Épisodes

  • Nancy Newman, "Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes" (SUNY Press, 2025)
    Oct 18 2025
    Upstate New York's Anti-Rent Movement is considered the last struggle over feudalism in the United States. Tenant farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region engaged in organized protest throughout the 1840s to contest monopoly ownership of the land they worked. Arguing their cause in newspapers, on broadsides, and at rallies, their aspirations also took shape in poetry and song. More than twenty sets of lyrics (and one instrumental composition) were written at various stages of the conflict. Some of their musical sources, such as "Old Dan Tucker" and "Bruce's Address," are still well known. Each fully contextualized song offers insight into the role vernacular music played in one of the nineteenth century's major social reform movements. Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York: Including Twenty-Two New Settings of Period Tunes (SUNY Press, 2025) by Dr. Nancy Newman is the first book to gather the poetry and corresponding tunes into one publication (you can find recordings of some of the songs here). It provides detailed analysis of the repertory, followed by new musical scores of the songs, reconstructed from contemporary historical sources for study and performance. It also examines the movement's later dramatization in novels, film, and public commemorations as successive generations grapple with its meaning. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 min
  • Árni Heimir Ingólfsson, "Music at World's End: Three Exiled Musicians from Nazi Germany and Austria and Their Contribution to Music in Iceland" (SUNY Press, 2025)
    Oct 4 2025
    A fascinating story of how three musicians, who escaped the Nazis, inspired Iceland's modern classical music. In Iceland in the 1930s, classical music was only beginning to be seriously practiced, at the same time when musicians of Jewish heritage were fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria. Despite the country's strict immigration policy, three outstanding young musicians were allowed to settle there: Robert Abraham, Heinz Edelstein, and Victor Urbancic. Their influence on Iceland's music scene as conductors, instrumentalists, teachers, and scholars proved invaluable. In Music at World's End: Three Exiled Musicians from Nazi Germany and Austria and Their Contribution to Music in Iceland (SUNY Press, 2025) the first in-depth study of the lives and careers of these three musicians, musicologist Árni Ingólfsson examines their formative years in Germany and Austria, their dramatic escapes from the Nazi regime, and their triumphs and frustrating setbacks in their new homeland, a country in which Jews were virtually unknown. This fascinating case study is a valuable addition to studies of musical exile during World War II and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    56 min
  • Robert F. Carley, "Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice" (SUNY Press, 2019)
    Sep 23 2025
    While scholars of social and political movements tend to analyze tactics in terms of their effectiveness in achieving specific outcomes, Robert F. Carley argues by contrast that tactics are, above all, what social movements do. They are not mere means to an end so much as they are a public form of expression pointing out injustices and making just demands. Rooted in a highly original analysis of the tactically mediated relationship between race and mobilization in the work of Italian philosopher and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (SUNY Press, 2019) demonstrates how tactics impact the organizational structures of social movements and expand the affinities of political communities. Carley looks at how Gramsci used innovative tactics to bridge perceptions of racial differences between factory workers and subaltern groups, the latter having been denigrated to the point of subhumanity by a complex Italian national racial economy. Newly envisioning Gramsci as a theorist of race within a broader context of social struggle, Carley connects Gramsci's insights into the political mobilizations of racialized subaltern groups to contemporary critical race theory and cultural studies of racialization and racism. Speaking across disciplines and drawing on a number of empirical examples, Carley offers a battery of original concepts to assist scholars and activists in analyzing the tactical practices of protests in which race is a central factor. Author info - Robert F. Carley is Associate Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station. Host info – Michael L. Rosino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy University, whose work focuses on racial politics, media, and democracy. He recently published the book Democracy is Awkward: Grappling with Racism inside Grassroots Political Organizing and an essay in Time on the importance of cross-racial coalitions in social movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    49 min
  • Ofer Ashkenazi and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, "Rethinking Jewish History and Memory Through Photography" (SUNY Press, 2025)
    Sep 6 2025
    Ofer Ashkenazi is a Professor of History and the director of the Richard Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While on sabbatical, in 2025-2026 he is the Mosse Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-author of the recently published monograph Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (2025) , as well as Anti-Heimat Cinema (2020); Weimar Film and Jewish Identity (2012); and Reason and Subjectivity in Weimar Cinema (2010). He edited volumes and published articles on various topics in German and German-Jewish history including Jewish youth movements in Germany; the German interwar anti-war movement; Cold War memory culture; Jewish migration from and to Germany; and German-Jewish visual culture. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan is a Professor of History and the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History at the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States. His research focuses on the linguistic, visual, and cultural history of Nazi Germany, modern German-Jewish history, historiography and historical theory, transnational history, and global protest movements in the twentieth century. His recent publications include Taking the Transnational Turn: The German Jewish Press and Journalism Beyond Borders, 1933-1943 [in Hebrew] (Yad Vashem Publications, 2023) and Holocaust Testimonies: Reassessing Survivors’ Voices and their Future in Challenging Times (with Wolf Gruner, Miriam Offer, and Boaz Cohen (Bloomsbury, 2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 min
  • Maddalena Cerrato, "Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy: A Critique of Subjectivation Processes" (SUNY Press, 2025)
    Sep 2 2025
    Michel Foucault's thought, Maddalena Cerrato writes, may be understood as practical philosophy. In this perspective, political analysis, philosophy of history, epistemology, and ethics appear as necessarily cast together in a philosophical project that aims to rethink freedom and emancipation from domination of all kinds. The idea of practical philosophy accounts for Foucault's specific approach to the object, as well as to the task of philosophy, and it identifies the perspective that led him to consider the question of subjectivity as the guiding thread of his work. Overall, in Michel Foucault's Practical Philosophy: A Critique of Subjectivation Processes (SUNY Press, 2025) Cerrato shows the deep consistency underlying Foucault's reflection and the substantial coherence of his philosophical itinerary, setting aside all the conventional interpretations that pivot on the idea that his thought underwent a radical "turn" from the political engagement of the question of power toward an ethical retrieval of the question of subjectivity. Maddalena Cerrato is an assistant professor in the Department of International Affairs. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 min
  • Angela Katrina Lewis-Maddox ed., "Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline" (SUNY Press, 2025)
    Jul 3 2025
    Political Scientist Angela K. Lewis-Maddox has pulled together an important and useful edited volume focusing on black women political scientists and their experiences in the discipline itself and in studying topics that include race and gender. Political Science, as a discipline, is a bit more than 100 years old, and studies politics, power, institutions, policy, methodology, and theory. These are the over-arching umbrellas within the discipline and many of the specific areas within political science take up questions that are connected to these broad concepts. As with many dimensions of our society, race and gender play a role in the discipline itself and in what we study as political scientists. But race and gender have also been considered tertiary issues within the discipline in terms of research. Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline (SUNY Press, 2025) is both autobiographical for some of the contributors as well as a rigorous interrogation of political science as a discipline. Lewis-Maddox has assembled a group of scholars across rank and position, region and geography, kinds of institutions, and scholarly emphasis. This diverse assembly of contributors have reflected on their particular experience within political science and have written about that experience from a variety of perspectives and approaches. This is a rich and deep study of those who have found themselves to be “space invaders”—black women in spaces and places that are not designed for them. These women all bring the experience of interposing themselves in a place or in places where they are not accepted. And yet they have also persevered in these spaces, in institutions, and within the discipline, and they have considered how they operate professionally and personally in “hostile” territory. Part of the thrust of Disrupting Political Science is to encourage the reimagining of political science as a discipline, to challenge the norms and expectations that have remained in place for over a century. Angela K. Lewis-Maddox and her assembly of contributing authors have done a great service to the discipline of Political Science in publishing these analyses and considerations. Disrupting Political Science: Black Women Reimagining the Discipline is shining a light on those who have often been obscured within the boundaries of the academic discipline—either because of who they are or because of what they study. Political Science is truly an expansive discipline, and to understand the world in which we live, individuals or groups should not be marginalized or erased, but re-centered and engaged. This book goes far in helping to refocus and consider otherwise obscured dimensions of political science and political scientists. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    51 min
  • Carolyn Wolf-Gould et al., "A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States" (SUNY Press, 2025)
    Jun 16 2025
    A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States (SUNY Press, 2025) takes an empathic approach to an embattled subject. Sweeping in scope and deeply personal in nature, this groundbreaking volume traces the development of transgender medicine across three centuries-centering the voices of transgender individuals, debunking myths about gender-affirming care, and empowering readers to grasp the complexities of this evolving field. More than forty contributors-including patients, advocates, physicians, psychologists, and scholars-weave an illuminating, sometimes surprising narrative of collaboration and conflict between trans people and the scientists who have studied and worked with them. An indispensable guide to understanding the current tumult surrounding trans health-care access in the United States, the volume underscores a crucial message: gender diversity is not a new phenomenon but an integral part of our shared human history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 3 min
  • Wendy Doniger, "An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64" (SUNY Press, 2023)
    Jun 12 2025
    Wendy Doniger’s An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963–64 (SUNY Press, 2023) is a memoir-style collection of letters and reflections from her first trip to India as a young scholar. It offers a rare glimpse into the formative experiences that shaped her future career in Indology. The personal letters of her younger self are in conversation with reflections of her older self. Using this work as a launchpad, this interview broaches Doniger's personal and professional life learning through the course of her prominent career, spanning over five decades. This conversation commemorates Raj Balkaran's 400th New Books Network interview. Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions in the Divinity School, University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 46 min