, consent...
ListenBrian Eugenio Herrera, “Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance” (U. Michigan Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2015) Brian Eugenio Herrera examines the way in which Latina/o actors have communicated...
ListenAndre Brock, "Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Technology has been instrumental in allowing audiences to encounter expressions of culture to which they may have no direct connection. The popular commercial platforms like Twitter and Instagram m...
ListenTom Mills, “The BBC: Myth of a Public Service” (Verso, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The BBC is often thought to be a great, impartial, defender of British values and society. In The BBC: Myth of a Public Service (Verso, 2016), Tom Mills, a lecturer in Sociology at Aston University...
ListenAdam J. MacLeod, "The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal" (Rowland and Littlefield, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Incivility in our public discourse is limiting our ability to get things done as a nation and preventing us from expressing ourselves in workplaces and classrooms for fear of offending those with r...
ListenMary Chapman, “Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton” (McGill-Queens UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016) is a collection of works–previously published and newly discovered–pro...
ListenLeslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...
ListenAlecia Swasy, “How Journalists Use Twitter: The Changing Landscape of U.S. Newsrooms” (Lexington Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With messages limited to 140 characters, Twitter once drew skepticism, even scorn, from journalists who saw little role for the social-media platform in their work. But as Alecia Swasy demonstrates...
ListenAbraham Newman and Henry Farrell, "Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle over Freedom and Security" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We live in an interconnected world. People, goods, and services leap across borders like never before. Terrorist organizations, like al-Qaida, and digital platforms, like Facebook, have gone global...
ListenKathryn Kleppinger, “Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and Media in France, 1983-2013” (Liverpool UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work o...
ListenChristopher D. Bader, "Fear Itself: The Causes and Consequences of Fear in America" (NYU Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture of fear. While fear is typically discussed in emotional or poetic t...
ListenAshaki Jackson, “Surveillance” (Writ Large Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Now in its fifth printing of a very short life, Ashaki Jackson’s Surveillance examines the relationship between acts of violence, the witnessing of violence, the witnessing of the witnessing of vio...
ListenThor Magnusson, "Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Thor Magnusson—musician, Professor of Future Music, and member of the Experimental Music T...
ListenAlison N. Novak, “Media, Millennials, and Politics: The Coming of Age of the Next Political Generation” (Lexington Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The millennial generation (those born from 1980 through the beginning of the 21st century) now comprises the largest voting bloc in the American electorate. In Media, Millennials, and Politics: The...
ListenAmy Koerber, “From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History" (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of New Books in Language, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Amy Koerber (she/hers), Professor at Texas Tech University, on the groundbreaking book From Hysteria to Hormones: ...
ListenEthan Michaeli, “The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Ethan Michaeli charts the riveting history of the Chicago Defender, one of the nat...
ListenPaul Nahin, "Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020), by Paul Nahin, is a book that is meant for s...
ListenLucas Graves, “Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In a fragmented media world where anyone can speak, professional journalists are no longer the “gatekeepers” who decide what the public will see and hear. Instead, citizens are barraged with claims...
ListenArthur Asseraf, "Electric News in Colonial Algeria" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (Oxford University Press, 2019) examines the workings of the “news ecosystem” in Algeria from the 1880s to the beginning of the Second World War. ...
ListenNoah Shenker, “Reframing Holocaust Testimony” (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I serve on a planning committee for the annual Holocaust Commemoration in Wichita, where I live and teach. Every year when we convene, we remind ourselves that we need to invite survivors to speak....
ListenMatt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...
ListenMonika McDermott, “Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With the 2016 presidential election in full swing and rhetoric surrounding each candidate becoming more polarized, how does gender impact the way that people behave politically? Monika McDermott in...
ListenNeil Selwyn, "What is Digital Sociology?" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and this short book introduces readers to an appro...
ListenMilton Chen, “Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools” (Jossey Bass, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It feels like schools are in the midst of unprecedented change — sometimes more in different places and sometimes more in different ways. Many people are thinking about education differently than t...
ListenMargaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Ins...
ListenMarc Raboy, “Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Our modern networked world owes an oftentimes unacknowledged debt to Guglielmo Marconi. As Marc Raboy demonstrates in Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press, 2016), it wa...
ListenJoseph Reagle, "Hacking Life: Systematized Living and its Discontents" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Life hackers track and analyze the food they eat, the hours they sleep, the money they spend, and how they're feeling on any given day. They share tips on the most efficient ways to tie shoelaces a...
ListenMary Chayko, “Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life” (SAGE, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
New technology has made us more connected than ever before. This has its advantages: instantaneous communication, expanded circles of influence, access to more information. And, of course, our conn...
ListenKristen Hoerl, "Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements" (UP of Mississippi, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Kristen Hoerl (she/hers) on...
ListenJean Chalaby, “The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution” (Polity, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Television had been transformed by the rise of the format. In The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution Jean Chalaby, Professor of International Communication at City University London,...
ListenJoshua Foa Dienstag, "Cinema Pessimism: A Political Theory of Representation and Reciprocity" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Joshua Foa Dienstag, Professor of Political Science and Law at UCLA, considers, in his new book, the interaction between our experiences in watching films and our positions as citizens in a represe...
ListenDaniel Kreiss, “Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Daniel Kreiss is back on the podcast with his new book Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Kreiss is associate professor ...
ListenÁine O'Healy, "Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her recently published Migrant Anxieties: Italian Cinema in a Transnational Frame (Indiana University Press, 2019), Áine O'Healy explores how filmmakers in Italy have probed the tensions accompa...
ListenSamantha Barbas, “Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America” (Stanford Law Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford Law Books, 2016), Samantha Barbas provides a history of Americans’ use of law to manage their public image. She approaches...
ListenRuth Palmer, "Becoming the News: How Ordinary People Respond to the Media Spotlight" (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, Becoming the News: How Ordinary People Respond to the Media Spotlight (Columbia University Press, 2017), Ruth Palmer argues that understanding the motivations and experiences of those ...
ListenJennifier Keishin Armstrong, “Seinfeldia: How a Show About Nothing Changed Everything” (Simon and Schuster, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Seinfeld is often referred to as the greatest television show of all time. Although this may be debated, there few who would argue that it holds a prominent place in television history and popular ...
ListenLewis Raven Wallace, “The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity” (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the New York Times to NPR, many major news organizations have strict policies about how reporters can conduct themselves in relation to the stories they cover. Journalists are discouraged from...
ListenMichael Lesher, “Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in the Orthodox Jewish Communities” (McFarland, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland, 2014) analyzes how and why cases of child sexual abuse have been systematically concealed in Orthodox Jewish communit...
ListenDennis Baron, "What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She" (Liveright, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today Dennis Baron talks about his new book What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He & She (Liveright, 2020). Baron is professor emeritus in English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has wr...
ListenPaul Roquet, “Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paul Roquet’s wonderful new book begins with an offering of jellyfish and proceeds to teach us how to read the air. Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)...
ListenTravis Bell et al., "CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic" (Lexington, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Travis Bell, Janelle Applequist, and Christian Dotson-Pierson to discuss their new book CTE, Media, and the NFL: Framing a Public Health Crisis as a Football Epidemic (Lexing...
ListenJosh Lambert, “Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture” (NYU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York University Press, 2014), Josh Lambert, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at U...
ListenAndrew Milner, "Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism?" (Brill/Haymarket, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Brill/Haymarket, 2018) brings together twenty-six essays charting the development of Andrew Milner's distinctively Orwellian version of cul...
ListenBenjamin Peters, “How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Something we might think of as the Soviet internet once existed, according to Benjamin Peters‘ new book, and its failure was neither natural nor inevitable. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy ...
ListenM. Maloney, S. Roberts, and T. Graham, "Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit’s r/gaming Community" (Palgrave, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What can online social spaces like Reddit’s r/gaming reveal about gender attitudes, masculinized spaces, and turning points in gamer communities? In their new book Gender, Masculinity and Video Gam...
ListenRonald R. Kline, “The Cybernetics Moment: Or, Why We Call Our Age the Information Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machi...
ListenErika Engstrom, "Feminism, Gender, and Politics in NBC’s Parks and Recreation" (Peter Lang, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Erika Engstrom is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her latest book, Feminism, Gender, and Politics in NBC’s Parks and Recreation (Peter Lang, 2017), analyz...
ListenJeremy Ahearne, “Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did two right wing presidents use culture to govern France? In Government through Culture and the Contemporary French Right (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Jeremy Ahearne, a Professor of French Stu...
ListenMichael Rechtenwald, "Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom" (New English Review, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Michael Rectenwald begins and ends his Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (New English R...
ListenEmily Schmitt and Lashawn Richburg-Hayes, “Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The application of behavioral science inside government has gained steam over the past few years with the creation of so-called “Nudge units” popping up in countries around the world. Their goals a...
ListenDiana Lemberg, "Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Since the 1940s, America’s relations with the rest of the world have been guided by the idea of promoting the free flow of information. It’s an idea that seems benign, perhaps even difficult to arg...
ListenMeredith Conroy, “Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Meredith Conroy is the author of Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). Conroy is assistant professor of Political Science at California State University, San B...
ListenPhillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...
ListenCass Sunstein, “The World According to Star Wars” (Harper Collins, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Cass Sunstein‘s son, Declan, got dad hooked on Star Wars. And dad, a Harvard Law professor, ended up writing a book about it. “If you’d told me a year ago that I’d write a book about Star Wars,” Su...
ListenL. Benjamin Rolsky, "The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As someone who grew up watching All in the Family and Sanford and Son, I’ve long been familiar with Norman Lear and his work. What I didn’t know, as a young child sitting cross-legged in front of t...
ListenSahana Udupa, “Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What role does Bangalore’s private news culture play in shaping the southern Indian metropolis’ ongoing urban transformation? Sahana Udupa‘s new book Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Po...
ListenCaitlin Frances Bruce, "Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter" (Temple UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Public art is a form of communication that enables spaces for encounters across difference. These encounters may be routine, repeated, or rare, but all take place in urban spaces infused with emoti...
ListenBernard Harcourt, “Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The landscape described in Bernard Harcourt‘s new book is a dystopia saturated by pleasure. We do not live in a drab Orwellian world, he writes. We live in a beautiful, colorful, stimulating, digit...
ListenGermaine R. Halegoua, "The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, The Digital City: Media and the Social Production of Place (NYU Press, 2019), Germaine R. Halegoua rethinks everyday interactions that humans have with digital infrastructures, nav...
ListenJoshua Braun, “This Program is Brought to You By . . . Distributing Television Online” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“One of the things that was most shocking to me getting into the media business, an MSNBC.com producer tells Josh Braun, was the realization that regular people were making it. Television to me . ....
ListenKimberly Meltzer, “From News to Talk: The Expansion of Opinion and Commentary in U.S. Journalism” (SUNY Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From talking heads on cable news to hot takes online, there seems to be more opinion than ever in journalism these days. There’s an entire body of research about how this shift toward opinionated n...
ListenMark Carrigan, “Social Media for Academics” (Sage, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can academics respond to the rise of social media? Or should they respond at all? In Social Media for Academics (Sage, 2016), Mark Carrigan, from the Centre for Social Ontology, offers an infor...
ListenKate Lockwood Harris, "Beyond the Rapist: Title IX and Sexual Violence on US Campuses" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Kate Lockwood Harris (s...
ListenSeth Jacobowitz, “Writing Technology in Meiji Japan” (Harvard UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Seth Jacobowitzs new book opens with a balloon ride and closes with a record-scratching cat, and in between it offers a fascinating history of Meiji media focused on technologies of writing and scr...
ListenSean Jacobs, "Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sean Jacobs, Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York City. Jacobs is also the founder and editor of the acclaimed Africa is A Country website, a leader His new bo...
ListenAlejandra Dubcovsky, “Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016) maps the intricate, intersecting channels of information exchange in the early American South, exploring h...
ListenRussell A. Newman, "The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Three years after the withdrawal of the Open Internet Order – then-President Barack Obama’s attempt at codifying network neutrality by prohibiting internet service providers from discriminating bet...
ListenJason Mittell, “Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television” (NYU Press 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We are said to be in a golden age of TV. The best stories today are told on television screens in serialized forms. The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos are a few of the shows that have eleva...
ListenAllison Ochs, "Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?" (Amsterdam UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new books, Would I Have Sexted Back in the 80s?: A Modern Guide to Parenting Digital Teens, Derived from Lessons of the Past (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Allison Ochs combines experie...
ListenBenjamin Castleman, “The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve Education” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Teenagers live in their phones. As an educator you can try to pull them away or meet them where they are. The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and Other Behavioral Strategies Can Improve ...
ListenAlexis Elder, "Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But ...
ListenJonathan Donner, “After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Thanks to mobile phones, getting online is easier and cheaper than ever. In After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet (MIT Press, 2015), Jonathan Donner challenges the optimi...
ListenK. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...
ListenFowler, Franz, and Ridout, “Political Advertising in the United States” (Westview Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Erika Franklin Fowler, Michael M. Franz, and Travis N. Ridout are the co-authors of Political Advertising in the United States (Westview Press 2016). Fowler is assistant professor of government at ...
ListenEleanor Gordon-Smith, "Stop Being Reasonable: How We Really Change Our Minds" (PublicAffairs, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With today's furious political and cultural divisions, it's easy to shake our heads in exasperation at those who disagree with us. In this episode with Australian writer and philosopher, Eleanor Go...
ListenDavid R. Brake, “Sharing our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With the growth of social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, we are increasingly heading toward a radically open society. In Sharing our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Soci...
ListenJodie Jackson, “You Are What You Read: Why Changing Your Media Diet Can Change The World” (Unbound, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The old mantra “if it bleeds it leads” is alive and well in today’s media landscape. In fact, social media and up-to-the-second news have made it easier than ever to ingest a constant stream of inf...
ListenJeffery Pomerantz, “Metadata” (MIT, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the “stuff” that fuels the information society in which we live? In his new book, Metadata (MIT 2015), information scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz asserts that metadata powers our digital socie...
ListenKeri Holt, "Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776-1830" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Keri Holt is the author of Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776-1830, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019. Reading These United States explores...
ListenFinn Brunton, “Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Finn Brunton‘s Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press, 2013) is a cultural history of those communications that seek to capture our attention for the purposes of exploiting it. From pran...
ListenHelen Taylor, "Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why and how is fiction important to women? In Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives (Oxford University Press, 2020), Helen Taylor, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Exet...
ListenBarry Brown and Oskar Juhlin, “Enjoying Machines” (MIT 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When we consider the television, we think not only about how it’s used, but also it’s impact on culture. The television, tv, telly, or tube, became popular in the West in the late 1940s and early 1...
ListenEbony Elizabeth Thomas, "The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the...
ListenPeter J. Gloviczki, “Journalism and Memorialization in the Age of Social Media” (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Humans have coped with tragedy using ritual and memorials since the Neolithic era. Doka called a memorial a space invested with meaning, “set aside to commemorate an event such as a tragedy.” Memor...
ListenNarges Bajoghli, "Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic" (Stanford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford University Press, 2019), Narges Bajoghli takes an inside look at what it means to be pro-regime in Iran, and the deba...
ListenMegan Prelinger, “Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age” (Norton, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Megan Prelinger‘s beautiful new book brings together the histories of technology and visuality to ask the question, “What cultural history of electronics can be extrapolated from a close look at th...
ListenStephen Benedict Dyson, "Imagining Politics: Interpretations in Political Science and Political Television" (U Michigan Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Stephen Dyson has provided a fascinating and engaging analysis of political science, the discipline, and political television in his new book, Imagining Politics: Interpretations in Political Scien...
ListenJerome Bourdon, “Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle” (Presses des Mines, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jerome de Bourdon‘s Histoire de la television sous de Gaulle (Presses des Mines, 2014) is a revised version of a book that first appeared in 1990. This edition has been revamped, and includes a new...
ListenRobert Rozehnal, "Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience" (OneWorld, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What happens when the digital world meets Sufism? This is the question raised in the exciting new book Cyber Sufis: Virtual Expressions of the American Muslim Experience (OneWorld Academic, 2019) b...
ListenJohn Durham Peters, “The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media” (U of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Durham Peters‘ wonderful new book is a brilliant and beautifully-written consideration of natural environments as subjects for media studies. Accessible and informative for a broad readership....
ListenH. Suzanne Woods and L. A. Hahner, "Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right" (Peter Lang, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Heather Suzanne Woods (she/...
ListenEric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder, “Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
By now it is incontrovertible that new technology has had an effect on how regular people get information. Whether in the form of an online newspaper or a Google search, new technology has allowed ...
ListenMark Bartholomew, "Adcreep: The Case Against Modern Marketing" (Stanford Law Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Advertising is everywhere. By some estimates, the average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements each day. Whether we realize it or not, "adcreep"?modern marketing's march to create a wor...
ListenHilary Neroni, “The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film” (Columbia UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Did you notice that after 9/11, the depiction of torture on prime-time television went up nearly seven hundred percent? Hilary Neroni did. She had just finished a book on the changing relationship ...
ListenStanley Fish, "The First: How to Think About Hate Speech" (One Signal, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-t...
ListenJoseph R. Dennis, “Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100-1700” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In late imperial China, how did local elites connect with and influence the central government? How was local information made and managed? How did the state incorporate frontier areas into the emp...
ListenXiao Liu, "Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
International and transnational historiography has given us vivid glimpses of the development and impact of cybernetics on a national scale in such countries as the Soviet Union, Chile and, of cour...
ListenGillian Isaacs Russell, “Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy” (Karnac, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At New Books in Psychoanalysis, interviews are conducted using Skype. As the program is audio rather than video based, it never occurred to me to use the camera on my computer to see on the screen ...
ListenAndrea Kitta, "The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore" (Utah State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one. This is the central tenet underlying The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore (Utah State University Press 2019) by Andrea Kit...
ListenKate Pahl, “Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited” (Bloomsbury, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Literary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl‘s Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2...
ListenJoshua Sperber, "Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace" (Lexington, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace (Lexington Books, 2019), Joshua Sperber analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which cu...
ListenLawrence M. Friedman, “The Big Trial: Law as Public Spectacle” (UP of Kansas, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the first legal history course I took as an undergraduate, I read Lawrence M. Friedman‘s A History of American Law and American Law in the 20th Century and have been fascinated with the subject ...
ListenTimothy J. Shaffer, "A Crisis of Civility? Political Discourse and its Discontents" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There are a lot of calls these days to “revive civility” in politics. While there are plenty of examples of uncivil behavior, there’s far less agreement about what civility should look like in 2019...
ListenJoseph M. Reagle, “Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do we know about the individuals who make comments on online news stories, blogs, videos and other media? What kind of people take the time to post all manner of information and context to mat...
ListenMichael Krona and Rosemary Pennington, "The Media World of ISIS" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From efficient instructions on how to kill civilians to horrifying videos of beheadings, no terrorist organization has more comprehensively weaponized social media than ISIS. Its strategic, multi-p...
ListenSonja D. Williams “Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom” (U of Illinois Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sonja D. Williams‘ book Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom (University of Illinois Press, 2015) connects its subject to some of the most important events and social movements of his t...
ListenCéline Carayon, "Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (University of ...
ListenNicole Starosielski, “The Undersea Network” (Duke UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nicole Starosielski‘s new book brings an environmental and ecological consciousness to the study of digital media and digital systems, and it is a must-read. The Undersea Network (Duke University P...
ListenAlison Rowley, "Putin Kitsch in America" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, Putin Kitsch in America (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), Alison Rowley examines the outsized influence that Vladimir Putin, both the man and the myth, have had on US political ...
ListenRandy Nichols, “The Video Game Business” (British Film Institute, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Video games have become an important cultural and economic force in our media environment. In his new book, The Video Game Business (British Film Institute, 2014), scholar Randy Nichols provides an...
ListenSimone Knox and Kai Hanno Schwind, "Friends: A Reading of the Sitcom" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does Friends mean to us now? In Friends: A Reading of the Sitcom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Simone Knox, an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Television at the Unive...
ListenChristopher Vitale, “Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age” (Zero Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Networks seem to be the dominant metaphor for contemporary society. In Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age (Zero Books, 2014), Christopher Vitale sets out a manifesto ...
ListenR. Muirhead and N. L. Rosenblum, "A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy" (Princeton UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From Pizzagate to Jeffrey Epstein, conspiracies seem to be more prominent than ever in American political discourse. What was once confined to the pages of supermarket tabloids is now all over our ...
ListenMichael Ray FitzGerald, “Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the ‘Good Indian'” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book Native Americans on Network TV: Stereotypes, Myths, and the ‘Good Indian’ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), Michael Ray FitzGerald reviews how television represented Native Americans,...
ListenPhilip M. Napoli, "Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Philip M. Napoli has been thinking about algorithmic news and social media feed curation for quite some time, as he acknowledges in his new book, Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulat...
ListenJonathan Coopersmith, “Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jonathan Coopersmith‘s new book takes readers through the century-and-a-half-long history of the fax machine and the technologies that shaped and were shaped by it, from Alexander Bain’s 1843 paten...
ListenDeborah Lupton, "The Quantified Self" (Polity, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With the advent of digital devices and software, self-tracking practices have gained new adherents and have spread into a wide array of social domains. The Quantified Self movement has emerged to p...
ListenJames A. Secord, “Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age” (U of Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
James A. Secord‘s new book is both deeply enlightening and a pleasure to read. Emerging from the 2013 Sandars Lectures in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library, Visions of Science: Books...
ListenDonna Guy, "Creating Charismatic Bonds in Argentina: Letters to Juan and Eva Perón" (U New Mexico Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Donna Guy’s 2016 book Creating Charismatic Bonds in Argentina: Letters to Juan and Eva Perón (University of New Mexico Press) is a history of Peronist populism that puts everyday people at the cent...
ListenChristian Fuchs, “Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social media is now a pervasive element of many people’s lives. in order to best understand this phenomenon we need a comprehensive theory of the political economy of social media. In Culture and E...
ListenAlberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...
ListenGreg Siegel, “Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Greg Siegel‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging and meticulously researched account of a dual tendency in modern technological life: treating forensic knowledge of accident causation as a key to s...
ListenRoland Elliot Brown, "Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda" (FUEL, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the arc of Soviet history, few government programs were as tenacious as the anti-religious campaign, which systematically set out to debunk organized religion as "the opium of the people." This ...
ListenJon L. Mills, “Privacy in the New Media Age” (University Press of Florida, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
That privacy in the digital age is an important concept to be discussed is axiomatic. Cameras in mobile phones make it easy to record events and post them on the web. Consumers post an enormous amo...
ListenPatricia Roberts-Miller, "Demagoguery and Democracy" (The Experiment, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When you think of the word “demagogue,” what comes to mind? Probably someone like Hitler or another bombastic leader, right? Patricia Roberts-Miller is a rhetoric scholar and has spent years tracin...
ListenTimothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society (Pluto Press, 2015). The book aims to co...
ListenDavid McCraw, "Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts" (All Points Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The First Amendment and a strong Fourth Estate are essential to a healthy democracy. David McCraw spends his days making sure that journalists can do their work in the United States and around the ...
ListenNaomi S. Baron, “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of content both visual and text. But it is not necessari...
ListenDave Tell, "Remembering Emmett Till" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Dave Tell (he/him/his)-...
ListenJason Stanley, “How Propaganda Works” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Propaganda names a familiar collection of phenomena, and examples of propaganda are easy to identify, especially when one examines the output of totalitarian states. In those cases, language and im...
ListenQuassim Cassam, "Conspiracy Theories" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
9/11 was an inside job. The Holocaust is a myth promoted to serve Jewish interests. The shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School were a false flag operation. Climate change is a hoax perpetrated b...
ListenChristine L. Borgman, “Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social media and digital technology now allow researchers to collect vast amounts of a variety data quickly. This so-called “big data,” and the practices that surround its collection, is all the ra...
ListenAnne Nelson, "Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the most important organization you’ve never heard of? Anne Nelson has an answer: the Council for National Policy. Nelson is Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs ...
ListenTodd Wolfson, “Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left” (U Illinois Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Todd Wolfson’s book, Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left (University of Illinois Press, 2014) examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, a...
ListenKathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...
ListenRobert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) ...
ListenAndreas Bernard, "Theory of the Hashtag" (Polity, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his short book, Theory of the Hashtag (Polity, 2019), Andreas Bernard traces the origins and career of the hashtag. Following the history of the # sign through its origins in the Middle Ages and...
ListenChristina Dunbar-Hester, “Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For the past few decades a major focus has been how the Internet, and Internet associated new media, allows for greater social and political participation globally. There is no disputing that the I...
ListenAndrew Hobbs, "A Fleet Street In Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900" (Open Book, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The dominance of the London press in the British national media has long overshadowed the presence of local newspapers in Great Britain and the roles they played in their communities. As Andrew Hob...
ListenThomas Leitch, “Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Wikipedia is one of the most popular resources on the web, with its massive collection of articles on an incredible number of topics. Yet, its user written and edited model makes it controversial i...
ListenJ. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...
ListenFrank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, “The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America ( U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones are the authors of The Politics of Information: Problem Definition and the Course of Public Policy in America (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Baumgartne...
ListenNoah Cohan, "We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sport" (U Nebraska, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Noah Cohan, Lecturer in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of A...
ListenSteven Fielding, “A State of Play” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trol...
ListenLeah Price, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Let’s talk about books! How, when, and what do you like to read? Have you ever thought about the history of books and reading? How about shape, size, or texture of your book? Where do books go afte...
ListenJohanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Johanna Drucker‘s marvelous new book gives us a language with which to talk about visual epistemology.Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014) simultaneously...
ListenAnastasia Denisova, "Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How have memes changed politics? In Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts(Routledge, 2019), Anastasia Denisova, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Westmins...
ListenBeth Driscoll, “The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty-First Century” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), B...
ListenThomas Aiello, "The Grapevine of the Black South" (U Georgia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. By 1932 the Atlanta World had become a daily paper and the basis of Scott's vis...
ListenVictor Pickard, “America’s Battle for Media Democracy” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The media system in the United States could have developed into something very different than what it is today. In fact, there was an era in which significant media reform was considered. This was ...
ListenTammy R. Vigil, "Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992-2016" (U Kansas Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Tammy Vigil’s new book, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992-2016 (University Press of Kansas, 2019), examines the contemporary “first...
ListenBridget Conor, “Screenwriting: Creative labor and professional practice” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Bridget Conor’s new book, Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice (Routledge, 2014), looks closely at the creative practice and profession of screenwriting for film and television i...
ListenVincent DiGirolamo, "Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford University Press, 2019) looks at the legion of children and teenagers who sold newspapers on city streets, moving trains, and even Civil War...
ListenRandal Marlin, “Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion” (Broadview Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s been 100 years since the start of the First World War, a conflict that cost millions of lives. In his recently revised book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2013), Randal Marlin write...
ListenGraham Thompson, "Herman Melville: Among the Magazines" (U Massachusetts Press 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"What I feel most moved to write, that is banned?it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the otherway I cannot." Herman Melville wrote these words as he struggled to survive as a failing novelist. ...
ListenEric Hayot, “The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities” (Columbia University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“This is a book that wants you to surpass and destroy it.” Eric Hayot‘s new book has the potential to transform how we teach and practice academic writing, and it invites the kind of reading and e...
ListenSuzanne Scott, "Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry" (NYU Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Suzanne Scott’s new book Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (NYU Press, 2019) provides an overview of the convergence culture industry and the world of fandom whi...
ListenAlon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Information, E-Government, and Exchange” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., an...
ListenJoseph M. Adelman, "Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
During the American Revolution, printed material, including newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and broadsides, played a crucial role as a forum for public debate. In Revolutionary Networks: The Busin...
ListenEthan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection” (Norton, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one another as never before. However, as Ethan Zucker...
ListenBelinda Stillion Southard, "How to Belong: Women’s Agency in a Transnational World" (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Belinda Stillion Southard (she/hers)...
ListenMarisol Sandoval, “From Corporate to Social Media” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What would a truly ‘social’ social media look like? This is the core question of From Corporate to Social Media: Critical Perspectives on Corporate Social Responsibility in Media and Communication ...
ListenDaniel Veidlinger, "From Indra’s Net to Internet: Communication, Technology, and the Evolution of Buddhist Ideas" (U Hawaii Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode of New Books in Buddhist Studies, I am joined by Daniel Veidlinger to discuss his exciting new book From Indra’s Net to Internet: Communication, Technology, and the Evolution of Bud...
ListenHugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Technology and Social Transformation” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. But the changes that we are seeing are far from...
ListenPolina Kroik, "Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Film and Literature" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does thinking about gender and work help to rethink cultural hierarchies? In Cultural Production and the Politics of Women’s Work in American Film and Literature(Routledge, 2019), Polina Kroik,...
ListenJulia Azari, “People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate” (Cornell UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Julia Azari has written Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate (Cornell University Press, 2014). Azari is assistant professor of political science at Mar...
ListenAnne O’Brien, "Women, Inequality and Media Work" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do women experience gender inequality in film and television production industries? In Women, Inequality and Media Work (Routledge, 2019), Dr Anne O’Brien, lecturer in the Department of Media S...
ListenJeremy Lipschultz, “Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law, and Ethics” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social media is a phenomenon that continues to grow and attract much attention in the form of consternation, commentary, criticism and scholarly research. Any attempt at truly understanding social ...
ListenDavid Resnick, "Representing Education In Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings and Issues" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
David Resnick combines two of his passions, movies and education, in his book, Representing Education In Film: How Hollywood Portrays Educational Thought, Settings and Issues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2...
ListenJoe Moran, “Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV” (Profile Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The social and cultural historian Joe Moran, Professor of English and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK is interested in the everyday moments between great events. In his boo...
ListenGregory Borchard, "A Narrative History of the American Press" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The American press is older than the United States itself. Ever since its catalytic role in the American Revolution, journalism has evolved to meet changing political, economic, and technological d...
ListenJudith Donath, “The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The conversation about the Web and social media skews toward a discussion of the potential for connections, and how both individuals and organizations are using the media to communicate, to form co...
ListenDavid Beer, “The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception“ (Sage, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the social role of data? In The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception (Sage, 2019), David Beer, a professor of sociology at the University of York, considers this question by introduc...
ListenLisa Gitelman, “Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“One doesn’t so much read a death certificate, it would seem, as perform calisthenics on one…” From the first, prefatory page of Lisa Gitelman‘s new book, the reader is introduced to a way of thi...
ListenMorgan Marietta, "One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
American society is deeply divided at this moment—not just on values and opinions but on basic perceptions of reality. In their latest book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Dem...
ListenPayal Arora, “The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Scholars and commentators have used metaphor in an attempt to describe the Web since public access began. Think of ideas like the information highway, cyberspace, the digital library, etc. In her n...
ListenJeffrey T. Zalar, "Reading and Rebellion in Catholic Germany, 1770-1914" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Popular conceptions of Catholic censorship, symbolized above all by the Index of Forbidden Books, figure prominently in secular definitions of freedom. To be intellectually free is to enjoy access ...
ListenIan Haney Lopez, “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ian Haney Lopez is the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford UP 2014). He is the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the...
ListenAmy Lippert, "Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth...
ListenPatrick Burkart, “Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The mid-’00s saw the rise of a political movement in Europe concerned with technocratic impositions on the ideals of free culture, privacy, government transparency and other technology policy issue...
ListenAnne A. Cheng, "Ornamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--Dr. Anne Cheng (she/hers)--Professor of English and Director of...
ListenJohn Nathan Anderson, “Radio’s Digital Dilemma: Broadcasting in the 21st Century” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Nathan Anderson’s new book, Radio’s Digital Dilemma: Broadcasting in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2014), documents the somewhat tortured path of broadcast radio’s digital transition in the Uni...
ListenEdward Vallance, "Loyalty, Memory and Public Opinion in England, 1658-1727" (Manchester UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
People value loyalty. We prize it in our dogs. We loyally carry loyalty cards to claim discounts at our favourite stores and coffee shops. We follow sports teams, even when they lose. Loyalty is al...
ListenDavid Hesmondhalgh, “Why Music Matters” (Wiley Blackwell, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the value of music and why does it matter? These are the core questions in David Hesmondhalgh‘s new book Why Music Matters (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). The book attempts a critical defence of...
ListenKara Ritzheimer, "'Trash,' Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany" (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Convinced that sexual immorality and unstable gender norms were endangering national recovery after World War One, German lawmakers drafted a constitution in 1919 legalizing the censorship of movie...
ListenLeilani Nishime, “Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture” (University of Illinois Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Leilani Nishime‘s Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2014) challenges the dominant U.S. cultural narrative that imagines multiracial peop...
ListenSharon Kirsch, "Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric" (U Alabama Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Sharon Kirsch (she/hers)--Associate Prof. of English and rhetorical studies in the New College at...
Listendanah boyd, “It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens” (Yale UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social media is ubiquitous, and teens are ubiquitous on social media. And this youth attachment to social media is a cause for concern among parents, educators, and legislators concerned with issue...
ListenHeidi Tworek, "News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In our current moment marred by media monopolies and disinformation campaigns, it is easy to get caught up in the dizzying temporality of the news cycle and think these are new phenomena. Heidi Two...
ListenJennifer Stromer-Galley, “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Digital Communications Technologies, or DCTs, like the Internet offer the infrastructure and means of forming a networked society. These technologies, now, are a mainstay of political campaigns on ...
ListenSara K. Eskridge, "Rube Tube: CBS and Rural Comedy in the Sixties" (U Missouri Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The television comedies of the 1960s set in the American South epitomize American innocence. But in their original historical, social, and commercial context, their portrayals of southern life and ...
ListenAndrew L. Russell, “Open Standards in the Digital Age” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We tend to take for granted that much of the innovation in the technology that we use today, in particular the communication technology, is made possible because of standards. In his book Open Stan...
ListenDerek Gaunt, "Ego, Authority, Failure: Using Emotional Intelligence Like a Hostage Negotiator to Succeed as a Leader" (New Degree Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo—is joined by co-host and recent Geneseo Graduat...
ListenBrett Hutchins and David Rowe, “Sport Beyond Television: The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Twenty years ago, when I was studying abroad in Europe, the only way to keep track of my teams back in the US was to sneak looks in The International Herald Tribune at the newspaper kiosk (the pric...
ListenJeremy Black, "The English Press: A History" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this succinct and brilliantly written one-volume account of the rise and fall of the English press, premier historian Jeremy Black, the most prolific historian writing in the Anglophone world, i...
ListenKarma Chavez, “Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities” (Illinois University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Karma Chavez is the author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Illinois University Press, 2013). Dr. Chavez is assistant professor of Communication Arts an...
ListenBryan McCann, "The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era" (U Alabama Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Bryan McCann (he/his)--Associate Professor of Communication at Louisiana State University--on a ...
ListenSara Bannerman, “The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Struggle for Canadian Copyright: Imperialism to Internationalism, 1842-1971, Sara Bannerman narrates the complex story of Canada’s copyright policy since the mid-19th century. The book detai...
ListenClare Daniel, "Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era" (U Massachusetts Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric and Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo--interviews Dr. Clare Daniel (she/hers)--Administrative Assistan...
ListenJoseph Uscinski, “The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism” (NYU Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“When we criticize the news, who are we really criticizing?” This is the final question asked by Professor Joseph Uscinski in his book, The People’s News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capit...
ListenRobert Darnton, “On the Future of Libraries” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Robert Darnton, author of books, articles, and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. Darnton joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the future ...
ListenMatt Guardino, "Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in US Public Policy" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Neoliberal policies have been a primary feature of American political economy for decades. In Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in US Public Policy (Oxford Uni...
ListenPatrick Burkart, “Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Conflicts” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Patrick Burkart‘s Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Conflicts (MIT Press, 2014) considers the democratic potential and theoretical significance of groups espousing radical perspectives on...
ListenAbigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, "#Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation" (U Michigan Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the new book #Identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (University of Michigan Press, 2019), Abigail De Kosnik and Keith Feldman bring together a broad array of chapters that di...
ListenErica Cusi Wortham, “Indigenous Media in Mexico: Culture, Community, and the State” (Duke University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Videography is a powerful tool for recording and representing aspects of human society and culture, and anthropologists have long used – and debated the use of – video as a tool to study indigenous...
ListenKerim Yasar, "Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868-1945 (Columbia UP, 2018) explores the soundscapes of modernity in Japan. In this book, Kerim Yasar argues that...
ListenMelissa Aronczyk, “Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity, Melissa Aronczyk locates the rise of nation branding as a response to the perceived need to sculpt national identity in the face of...
ListenMartin Collins, "A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s easy to take for granted that one can pick up a cell phone and call someone on the other side of the planet. But, until very recently, this had been a mere dream. Martin Collins’ A Telephone f...
ListenThomas Bey William Bailey, “Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society” (Belsona Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on ...
ListenDerrick Spires, "The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With talk about birthright citizenship and border walls running rampant in Trump’s America, there are many scholars reaching back to antebellum America to historically ground today’s citizens in de...
ListenEthan Thompson and Jason Mittell, “How to Watch Television” (NYU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What if there was an instruction manual for television? Not just for the casual consumer, but for college students interested in learning about the culture of television, written by some of the fie...
ListenNicholas Baer et al. "Unwatchable" (Rutgers UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor...
ListenHeidi Campbell, “When Religion Meets New Media” Routledge, 2010 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does religion have to do with technology? Many people think that religious practitioners are inherently opposed to new technological developments. The reality of the situation is that religiou...
ListenPeter Daou, "Digital Civil War: Confronting the Far-Right Menace" (Melville House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Democratic political adviser Peter Daou has long toggled between the world of presidential campaigns and online activism. He worked for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary ...
ListenAllen Salkin “From Scratch: Inside the Food Network” (Putnam, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When I was growing up the only cooking show on TV I remember was Julia Child. I sometimes watched “The French Chef,” not so much to learn anything about cooking, but rather just to watch Julia. She...
ListenMichael A. Cohen, "Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We are fed a steady stream of doom and gloom—terrorist attacks, erosion of democracy, robots taking our jobs. But Michael A. Cohen and his co-author Mich Zenko argue in Clear and Present Safety: Th...
ListenGeorge Brock, “Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age” (Kogan Page, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
George Brock approached his book about newspapers and journalism in the digital age unwilling to write another gloom-and-doom narrative about the death or decline of the industry. When he studied t...
ListenCrystal Abidin, "Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online" (Emerald Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to be famous on the Internet? How do people become Internet celebrities, and what can that celebrity be used to do? Dr. Crystal Abidin offers anthropological insight into these qu...
ListenIan Samson, “Paper: An Elegy” (Harper Collins, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In our digital world, it does seem like paper is dying by inches. Bookstores are going out of business, and more and more people get their news from the internet than from newspapers. But how irrel...
ListenMatthew Fox-Amato, "Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Shortly after its introduction, photography transformed the ways Americans made political arguments using visual images. In the mid-19th century, photographs became key tools in debates surrounding...
ListenDavid Beer, “Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation” (Palgrave, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Popular Culture and New Media: The Politics of Circulation (Palgrave, 2013) is written by David Beer, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at York University in the UK. He blogs here and tweets here. The...
ListenLeslie Hahner, "To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early 20th Century" (Michigan State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they)--Assistant Professor, Dept. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Leslie Hahner--Associate Professor, Dept. of Communicati...
ListenSarah Banet-Weiser, “Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture” (NYU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2013), Sarah Banet-Weiser scrutinizes the spread of brand culture into other spheres of social life that the market–at leas...
ListenRósa Magnúsdóttir, "Enemy Number One: The United States of American in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Enemy Number One: The United States of American in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945-1959 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Dr. Rósa Magnúsdóttir of Aarhus University, explores depictions of A...
ListenBrian Michael Goss, “Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propaganda Model in the Twenty-First Century” (Peter Lang, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Michael Goss, professor of communication at St. Louis University in Madrid, has taken one of media’s most studied theories and given it a facelift. In Rebooting the Herman and Chomsky Propag...
ListenRacquel J. Gates, "Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Racquel J. Gates’ new book, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018), interrogates understandings of African-American representations on screen. This book...
ListenJohn O. McGinnis, “Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology” (Princeton UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The advent of very powerful computers and the Internet have not “changed everything,” but it has created a new communications context within which almost everything we do will be somewhat changed. ...
ListenDave Dillon, "Blueprint for Success in College and Career" (Rebus Community Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dave Dillon of Grossmont College--on a valuable work for higher education: Bluep...
ListenMichael Serazio, “Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing” (NYU Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Power through freedom.” Michael Serazio‘s Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013) traces the mushrooming world of guerrilla marketing–defined to include word-of-mouth,...
ListenTom Wheeler, "From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future" (Brookings, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It's easy to get sidetracked while writing a book. But imagine being interrupted by the President of the United States. That happened to Tom Wheeler, who was in the midst of writing a history of co...
ListenNicco Mele, “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath” (St. Martin’s Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nicco Mele is the author of The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath (St. Martin’s Press, 2013). He is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Cent...
ListenMichael Mario Albrecht, "Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television" (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dr. Michael Mario Albrecht (he/his)--to discuss a sweeping exploration of ma...
ListenDominic Pettman, “Human Error” (UMinnesota, 2011)/”Look at the Bunny” (Zero Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“The humans are dead.” Whether or not you recognize the epigram from Flight of the Conchords (and if not, there are worse ways to spend a few minutes than by looking here, and I recommend sticking...
ListenRicha Kaul Padte, "Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography" (Penguin Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Parents, teachers, feminists, conservatives, lawyers, the concerned citizen – pornography raises everyone's hackles. Author Richa Kaul Padte approaches pornography with a combination of light-heart...
ListenDan Kennedy, “The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age” (UMass Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dan Kennedy envisioned a massive book project, a big-picture investigation into current issues facing journalism and media. Instead he found everything he needed in New Haven, Conn., inside the sma...
ListenDiscussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...
ListenDouglas Rushkoff, “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” (Current, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Humans understand the world through stories, some short and some long. But what happens when the stories become so short that they, well, aren’t stories at all? In Present Shock: When Everything Ha...
ListenSuk-Young Kim, "K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance" (Stanford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Given its expanding multimedia presence in Asia and around the world for many years now, K-pop is a phenomenon that is hard to ignore. This “animal that thrives on excess,” as Suk-Young Kim puts it...
ListenMuzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard, “Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring” (Oxford UP 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Muzammil Hussain and Phillip Howard have authored Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013) which explores the role social media (Twitter, Facebook,...
ListenAmit Pinchevski, "Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to consider trauma and media from the perspective of technology and not from that of the subject of trauma, the clinician or the witness? In Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Medi...
ListenDavid Hochfelder, “The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), David Hochfelder provides a taut and consistently intelligent history of the telegraph in American life. The book is n...
ListenReece Peck, "Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Reece Peck's Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cambridge University Press, 2019) offers a unique argument of why the Fox News Channel has been both a commercial successful and w...
ListenMartin Kelner, “Sit Down and Cheer: A History of Sport on TV” (Bloomsbury, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I have never been to the Super Bowl, and I will probably never will. I’ve never been to a World Cup match or an Olympic event. I’ve never been to the Final Four or the Rose Bowl. I’ve never been to...
ListenMeredith McCarroll, "Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film" (U Georgia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example of how the region is stereotyped and misunderst...
ListenRobert W. McChesney, “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy” (The New Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Robert W. McChesney, the celebrated political economist of communication, takes the Internet, industry and government head-on in his latest book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the I...
ListenJames Schwoch, "Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier" (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It's been called the first Internet. In the nineteenth century, the telegraph spun a world wide web of cables and poles, carrying electronic signals with unprecedented speed. In order to connect th...
ListenVicki Mayer, “Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy (Duke University Press, 2011), Vicki Mayer provides a major theoretical contribution to media production studies. T...
ListenThomas F. Gieryn, "Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe" (U Chicago, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Is the existence of truth coming to a screeching halt? Does truth still exist? In Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dr. Thomas F. Gieryn takes time to...
ListenHenry Jenkins, Sam Ford, Joshua Green, “Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture” (New York University Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead This is the unifying idea of Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s new book, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York Uni...
ListenMargaret Hennefeld, "Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes" (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the early days of film, female comedians appeared in films that included both strange activities and slapstick. In her new book Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia Univer...
ListenC.W. Anderson, “Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age” (Temple UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Somewhere along the line, C.W. Anderson became fascinated with digital journalism and the culture that surrounds it: engaged publics, social networks, and the challenges to “legacy” media. Rebuild...
ListenJacob Johanssen, "Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How can insights from psychoanalysis help us understand digital culture? in Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture: Audiences, Social Media, and Big Data (Routledge, 2018), Jacob Johanssen, a senior le...
ListenDennis Deninger, “Sports on Television: The How and Why Behind What You See” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Did you watch the game last night? No matter if you live in Australia, England, India, Ontario, or the US, chances are you’ve heard that question today. Televised sports are a constant presence in...
ListenBradford Vivian, "Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture" (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of New Books in Communications, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Bradford Vivian (he/his) of Penn State University on his fabulous new book Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical In...
ListenNick Couldry, “Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice” (Polity Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity Press, 2012), Nick Couldry provides a sweeping synthesis of his important media theory over the last decade. Couldry reass...
ListenKendall Phillips, "A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema" (U Texas, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Kendall Phillips (he) of Syracuse University on his fabulous new book A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in E...
ListenBarry Kernfeld, “Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution Since 1929” (University of Chicago Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
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 pur...
ListenJoy Lisi Rankin, "A People’s History of Computing in the United States" (Harvard UP, 2018). from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We know, perhaps too well, the innovation-centric history of personal computing. Yet, computer users were not necessarily microelectronics consumers from the get-go; rather, earlier efforts to expa...
ListenMarshall Poe, “A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet” (Cambridge UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is not every historian who would offer readers an attempt to explain human nature. In A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge Unive...
ListenMargaret Peacock, "Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (University of North Press, 2014), Margaret Peacock analyzes the various ways in which images of children were put...
ListenAnn M. Blair, “Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age” (Yale University Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Chewing on raw turnips and sand, keeping both feet in a tub of cold water, reading with just one eye open (to give the other a chance to rest) and sleeping only every other night: no, I am not desc...
ListenJieun Baek, "North Korea's Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society" (Yale UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With recent events having raised hopes that significant change may be afoot in North Korea, it is important to remember that DPRK society has in fact been undergoing steady transformation for a con...
ListenRobert Lane Greene, “You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws and the Politics of Identity” (Delacorte Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Isn’t it odd how the golden age of correct language always seems to be around the time that its speaker was in high school, and that language has been going to the dogs ever since? Such is the angu...
ListenElliott J. Gorn, "Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The story of Emmett Till’s death at the hands of white Mississippians is well known. For many Americans, it highlights the racism of the Jim Crow South and was a defining moment that helped galvani...
ListenDaniel Veidlinger, “Spreading the Dhamma: Writing, Orality, and Textual Transmission in Buddhist Northern Thailand” (University of Hawaii Press, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
New media technology changes culture. And when it comes to religion, new technology changes the way people think and practice their traditions. And while we usually think of technology as some new ...
ListenKatie Beswick, "Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage" (Methuen Drama, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How has the council estate been represented on stage? In Social Housing In Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage (Methuen Drama, 2018), Dr. Katie Beswick, a lecturer in drama at...
ListenIan McNeely, “Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet” (Norton, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We don’t think much about institutions. They just seem to “be there.” But they have a history, as Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton show in their important new book Reinventing Knowledge. From Alexa...
ListenVolker Berghahn, "Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer: From Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What can the lives of journalists under Hitler and Adenauer reveal? How did they navigate the Third Reich as "internal emigrants"? How did the emerging Cold War shape new tensions with their govern...
ListenAlex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, "The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms" (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Our evolutionary success, according to co-authors Alex Bentley and Michael O'Brien, lies in our ability to acquire cultural wisdom and teach it to the next generation. Today, we follow social media...
ListenJoe Street, "Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash" (UP of Florida, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When "Dirty Harry" first premiered in 1971, it was both praised and condemned for its portrayal of a rogue policeman fighting crime by ignoring many of the rules and procedures of the profession. Y...
ListenIrmak Karademir Hazir, "Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How has European culture changed since the 1960s? In Enter Culture, Exit Arts? The Transformation of Cultural Hierarchies in European Newspaper Culture Sections, 1960–2010 (Routledge, 2018), Dr. Ir...
ListenPamela E. Klassen, "The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across dis...
ListenTison Pugh, "The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom" (Rutgers UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Perhaps no form of popular art has appeared as poised to resist subversive sexual themes as the television situation comedy. But Tison Pugh writes that the sitcom’s historic dogmatic insistence on ...
ListenAnnabel Cooper, "Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen" (Otago UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen (Otago University Press, 2018), Annabel Cooper, an Associate Professor in the Gender Studies Programme at the University o...
ListenSarah Banet-Weiser, "Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the relationship between popular misogyny and popular feminism? In Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny(Duke University Press, 2018), Sarah Banet-Weiser, Professor of Media and ...
ListenMcKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...
ListenKevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman, "Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War" (Dartmouth College Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
One of the major aspects of the end of the Cold War has been the discovery and release of records related to many government activities from the period. In Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood St...
ListenMark Polizzotti, “Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto” (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The success of a translator may seem to lie in going unnoticed: the translator ducks out of the spotlight so that the original author may shine. Mark Polizzotti challenges that idea in a provocativ...
ListenJ.R. Osborn, “Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Arabic script is astounding! Not only because it represents one of the most commonly spoken languages today –that is, the Arabic language– but because it has represented dozens of other languages ...
ListenChris Horrocks, “The Joy of Sets: A Short History of the Television” (Reaktion Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today,...
ListenRaymond Boyle, “The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways” (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of commu...
ListenMike Ananny, “Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear” (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), journalism professor Mike Ananny provides a new framework for thinking about the media at a time o...
ListenLee Humphreys, “The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life” (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Physical journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums all offer their owners the opportunity to chronicle both mundane and extravagant events. But unlike social media posting, this analog memorializing o...
ListenKathryn Fuller-Seeley, “Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jack Benny was one of the first crossover stars in broadcast comedy, rising from the vaudeville circuit to star in radio, film, and television. Kathryn Fuller-Seeley chronicles Benny’s career in he...
ListenRachel O’Neill, “Seduction: Men, Masculinity, and Mediated Intimacy” (Polity , 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the seduction, or “pick-up artist,” industry work? In her new book Seduction: Men, Masculinity, and Mediated Intimacy (Polity, 2018), Rachel O’Neill provides a sociological analysis of the...
ListenDeborah Jaramillo, “The Television Code: Regulating the Screen to Safeguard the Industry” (U Texas Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you watch old movies or study film history, you may know that early 20th-century Hollywood operated under the Motion Picture Production Code, which dictated what could and couldn’t be portrayed ...
ListenP.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, outlines the history of social media platforms and their use in popular culture...
ListenAllyson Jule, “Speaking Up: Understanding Language and Gender” (Multilingual Matters, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In a time where concepts such as gender pronouns, sexual assault and harassment, and toxic masculinity are entering and shaping public discourse, knowing the ways in which gender and language inter...
ListenLorenzo Zamponi, “Social Movements, Memory and Media: Narrative in Action in the Italian and Spanish Student Movements” (Palgrave, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do social movements remember the past? How do collective memories affect their current strategic choices? In his book Social Movements, Memory and Media: Narrative in Action in the Italian and ...
ListenJ. Lester, C. Lochmiller, and R. Gabriel, “Discursive Perspectives on Education Policy and Implementation” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The study of education policy is a scholarly field that sheds light on important debates and controversies revolving around education policy and its implementation. In this episode, we will be talk...
ListenDenise Y. Ho, “Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyo...
ListenBen Epstein, “The Only Constant is Change: Technology, Political Communication, and Innovation Over Time” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ben Epstein’s new book, The Only Constant is Change: Technology, Political Communication, and Innovation over Time (Oxford University Press, 2018), traces communication changes and innovations in t...
ListenMary E. Stuckey, “Political Vocabularies: FDR, The Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument” (Michigan State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mary E. Stuckey’s new book, Political Vocabularies: FDR, The Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument (Michigan State University Press, 2018), is a fascinating and engaging investigat...
ListenPaul Offit, “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” (Columbia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You should never trust celebrities, politicians, or activists for health information. Why? Because they are not scientists! Scientists often cannot compete with celebrities when it comes to charm o...
ListenJohn H. McWhorter, “The Creole Debate” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John H. McWhorter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written academic books on creole linguistics, including the book we’ll be talking about...
ListenYves Citton, “The Ecology of Attention” (Polity Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being reconfigured as a result. But how is this happenin...
ListenMaria Repnikova, “Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Despite its extraordinary diversity, life in the People’s Republic of China is all too often viewed mainly through the lens of politics, with dynamics of top-down coercion and bottom-up resistance ...
ListenMartin Shuster, “New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How should we understand our new golden age of television? In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Martin Shuster, Director of Judaic Studies ...
ListenKelsy Burke, “Christians Under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet” (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do we conceptualize religious conservatives and their relationship with sex? And how do Christians use digital media for sexual knowledge and pleasure? In her new book, Christians Under Covers:...
ListenDaniel Hopkins, “The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Will voters this fall be voting for or against Donald Trump, even though he isn’t on the ballot? Will they be voting on national issues, such as immigration or relations with North Korea, even when...
ListenEric Miller, “The Rhetoric of Religious Freedom in the United States” (Lexington Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The recent Supreme Court Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling showed the on-going debate between religious conservatives and advocates of LGBTQ rights. Much of this debate has been about the definition of r...
ListenYaron Peleg, “Directed by God: Jewishness in Contemporary Israeli Film and Television” (University of Texas Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation, the nascent Israeli state tried to limit Jewish religiosity. However, with the steady growth of the ultraorthodox community and the expan...
ListenHala Auji, “Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut” (Brill, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Pr...
ListenRoderick P. Hart, “Civic Hope: How Ordinary Americans Keep Democracy Alive” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To find out what Americans really think about their government, University of Texas-Austin Professor Roderick P. Hart read and analyzed approximately 10,000 letters to the editor, from 12 “ordinary...
ListenErik Mueggler, “Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China” (U Chicago Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Lòlop’ò of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province have a folktale in which they, Han Chinese, and Tibetans were given the technology of writing. The Han man was wealthy, purchased paper, and wrote o...
ListenPeter Hoar, “The World’s Din: Listening to Records, Radio and Films in New Zealand 1880–1940” (Otago University Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, The World’s Din: Listening to Records, Radio and Films in New Zealand 1880–1940 (Otago University Press, 2018), Peter Hoar, a senior lecturer in radio and media history at Auckland...
ListenDiscussion with Dahlia Schweitzer (“Going Viral”) and Rob Thomas (“Veronica Mars”) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Follow-up interviews are always fun. Listen to my follow-up interview with Dahlia Schweitzer, author of Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (Rutgers University Press, 2018). I t...
ListenSophia Rose Arjana, “Veiled Superheroes: Islam, Feminism, and Popular Culture” (Lexington Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Veiled Superheroes: Islam, Feminism, and Popular Culture (Lexington Books, 2017) by Sophia Rose Arjana (with Kim Fox), takes us on a riveting journey through the world of superheroes and villains f...
ListenSam Lebovic, “Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Appeals to “press freedom” can be heard from across the political spectrum. But what those appeals mean varies dramatically. Sam Lebovic, in his excellent new book, Free Speech and Unfree News: The...
ListenJohn Nathaniel Clarke, “British Media and the Rwandan Genocide” (Routledge Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It seems safe to assume that media coverage changes the behavior of politicians and voters. And it seems safe to assume this happens in cases of humanitarian crisis. But it’s really hard to go be...
ListenIan McNeely, “Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet” (Norton, 2008) from 2008-08-22T01:57:14
We don’t think much about institutions. They just seem to “be there.” But they have a history, as Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton show in their important new book Reinventing Knowledge. From Alexa...
ListenIan McNeely, “Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet” (Norton, 2008) from 2008-08-22T01:57:14
We don’t think much about institutions. They just seem to “be there.” But they have a history, as Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton show in their important new book Reinventing Knowledge. From Alexa...
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