NBN Seminar

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, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you. Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that. Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them. However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas. In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are written. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 necessarily make us good teachers. Jessamyn Neuhaus’s Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers (West Virginia University Press, 2019) helps us to identify and embrace that geekiness in us and then offers practical, step-by-step guidelines for how to turn it to effective pedagogy. It’s a sharp, slim, and entertaining volume that can make better teachers of us all. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Much of the debate about the roles of nature vs. nurture in the development of individual people has settled into accepting that it's a bit of both, although what each contributes to a given trait or feature, how much, and they interact are still matters of dispute. In What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept(MIT Press, 2018), Maria Kronfeldner critically examines instead the 'nature' side of this dichotomy: what exactly is a human "nature"? Is it some kind of fixed human essence, a statistical norm, a normative ideal of how a human being ought to be? Kronfeldner, who is an associate professor of philosophy at Central European University in Budapest, argues against an essentialist view of nature, and replaces it with three concepts – descriptive, classificatory, and explanatory natures – that can do the various jobs that we want a "nature" concept to do without contributing to dehumanization, as the essentialist concept frequently has. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it like to be a bat, or a dog, a robot, a tree, a human being, a rock, a star, a neutrino? Discognition looks at a series of fascinating science fiction narratives – in some cases reading philosophical or scientific literature as speculative fiction – to raise important questions about consciousness and sentience and to help readers understand the significance of those questions for how we live with ourselves and each other. In addition to opening up some wonderfully thoughtful and provocative works of science fiction, the book also models a transdisciplinary mode of scholarship that is as inspiring as it is effective. Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being reconfigured as a result. But how is this happening, what are the consequences, and is “economy” necessarily the most productive frame in which to understand these transformations in attention and distraction? Yves Citton’s new book explores these questions in a fascinating study of attention as economy, ecology, and “echology” (with the last taking on resonances of the notion of the echo). The Ecology of Attention (tr. Barnaby Norman) (Polity Press, 2017) looks carefully at attention-related phenomena emergent at a number of scales and argues throughout that there are high stakes for how we understand and work with these phenomena: for teaching, performance, the environment, and liberty itself. It’s a clear and compelling book about an important topic, and it will be of interest to a wide readership. Enjoy the conversation! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are we good people? Or do we just think we are? In his new book The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2017), author Christian B. Miller tackles these questions and more, breaking down what character is, how to measure it, and how to distinguish good from bad moral behavior. In our interview, Miller talks to us about finding his way into this area of study and what research says about our tendencies to display our best and worst qualities. His insights and findings offer us the chance to better understand whats going on when we witness ourselves, our loved ones, and even our highest-ranking leaders behaving in ways that run against consciously-held morals. They also offer pathways for developing and inspiring more upstanding behavior. Christian B. Miller is A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Director of the Character Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 75 papers as well as two books with Oxford University Press,Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013) and Character and Moral Psychology (2014). He is also the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Oxford University Press), and several other volumes. Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute, where he also chairs their monthly LGBTQ Study Group.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University. As a feminist and moral philosopher, Manne examines an idea that has been inadequately addressed in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2017). She argues that misogyny is on the wane as a working concept and situates her analysis in recent news stories and events. She offers a definition that is not psychological but rather considers it a system of social control. Manne brings a fresh analysis to our understanding of “misogyny” and the related term “sexism.” Misogyny is selective because it targets those who fail to uphold the patriarchal standards of a woman’s place in a masculine world and works as the policing and enforcement branch of the ideology of sexism. Women caught in “asymmetrical moral support” roles are expected to offer respect, deference, admiration, and gratitude to favorably situated men and provide, especially elite men, with comfort, care, and sexual and emotional labor in many different situations. Misogyny shows up in conversation; office politics; and the dispensation of favors flowing from a man’s relative status, wealth, or celebrity. Rewards come to those who comply. In this scenario, women act as human givers rather than full and equal human beings. Manne’s book is one for the moment. This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’ve ever wondered how your favorite writers go about crafting their written works, or if you’ve ever been interested in writing a book yourself, chances are you’ve wandered into a bookstore or a library, scanning the shelves for some kind of guidance. Books on writing typically fall into two camps: some are more centered on writing as philosophy, a way of life. Less about how to write and more about the author, and their specific writing journey, like Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and Stephen King’s On Writing, which are both fascinating and inspiring, but not necessarily all that helpful if you’re looking for some quick and dirty tips on revising a story. Many other books on writing—I would venture to say even most—act as coaches: they preach writing regimens and keeping daily journals—finding the time and making the space. The strategy with these is often to write as much as you can as quickly as possible, because the goal is to get your foot in the door: to actually sit there and write something. But what comes after that? You’ve sat and written and maybe you have enough for a novel, or a memoir. The story is all there, but still somethings not quite right, and you cant be sure how to diagnose the problem. The characters don’t relate to one another like real people, the dialogue feels stiff, the sentences just don’t flow the way you’ve seen them do in your favorite Annie Dillard or Stephen King books, and maybe by now the self-doubt is starting to set in, and you’re wondering, am I really cut out for this? Enter Dinty W. Moore, the longtime editor of the online publication Brevity, a journal of concise literary nonfiction, and the author of numerous books on writing including his latest, called The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir (Ten Speed Press, 2016). Often, Moore says, when people write their stories, they tend to place the blame for the writings shortcomings on themselves. The Book Doctor, however, believes that whatever is ailing a novel or memoir in progress is not about the writer, it is about the story: how well we understand it, how well we tell it, and how well we enable it to come alive in the reader’s mind. With my cohost Eric LeMay and I today on the New Books Network is Dinty W. Moore, dispeller of the pervasive myth that good writing should be effortless, and a staunch believer that anyone is capable of writing, and, with practice, of writing well.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The categories religion and race share a common genealogy. The modern understanding of these terms emerges within the European enlightenment but grasping their gradual production requires us to investigate further. In Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford University Press, 2016), Theodore Vial, Professor at Iliff School of Theology, argues that the intersection of religion and race can be better understood by looking at the work of nineteenth-century German romantics. In the post-enlightenment period religion becomes a racialized category. Vial examines the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Max Muller, and Johann Gottfried Herder in order to outline the linked nature of race and religion as social categories. He puts their definitions and positions to work to determine the conceptual framework these authors deploy for theorizing difference. In our conversation we discuss Immanuel Kant on race, Schleiermacher as theologian and scholar of religion, the symbolic power of Max Muller within contemporary Religious Studies, the role of language and nation in the construction of religion and race, W. E. B. Du Bois, theological anthropology, analyzing Australian aborigines, and the legacy of nineteenth-century German constructions of race and religion for Religious Studies today. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a career spanning several decades, James L. Kugel has illuminated the Hebrew Bible from the perspectives of both a biblical scholar of enormous skill and eloquence and as an engaged and imaginative reader. In The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), Kugel, Starr Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University, consults not only biblical scholarship but neuroscience and anthropology to examine the relationship between conceptions of self and conceptions of God. The way these conceptions shift over time, and the way biblical text itself reflects on these changes, shed new light on changing notions of self and God, and the relationship between these changes. David Gottlieb is a PhD Candidate in the History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research focuses on interpretations of the Binding of Isaac and the formation of Jewish cultural memory. He can be reached at davidg1@uchicago.edu.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does a book come into being? In Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (Princeton University Press, 2017), Clayton Childress, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at The University of Toronto, accounts for the social processes behind the contemporary novel. The book uses a case study of Jarrettsville, a work of historical fiction, to explore the processes of creation, production, and reception for the book. Drawing on, but also extending and developing, field theory, the book challenges the usual perception of a lone authorial genius with a detailed sociological picture of how a novel is made. The book offers rich empirical material, from quantitative analysis of inequalities in publishing, through readers’ responses to the novel and insider knowledge from agents and editors, to ethnographic reflections on the social setting for authorial work. The book is a fascinating and accessible read for anyone interested in contemporary culture. The first chapter is available for as a preview here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When undergraduate students look through a course catalog and see the title World Religions they probably have some idea what the course will be about. But why is that? Why do World Religions seem so self-evident in this historical moment? In After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (Routledge, 2016), edited by Christopher R. Cotter, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and David G. Robertson, Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, several authors attempt to delineate the history and engage with the problems of the World Religions paradigm. The history of the production of the category religion has defined the concept as a universal sui generis entity. This system of classification was bound up in scientism, evolutionary thinking, colonial encounters, and Protestant biases. The World Religions Paradigm extends from this model and has governed both research and teaching in Religious Studies. The essays in After World Religions offer strategies to interrogate or subvert the World Religions Paradigm from within, how to approach introductory courses in the study of religion outside of this governing structure, and the role of emergent pedagogical techniques. In our conversation we discussed the history of religion, textbooks as data, navigating graduate instruction, questions of the sacred, archeological data, new age stuff, critical thinking as opposed to the accumulation of information, the destabilizing effects of alternative data, the planet Pluto, and another podcast, the wonderful Religious Studies Project. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is science? A seemingly profound, yet totally ridiculous question to try and answer. Yet, when Oxford University Press reached out to the brilliant scholar of Victorian science, Iwan Rhys Morris, they were tapping the right man for the job on the shoulder. He designed, contributed, and edited The Oxford Illustrated History of Science (Oxford University Press, 2017) which was published earlier this year. He assembled an all-star team of specialists with backgrounds in a variety fields in this history of science. His simple yet complex answer to the question I just posed is: science is humanity. Without humanity, there would be no science. No Newton, no Darwin, and no Dr. Who. This book is both conventional and not, sweeping yet focused, and really fun to read as both a reference source and as a piece of world history. Join me, J.N. Campbell and for podcasts to come, my colleague Steve Rooney, as we host new segments for New Books in Science. We will ask probing questions, and of course, we hope you enjoy our rapid fire installment at the end! Here is the first installment with my guest, Iwan Morris. Enjoy! J. N. Campbell is an independent scholar and writer in Houston, Texas. He is the co-author with Steven M. Rooney of How Aspirin Entered Our Medicine Cabinet (Springer, 2017), which can be found on Amazon. They have a second book entitled, Numb: A Chemical History of Opioid Epidemic, which is due out in 2018. He has written for the International Journal of the History of Sport, Reviews in History, and is a featured writer for Good Grit Magazine. After receiving an M.A. in History from the University of Kentucky, he fashions himself as a life-long student of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As I was reading Ron Edward’s fascinating and far-reaching new book, The Edge of Evolution: Animality, Inhumanity, and Doctor Moreau (Oxford University Press, 2016), I had a flashback. I must have been about seven. I was watching a film adaptation of H.G. Well’s classic work of science fiction, The Island of Doctor Moreau. It’s about a doctor who takes animals and tries to make them human by surgically alerting them. I don’t remember much about the movie–I think Burt Lancaster played Moreau–but what I remember is that the story really creeped me out. It stayed with me for a long time. And, even now, as I remember those half-man, half-beasts that populate Dr. Moreau’s island, I’m creeped out. The feeling is something like a primordial shiver. Now you may attribute that feeling to the sensitivity of a seven-year-old, and that’s probably right: what were my parents thinking letting me watch a horror movie at that age? Edwards, however, has a different answer, one based on Well’s original story. It’s that these man-beasts that Wells imagines force us to realize us that we are, in our essence, animals. This realization is something that, as a culture and as individuals, we don’t like to contemplate. It unnerves us. It creeps us out. And that’s what Edward’s book explores: it is, among other things, a case against human exceptionalism, one that asks us not only to rethink our animal selves, but also our relationship to those other creatures who share our animality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Doing Reflexivity: An Introduction (Policy Press, 2017) by Jon Dean, a senior lecturer in politics and sociology at Sheffield Hallam University, explores and explains reflexivity as one of the essential concepts in modern social research. The book draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu as its starting point, but broadens out the definition of reflexivity to include a range of critical perspectives, particularly those associated with feminist standpoint epistemologies. The book also engages with the practice of research, setting out examples from Dean’s own work, on culture and on non-profits, along with detailed case studies of different types of reflexivity in different social research settings. The book is essential reading for social researchers everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A revealing exploration of representative modes of medievalism, Medievalism: A Critical History (Boydell & Brewer; hardcover 2015, paperback 2017), by David Matthews, examines the people, institutions, and moments that have driven societies around the world to reimagine and revive a medieval past. Eschewing shallow comprehensiveness, David Matthews instead offers a careful and extended handling of significant moments of medieval revival. From Sir Walter Scott and Cardinal Newman embracing structures of medieval ceremony in the early nineteen century to today’s medieval reenactments and medieval markets that employ touristic capital by celebrating a medieval inheritance, Matthews explores the positive vision of the romantic middle ages. Imagined as a world of chivalry and preindustrial economy defined by courtesy and noblesse, the romantic medieval offers connection to the land, more primitive, and more peaceful, social relations, to those who long for a world before industrialism and global capitalism. Following the interlaced negative vision of the grotesque middle ages–a world of barbarity and violence, of cruelty, ignorance, superstition, and narrow parochialism–the argument examines the ways in which communities and thinkers recover both grim and grand visions of the medieval, also exploring aspects medievalism that fall outside this neat binary. Medievalism: A Critical History moves deftly from examinations of medieval recovery in statecraft, aesthetics, art, literature, architecture, and the scholarly discipline of medieval studies. Matthews shows that an investment in the medieval has often reached far beyond academic interest in historical detail or popular interest in knights and castles. He pays particular attention to what is here called civic medievalism–attempts by writers and thinkers to recover that part of the middle ages that encouraged trade, labor, and industry, an interest on the part of statesmen and business leaders who find in the middle ages a worthy model of infrastructural expansion and open commerce. Likewise, with careful eye on ways in which being “medieval” can serve as a condemnation, Matthews pays close attention to how the idea of being medieval in the present day has the power to both attract and repel those who see an unevenness of time in our present world. Discussing the ways in which various writers and communities have employed these modes of medievalism to great effect, Medievalism: A Critical History asks readers to consider why we employ the past to do work in the present, and how the pursuit of recovering the past makes that very past a malleable thing. Careful not to exaggerate the significance of medievalism in moments when it was merely one stream of many, while also directing attention to ways in which interest in the medieval world has been underrecognized, David Matthews makes a commendably searching and scholarly contribution to the study of medievalism. Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor who researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work and request an editorial consultation at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepanier’s collection, Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education (Lexington Books, 2017), brings together authors in a variety of fields within the humanities to reconsider the arguments that have been made in support of the humanities over the past decades, even as these disciplines have declined in terms of majors and faculty appointments across the United States. Kirk Fitzpatrick, James W. Harrison, Nozomi Irei, David Lunt, Kristopher G. Phillips and the collection editor, Lee Trepanier, represent perspectives from philosophy, literature, history, languages, political philosophy, while also engaging the question of what constitutes a liberal education in the 21st century, especially given the role of education within society. This text, which provides some thoughtful considerations beyond the often-given reasons for why the humanities are fundamentally important, is a kind of starting point for dialogue across disciplines, within colleges and university, but also among the public in considering the role of higher education in our contemporary democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carrie Jenkins‘ new book is a model for what public philosophy can be. Beautifully written, thoughtful, and compellingly and carefully argued, What Love Is: And What it Could Be (Basic Books, 2017) invites us to think openly and critically about romantic love: what it is, what it could be, and why it is crucial for us to ask these questions and come to our own answers. Engaging the work of bell hooks, Bertrand Russell, Simone de Beauvoir, and more, Jenkins argues that love has a dual nature both social and biological and the book develops that position while offering a critical perspective on the arguments and evidence proposed by scientists, philosophers, and other interlocutors on whose work Jenkins builds. Romantic love is in the process of changing, suggests Jenkins, and the norm of monogamy could be one of the features in flux. The work offers a critique of amatonormativity including the assumed norm of monogamous dyads as the basis of romantic relationships while leaving readers with a take-home message that is simultaneously generous, bold, and inspiring: think about love for yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

McKenzie Wark’s new book begins and ends with a playful call: “Workings of the world untie! You have a win to world!” Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015) creates a conversation between work from two very different Soviet and American contexts. After guiding readers through the work and theories of Alexander Bogdanov, whose focus on the importance of labor in organizing knowledge forms a central thread through the book as a whole, Wark traces some of those notions in the writing of novelist and utopian Andrey Platonov. The second half of the book extends the conversation into science studies, beginning in a chapter that considers the work of Feyerabend, Haraway, Barad, and Edwards in light of Bogdanov and Platonov’s approaches to labor and knowledge, and continuing into a chapter devoted to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. The result is a fascinating treatment of the centrality of labor and the importance of the not-necessarily-human to understanding and theorizing the Anthropocene. (As Wark reminds us, Labor is the mingling of many things, most of them not human.) The entire book is highly recommended, and for the STS-minded among us the third chapter of the book would make an especially useful assignment in a discussion group or seminar devoted to contemporary theory and/in STS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From its opening fragment on “Fragments” to its “Possibly dolorous tropical lyrical coda,” Simon Critchley‘s new book is a pleasure to hold in the hand and the mind. ABC of Impossibility (Univocal Publishing, 2015) is a collection of fragments and a catalog of “impossible objects”: poetry, America, emptiness, indirection, money, and more. Thoughts and jokes and quotes and small essays ranging from one line to several pages are arranged in a sequence that plays with unusual juxtapositions and acts as a form of “counterpoint,” riffing on and playing off of the work of Pessoa and Augustine and Rousseau and Blake and Heidegger and others. This is a thoughtful and playful book about time, and the sea, and humor, and loss, and slavery, and the importance of unlearning. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Durham Peters‘ wonderful new book is a brilliant and beautifully-written consideration of natural environments as subjects for media studies. Accessible and informative for a broad readership. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is structured as a series of meditations on and explorations of water, fire, air, earth, and ether media. After a chapter that sets out some of the foundational ideas shaping the book and charts an intellectual landscape for rethinking media, each of the following chapters offers a carefully curated series of studies of particulars – dolphin jaws, candles, towers, watches, clouds, feet, bells, weathermen, Google, and more – as a means of examining the significance of infrastructure, forgetting, technicity, and other modes of understanding media. Peters asks us to come with a fresh perspective to notions that we otherwise take for granted, and the result is a thoughtful and inspiring account that brings together media studies, theology, philosophy, and the natural sciences in thoroughly compelling ways. Among other things, the book is a call for a “greener media studies” that “appreciates our long natural history of shaping and being shaped by our habitats as a process of mediation.” What if, Peters asks, we took nature instead of the mind as the “epitome of meaning”? What are the stakes of doing so? The result is among the most exciting and enjoyable books that I’ve read in some time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eugene Thacker‘s wonderful Horror of Philosophy series includes three books – In the Dust of this Planet (Zero Books, 2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (Zero Books, 2015), and Tentacles Longer than Night (Zero Books, 2015) – that collectively explore the relationship between philosophy (especially as it overlaps with demonology, occultism, and mysticism) and horror (especially of the supernatural sort). Each book takes on a particular problematic using a particular form from the history of philosophy, from the quaestio, lectio, and disputatio of medieval scholarship, to shorter aphoristic prose, to productive “mis-readings” of works of horror as philosophical texts and vice versa. Taken together, the books thoughtfully model the possibilities born of a comparative scholarly approach that creates conversations among works that might not ordinarily be juxtaposed in the same work: like Nishitani, Kant, Yohji Yamamoto, and Fludd; or Argento, Dante, and Lautramont. Though they explore topics like darkness, pessimism, vampiric cephalopods, and “black tentacular voids,” these books vibrate with life and offer consistent and shining inspiration for the careful reader. Anyone interested in philosophy, theology, modern literature and cinema, literatures on life and death, the history of horror…or really, anyone at all who appreciates thoughtful writing in any form should grab them – grab all of them! – and sit somewhere comfy, and prepare to read, reflect, and enjoy. For Thacker’s brand-new book Cosmic Pessimism (published by Univocal with a super-groovy black-on-black cover) go here. Thacker is co-teaching a course with Simon Critchley on “Mysticism” at the New School for Social Research this fall 2015. You can check out the description here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The discontented graduate student is something of a cultural fixture in the U.S. Indeed theirs is a sorry lot. They work very hard, earn very little, and have very poor prospects. Nearly all of them want to become professors, but most of them won’t. Indeed a disturbingly large minority of them won’t even finish their degrees. It’s little wonder graduate students are, as a group, somewhat depressed. In his thought-provoking book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015), Leonard Cassuto tries to figure out why graduate education in the U.S. is in such a sadstate. More importantly, he offers a host of fascinating proposals to “fix” American graduate schools. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-knowledge, but autonomy and personality. Yet we now know that the image of the individual chooser that Mill’s view seems to presuppose is not quite accurate. It is not only the case that environmental factors of various kinds exert a great but often invisible influence over our choices; we must also contend with the limits of our cognitive resources. Sometimes, having to choose can be a burden, a hazard, and even an obstacle to liberty. In Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015), Cass Sunstein examines the varied phenomena of choice-making. Bringing a range of finding from behavioral sciences, Sunstein makes the case that sometimes avoiding or delegating choice is an exercise of individual freedom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nick Sousanis‘s new book is a must-read for anyone interested in thinking or teaching about the relationships between text, image, visuality, and knowledge. Unflattening (Harvard University Press, 2015) uses the medium of comics to explore “flatness of sight” and help readers think and work beyond it by opening up new perceptive possibilities. It proposes that we think about unflattening as a “simultaneous engagement of multiple vantage points from which to engender new ways of seeing,” and beautifully embodies what it can look like to make that happen. Readers will find thoughtful reflections on the possibilities and constraints afforded by working and thinking with different kinds of verbal and visual language, including a consideration of comics as “an amphibious language of juxtapositions and fragments,” and some wonderful work on storytelling and imagination. The book includes a wonderful “Notes” section that offers some background on the inspiration behind many of the images (including Flatland, Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, Deleuze & Guattari, and many others) a bibliography for further reading, and a series of maps of the structure of the book when it was a work-in-progress. It’s a fabulous book that is a pleasure to read and deserves a wide readership. For more on Nick’s work on Unflattening and beyond, check out his website: http://spinweaveandcut.com/. For listeners and readers interested in teaching with the book, check out this site: http://scholarlyvoices.org/unflattening/index.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Screens are ubiquitous. From the screen on a mobile, to that on a tablet, or laptop, or desktop computer, screens appear all around us, full of content both visual and text. But it is not necessarily the ubiquity of screens that has societal implications. The significance is in how screens fundamentally change how we ingest information. In her new book, Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World (Oxford University Press, 2015), Naomi S. Baron, professor of linguistics and Executive Director of the Center for Teaching, Research & Learning at American University, asserts that despite the benefits of convenience and monetary savings, reading onscreen has many drawbacks. Using surveys of millennials in the United States, Japan and Germany, combined with anecdotes, and information from writers, Baron provides evidence of the impact of technology on reading, and thinking, in society. Just listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a beautifully written and evocative meditation on extinction. The book offers (and implicates us in) stories about five groups of birds – albatrosses, vultures, Little Penguins, whooping cranes, and Hawaiian crows – that build upon one another and collectively enable us to explore and re-imagine what, where, and how extinction is, and why that matters. Van Dooren emphasizes the importance of storytelling to understanding and inhabiting the world, and the book’s five “extinction stories” each bring to life the entanglements of avian, human, and other beings to ask readers to consider a series of questions that can best be explored, understood, and engaged through attentiveness to these entanglements. “What is lost,” van Dooren asks, “when a species, an evolutionary lineage, a way of life, passes from the world?” How does this loss mean, and what does it mean, within the particular multispecies community formed and shaped by that way of life? And how might storytelling, conceived as an act of witnessing, help draw us into new relationships and accountabilities within our multispecies communities? Flight Ways is deeply concerned with the ethical questions that emerge – and that must be sustained – in the course of thinking through these crucial questions, and it is committed to moving us away from a position of human exceptionalism as we work with and inside of that ethical troubling. Deeply interdisciplinary, van Dooren’s book brings together approaches in animal studies and the environmental humanities, but it speaks to and from many more fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. While The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) will satisfy even advanced scholars working on “object-oriented ontology” and related issues, it’s also a fantastic introduction for readers who have never heard of “correlationism” or panpsychism, don’t quite understand what all of the recent humanities-wide Whitehead-related fuss is all about, and aren’t sure where to begin. After a helpful introduction that lays out the major terms and stakes of the study, seven chapters each function as stand-alone units (and thus are very assignable in upper-level undergrad or graduate courses) while also progressively building on one another to collectively advance an argument for what Shaviro calls a “speculative aesthetics.”The Universe of Things emphasizes the importance of aesthetics and aesthetic theory to reading and engaging the work of Whitehead, Harman, Meillassoux, Kant, Levinas, Bryant, and others as an ongoing conversation about how we understand, inhabit, and exist as part of a material world. It’s a fabulous (and fabulously clearly written!) work that I will be recommending widely to colleagues and students. During the course of the interview we talked a bit about the opportunities that electronic and web-based media have brought to life and work in academia. On that note, you can find Steve’s blog here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most puzzling things about humans is their ability to manipulate symbols and create artifacts. Our nearest relatives in the animal kingdom–apes–have only the rudiments of these abilities: chimps don’t have language and, if they have culture, it’s extraordinarily primitive in comparison to the human form. What we have between apes and humans is not really a continuum; it’s a break. So how did this break occur? The answer, of course, is evolutionarily. It stands to Darwinian reason that our distant ancestors must have been selected for symbolic use and cultural production, and it was in this natural selective way that they became human. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it presents us with another puzzle: why is human language and culture so astoundingly complex? In order to prosper in the so-called “era of evolutionary adaptation,” neither needed to have been complex at all. A Hominin with a smallish fraction of the symbolic and cultural abilities of Homo sapiens would easily have emerged (and maybe did emerge) as a completely dominant alpha predator. Imagine, if you will, a chimp that could talk a bit and produce reasonably effective missile weapons. How much selection pressure would such a talking, armed chimp face? Not much, at least from other animals. Such an Hominin would not, ceteris paribus, need to evolve new and more complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms. But complex linguistic and cultural abilities and forms did evolve. So, we have to ask, where do Shakespeare and Large Hadron Colliders come from? Daniel Cloud has an answer: domestication. In his fascinating and thought-provoking new book The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal (Columbia University Press, 2014), Cloud argues that over the millennia proto-humans and humans have been selecting mates who were good with symbols and selecting symbols themselves. This process–a kind of runaway sexual selection and domestication–rapidly (in evolutionary time-scales) produced both a huge expensive brain and an ornate culture to match. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Johanna Drucker‘s marvelous new book gives us a language with which to talk about visual epistemology.Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014) simultaneously introduces the nature and function of information graphics, awakens readers to the visual interfaces prevalent in our daily work, and considers how paying careful attention to visual interpretation can serve a broader humanistic agenda. Drucker urges us to think of graphic forms of knowledge not as mere presentation, but as interpretation, as “arguments made in graphical form.” Here, images are not necessarily fixed displays of information:Drucker suggests a way to think about images as producers of knowledge. Once we understand and approach a graphic display as a generative technology, it opens up some fascinating ways of imagining the future of the book, of reading, and of composition. As a thoughtfully and beautifully produced volume, Graphesisalso challenges our visual and material expectations for a book-as-object in its form as well as its argument. This will be a fascinating and compelling read for anyone working in/on/with visual forms of knowledge production in the humanities (digital and otherwise) or the history of the book. It is an excellent and productive book to think with, to create with, and to teach with. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“This is a book that wants you to surpass and destroy it.” Eric Hayot‘s new book has the potential to transform how we teach and practice academic writing, and it invites the kind of reading and engagement that makes such a transformation possible. The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2014) is a style guide geared specifically toward academic writers in the humanities, paying special attention to the field of literary and cultural theory but applying equally well across humanistic disciplines. At turns funny, moving, and brilliant – not always qualities we associate with writing style guides – Hayot’s book treats writing as a process that encompasses “behavioral, emotional, & institutional parameters.” The first section of the book treats writing as a form of life, addressing the contexts and habits of the writer and the institutional contexts in which we teach and write. It also offers some strategies for getting writing done in the course of the typically crazy, packed life of the academic writer, and includes some great advice for thinking about the relationship between a dissertation and a book. The second section addresses strategies of academic writing, introducing the scalable “Uneven-U” model for conceptualizing the structure of paragraphs, essays, and beyond. It also includes some helpful ways to understand and craft openings and closings, and reminds us how important it is to keep the experience of our readers in mind as we write. The third section offers great advice on some of the elemental tactics of writing practice, including citation, sentence rhythm, and much more. The final section suggests a way to think about the writing in terms of “becoming”: a writer, a written work, a form of life. The Elements of Academic Style is a book well worth reading and rereading. I’ve already been using it in my teaching and writing, and it’s a fitting work to inaugurate the New Books Network Seminar! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices