Épisodes

  • Henry H. Sapoznik, "The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City" (SUNY Press, 2025)
    Nov 18 2025
    The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) by Henry H. Sapoznik explores a century of Yiddish popular culture in New York City. Sapoznik--the author of Klezmer! Jewish Music fro0m Old World to Our World and a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project--tells his story through chapters on eating, architecture, music and theater. Within each chapter are shorter entries on topics as varied as knishes, cafeterias, prominent buildings, Jews and jazz, Black cantors, women cantors, and Yiddish theater. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles, the book offers fresh insights into the profound influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. The guide also contains fifty images, many of which have never before been published. The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City is vivid, deeply researched, and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    48 min
  • Carolyn T. Adams et. al, "Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century" (Penn Press, 2025)
    Nov 14 2025
    Informed by current scholarship and richly illustrated with full-color photographs and maps, Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century (Penn Press, 2025) brings to the public an up-to-date, diverse history of Philadelphia across its many dimensions. Volume 1 adopts "Greater Philadelphia" to indicate a regional scope, but not one limited by a fixed geographical boundary. Instead, "Greater Philadelphia" refers to the interdependence between the city and its periphery across parts of three states: southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware. The Greater Philadelphia Region represents a collection of stories fundamental to the Philadelphia area's history and evolution based on the belief that regions work best when residents, divided in space but linked in multiple ways through social and economic connections, possess shared knowledge about the people and the places that surround them. Volume 2 begins with Philadelphia's role during the American Revolution, as the nation's first capital until 1800, and as home to one of the North's largest free African American communities in the antebellum period. From the Civil War to woman suffrage, from the Lenape people to the Gray Panthers, from Black Power to Occupy Philadelphia, the book chronicles the ongoing dynamics of citizenship and nationhood as they unfolded in the Philadelphia region from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Greater Philadelphia and the Nation demonstrates how Philadelphia, and its periphery across southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware, create, challenge, and sustain the nation. Volume 3 reveals the influence of empires and nations on Greater Philadelphia while also emphasizing the dynamic role the region and its people have played in shaping the modern world. Exploring the immigrants who peopled the Delaware Valley, the faiths they practiced, the environment they shaped, the wars they waged, and the global connections they forged, Greater Philadelphia and the World reveals a city and its surroundings that has been continually molded by its links to the Atlantic, the Americas, and the Pacific. Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD Candidate in History & African American Studies at UC-Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    37 min
  • Ihnji Jon, "Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics" (Pluto Press, 2021)
    Nov 8 2025
    Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action 'for the environment' is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city. Based on the author's site visits and interviews in Darwin (Australia), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Cleveland (Ohio), and Cape Town (South Africa), Ihnji Jon's Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics (Pluto Press, 2021) tells the story of how cities can lead a transformative pro-environment politics. National governments often fail to make binding agreements that bring about radical actions for the environment. This book shows how cities, as local sites of mobilizing a collective, political agenda, can be frontiers for activating the kind of environmental politics that appreciates the role of 'nature' in the everyday functioning of our urban life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 min
  • William J. Glover, "Reformatting Agrararian Life: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India" (Stanford UP, 2025)
    Nov 5 2025
    Reformatting Agrarian Life presents a stealth urban history from the countryside that foregrounds the mutual entanglements of agrarian and urban expertise. William J. Glover traces an essential genealogy for understanding how urbanism unexpectedly left the city in late colonial India and began to settle in agrarian space, exploring how two milieus that were initially seen as distinct were gradually brought together both conceptually and in practices of ordinary life. He argues that rural change and the expert knowledge associated with managing the countryside in colonial India opened paths for urban concepts and forms to permeate agrarian settings where they were previously thought to have little relevance. This process indelibly shaped idioms and modes of agrarian life, just as it gave rural problems and processes a structural role in urban discourse. By illuminating the intellectual paths by which agrarian and urban processes came to be understood as co-constituting, and exploring multiple vivid, empirically rich case studies of projects where those relations were made evident, this book presents a compelling case to move beyond traditional intellectual silos and enter new theoretical territory to understand processes of urban and rural transformation. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 min
  • Cynthia Paces, "Prague: The Heart of Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Nov 2 2025
    In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast, I sat down with Cynthia Paces to talk about her new book, Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford UP, 2025). Prague is the first English-language book to trace the history of the city from the tenth century to the present. Cynthia discusses her personal connection to Prague, highlights key moments in the city’s history, and shares a few tips for those planning to visit. You can purchase the book from Oxford University Press here. The CEU Review of Books Podcast Series explores the questions that affect us all through in-depth talks with researchers, policy makers, journalists, academics and others. We showcase the most current research linked to Central Europe through these discussions. At the CEU Review of Books, we encourage an open discussion that challenges conventional assumptions to foster a vibrant debate. Visit our website to read our latest reviews, long reads and interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    46 min
  • C. Yamini Krishna, "Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
    Nov 1 2025
    Film City Urbanism in India: Hyderabad, from Princely City to Global City ,1890-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2025) is about the reciprocal relationship between cinema and the city as two institutions which co-constitute each other while fashioning the socio-political currents of the region. It interrogates imperial, postcolonial, socio-cultural, and economic imprints as captured, introduced, and left behind by politics of cinema, in the site of Hyderabad. It traverses through the makings and remakings of Hyderabad as princely city, linguistic capital city, and global city, studied through capital, labour, and organization of the film industry. It brings together diverse, and rich historical material to narrate the social history of Hyderabad, over a hundred years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    49 min
  • Pablo Meninato and Gregory Marinic, "Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America" (Routledge, 2025)
    Oct 31 2025
    Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America examines intervention initiatives in informal settlements in Latin American cities as social, spatial, architectural, and cultural processes. From the mid-20th century to the present, Latin America and other regions in the Global South have experienced a remarkable demographic trend, with millions of people moving from rural areas to cities in search of work, healthcare, and education. Without other options, these migrants have created self-built settlements mostly located on the periphery of large metropolitan areas. While the initial reaction of governments was to eliminate these communities, since the 1990s, several Latin American cities began to advance new urban intervention approaches for improving quality of life. This book examines informal settlement interventions in five Latin American cities: Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Tijuana. It explores the Favela-Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro during the 1990s which sought to improve living conditions and infrastructure in favelas. It investigates projects propelled by Social Urbanism in Medellín at the beginning of the 2000s, aimed at revitalizing marginalized areas by creating a public transportation network, constructing civic buildings, and creating public spaces. Furthermore, the book examines the long-term initiatives led by SEHAB in São Paulo, which simultaneously addresses favela upgrading works, water pollution remediation strategies, and environmental stewardship. It discusses current intervention initiatives being developed in informal settlements in Buenos Aires and Tijuana, exploring the urban design strategies that address complex challenges faced by these communities. Taken together, the Latin American architects, planners, landscape architects, researchers, and stakeholders involved in these projects confirm that urbanism, architecture, and landscape design can produce positive urban and social transformations for the most underprivileged. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and professionals in planning, urbanism, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, urban geography, public policy, as well as other spatial design disciplines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 17 min
  • Claudia Gastrow, "The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda" (UNC Press Books, 2024)
    Oct 31 2025
    After centuries of colonial rule, the end of Angola’s three-decade civil war in 2002 provided an irresistible opportunity for the government to reimagine the Luanda cityscape. Awash with petrodollars cultivated through strategic foreign relationships, President José Eduardo dos Santos rolled out a national reconstruction program that sought to transform Angola’s capital into what he considered to be a modern, world-class metropolis. Until funds dried up in 2014, the program—in conjunction with sweeping private investments in real estate—involved mass demolitions of vernacular architecture to make way for high-rise buildings, large-scale housing projects, and commercial centers. The program thus underestimated the values enshrined in the materials and designs of Luanda’s existing “informally” constructed neighborhoods, or musseques. The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) explores the political significance of aesthetics in the remaking of the city. Dr. Claudia Gastrow’s archival and ethnographic work, which includes interviews with city planners, architects, nonprofit leaders, and urban dwellers, shows how government infrastructure projects and foreign-inspired designs came to embody displacement and exclusion for many. This, Dr. Gastrow argues, catalyzed a countermovement, an aesthetic dissent rooted in critically reframing informal urbanism as Indigenous—a move that enabled the possibility of recognizing the political potential of informal settlements as spaces that produce belonging. 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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    58 min