Épisodes

  • How ClioVis is Transforming Education and Historical Research

    How ClioVis is Transforming Education and Historical Research
    Jul 19 2025
    Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and scholars. I’m thrilled to get the chance today to speak with Marcus about this software to share with our listeners how they can enhance their own work and teaching. Visit ClioVis' website to learn more: Click Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    22 min
  • Meegan Kennedy, "Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Meegan Kennedy, "Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Jul 18 2025
    Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Meegan Kennedy examines a revolutionary period in microscopical technology and practice. At first considered a mere toy, by 1900 the microscope rivaled the railway and telegraph as an emblem of modernity and enjoyed an astonishing diversity of applications. This technology could drive scientific debates on subjects like cell theory, vitalism, and bacteriology; guide workers in classrooms, laboratories, and businesses; and inspire a personal hobby or a mass entertainment. Victorian microscopy productively cuts across the ostensibly separate domains of science, religion, commerce, art, education, entertainment, and domestic life.Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy reads nineteenth-century microscopy across scientific, literary, religious, and popular texts. It argues that Victorian microscopists saw their vision and cognition as fully embodied experiences, the images emerging through a material entanglement of bodies (observer, instrument, apparatus, object) in a dynamic, unstable system. These ideas echo the work of physiological psychologists, who proposed mind as a system of embodied, distributed, and dynamic processes shaped by automatic or unconscious reflex action, attention, mental training, and fatigue. Striving to regulate this complex system, microscopists circulated tropes of embodiment through the varied forms of nineteenth-century print culture. They adapted existing concepts (such as beauty, the sublime, natural theology, and fairylands), or coined new phrases (such as many-sided comprehension), to promote favored forms of embodiment and enculturate microscopy as a difficult but valuable pursuit. Writing Embodiment draws on important work in book history and periodical studies by emphasizing the circulation of these tropes in intermedial conversations across diverse print forms.Victorians understood wonder and skepticism not as incommensurate approaches to scientific observation but rather as complementary forms of embodiment. Romantic tropes of wonder solicit affective flows from observer to wriggling animalcule and back; while skeptical, realist tropes offer to train the reader's eye, hand, body, and judgment and to formalize microscopical practice. Microscopical narratives may manipulate wonder and skepticism in productive tension or create virtual storyspaces that enlist the reader in virtual witnessing. These tropes shape every level of microscopical interest and proficiency. By analyzing their use and circulation, Writing Embodiment illuminates wider patterns of Victorian thought on embodiment, scientific practice, and community. 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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    42 min
  • Edward Tenner, "Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences" (APS Press, 2025)

    Edward Tenner, "Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences" (APS Press, 2025)
    Jul 11 2025
    How did the addition of lifeboats after the Titanic shipwreck contribute to another tragedy in Chicago harbor three years later? How efficient are wild animals as investors, and how do dog breeds become national symbols? Why have scientific breakthroughs so often originated in the study of shadows? How did the file card prepare scholarship and commerce for the rise of electronic data processing, and why did the visual metaphor of the tab survive into today's graphic interfaces? Why have Amish artisans played an important role in manufacturing advanced technology? Why was United Shoe Machinery the Microsoft of the 1890s? Surprises like these, Edward Tenner believes, can help us deal with the technological issues that confront us now. Since the 1980s, Edward Tenner has contributed essays on technology, design, and culture to leading magazines, newspapers, and professional journals, and has been interviewed on subjects ranging from medical ethics to typography. Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays in Unintended Consequences (American Philosophical Society Press, 2025)--named for one of the paradoxes that can result from the inherent contradictions between consumer safety and product marketing--brings many of Tenner's essays together into one volume for the first time, accompanied by new introductions by the author on the theme of each work. As an independent historian and public speaker, Tenner has spent his career deploying concepts from economics, engineering, psychology, science, and sociology, to explore both the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuity. Edward Tenner is an independent writer and Distinguished Scholar in the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and teaches the course Understanding Disasters at Princeton University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 1 min
  • Robert G. Morrison, "Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe" (Stanford UP, 2025)

    Robert G. Morrison, "Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe" (Stanford UP, 2025)
    Jul 10 2025
    Between 1450 and 1550, a remarkable century of intellectual exchange developed across the Eastern Mediterranean. As Renaissance Europe depended on knowledge from the Ottoman Empire, and the courts of Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II greatly benefitted from knowledge coming out of Europe, merchants of knowledge—multilingual and transregional Jewish scholars—became an important bridge among the powers. With this book, Robert Morrison is the first to track the network of scholars who mediated exchanges in astronomy, astrology, Qabbalah, and philosophy. Their books, manuscripts, and acts of translation all held economic value, thus commercial and intellectual exchange commingled—knowledge became transactional as these merchants exchanged texts for more intellectual material and social capital. While parallels between medieval Islamic astronomy and the famous heliocentric arrangement posited by Copernicus are already known, Morrison reveals far deeper networks of intellectual exchange that extended well beyond theoretical astronomy and shows how religion, science, and philosophy, areas that will eventually develop into separate fields, were once interwoven. The Renaissance portrayed in Merchants of Knowledge: Intellectual Exchange in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Europe (Stanford UP, 2025) is not, from the perspective of the Ottoman Muslim contacts of the Jewish merchants of knowledge, hegemonic. It's a Renaissance permeated by diversity, the cultural and political implications of which the West is only now waking up to. Robert G. Morrison is a professor at Bowdoin College. He is the author of The Light of the World: Astronomy in al-Andalus (2016). 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: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 2 min
  • Brent Z. Kaup and Kelly F. Austin, "The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease" (U of California Press, 2025)

    Brent Z. Kaup and Kelly F. Austin, "The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease" (U of California Press, 2025)
    Jul 4 2025
    The Pathogens of Finance: How Capitalism Breeds Vector-Borne Disease (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Brent Z. Kaup & Dr. Kelly F. Austin is an exploration of how the rising power and profits of Wall Street underpin the contemporary increases in and inadequate responses to vector-borne disease. Over the past fifty years, insects have transmitted infectious diseases to humans with greater frequency and in more unexpected places. To examine this phenomenon, Dr. Kaup and Dr. Austin take readers to the exurban homes of northern Virginia; the burgeoning agricultural outposts of Mato Grosso, Brazil; and the smallholder coffee farms of the Bududa District of eastern Uganda. Through these case studies, the authors illuminate how the broader financialization of society is intimately intertwined with both the creation of landscapes more conducive to vector-borne disease and the failure to prevent and cure such diseases throughout the world. 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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    56 min
  • Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira, "Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France" (MIT Press, 2025)

    Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira, "Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France" (MIT Press, 2025)
    Jul 2 2025
    On August 27, 1783, a large crowd gathered in Paris to watch the first ascent of a hydrogen balloon. Despite the initial feverish enthusiasm, by the mid-nineteenth century the balloon remained relatively unchanged and was no longer seen as the harbinger of a new era. Yet that all changed in the last third of the century, when following the traumatic Franco-Prussian War defeat, the balloon reemerged to become the modern artifact that captured the attention of many. Through this process, the balloon became an important symbol of the fledgling Third Republic, and France established itself as the world leader in flight. In Ascending Republic: The Ballooning Revival in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025), Dr. Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira tells for the first time the story of this surprising revival.Through extensive research in the press and archives in France, the United States, and Brazil, De Oliveira argues that French civil society cultivated popular enthusiasm for flight (what historians call “airmindedness”) decades before the advent of the airplane. Champions of French ballooning made the case that if the British Royal Navy controlled the seas and the Imperial German Army dominated the continent, then France needed to take ownership of the skies. The French appropriated this newly imagined geopolitical space through a variety of practices, from republican savants who studied the atmosphere at high altitudes to aristocrats who organized transcontinental long-distance competitions. All of this made Paris into the global capital of a thriving aeronautical culture that incorporated seemingly contradictory visions of sacrificial patriotism, aristocratic modernity, colonial anxiety, and technological cosmopolitanism. 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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    1 h et 18 min
  • Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, "Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)

    Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Halper, "Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins" (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
    Jun 30 2025
    A thrilling exploration of competing cosmological origin stories, comparing new scientific ideas that upend our very notions of space, time, and reality.By most popular accounts, the universe started with a bang some 13.8 billion years ago. But what happened before the Big Bang? And how do we know it happened at all? Here prominent cosmologist Niayesh Afshordi and science communicator Phil Halper offer a tour of the peculiar possibilities: bouncing and cyclic universes, time loops, creations from nothing, multiverses, black hole births, string theories, and holograms. Along the way, they offer both a call for new physics and a riveting story of scientific debate.Incorporating insights from Afshordi’s cutting-edge research and Halper’s original interviews with scientists like Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins (University of Chicago Press, 2025) compares these models for the origin of our origins, showing each theory’s strengths and weaknesses and explaining new attempts to test these notions. Battle of the Big Bang is a tale of rivalries and intrigue, of clashes of ideas that have raged from Greek antiquity to the present day over whether the universe is eternal or had a beginning, whether it is unique or one of many. But most of all, Afshordi and Halper show that this search is filled with wonder, discovery, and community—all essential for remembering a forgotten cosmic past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 1 min
  • Matthew Wisnioski on the History of the Idea and Culture of “Innovation” in the United States

    Matthew Wisnioski on the History of the Idea and Culture of “Innovation” in the United States
    Jun 30 2025
    Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Wisnioski, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, about his new book, Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life. The pair talk about how the new book connects to Matt’s earlier book, Engineers for Change; how what Matt calls “innovation expertise” first emerged; how government played a key role in promoting the idea of innovation; how the idea of innovation was democratized from focusing on elite white men to focusing on women, people of color, children, and, well, everyone; and much more. Vinsel and Wisnioski also talk about Matt’s current book project with Michael Meindl, Associate Professor of Communication at Radford University - a history of the television show and multimedia product, The Magic School Bus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 39 min