Podcasts by New Books in Geography
Interviews with Geographers about their New Books
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On Maciej Miechowita's "Treatise on the Two Sarmatias" from 2022-09-09T08:00
In Treatise on the Two Sarmatias, Polish scholar Maciej Miechowita argued that two mountain ranges that were described on maps dating back to antiquity did not, in fact, exist. This was the 1500s, ...
ListenDeterritorialization from 2022-05-10T08:00
Saronik talks to Shweta Krishnan, doctoral candidate in Anthropology at George Washington University. She speaks about how she uses Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of deterritorializatio...
ListenSilvie Jacobi, "Art Schools and Place: Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scenes" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is an art school? In Art Schools and Place: Geographies of Emerging Artists and Art Scenes (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Dr Silvie Jacobi, a researcher and head of education at London School...
ListenDoug Specht, "Mapping Crisis: Participation, Datafication and Humanitarianism in the Age of Digital Mapping" (U London Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The digital age has thrown questions of representation, participation and humanitarianism back to the fore, as machine learning, algorithms and big data centres take over the process of mapping the...
ListenJeffrey Alan Erbig Jr., "Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in 18th-Century South America" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America (UNC Press, 2020), Dr. Jeffrey Erbig charts the interplay between imperial and indigenous spatia...
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...
ListenAlexis Wick, "The Red Sea In Search of Lost Space" (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Red Sea has, from time immemorial, been one of the world’s most navigated spaces, in the pursuit of trade, pilgrimage and conquest. Yet this multidimensional history remains largely unrevealed ...
ListenDaniel Macfarlane, "Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall" (UBC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Water and diplomatic historian Dan MacFarlane has written a fascinating book on a fundamental debate in environmental history: What is a natural landscape? Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy...
ListenBenjamin D. Hopkins, "Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State" (Harvard UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Intrinsic to the practice of empire is the creation of boundaries. We tend to think of such boundaries as borders, physical lines of demarcation past which the empire’s sovereignty has no purchase....
ListenJohn W. Traphagan, "Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan" (Cambria Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John W. Traphagan’s Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan (Cambria Press, 2020) presents a series of deeply contextualized ethnographies of small...
ListenE. A. Alpers and C. Goswami, "Transregional Trade and Traders" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Blessed with numerous safe harbors, accessible ports, and a rich hinterland, Gujarat has been central to the history of Indian Ocean maritime exchange that involved not only goods, but also people ...
ListenS. Lawreniuk and L. Parsons, "Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality (Oxford UP, 2020) brings together more than a decade’s worth of research during one of the most consequential moments in Cambodian ...
ListenBrian Eyler, "Last Days of the Mighty Mekong" (Zed Book, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then borders or runs through all the countries of mainl...
ListenSai Balakrishnan, "Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sai Balakrishnan (Assistant Profe...
ListenMolly Loberg, "The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914-1945" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who owns the street? This is the question that animates The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914-1945 (Cambridge University Press) by Molly Loberg. Inter...
ListenN. Detering and?I. Walser-Bürgler, "Contesting Europe: Comparative Perspectives on Early Modern Discourses on Europe, 1400–1800" (Brill, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While the term ‘Europe’ was used sporadically in ancient and medieval times, it proliferated between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and gained a prevalence in the seventeenth and eighteenth...
ListenKatherine Zien, "Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone" (Rutgers UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Katherine Zien examines the ways politicians, activists, artists, and residen...
ListenSandra Postel, "Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity" (Island Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity (Island Press), Sandra Postel acknowledges society’s past mishaps with managing water and emphasizes our future is contingent upon rehabilit...
ListenThaisa Way, "River Cities, City Rivers" (Dumbarton Oaks, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today I talked to Thaisa Way, editor of River Cities, City Rivers (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2018). Cities have been built alongside rivers throughout history. These rivers ca...
ListenSara Smith, "Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold" (Rutgers UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What’s love got to do with it? Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold (Rutgers University Press, 2020) by feminist political geographer Sara Smith tell u...
ListenLuca Scholz, "Borders and Freedom of Movement in the Holy Roman Empire" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we speak with Luca Scholz, a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester. Dr. Scholz has varied interests: wide-ranging data analysis, the collection of that data, broad tr...
ListenPeter Naldrett, “Around the Coast in 80 Days" (Bloomsbury, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Peter Naldrett, author of Around the Coast in 80 Days: A Guide to Britain’s Best Coastal Towns, Beaches, Cliffs, & Headlands (Bloomsbury) begins his enjoyable trip around the British coast with the...
ListenJeremy Black, "Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s World through Maps" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jeremy Black, the prolific professor of history at Exeter University, has published a stunningly attractive volume entitled, Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare’s World through Maps ...
ListenAyesha Siddiqi, "In the Wake of Disaster: Islamists, the State and a Social Contract in Pakistan" (Cambridge UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Over the last couple of decades, a number of books written both by the academics and journalists have appeared on many dysfunctions of the Pakistani state, a few of them even predicting why and ho...
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...
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...
ListenBen Nobbs-Thiessen, "Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present" (UNC Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present (UNC Press, 2020), traces the entwined histories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan mig...
ListenAlexander Bukh, "These Islands Are Ours" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Alexander Bukh’s These Islands Are Ours: The Social Construction of Territorial Disputes in Northeast Asia (Stanford University Press 2020) provides critical historical perspective on the social co...
ListenKory Olson, "The Cartographic Capital: Mapping Third Republic Paris" (Liverpool UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When is the last time you looked at/consulted a paper map? Perhaps you have one hanging on a wall at home or work, framed or not. Or maybe you have some old road maps in a stack somewhere, as I do,...
ListenDavid Ambaras, "Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Through a series of provocative case studies on mobility, transgression, and intimacy, David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge Universi...
ListenSheetal Chhabria, "Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay" (U Washington Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the city of Bombay o...
ListenAlex Jeffrey, "The Edge of Law: Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What happens when a court tries to become a “new” court? What happens to the many artifacts of its history—previous laws and jurisprudence, the building that it inhabits, the people who weave in an...
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...
ListenMaura Finkelstein, "The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mumbai's textile industry is commonly but incorrectly understood to be an extinct relic of the past. In The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2019), Maur...
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...
ListenSteven Seegel, "Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Steven Seegel’s Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an insightful contribution to the history of map m...
ListenJessie Labov, "Transatlantic Central Europe: Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture beyond the Nation" (Central European UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While there are still occasional uses of it today, the term "Central Europe" carries little of the charge that it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and as a political and intellectual project it ha...
ListenDiane Jones Allen, "Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transit Access, and Suburban Form" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Increased redevelopment, the dismantling of public housing, and increasing housing costs are forcing a shift in migration of lower income and transit dependent populations to the suburbs. These sub...
ListenNancy Appelbaum, "Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia" (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Chorographic Commission of Colombia, an ambitious geographical expedition, set out to define and map a nascent and still unstable republic. The commission’s purpo...
ListenSophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, "Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019) is an ethnography of Palestinian life under occupation that takes waste infrastructures as a starting point fo...
ListenLarry Wolff, "Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe" (Stanford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allied powers met to reenvision the map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson's influence on the remapping of ...
ListenAlex Hidalgo, "Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico" (U Texas Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is far more to a map than meets the eye. Such is the case in historian Alex Hidalgo’s Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2019)...
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...
ListenPhil Christman, "Midwest Futures" (Belt Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does the future hold for the Midwest? A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for t...
ListenJulian Bolleter, "Desert Paradises: Surveying the Landscapes of Dubai’s Urban Model" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Desert Paradises: Surveying the Landscapes of Dubai’s Urban Model (Routledge, 2019) explores how designed landscapes can play a vital role in constructing a city’s global image and legitimizing its...
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...
ListenMichael F. Robinson, "The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Radio host Kevin Fox interviews Michael F. Robinson about the history of American Arctic exploration, the subject of his book, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Univers...
ListenChristian J. Koot, "A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake" (NYU Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Labels on a map: Surrey. Lower Norfolk. The Isle of Wight. Northumberland. Middlesex. Not a map England, but of the British colonies of Virginia and Maryland published in 1673. This is a map that p...
ListenPenny Sinanoglou, "Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of Empire" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Partitioning Palestine: British Policymaking at the End of the Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partit...
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...
ListenJeremy Black, "Geographies of an Imperial Power: The British World, 1688-1815" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we talk to Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, UK, about two of his most recent book projects, both of which relate to the ways in which we think about empires, and the B...
ListenAlyssa M. Park, “Sovereignty Experiments: Korean Migrants and the Building of Borders in Northeast Asia, 1860-1945" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Even in states where borders and sovereignty are supposedly well established, large movements of transnational migrants are seen to present problems, as today’s crises show the world over. But as A...
ListenSusan Schulten, "A History of American in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book A History of American in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press 2018), historian Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European ...
ListenChet Van Duzer, "Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Chet Van Duzer's new book Martin Waldseemüller’s 'Carta marina' of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends (Springer, 2019), presents the first detailed study of one of the most important...
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...
ListenEmanuela Grama, "Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Focusing on Romania from 1945 to 2016, Emanuela Grama's new book Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania (Indiana University Press, 2019) explores the socialist state's attemp...
ListenR. Cervero, E. Guerra, S. Al, "Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places" (Island Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places (Island Press, 2017) by Robert Cervero, Erick Guerra and Stefan Al is about prioritizing the needs and aspirations of people and the creation ...
ListenPenelope Plaza Azuaje, “Culture as Renewable Oil: How Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture Coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do states use cultural policy? In Culture as Renewable Oil: How Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture Coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate (Routledge, 2018), Penelope Plaza Azuaje, a lectu...
ListenMargaret E. Schotte, "Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Throughout the Age of Exploration, European maritime communities bent on colonial and commercial expansion embraced the complex mechanics of celestial navigation. They developed schools, textbooks,...
ListenSerin D. Houston, "Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance" (U Nebraska Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Imagining Seattle: Social Values in Urban Governance (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), the geographer Serin Houston complicates Seattle’s liberal and progressive reputation through a close e...
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...
ListenDavid Biggs, "Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam" (U Washington Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
By now we all know that Vietnam is a country, not a war. But how have decades, and even centuries, of war impacted the land of this southeast Asian nation? Professor David Biggs of the University o...
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...
ListenElizabeth Cullen Dunn, "No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement" (Cornell UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2018), Elizabeth Cullen Dunn describes in a very on point and straight forward way how displacement has ...
ListenMark Monmonier, "Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography" (ESRI Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography (ESRI Press, 2019), cartographic cogitator Mark Monmonier shares his insights about the relationships between netw...
ListenHumphrey Davies and Lesley Lababid, "A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo" (AU in Cairo Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Guides have been written to the city of Cairo for generations. Whether they’re for foreigners who’ve come to the city or its residents. However, it might be safe to say thatA Field Guide to the Str...
ListenBathsheba Demuth, "Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait" (W. W. Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into eco...
ListenLaura Alice Watt, "The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore" (U California Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“Wilderness,” “nature,” and their “preservation” are concepts basic to how the National Park Service organizes our relationship to American land. They are also contested concepts, geographer and en...
ListenLina del Castillo, "Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia" (U Nebraska Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lina del Castillo’s book explores scientific, geographic, and historiographic inventions in nineteenth-century Colombia. In this fascinating book, well-known figures of Colombia’s history (such as ...
ListenGenevieve Carpio, "Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race" (U California Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019), Professor Genevieve Carpio considers tensions around mobility and settlement ...
ListenMatthew Edney, "Cartography: The Ideal and Its History" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and spac...
ListenGregory H. Wolf, "Wrigley Field: The Friendly Confines at Clark and Addison" (SABR, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Wrigley Field is one of a handful of sports stadiums to have transcended its athletic purpose to become a true American landmark. Nestled in its neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, the park ...
ListenChris S. Duvall, "The African Roots of Marijuana" (Duke UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There's so much discussion in the contemporary United States about marijuana. Debates focus on legalization and medicalization. Usually, Reefer Madness, Harry Anslinger, and race are brought into t...
ListenSafet HadžiMuhamedovi?, "Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape" (Berghahn Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Set in the beautiful, sprawling Field of Gacko in southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, Safet HadžiMuhamedovi?’s book Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (Berghahn Books, 2...
ListenJennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr, "The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements" (U Georgia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For most people, geopolitics is something that happens out there, in boardrooms and on battlefields. But critical geographers, and feminist political geographers in particular, have in recent years...
ListenDavid Bissell, "Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What kind of time do we endure on our daily commutes? What kind of space do we occupy? What new sorts of urbanites do we thereby become? In Transit Life: How Commuting Is Transforming Our Cities (M...
ListenMax Edelson, "The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence" (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When we think of the history of the British empire we tend to think big: oceans were crossed; colonies grew from small settlements to territories many times larger than England; entire Continents, ...
ListenKristin L. Hoganson, "The Heartland: An American History" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Great West. Middle America. Flyover Country. The expanse of plains, lakes, forests, and farms, between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountains has carried many names. Beginning in the twentieth cen...
ListenE. MacDonald et al., "Time and a Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With its long and well-documented history, Prince Edward Island makes a compelling case study for thousands of years of human interaction with a specific ecosystem. The pastoral landscapes, red san...
ListenChristof Spieler, "Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit" (Island Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Christof Spieler, PE, LEED AP, is a Vice President and Director of Planning at Huitt-Zollars and a lecturer in Architecture and Engineering at Rice University. He was a member of the board of direc...
ListenLukas Engelmann, "Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What role do visual media play in establishing a medical phenomenon? Who mobilizes these representations, and to what end? In Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (Cambridge UP, 2...
ListenRobert A. Voeks, "The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Jungle medicine: it's everywhere, from chia seeds to ginseng tea to CBD oil. In the US, what was once the province of counter culture has moved squarely into the mainstream of Walmart and Walgreen...
ListenKevin T. Smiley, "Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future" (NYU Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Are market cities better than people cities? Does the satisfaction that residents take in their city vary from market city to people city? In Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Fu...
ListenStuart Elden, "Shakespearean Territories" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What can Shakespeare tell us about territory, and what can territory tell us about Shakespeare? In Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Stuart Elden, Professor of Politic...
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...
ListenJeremy Black, "Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance" (Indiana UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the spatial angle, ...
ListenNatalie Koch, "Critical Geographies of Sport: Space, Power, and Sport in Global Perspective" (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today we are joined by Natalie Koch, Associate Professor of Geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and editor of Critical Geographies of Sport: Sp...
ListenAmalia Leguizamón, "Seeds of Power: Environmental Injustice and Genetically Modified Soybeans in Argentina" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1996 Argentina adopted genetically modified (GM) soybeans as a central part of its national development strategy. Today, Argentina is the third largest global grower and exporter of GM crops. It...
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...
ListenMichael Mascarenhas, "Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More" (Sage, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Michael Mascarenhas's book Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More (Sage, 2020) provides an entry point to the field by bringing together the work...
ListenChet Van Duzer, "Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence" (Springer, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Chet Van Duzer, an accomplished historian of cartography, trains his sight in this book on one uniquely important map produced in early modern Europe. The 1491 world map by Henricus Martellus has l...
ListenDale Kedwards, "The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland" (D. S. Brewer, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, s...
ListenMatthew Longo, "The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book, Matthew Longo takes the reader on an unusual journey, at least within political theory, since his work combines a normative political theory approach with an ethnographic approach ...
ListenM. Wodzi?ski and W. Spallek, "Historical Atlas of Hasidism" (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton UP, 2018) is the first cartographic reference book on one of the modern era’s most vibrant and important mystical movements. Featuring seventy-four large...
ListenSun-Young Park, "Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We know quite a bit about the physical signatures of urban “modernity” foisted upon Paris by Baron Haussmann in the late nineteenth century — the broad boulevards, networked infrastructures, connec...
ListenL. L. Paterson and I. N. Gregory, "Representations of Poverty and Place: Using Geographical Text Analysis to Understand Discourse" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Representations of Poverty and Place: Using Geographical Text Analysis to Understand Discourse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) explores a novel methodological approach which combines analytical techniqu...
ListenRosalind Fredericks, "Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The production and removal of garbage, as a key element of the daily infrastructure of urban life, is deeply embedded in social, moral, and political contexts. In her book Garbage Citizenship: Vita...
ListenNicholas Bauch, "Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise" (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century. In A Geograph...
ListenChristian B. Long, "The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960-2000" (Intellect, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While most every live-action film takes place in a specific location, the role of these places has not often been studied. In his new book The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema 1960-2000 (Int...
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...
ListenD.A. Silver and T.N. Clark, "Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life" (U Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
I don’t mean to make a scene, but please open your eyes and look around. There are complex scenes everywhere and we have all served witness to them. A scene is an experience in which we feel connec...
ListenG. Mitman, M. Armiero and R. S. Emmett (eds.), “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a pain...
ListenJim Clifford, “West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914” (UBC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshlands, 1839-1914 (University of British Columbia Press, 2017), Jim Clifford brings together histori...
ListenWilliam D. Bryan, “The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South” (U Georgia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Southern capitalists of the postbellum era have been called many things, but never conservationists. Until now. Environmental historian William D. Bryan has written a brilliantly disorienting reass...
ListenGary Fields, “Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Inspired by the usage of the term ‘enclosure’ to describe the Separation Wall in Israel-Palestine on a visit he made to the West Bank, Gary Fields in Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historic...
ListenKate McDonald, “Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kate McDonald‘s Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) is a thoughtful and provocative study of the spatial politics of Japanese ...
ListenClayton Nall, “The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermine Cities” (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Several recent guests on New Books in Political Science have talked about the path to political polarization in the US, including Lilliana Mason, Dan and Dave Hopkins, and Sam Rosenfeld. The deep d...
ListenLaura Robson, “States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East” (U California Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The First World War ended over four centuries of Middle East rule by the expansive, multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual Ottoman Empire. In its wake, Britain, France, and some groups withi...
ListenCynthia A. Ruder, “Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space” (I. B. Tauris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Building Stalinism: The Moscow Canal and the Creation of Soviet Space (I. B. Tauris, 2018), Cynthia Ruder explores how the building of the Moscow canal reflected the values of Stalinism and how ...
ListenAmanda Huron, “Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C.” (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Is modern capitalism too far advanced in the U.S. to create common property regimes? Are there models for what an Urban Commons might look like? Join us as we speak with Amanda Huron, author of Car...
ListenRob Sullivan, “The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given” (U Georgia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How to theorize what goes without saying? In The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given (University of Georgia Press, 2017), Rob Sullivan develops a general theory of every...
ListenCaitlin DeSilvey, “Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving” (U Minnesota Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), geographer Caitlin DeSilvey offers a set of alternatives to those who would assign a misplaced solidity to historic b...
ListenBrian Tochterman, “The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to say that a city can “die”? As Brian Tochterman shows in this compelling intellectual and cultural history, motifs of imminent death—of a “Necropolis” haunting the country’s gre...
ListenAlison B. Hirsch, “City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America” (U Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lawrence Halprin, one of the central figures in twentieth-century American landscape architecture, is well known to city-watchers for his work on San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square, Seattle’s Freew...
ListenTimothy Neale, “Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia” (U Hawaii Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Wild Articulations: Environmentalism and Indigeneity in Northern Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2017), Tim Neale examines the controversy over the 2005 Wild Rivers Act in the Cape York P...
ListenNatchee Blu Barnd, “Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism” (Oregon State UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Oregon State University Press, 2017), Natchee Blu Barnd examines how Indigenous populations create space and geographies thro...
ListenElizabeth Catte, “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” (Belt Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is an alarming tendency to paint some topics with a broad brush, allowing for easy understanding, but losing the proper nuance that avoids stereotype. In her book, What You Are Getting Wrong ...
ListenJo Woolf, “The Great Horizon: 50 Tales of Exploration” (Sandstone Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hello from Gabrielle at the NBN Fantasy and Adventure channel. This podcast will be about adventure, and what could be more adventurous than traveling to a far-away place thats hard to get to, and ...
ListenDavid A. Hopkins, “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Do we live in a country of red and blue states or something more purple-ish? The red state/blue state meme of 2000 has really never gone away, and scholarly debate, as well as frequent media attent...
ListenLisa Brooks, “Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War” (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lisa Brooks, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst College, recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Ph...
ListenSusan Smith-Peter, “Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia” (Brill, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Imagining Russian Regions: Subnational Identity and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Brill, 2017), Susan Smith Peter discusses the origins of the creation of distinct provincial ident...
ListenLinda Grover, “Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year” (U Minnesota Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Onigamiising is the Ojibwemowin word for Duluth and the surrounding area. In this book of fifty warm, wise and witty essays, Linda LeGarde Grover tells the story of the four seasons of life, from Z...
ListenMegan Adamson Sijapati and Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, “Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Himalayas have long been at the crossroads of the exchange between cultures, yet the social lives of those who inhabit the region are often framed as marginal to historical narratives. And whil...
ListenOwen Flanagan, “The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by ...
ListenRicardo D. Salvatore, “Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ricardo D. Salvatore‘s new book, Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (Duke University Press, 2016) offers an alternative narrative on the origins of Latin American Stud...
ListenRyan D. Enos, “The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ryan Enos is the author of The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Enos is associate professor of government at Harvard University. Scholars have lon...
ListenSara Dant, “Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From Frederick Jackson Turner to Walter Prescott Webb, the high cliffs of Yosemite to the flat deserts and blasted rock of the Nevada Test Range, the American West has long been defined by its envi...
ListenErnesto Bassi, “An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World” (Duke UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Where is the Caribbean? In An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke University Press, 2017) Ernesto Bassi makes the case for a transim...
ListenBetty S. Anderson, “A History of the Middle East: Rulers, Rebels, and Rogues (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As the Middle East continues to become more topical to American and European audiences, a need for textbooks to teach the history of the region has become urgent. Some such textbooks take a topical...
ListenBradley Camp Davis, “Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands” (U of Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Recent years have seen an upsurge in studies asking questions about, and in, borderlands. The topic is certainly not new to scholars of mainland Southeast Asia, but as Bradley Camp Davis shows in I...
ListenZachary Lockman, “Field Notes: The Making of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The dominant narrative in the history of the study of the Middle East has claimed that the Cold War was what pushed Middle East studies to develop, as part of a greater trend in area studies. Drawi...
ListenSteven Seegel, “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire” (U. of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Euro...
ListenMichael Youngblood, “Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization” (South Asian Studies Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization by Michael Youngblood, a cultural anthropologist based in San Francisco, was published in November, 2016 by...
ListenDalia Muller, “Cuban Emigres and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Cuba and Mexico have a long history of exchange and interaction. Cubans traveled to Mexico to work, engage in politics from afar, or expand businesses. Dalia Antonia Muller‘s Cuban Emigres and Inde...
ListenNeil M. Maher, “Apollo in the Age of Aquarius” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the summer of 1969, two seminal events of the sixties happened within a few weeks of each other: the first man walked on the moon and the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. A...
ListenJorge Duany, “Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Not quite a colony, not quite independent, fiercely nationalist, what is Puerto Rico’s status, exactly? Jorge Duany‘s Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017) offers...
Listen“Latino City” Part I: An Interview with Dr. Erualdo Gonzalez from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Latino City: Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots (Routledge 2017) Dr. Erualdo R. Gonzalez addresses the salient issue of gentrification and its effect on immigrant and working-class pop...
ListenOr Rosenboim, “The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The world order was in crisis at mid-century. Intellectuals in England and the United States perceived the rise of totalitarianism, the Second World War, the invention of the atomic bomb, the start...
ListenWillliam Rankin, “After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century” (U. Chicago Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Policymakers and the public clamored for maps throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, maps were a necessity for war, navigation, and countless other activities. Yet by the 1960s...
ListenLisa Messeri, “Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds” (Duke UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri‘s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps...
ListenTerritory-A Literary Project about Maps: Discussion with Tommy Mira y Lopez from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published...
ListenCemil Aydin, “The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History” (Harvard UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Almost daily in popular media the Muslim World is pinpointed as a homogeneous entity that stands separate and parallel to the similarly imagined West. But even scratching the surface of the idea of...
ListenAllison E. Fagan, “From the Edge: Chicana/Chicano Border Literature and the Politics of Print” (Rutgers UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is a book? The answer, at first glance, may seem apparent: printed material consisting of a certain amount of pages. However, when a printed item goes under the scrutiny of readers, writers, e...
ListenSerhat Unaldi, “Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Working Towards the Monarchy: The Politics of Space in Downtown Bangkok (University of Hawaii Press, 2016), Serhat Unaldi offers a provocative and original interpretation of the relationship bet...
ListenGlen A. Fritz, “The Lost Sea of the Exodus, 2nd Edition” (GeoTech, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The crossing of the Israelites through the Red Sea is one of the most famous scenes in the story of the Exodus out of Egypt. But can it be that for the last couple thousand years, historians, geogr...
ListenJayde Lin Roberts, “Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In recent years, scholarship on Burma, or Myanmar, has undergone a renaissance. Jayde Lin Roberts’ Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese (University of Washington Press,...
ListenRandy Olson, “Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story” (U. Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Randy Olson, author of Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has an unusual background. He is a Harvard-trained biologist and former tenured pr...
ListenJoshua Howe, “Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming” (U. Washington Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The year 2016 was the hottest year on record, and in recent months, drought and searing heat have fanned wildfires in Fort McMurray Alberta and in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Meanwhile, the Arctic has h...
ListenRegis Darques, “Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans” (Springer, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Regis Darques‘ Mapping Versatile Boundaries: Understanding the Balkans (Springer, 2016) offers the unique mapping perspectives on the Balkan region. By exploring a range of topics such as borderlan...
ListenCharlotte Mathieson, ed. “Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present” (Palgrave, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the relationship between the sea and culture? In Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present (Palgrave, 2016) , Charlotte Mathieson, a lecturer in English Literature at the ...
ListenJamie Peck and Nik Theodore, “Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism” (U. of Minnesota Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do new policies move from one city or country to another, and is there something distinct about how those transfers work in our perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected world? Join...
ListenHarini Nagendra, “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2016), Harini Nagendra traces centuries of interaction between ecology and urban change, revealing not on...
ListenNeil Kent, “Crimea: A History” (Hurst/Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 2014 Crimea shaped the headlines much as it did some 160 years ago, when the Crimean War pitted Britain, France and Turkey against Russia. Yet few books have been published on the history of the...
ListenWilliam Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Air pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the...
ListenD. Asher Ghertner, “Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
D. Asher Ghertner explores why the ways things look are fundamental for Delhi’s transformation into a “world class”city. Based on deep ethnographic engagement in one of the city’s slums that is des...
ListenAna Foteva, “Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe” (Peter Lang, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th throu...
ListenEmily T. Yeh, “Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development” (Cornell UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Emily T. Yeh‘s Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press, 2013) is an award-winning critical analysis of the production and transformation...
ListenTom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, and James McCarthy, eds., “The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Political ecology is among the most vibrant sub-fields in the discipline of geography. Since the field first developed in the 1980s, political ecologists have pioneered new approaches to studying r...
ListenBenjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World” (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Benjamin Schmidt‘s beautiful new book argues that a new form of exoticism emerged in the Netherlands between the mid-1660s and the early 1730s, thanks to a series of successful products in a broad ...
ListenJulie Sze, “Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis” (U of California Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Julie Sze‘s new book opens by bringing readers into the wetlands of Dongtan, introducing us to an ambitious but unrealized project to create the “world’s first great eco-city.” Fantasy Islands: Chi...
ListenFinis Dunaway, “Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images” ( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Oil-soaked birds in Prince William Sound. The “crying Indian” in a 1970s anti-littering ad. A lonely polar bear on an Arctic ice floe. Such environmental images have proliferated over the past half...
ListenDeborah Cowen, “The Deadly Life of Logistics” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Our guest today tells us that the seemingly straightforward field of logistics lies at the heart of contemporary globalization, imperialism, and economic inequality. Listen to Deb Cowen, the author...
ListenThom van Dooren, “Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Thom van Dooren‘s new book is an absolute must-read. (I was going to qualify that with a “…for anyone who…” and realized that it really needs no qualification.) Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Ed...
ListenAmanda Rogers, “Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geographies of Performance” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Identity, performance and globalisation are at the heart of the cultural practices interrogated by Amanda Rogers in Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity and the Geography of Perfor...
ListenCarolyn Finney, “Black Faces, White Spaces” (UNC Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Geographer Carolyn Finney wrote Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), out of a frustration w...
ListenEdmund Russell, “Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth” ( from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Evolution is among the most powerful ideas in the natural sciences. Indeed, the evolutionary theoristTheodosius Dobzhansky famouslysaid nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evoluti...
ListenAnne Knowles, Mastering Iron (U of Chicago Press, 2013) and Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigra...
ListenSusan Schulten, “Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Our everyday lives are saturated with maps. We use maps on our smart phones to help us navigate from place to place. Maps in the newspaper and online show us the spread of disease, the state of the...
ListenMatthew Huber, “Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital” (U of Minnesota Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is an incisive look into how oil permeates our lives and helped shape American politics during the twentieth...
ListenTariq Jazeel, “Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood” (Liverpool UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ruhuna National Park and ‘tropical modernism’ architecture are aesthetically analysed in Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood (Liverpool ...
ListenStephen Legg, “Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India” (Duke UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The spatial politics of brothels in late-British India are the subject of Stephen Legg‘s second book Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India, published by ...
ListenGregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Co...
ListenSilver Donald Cameron, “The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea” (Red Deer Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014),...
ListenBradley Garrett, “Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City” (Verso, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
More and more of the world is living in cities, yet we rarely stop to examine how our spaces are organised and controlled. In a remarkable new book, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Vers...
ListenJohn R. Gillis, “The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History” (University of Chicago Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Americans are moving to the ocean. Every year, more and more Americans move to–or are born in– the coasts and fewer and fewer remain in–or are born in–the interior. The United States began as a coa...
ListenTimothy J. Brook, “Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer” (Bloomsbury, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The story opens with a closing and closes with an opening. The closing is the sale of the map of Martin Waldseemuller, “America’s birth certificate,” for $10 million to the Library of Congress. The...
ListenGiancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Age of Exploration” (Oxford UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You’ve probably heard of the “Age of Exploration.” You know, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, etc., etc. But actually that was the European Age of Exploration (and really it wasn’t eve...
ListenToby Lester, “The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name” (Free Press, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth...
ListenPeter Mancall, “Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson” (Basic Books, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You’ve probably heard of the Hudson River, and you may have even heard of Hudson Bay. But have you ever heard of Henry Hudson? Well you should, and now thanks to Peter Mancall‘s page-turning Fatal ...
ListenColin Gordon, “Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
This week we have Professor Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa on the show talking about his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Pr...
ListenColin Gordon, “Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) from 2008-05-09T19:18:47
This week we have Professor Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa on the show talking about his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Pr...
ListenColin Gordon, “Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) from 2008-05-09T19:18:47
This week we have Professor Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa on the show talking about his new book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Pr...
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