The Hedgehog and the Fox

Arnold Weinstein, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, discusses his latest book, The Lives of Literature, and his own life of literature: the authors that have mattered most to him, what students have taken from his courses, and which books have recently become unteachable. He writes, 'The best books interrogate their readers—jostle their assumptions, challenge their own sense of "me" – and the teacher's calling must be to convey this "live”.' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Translator Laura Marris discusses her experience of translating Albert Camus's 1947 novel, The Plague, during the Covid pandemic: 'I would be working on the scene where the doctors are meeting with the prefect of the city to try to convince him to put in more stringent public health measures. And then I would read the paper and there would be stuff about the CDC, Trump and I'd just think this is a very bizarre parallel. In the end, that was also something I had to think about, and potentially correct for, because this is a book about a plague that was translated during a plague, but it shouldn't really be like a COVID book. It should have like a longer life, I think.' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When she tells people she's researching the royal family, Laura Clancy, our guest on this week's episode, often encounters the response that the UK has more important things to worry about. Plus the associated responses that the royals don't cost that much, that they're good for the country, or that ultimately they don't really matter. For a lot of Britons, they just are, a bit like the weather. Laura disagrees. She says: ‘we cannot talk about inequalities in Britain without talking about the monarchy'. Her book, Running the Family Firm (Manchester University Press, 2021), argues that ‘the principles by which monarchy works are key principles by which the whole system works, and in understanding monarchy we can begin to make sense of the system.' In this interview, she discusses what she discovered in the course of her research... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the second half of the conversation I had last autumn with Polly Barton, a translator from Japanese and the author of a terrific memoir cum reflection on language and translation, Fifty Sounds. In the first part we talked about Polly's early fascination with Japan and language, and her decision aged 21 to go to live and work on a remote Japanese island and her experience of learning the language. In this part we talk about her decision to become a translator, some of the challenges that presented, and presents, and also about her book.Fifty Sounds has fifty chapters, each of which takes a single Japanese word as its starting point or leitmotiv. All of these words are so-called ‘mimetics', a distinctive and richly expressive class of word in Japanese that merits its own chunky dictionary, but which in the English language we generally pay little attention to. They're words that give colour and individuality to storytelling; the kind of words that convey the speaker's sense of being an embodied person in the world, alert to its texture and feel. In choosing to build her book around these words, Polly seems to get to the heart of Japanese, or if that is too grand a claim, to capture the essence of what it meant to her to learn Japanese and to begin to glimpse the world through the lens of Japanese. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this first part of my conversation with translator and writer Polly Barton, we talk about Polly's early fascination with Japan and how she found herself on a remote Japanese island at the age of 21. ‘Sometimes', she writes in her book Fifty Sounds, ‘I wonder how I ever thought I'd survive, setting out for a rural island with just a handful of Japanese words to my name.' But survive she does and goes on to tell the tale... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'Music somehow seems to be natural, to exist as something apart – and yet it is suffused with human values, with our sense of what is good or bad, right or wrong. Music doesn't just happen, it is what we make it, and what we make of it. People think through music, decide who they are through it,' says Nicholas Cook, my guest in this episode. His quest in his recent new edition of his highly influential Very Short Introduction to Music (Oxford, 2021) is to explore those human values. In this podcast he talks about how the world of music and our relationship has changed since the first edition appeared in 1998, in an era before smartphones and streaming...Nicholas Cook was until his retirement in 2017 the 1684 Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this programme we're looking at what I thought of as ‘the humble filing cabinet' until I read Craig Robertson's fascinating book, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). It's easy to regard filing cabinets as space-hogging lumps of metal from a bygone era filled with dusty files; an obsolete way of storing information now that all our data lives in the cloud. But previous generations thought of their data as ‘live' too, and a century or so ago, filing cabinets were being marketed as the essence of modernity and business efficiency, the very heart of the modern office – or perhaps more accurately, its brain. Listen to the interview and find out how much this not-so-humble piece of office furniture can tell us about work, information and gender roles in the 20th century. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Charles Dickens introduced the word 'boredom' to the English language in 1853, but the feeling it describes dates back much further. You can find it in the Bible or the work of classical writers. Only recently, though, have psychologists investigated what boredom is actually trying to tell us. And the news is not all bad. In this episode, Professor James Danckert reveals some of the latest discoveries in the science of boredom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nineteenth-century Dublin was a city full of beasts: horses, pigs, cattle, sheep, dogs... all living in close proximity to the human residents. Historian Juliana Adelman describes the city thronged with beasts and explains why animals were often at the centre of Dubliners' heated debates about the kind of city they wanted to live in – and what that meant for the animals. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this new episode in the Conversations with Publishers series, my guest is Margo Irvin, who's an editor at Stanford University Press, where she's been commissioning history and Jewish studies for the past five years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we delve deep into clutter with Jennifer Howard, author of a recent book entitled Clutter: An Untidy History. This book is for you if you have a closet that will no longer close because it is so crammed with clothes, or a garage piled with boxes you keep meaning to sort, or a storage unit that you pay for every month without having an exit strategy. Maybe it's especially for you if you have an older relative with a house piled high with belongings that you know they will never get rid of and you have a growing sense of dread that one day you are going to have to roll your sleeves up and tackle it... Jennifer talks about her own experience of clearing her mother's house and, more broadly, why we seem to have an increasingly vexed relationship with our (many) possessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“From childhood,” Sonia Shah says, “we are taught that plants, animals, and people belong in certain places.” A powerful result of this, she suggests, is a dominant view of human migration as unnatural, a threat, and migrants as vectors of chaos and disorder. Her important new book, featured here, sets out to challenges this and other persistent myths. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rob Tempio is Princeton University Press's publisher for the ancient world, philosophy & political theory. He says on the Press's website:'I believe passionately in both the inherent and enduring fascination of these subjects and in the ways in which they perpetually speak to the present.' In this interview he talks about his career and his books, including the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For all its importance to Greek history and myth, Thebes – Seven-gated Thebes whose patron god was Dionysus, birthplace of Herakles, the city of Oedipus and Antigone – tends to get bit parts in the broader story of ancient Greece. Until now. Paul Cartledge, Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University, has devoted a whole book to what he calls the ‘forgotten city' of ancient Greece. I think you're likely to find it fascinating for the fresh insights that a shift in perspective can bring, seeing the world not from ‘violet-crowned' Athens – as Theban poet Pindar put it – but from ‘the dancing floor of Ares', Thebes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, I talk to Dean Smith, who's been director of Duke University Press for almost a year and a half, and before that was director of Cornell University Press. Earlier in his career, Dean held posts at Chapman & Hall as director of electronic publishing and the American Chemical Society as vice president for sales and marketing. Earlier still, he was the director of Project MUSE at the Johns Hopkins University Press. So a wealth of experience in the university press world. When his departure from the Cornell University Press, I read on their blog:Dean leaves us at CUP with an emboldened mentality. He has given us the spirit and desire to fly ever higher, to dream ever bigger, and to achieve ever more.So when I spoke to him during his convalescence after hip surgery, I wanted to know more about how Dean saw the role of university press director. I also wanted to find out a bit more about his hinterland. Dean was born and raised in Baltimore; that city is clearly still close to his heart, as are its sports. He wrote about the Baltimore Ravens' 2013 against-the-odds Superbowl triumph in Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season.Dean's also a published poet and when we spoke a few weeks back, we talked about his debut collection, American Boy, which draws on his 1960s Baltimore childhood.In this interview, you'll also hear what Dean thinks are the lessons of the recent Jessica Krug affair, as that author was published by Duke, and why he compares his press to a spaceship in the desert. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is another in the series of Conversations with Publishers, which aims to find out more about the people who decide what gets published. Our guest is Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, a post he has held since 1998, and in the interview we talk about his career both before and after his arrival in Minneapolis.The University of Minnesota Press was established 1925. On its website, it says: ‘Minnesota is a midsize university press.' If so, it would be fair to say it punches well above its weight in terms of reputation and impact... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this programme, we're exploring the life and music of Francis Poulenc, in the company of writer and musicologist Roger Nichols. Yale University Press recently published Roger's biography of Poulenc, who was the pre-eminent member of the group known as Les Six and remains probably France's best-loved and most-performed 20th-century composer. One reviewer wrote of Roger's book: ‘I don't think anyone writes better about classical music than Nichols, his wry humour and gift for surprising connections never losing touch with scholarly erudition.' Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we explore the life and work of the master of the 19th-century short story, Guy de Maupassant, in the company of his recent biographer Christopher Lloyd, who's emeritus professor of French at Durham. (The TLS called Chris's book ‘a crisp, witty, balanced and well-informed guide.')Depending on your age and background, you might have read some Maupassant at school, or maybe encountered him on a literature survey course at university. He's much anthologized. But that has proved to be a mixed blessing. The same pieces crop up again and again, representing just a tiny fraction of his 300 short stories. In France, by some estimates, he is the best-selling classic author, thanks to continuing educational sales. So his name is well known. Many people feel they know him, without really knowing him.As Christopher Lloyd's book shows, most of us have barely glimpsed the full extent of Maupassant's writing, which includes half a dozen novels as well as the short fiction, and a wide range of themes which one French edition meticulously catalogued. It included ‘devil', ‘divorce', ‘double', ‘duel', ‘strangling', ‘fantastic', ‘madness', ‘drunkenness'… which maybe already gives some insight into the often dark and dangerous world Maupassant's characters inhabit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We all know the Aztecs practised human sacrifice, a fact that so predominates in popular impressions of them that almost everything else about them is cast in its shadow. Yet as my guest in this episode, Camilla Townsend, writes in her latest book, The Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs: "The Aztecs would never recognize themselves in the picture of their world that exists in the books and movies we have made." So who were the Aztecs really? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Babette's Feast, released in 1987, was the first Danish submission to win the Oscar for best foreign language film and it's the subject of Julian Baggini's recent book in the BFI Film Classics series. A short, engaging essay on the film that won't take you much longer to read than the film's running time. Babette's Feast is based on a short story by Karen Blixen, best known as the author of Out of Africa. It's set in the 19th century an austere part of northern Denmark in an equally austere Christian community, into which comes Babette, once a celebrated Parisian chef, now fleeing the counter-revolutionary violence of the Paris Commune in 1871.What could have been merely a pointed satire on the rigidity of a certain kind of religious life or a gentle culture-clash comedy, is, Julian suggests, something much deeper and much more thought-provoking: an example of film as philosophy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A young man inherits a house on an island in the middle of the raging waters of a mighty river from a mysterious great-uncle. But to satisfy the conditions of the will, the man must remain on the island for three months, with no other human company save his great-uncle Malicroix's taciturn servant. And then there will be a further obligation to fulfil…The book is set in the Camargue in southern France in the early 19th century and was written in the 1940s by French novelist Henri Bosco. Despite Bosco being a major figure in mid-century French literature, the book remained unpublished in English until this year, when my guest Joyce Zonana's translation appeared in the New York Review of Books Classics series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why is it so hard to concentrate? How can we do it better? Dutch psychologist Stefan van der Stigchel has some suggestions... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we have a returning guest to the podcast, Oxford professor of geography Danny Dorling, who spoke to me recently about his new book Slowdown. Danny has given his book one of those subtitles that clearly map out the terrain he intends to cover: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives.You may currently be feeling at best ambivalent about the idea of slowdown, with so many of us are enduring a Covid-19-enforced pause and desperate to know when we might get back up to normal speed.Danny's message is not that humanity collectively needs to slam on the brakes, but that slowdown in many aspects of modern life (though not quite all) is already happening, and we need to think about its consequences, and potential.In our day-to-day lives we may fail to see it, he suggests, but look at the patterns in the data and slowdown becomes visible. As he puts it in his opening pages, “An era is ending.”But he's not out to paint a picture of societal collapse or some dystopian regression to barbarism. In his first chapter, he writes:There are good seasons to come, but not fertile seasons in which our numbers, inventions, and aggregate wealth grow exponentially; in fact, our numbers will very soon stop growing at all.The past few generations have seen great progress as well as great suffering, including the worst of all wars in terms of fatalities, genocides, and the most despicable of all human behaviors —including the planning and construction required for the mass nuclear annihilation of our species.It may take us some time to accept that we now face a future of fewer discoveries, fewer new gizmos, and fewer “great men.” But is this such a bitter pill to swallow? We will also see fewer despots, less destruction, and less extreme poverty.And we will never again worship the “creative destruction” that twentieth-century economists so stupidly lauded at the height of the great acceleration.So for Dorling, slowdown is (potentially) a good thing: not only better than headlong acceleration, but our only hope of continuing to inhabit this planet. Not a guarantee of utopia, but a prospect of some sort of stable, sustainable life.Danny Dorling, at home and podcast-ready, April 2020But if slowdown sets the context, it doesn't determine the political choices that will have to be made. And so much of what we believe about our lives and our world is still about quickening change, the need to keep up or be left behind, the obligation to produce more or be found wanting. We're not imaginatively well-equipped to deal with the idea of slowdown. Canadian premier Justin Trudeau put it like this in 2018:Think about it: The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.That's the strongly ingrained perception that Danny is challenging in his book, and that's where we started our conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last November, I spoke to Christopher E. Forth about his book, Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life (Reaktion Books, 2019), which he describes as a ‘study in the formation of stereotypes', and in particular the negative stereotypes that have accreted round fat, and fat people, over time.Those stereotypes may have gone into overdrive in the latter part of the 20th century, but Chris shows that there was already ambivalence about corpulence in the ancient world: the building blocks of later stereotypes were fashioned early.Rather than the familiar narrative of ‘something good becoming ugly and then bad', Chris shows how an early ambiguity mutated over time. He also reminds us that ‘fat' is not just an adjective, it's also a noun: it's a substance with properties of its own that played an important, sometimes surprising, part in human history. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, another interview in the series of Conversations with Translators. My guest is Meredith McKinney, a translator from Japanese whose anthology of classical Japanese travel writing was published in Penguin Classics at the end of last year.I was alerted to her book by an excellent review of it by PD Smith in the Guardian:‘In this remarkable work of translation and scholarship, filled with wonderful vignettes of Japanese life and sensibility, McKinney introduces readers to the nation's rich and unique literary tradition.'The anthology takes the story of Japanese literature up to the late 17th century and the poet Basho, who wrote The Narrow Road to the Deep North, having begun around a thousand years earlier. In this interview, Meredith explained that the Western reader needs to set aside certain preconceptions of what travel writing is in approaching her book:We think of travel writing really as writing about adventure; the traveller going off and witnessing new things, discovering new things about themselves and other people and other places. Newness is probably the essence of what we think about in travel writing, whereas this travel writing is hugely about its own tradition: going back and touching the things that earlier travellers had touched was really the touchstone, as it were, of so much of this writing.Meredith lived and taught in Japan for around twenty years, then returned to Australia in 1998 and now lives near the small town of Braidwood, in south-eastern New South Wales. She is currently an honorary associate professor at the Japan Centre, Australian National University.The post Conversations with Translators: Meredith McKinney appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After a three-month hiatus, the Hedgehog and the Fox is back with a new spring season. To get it under way, in this latest podcast we explore the role of pigs and pork in shaping American history, in the company of historian Joseph Anderson, who told me:Swine, like so many species, are very opportunistic and they are able to exploit a niche. That was one of the things that made them such a great source of calories for thousands of years. When you put them in an estuary, or you put them in hill country, or in a forest or savannah, they will find a way [to thrive]. They're incredibly tough, so terribly fast, and they're able to exploit lots of different ecosystems. It makes them great colonizers.J.L. AndersonIn his book, Capitalist Pigs, Joe reproduces a humorous map of the United States from 1876 entitled a ‘Porcineograph', in which the outline of the entire country has been lightly tweaked to take on the appearance of a pig: snout to the east, tail to the west, Florida a fore trotter, Baja California co-opted as a rear one.The legend on the map listed pork dishes associated with each region: ham sandwiches in California, salt pork in Arkansas, scrapple in Pennsylvania, pickled trotters (appropriately enough) in Florida. ‘The message', Joe writes, ‘was simple. Swine and pork were omnipresent from coast to coast.'How pork came to be ‘the meat that built the nation' is the theme of Joe's book, and also of our conversation. He writes, ‘Bacon was the most commonly consumed meat on the Oregon and California Trails. Immigrant Helen Carpenter complained about the monotony of overland trail food:“About the only change we have from bread and bacon is to bacon and bread.”‘Authors of guidebooks for overland immigrants advised packing 25 to 75 lbs of bacon per person for the 110-day trek, which meant as much as over half a pound per day.‘Pork fuelled the gold rushes, the logging frontier, military posts, and the canal and railroad boom across the continent.'It also fed the enslaved people of the American south, their calorie intake carefully calculated to maximize productivity without enabling dissent.The post American GeHographies appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we have an interview with Sarah Caro, who describes herself on Twitter as ‘Editorial Director for Social Sciences at Princeton University Press, long-suffering Arsenal fan and qualified optimist'. In this interview we focus mostly on the first of those, though the third clearly influences everything Sarah does.As you'll hear, she's had an amazingly dynamic career, having worked at a significant number of leading publishers in senior roles across a number of disciplines. Along with her management role, so still finds time to commission and edit books: she's the editor of one of Princeton's highest-grossing, highest-profile recent titles, Capitalism Without Capital by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake.Of PUP's place in economics publishing, Sarah says:Princeton has always been very good, especially in economics, at commissioning high profile authors and fashioning them so that they still have huge intellectual heft and are highly respected within the academy, but they're read by a very wide audience of people outside the academy, including policymakers and people working in the finance industry, and just generally people who are involved in all aspects of government and business.The post Conversations with Publishers: Sarah Caro, Princeton University Press appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hedgehog & FoxThis week we have an interview with Amy Brand, who for the past four years has been director of the MIT Press. In a recent Q&A that appeared on the Scholarly Kitchen, Amy said of her role at the MIT press:The job is a perfect fit for me because it builds on my experiences beyond publishing in academic science, university administration and research startups.In our conversation, we talk about the changes Amy has made at the press and how she sees them against the wider context of the publishing and scholarly landscape. Amy's appointment in 2015, in fact, marked a return to the MIT press, as she'd been their executive editor in cognitive science and linguistics from 1994 to 2000. Between those appointments, Amy's career included a number of years at Harvard University, first as program manager of the Office for Scholarly Communication and then as assistant provost for faculty appointments and information.When I spoke to Amy on the phone, I began by remarking that I'd noticed she was producing a documentary, so she was clearly interested in a wide range of ways of presenting knowledge beyond the traditional university press categories.Amy BrandVery, very much so. You know, that dates back to the experience I had as an editor at the MIT press in the '90s. The director of the press at the time, Frank Urbanowski, was, I would say, ahead of his time in terms of thinking about the potential for digital media in relation to scholarship. We were one of the first presses – along with Columbia University Press – to begin to really invest in online communities and specific subject areas. For us, it was cognitive science, which was my area as a PhD and also as an editor; for Columbia was political science. And I became fascinated with how we could translate the work that was going on in the academy for a broad audience and build in opportunities for immersion beyond your typical journal article or monograph in terms of the genre of the information. So that set me down that path. I had been an acquisitions editor here for about seven years before I left in 1999/2000 and that experience is what led me away from MIT initially, because I became so interested in digital publishing.Hedgehog & FoxGoing all the way back to undergraduate work, you studied linguistics. Am I reading too much into it to see that interest in deep structures and connections that that linguists are involved in as something that's a thread running through your interests subsequently?Amy BrandNot at all. I think that I've very much stayed true to this interest in how language conveys information, how the mind structures language. And I see what university presses do and what publishers do is about that very path from text to knowledge. And so I see a great deal of continuity between my earlier interests and what I do now.Hedgehog & FoxBut unlike some directors of university presses, you stepped outside the university press world. You were for a number of years an assistant provost at Harvard University. So I guess there must have come a point where you had to decide, do I want to step back into the university press world? Or, given that there are lots of questions about what his future holds, you might have decided, no, there are other areas that will absorb and retain my interest outside that world. But you made the conscious, very specific decision to come back.Amy BrandYes. You know, I again see a lot of continuity in that. The Harvard story is a little bit different. What happened was, I left the MIT Press where I'd been an editor. I went to work at Crossref, which I am is an organization I'm still very involved in as a board member. And I feel very strongly about how it's transformed scholarly information. But when I was working at Crossref, that was sort of the start of the open access fervour. And a friend of mine, someone that I had known for my academic days, who was a professor at Harvard, reached out and said, ‘I'm starting this office for scholarly communication.' That's when I left Crossref to go help start up the office for scholarly communication at Harvard. And it was when I was in that role that I began to see that there's really this fascinating connection between publishing and academic careers and access to information. And in some respects, the Harvard job was kind of shaped around my interest because it wasn't just straightforward academic administration. It was, ‘how do people present or narrate their contribution to scholarship, to new knowledge, and how does that impact their careers?' And so it was very relevant to my whole set of interest in that space; it wasn't as much of a departure as people think. Now, it was very different work environment from working in the university press.Hedgehog & FoxSo what was it like, Amy, coming back to MIT after having been away for a number of years? Did it feel familiar or had everything changed?Amy BrandI'll never forget when I first came in to meet with staff before I started here. Now, the position I left to come back to the MIT Press was literally a block away. It was down the street on First Street in Cambridge. This was the US offices of Digital Science, which is part of Nature Macmillan. And I was actually running the US office for Digital Science. So I walked down the street because I'd just been hired, and the outgoing director said, ‘I really want you to meet with all the staff.' And I come back into the large conference room here and the majority of the people were the same people that I had worked in the ‘90s. Yes, there were some new faces, but it really was like coming home to my second family and I've certainly felt that way since I've been here. It's just over four years as director. So it's a homecoming in many respects. It's not just the Press, it's MIT and MIT's culture, which is very different from Harvard's culture. And it's a focus around the Press – but I think was there when I was here as an editor too – which is, this isn't just about complacently doing what we've always done. It's about constantly rethinking what kind of publishing is best for universities and for MIT in particular.Hedgehog & FoxAnd when you became director in 2015, you consciously gave yourself six months, I think, in order to produce a five-year plan for the Press's future. I'm sure there are many, many aspects to that, but can you maybe summarize how you set about that task?Amy BrandWell, yeah. It was very conscious. It was not, I think, imposed on me. It maybe came a little bit from the mindset that I had had managing at Harvard a lot of complex projects, where I had learned about agile project management and things like that. But it meant that in order to be able to produce this thing that I wanted to produce, that I had to spend a lot of time meeting with and listening to people at the Press and also on campus. And so that was extremely valuable. And it also was an incredibly valuable team-building exercise for my senior staff, the folks that report to me directly, because it was very much a joint effort. Every member of the senior team had a part in producing that report and those recommendations. And then we brought them up to the provost. It gave us a roadmap for the way forward. I mean, when we're when we're sitting there thinking, is this consistent with what we said we wanted to do? It's very valuable to be able to check back. We had emerged with a list of eight strategic priorities at the time and it's been very helpful.Now, I would say four years in – it was a five-year plan – it's outlived its usefulness, in part because we surpassed our financial objectives. And so we've already reached where we wanted to be. But also because I learned in the process that the way we had done that was not actually maximally engaging to the staff here. So they had a voice. And then this thing was delivered to them. But they weren't given the information about ‘how does what I do in my unit support those higher-level priorities?' And so now we're taking a different approach to strategic planning called OKRs, objectives and key results, which of course, like everything else, emerges out of Silicon Valley. But it's been a really good process for engaging staff so that there is much more local ownership over what those priorities are and what needs to be done to realize them.Hedgehog & FoxAnd again, I know this is a big question, so just tell me if it's impossible to answer succinctly, but I was thinking about that process you undertook of going out and having conversations. And I was thinking about all the constituencies that you would inevitably have been thinking about: about staff, your authors, readers, students, faculty, your parent institution. And then the wider culture, the whole economy of knowledge. So you must have had to navigate quite a sensitive course in order to boil that down into eight strategic priorities.Amy BrandYeah, I would say it probably wasn't a perfect mapping between the evidence base of what I heard from all those constituents and what we ended up with. None of these things ever is, right? But I think that it was quite a process and, in addition to helping us get to those priorities, it was also an exercise in bridge building that's been extremely important in how the Press works with the rest of the university.Part of what I've tried to do in my leadership since coming in is really take the university press and pivot it back towards the institute rather than away. It's always a difficult thing to navigate because, of course, you want to have complete editorial independence. And of course, most of our authors, at least 90 per cent of our authors, have nothing to do with MIT and shouldn't. So it's not about that. It's about how we best serve to amplify what MIT is trying to do, and its faculty are trying to do, and how we bring other voices into the mix. But we have, as a result of that strategic planning process, many new partnerships with different units, with the open learning folks, certainly with the Media Lab, with the libraries. We never had, for example, a partnership with the Sloan School of Management, which publishes a lot. Their faculty publish quite a bit, wonderful business and finance books. And now we have two series. MIT's magazine, that's quite well known, is Technology Review. They had started publishing some great books in science fiction and were looking for a partner to help distribute them, and if I wasn't doing that listening tour, I wouldn't have known that.Hedgehog & FoxAnd is that part of one of your strategic priorities that you've described as ‘opening up the black box of publishing‘, unbundling what publishers do in order to create new strategic partnerships rather than a manuscript is delivered at one end and out pops a book at the other?Amy BrandYes, it definitely is. It's forming those partnerships because faculty in many cases are their own kind of publishing entity. I remember actually when I came into the office for scholarly communication at Harvard and we were starting it up and I thought, OK, the first thing I'm going to do, since this is all about helping Harvard do more open access publishing (the faculty, it had nothing to do with the Press at Harvard), I was going to do an audit of how many journals are being published at Harvard. And it turned out to be something like 60. Most of them were within departments and they were handling it themselves. And so, to me, it just seems that if you are, as we are in our case, which isn't, say, true of Princeton, we are part and parcel of MIT, we're not even a separate physical entity, no separate tax ID, we're just part of the institute, that part of our role should be to be serving those faculty who are doing that. The other thing that I should really point out is that most university presses don't publish journals. And so, of course, how we're going to look at this space is going to be coloured by the fact that we are doing both books and journal.Hedgehog & FoxYes, so you have that expertise in-house to draw on. I don't know if it was the top priority only in terms of numerical order, but enhancing the trade list was something you set down as a priority. And certainly I was looking through the catalogue this morning and the trade titles come at the front and they run to about 85 pages, so it's a very rich and varied trade list that you've developed there. In those four years, has that come on greatly? If I'd looked at the catalogue from 2014, would the trade list have been significantly smaller?Amy BrandIt would have been significantly smaller and it would have been largely focused around art and architecture. Part of the history here is that the Press had developed very, very strong expertise around trade publishing, in design and publicity and marketing and all of that, but was only applying it, or largely applying it, to one part of the list. And so it wasn't so much coming in and saying, ‘OK, I just have to reinvent the MIT Press.' It was coming in and saying, ‘We should be applying our ability to do trade books more broadly, and in particular because of my background through more on the science side and my interest in the fact that part of what I was seeing out there in the world is a much larger appetite among reading audiences for accessible science and technology information, it seemed like a good opportunity and it also was a way in which we were serving the objectives of the institute around being a science and technology (for the most part, not exclusively) university that believes in using that research and scholarship to solve problems in the world. That would be a way for us to align with that.Hedgehog & FoxI noted one of the titles in your current catalogue has the subtitle ‘roadmaps for the present‘ and it seemed to me that that actually was something that you were delivering on across the catalogue. You were looking at a technological, scientific issue, problem or development, but you were actually presenting books which were up to date in thinking about its real world applicability: how will this actually have an impact on people's lives? What are the things we should know about this and how should we be handling developments'?Amy BrandRight. And it's often a tough call. I don't know if you've heard this from other directors that you've spoken with. The line between what is a professional book and what is a trade book is sometimes quite blurry and it's something that we wrestle with constantly. We're not like a trade publishing house that puts out a truly popular treatments of this kind of topic. We are much more about books that honour the complexity of their subject, even when they are trade books.Hedgehog & FoxWell, I wondered, because sometimes you buy in rights, I think from UK trade houses, don't you? So I guess you're always asking yourself that question: ‘does this meet the criteria of an MIT Press trade book?'Amy BrandYes, everything that we do, you know, 99.9 per cent of what we publish, is going to undergo a fairly rigorous peer review process. Sometimes the imports will not in the same way because, say if we're translating a book from French or Italian, we're not going to do big revisions in the English edition of that book. And there are reviews published and we can already get a sense of the quality of the work. Sometimes when I do a translation, I'll reach out to the press director of the original language publication to get their view. But yes, everything that we published does go through peer review and that's an extremely important and interesting part of what university presses do.Hedgehog & FoxAnd I've heard it said by some of your peers that it's something that should be made more of in the wider public forum, because it's not an impediment to publishing. It's something that gives university press publishing part of their character in their calibre.Amy BrandAbsolutely. I think among university presses we're probably more rigorous than most in terms of the number of reviews we do at different stages. But I think the whole system is flawed. I mean, I think it served us very well and continues to serve us well, but I tend to think about peer review in the context not only of publishing, but also in terms of academic careers, tenure and promotion, grant making and review panels around that. When you have a process that's highly anonymized, yes, it can be more trustworthy, but it can also be a vehicle for amplifying bias. And I think that that's some of what we've seen around peer review. And then, of course, the other thing is it's just hard to get peer reviewers if you rely on the typical way that most of us think about getting experts to comment on research. It's a bit cronyistic, right? You go back to the same network and people get exhausted. They're also managing a whole set of incentives around conflict of interest and things like that. I'm currently working on peer review as a research project because I really think it's an opportunity to improve how we do it.Hedgehog & FoxWell, we must definitely speak about that again when you publish and I'd be fascinated to talk in more detail about that. Do you have time, Amy, to acquire books? Or are you really operating at the strategic level and unable to give attention to books?Amy BrandYou know, that has been one of the hardest things for me here because I always want to acquire books. I'm constantly meeting people and hearing about great projects. And I'd love to do it, but I don't have time. So what I do is go so far in a conversation and then hand off the connection or the relationship to one of my editorial colleagues. And I think it's worked out well. I don't ever want them to feel that, because I think so-and-so is interesting and the project is interesting, that therefore the director said this, so we have to publish it. It's not how it works. It's just sort of, ‘you should look at this and then it's completely in your hands'.Hedgehog & FoxSo you get a little bit of vicarious satisfaction, but it's not quite the same as seeing it all the way through yourself?Amy BrandYes. Exactly. And, you know, sometimes I'll stay a little bit more involved, especially, all of us university presses tend to do regional interest books or books that touch on our home institutions. And I tend to stay a little bit more involved in those projects.Hedgehog & FoxAnd if I said, let's take quality of content as a given, but if I said what would you like the MIT Press colophon on the spine of the book to say to a fairly sophisticated reader, a reader who is aware of colophons and what they might mean? What sort of values would you like them to associate, albeit subconsciously, with that on the spine?Amy BrandYeah, that's a really good question. I think that – there's word I'm searching for, I'm having a hard time finding – that means something like a little bit edgy and challenging, whatever the subject matter is. You know, I'd like to think that we're very independent. We like to foster cross-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, anti-disciplinary work, which also raises questions for peer review because it's sometimes harder. And we want to be the best publisher in the areas in which we publish when it comes to bringing fresh new voices. What's fascinating about that is, we are a prestigious press and I want to protect that prestige, but never to the point of saying, ‘I'm going to make a decision about publishing a book based on the pedigree of the academic who's writing it'. So you'll see in our list a lot of younger voices, a lot of assistant professors, even postdocs who are writing their first book because they have a fresh perspective on what might be an entirely new field or subject matter, where they bring that kind of passion to it. I think there are some more established presses that don't tend to do that as much. We take more risks that way.Hedgehog & FoxIf I were to ask you, Amy, what are the ‘known unknowns' that keep you awake at night or that you wake up thinking about in the morning? What's on your list?Amy BrandThat's a really good question as well. You know, I'm constantly asking myself in the bigger decisions that I make every day, ‘Am I consistently putting the Press's interests and reputation above my personal interests and my personal reputation?' Because I hope that I am. To me is extremely important. I don't know if you saw it, I wrote a piece recently about leadership, posted it to LinkedIn: after years of reflecting about leadership, realizing that there's so much humility and being given the opportunity, to use that denigrated George Bush phrase, be the decider. And you can never do that from the position of hubris; that has to be really from ‘I don't think that I necessarily know more than you do or I'm better, I'm smarter. But I take this responsibility and I put it above myself.' When you have a complicated web of relationships with senior administrators at the university where you work and with authors who feel like they've known you for 30 years, as many of mine have, and they want to call in a favour – you know, that kind of thing. But I do think about that a lot.Hedgehog & FoxAgain, this is a big question, but what about the wider question about the evolution, or the revolutions, taking place in the knowledge economy and whether there's going to be a squeezed place for the university press? Is that something that keeps you awake?Amy BrandIt's something that's top of mind for sure. I feel pretty confident in our strategy, which I think is also quite unique. Which is, again, the sort of pushing more towards trade and being successful in that space, while not sacrificing on quality and peer review and serving our authors. And at the same time, going all out into the publishing innovation space, where one can support the other.I think it goes in both directions. So, I don't think the need for the Press is going to be obviated by library-based publishing, for example. I see a renaissance, an interest in the types of books that we publish, certainly among bookstores and booksellers and through that the sales that we're seeing. I've never really believed in certain dichotomies that people talk about, ‘well, it's gonna be all digital'. Well, no, you can have books and print continue at the same time that people are listening to audio books and reading on their Kindle. And similarly, I've never seen the dichotomy between all open or all paid. I think they can coexist very productively. And we're doing a lot of work around that now with our professional, truly scholarly monographs, around ‘what would it mean to get to the point where actually all of those books are subvented and published open access even as we continue to produce print and sell print?'Hedgehog & FoxThis is always a tough question for people, but if I were to ask you to choose an MIT Press title that you think embodies the spirit of what we've been talking about this morning, it needn't be a bestseller, but a title that that you cherish for whatever reason, either because you published it or … Does anything come to mind?Amy BrandOh, no, there's so many! It's like so many children! I'm trying to think… I'm running through these books in my mind and I can think of our bestselling book that sold 350,000 copies, and it wouldn't be that, so I'm not going to mention that. And I can think of my personal favourites, which wouldn't necessarily be representative of the whole Press. So, rather than saying the title, I can tell you about the process. I think my favourite books are often – in more recent times, because there's so many fabulous MIT Press classics and backlist titles – the ones where the process reflects intellectual engagement on the part of the editor in identifying the subject matter and matching it up with the right author. We have books where the editor's read or I have read an article in The New Yorker and I think, oh, my God, this has to be a book. When that happens, it's extremely satisfying.Well, actually, now I think I can mention one book, a recent book, which I think speaks to a lot of what the Press is trying to do. So with the hedge that this isn't the best or most important book that the MIT Press ever published, there's a book called The Dialogues by a physicist at the University of Southern California named Clifford Johnson, which is a graphic novel treatment about the origins of the universe, using African-American drawn figures having conversations. This book has been extremely successful and I love it because I love the author. I love Clifford and I love the fact – and it's been a top seller for us – he tried to have the project agented and failed and ultimately came to the Press. And he also was very insistent about doing the drawings himself and designing it exactly the way he wanted it designed. It's brought us into a whole new market, the whole kind of Comic Con world. And we have many more graphic novel treatments in the works. But that to me represents, you know, we're moving into a bit more kind of the popularization of science, capturing new voices, capturing new genre and formats. So I think The Dialogues is a really good example of what we're trying to do now.Hedgehog & FoxThat sounds like a very good choice; I should definitely check that out. And which other presses do you look to with particular admiration?Amy BrandOh, I mean, there are so many. I had the privilege recently of being on a review committee for Duke University Press and digging in to what they're doing, and I have so much admiration for their approach to publishing in the humanities, which is quite different from what we do. We have had a very close relationship over the years with Princeton and Harvard and Yale because of our various sales consortia here and also Columbia and California, so I get kind of more of a front-view look into what those other presses are doing. And sometimes I'm a little jealous that we don't do more in history because those are books that I love to read and all of those presses do a fabulous job. I don't see us going in that direction. But I think there are so many just wonderful university presses and they each do things slightly differently. I will say, in a more competitive spirit, that I don't think anybody's as distinctive as we are!Hedgehog & FoxHere's a very last question, Amy. When you want to switch off from all these big questions we've been discussing today, at the end of the day or when you're on holiday, how do you switch off?Amy BrandThat has a very easy answer for me. Certainly time with family is top. I have three kids. Two of them are out of the house now because they're older. The other thing is I have a very serious yoga practice. It's a part of my life and I find that that's probably the quickest way for me to switch off, to be able to go to that space. That's where I can reset.The post Conversations with Publishers: Amy Brand, MIT Press appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today is Charlie Gere, who hates the Lake District; so much so, in fact, that his new book is unambiguously entitled I Hate the Lake District. But it's not a diatribe against fudge shops and coach tours. He writes in his introduction:‘I love the North West of England, but hate the “Lake District”, and the way it's fetishized and sacralized as some kind of “unspoilt” paradise, a consolatory Eden to which those battered by contemporary life can retreat. ‘I also love it, guiltily, for the very reasons that I hate it. I am overwhelmed, for example, by the experience of the mountains of the North Lakes in the autumn light, and uneasy that the pleasure I feel is a false appeal to “nature” as redemptive.'View from Kirkby LonsdaleSo Charlie's attitude to the Lakes and the sort of post-Romantic, anti-modernist, mystical, almost Tolkienesque attitude to nature that they are often made to embody is complex, often ambivalent. He wants to see beyond the tourist vistas in golden autumn hues and reintroduce some chiaroscuro into the landscape, let in a bit of shade and darkness. So the stories he pursues are of the people and places normally omitted from the tourist guides: of nuclear catastrophe barely averted, eccentric artists, bodies in lakes, UFOs, even a failed theme park devoted to the nightmarish children's character Mr Blobby. It's a view of the North West that lets the uncanny back in.[There is a] largely unacknowledged uncanniness of the Lake District, the sense that underneath the tourist veneer there lies something far stranger and discomforting, something apocalyptic.The post Charlie Gere hates the Lakes appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest in this programme is Duncan Exley, who in his recent book, The End of Aspiration, warns:Living standards over the coming years are predicted to stagnate for middle-income households and to fall for those with low incomes, and in occupational terms, people born in the early 1980s are the first group since comparable records began in 1946 to be in lower-status jobs than their parents were at the same age.Our children are now more likely to slide down the scale than to climb up.Duncan is a former director of the Equality Trust, a charity that seeks to address the economic inequalities in the UK. In his book, he examines not only the data that suggests the UK is becoming markedly less meritocratic, but also speaks to people whose own stories buck the trend: people from non-privileged backgrounds who went on to have successful careers in professions such as the law, medicine, politics and the media, which are generally regarded as difficult to access. What can we learn from their stories?Duncan's own story is that he came from a small mining town in West Yorkshire, was the first in his family to attend university, and went on to have the sort of professional job in London that meant some regarded him as having joined the elite. That, as you'll hear, has given him a sharp awareness of all the factors that can get in the way of bettering your circumstances, barriers that those born to privilege do not even realise exist. At the same time there are what Duncan calls ‘glass ladders' – opportunities that are there for the taking, but you have to know they are there in the first place. And that usually means knowing people who can point them out to you.We also talk about tuition fees, inheritance tax, zero-hours contracts and Brexit's likely impact. But when I met Duncan in a bookshop café a few weeks ago – just before another old Etonian came to power – I began by asking him about the kinds of people he had wanted to interview and what he hoped their stories would reveal.The post Duncan Exley: The End of Aspiration? appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we have an interview with Christie Henry, who's director of Princeton University Press. She joined PUP two years ago in September 2017, after twenty-four years at the University of Chicago Press, where she was Editorial Director for Sciences, Social Sciences, and Reference Publishing. In the course of our conversation, Christie mentioned that she thought university presses had some ‘reputational work' to do. I asked her to expand on this:Christie HenrySpecific to PUP, the reputational work I feel that is important to us extends from the cultural work we're doing internally to become a more inclusive environment where we have empowered a wide range of staff in all departments to be active contributors to who we are and what our brand is. And we will be soon releasing a new website that will showcase that: telling more of our story and explaining why we think the collaborations that we have and that are entrusted to us are so powerful.I think university presses in general need to be thinking about being less reactive and less in service to universities and really being powerful forces in shaping knowledge and shaping communication. And I do think many of us do that, but in a role that is quieter, in much the way that editors play a role that is often unnoticed and subtle and very purposeful at the same time. So I think it might take us doing a little bit more public communication around the role that we're playing than we we do now – with doses of humility, of course. I think that's really important.I've been overseeing a taskforce on gender equity and cultures of respect for the AU presses, which we'll be turning over to the board this week. We, like many publishers in the UK, are struggling to reach equity along a number of axes. We have a dominance of women in positions, but not in leadership positions. We have pay inequities. (This is speaking across the university press world.) We've conducted a survey of the lived experience of the community to learn where people feel we have work to do on equities. I think that's where we can also effect some important reputational change.We can do things like look at the author demographics of our list; as proud as every publisher is of their list,there is room to grow and to adapt. I also think it's really important for us to think about ourselves as an industry and how we present to the new generation of colleagues and collaborators; we're switching from an environment that was dominated by baby boomers to one that is by millennials. And what does that mean we have to change in terms of our management style, in terms of our team dynamics?University presses, I think, I have been known to be a little bit more conservative and slow to change; going back to evolutionary terms, maybe operating in a more kind of punctuated equilibrium model. I think we need to do more punctuation and with intention, and that will help lend a currency to our reputations that we don't always have. Many of us have very storied histories, but trying to connect those histories to the here and now and also to the future impact is really important and I know a lot of my peers directors are spending a lot of time thinking about that.The post Christie Henry: ‘Shaping knowledge, shaping communication' appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Georgian London as you've never experienced it before: populated with animals, pullulating with animals – pigs snuffling in the dirt recycling the city's waste; herds of sheep and cattle, thousands of them each week, being driven through the streets to and from Smithfield market; horses being used for every form of transport and playing a key part in old and new industries; barking guard dogs protecting property from prowling burglars. Londoners lived cheek by jowl with their animals: as my guest in today's programme colourfully puts it, ‘London's air was pungently infused with a plethora of animal smells'.My guest is Thomas Almeroth-Williams, research associate at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at York University, author of City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London (Manchester University Press, 2019) and, as it happens, a pig farmer's son:I have to tread carefully, not least because my dad would be the first in line to point out that I'm not an expert pig farmer in the making. So I suppose my interactions were always kept at arm's length. I never showed an interest in becoming a farmer, but I did visit quite often and would go and play with the piglets. And in the book, I don't claim to to bring the expertise of a pig farmer to the book. In order to get that, I've had to use primary source material and also read animal behavioural science, etc.The key thing is that having those experiences as a farmer's son, seeing how exhausted my father was after a day's work, joining him at the farm for a day and seeing what he did, seeing what the challenges were, the hours of work, the injuries that were inflicted when a pig suddenly slipped in between your legs when you're trying to give them an injection and you fall over in the muck, that, I think, has made me more sensitive to how difficult it is to manage animals. And then I project that onto what it must have been like to manage those animals in such a difficult environment as Georgian London.Tom writes in his Preface:‘Very few historians have acknowledged the city's animals and even fewer have integrated them into key debates in social, urban and economic history.'And that is precisely what his book does, though not, I hasten to add, in a way that is the slightest bit dry: the book is written with brio and packed with memorable anecdotes. This, for example: in 1752 Horace Walpole describes riding a few miles out of the city and enjoying ‘a syllabub under the cow', by which he meant the cow was milked straight into a glass of cider or ale.I began our conversation by asking Tom what it would have been like to visit Georgian London for the first time.The post Thomas Almeroth-Williams: Georgian London – a city full of beasts appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, a new life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the fourteenth-century poet who is regarded as a father of English literature, though that's a stereotype my guest, Marion Turner, wants to ditch.Marion TurnerI think a lot of the ways that we think about Chaucer now are very problematic. Particularly the idea of ‘the father of English literature', which immediately makes people think he's a bit boring, that he's an old man and a patriarch, and that he's didactic. In fact, that's the opposite of what Chaucer actually was like; I think in his poetry, Chaucer is saying all the time, there is not a fixed meaning, there is not a moral. At the end of the Nun's Priest's Tale he says, ‘take the moralite, good men'. This is a poem which absolutely refused to give a moral, which has gone all over the place, in a dizzying array of genres. So the moral is: go and find your own moral – think for yourself. He's not a didactic poet at all. He's a poet who empowers the reader.Hedgehog & FoxAnd what about Chaucer as sober patriarch. Marion Turner wants to overturn that, too.Marion TurnerThat only comes about in the fifteenth century, after Chaucer's death. In his life, he was all kinds of different things. He was a fashionable teenager. He was a diplomat. He was someone who travelled to Spain, to Italy repeatedly. He was living on the walls of the city when the rebels flowed under the gate in 1381. He saw the deposition of the king. He travelled all around the country as well as all over Europe. He lived in a global trading environment in the city of London. He was a parent. He was a father of a daughter and sons, not the father of English literature. And I'm interested in all those different aspects of his life, which I think are not very familiar to many people today.Hedgehog & FoxFar from seeing himself as founder of the canon, the Chaucer who emerges from the pages of this biography is one who challenges the idea of authority, stability, fixity of meaning. In his dream vision, The House of Fame, the poet finds himself in the eponymous house.Marion TurnerChaucer shows us how random the canon is: authors names are etched in ice. If they're on the sunny side, they melt away. And if they're on the shaded side, they survive. But it's arbitrary and Fame herself is an arbitrary figure. So Chaucer mocks the idea of authority. Then at the very end, the Geoffrey figure comes to the House of Rumour, this chaotic, dynamic place where all kinds of stories and gossip are whirling around and ordinary people come along: pardoners, shipmen, pilgrims, who have bags full of stories. And Chaucer is really showing us that everyone has a story to tell. That it's important to listen to all kinds of different voices and that it is not enough only to read on your own in your room, just to read the old classics that people have already validated for you. You have to think for yourself.Hedgehog & FoxMarion Turner teaches English at Jesus College, Oxford. Her biography has been praised by critics as ‘carefully nuanced', ‘hugely illuminating', ‘perspicacious and often slyly humorous', ‘meticulously researched', ‘radical', ‘rich, thought-provoking and readable' and ‘magnificently scholarly'. One critic concluded, ‘this meaty new biography is likely to be the best book on the subject for decades to come'. So when I met Marion, I asked her how, having been fascinated by Chaucer for years, she decided to embark on a biography.Marion TurnerI first of all assumed that if I did a biography, it would have to be a cradle-to-grave one. And I remember sketching out the chapters and they started with the early years and they ended with the late years. And I thought, ‘I don't want to do this. This is so boring. I can't see how I can make this different.' And I actually went for a walk. It sounds like such a cliché, but I did. I went for a walk around the meadows, around Christchurch Meadow here in Oxford. And I walked around and thought about it. And I did have a road to Damascus moment where I decided that I would try to do this biography and I would do it through places and spaces. And for me, that completely transformed the idea of doing it because what I realized was that if I approach Chaucer's life through spaces and places, I could make this a biography of the imagination, I could be more flexible in how I cut across his life. So although the biography is roughly chronological, it's in three sections that move roughly through sections of his life because I am interested in the development of his imagination across time. But at the same time, I often want to follow strands that are not strictly bound by chronology and by thinking about spaces and places, I could really focus on what he saw, what kind of structures he lived in, and how that affected his sense of his own identity and his audience's sense of their identities, what his metaphors actually meant in terms of the material objects that he saw with which he was familiar.And so for me, that was a really productive way of approaching biography. And the places are varying. Some of them are actual places such as Genoa and Florence, or Reims and Calais or Navarre, places that he went to. Some of them are structures. So things like the great household, which doesn't exist in the same way today and really lets us think about the public and the private life. And some are more abstract still: the cage, the Milky Way, peripheries, places that he talks about perhaps metaphorically or that he speculates about. So that structure allowed me to look at a range of different aspects of his life and also helped me to crystallize in my mind that I wasn't going to try to make this a biography of the emotional life. When you're writing about someone for whom you do not have private letters, diaries, memoirs, and you can't interview their grandchildren, I don't think you can get at that private, emotional life the way that you can from more recent subject. But I think you can get it their imagination. And that was what I wanted to focus on.The post Marion Turner on Chaucer: A European Life appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we have the director's cut of an interview with Caroline Priday, who's Global Promotions Director for Princeton University Press, and head of their European office in Woodstock, near Oxford. (Extracts from this interview featured in the podcast marking Princeton's European office's 20th birthday recently and longer interviews with other participants in that programme will appear in the next few months, including an extensive interview with the Press's director, Christie Henry.)When I spoke to Caroline in Woodstock a few weeks ago, I was interested to ask her about how promoting academic books had changes since she began; whether her heart sinks when an author insists they ‘don't do social media'; and why the PUP Europe office is a good place to experiment. Oh, and the episode also contains a bottle of sherry and some glam rock, but you'll have to listen to find out why.Caroline started her publishing career in 1979 as a secretary to two academic marketing managers at Oxford University Press. There followed a fifteen-year stint at Elsevier and two years working for a book distributor in Singapore. And then, fourteen years ago, she was back in the UK and living in Woodstock when she heard about an opening at Princeton University Press…The post Caroline Priday on promoting university press books appeared first on The Hedgehog and the Fox. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we ask, are Britain and France still trapped in their own myth-making about their colonial pasts? My guest on the programme is Robert Gildea, who is professor… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week's programme is rather unusual: it has six guests rather than one. To mark the twentieth birthday of Princeton University Press‘s European office in Woodstock, near Oxford, I spoke… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week the Hedgehog and the Fox explore four centuries in the afterlife of Joan of Arc. Our guest, Gail Orgelfinger, is a medievalist by training and a founding member… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, another in our series of Conversations with Translators. And with my guest Tim Allen, we move for the first time (at last) beyond European languages. I'm always interested… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, the Hedgehog and the Fox explore the benefits of speaking more than one language in the company of science writer Marek Kohn. Marek has recently published a book… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, the Hedgehog and the Fox investigate the origins of human musicality by looking for musical ability and perception in other animals, including rhesus macaques, zebra finches, a cockatoo… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we launch a new series, Conversations with Publishers. It seems to me that being curious about books needn't stop at the people who write them; it can also… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest this week is Mark Polizzotti, author notably of a biography of surrealist André Breton; publisher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and acclaimed translator from French of books… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we're focusing on one of the nineteenth century's most successful and influential writers, Victor Hugo. By the time of his death in 1885, Hugo was undoubtedly the most… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we tackle a big question with my guest Tim Ingold: what's the point of anthropology? Tim tells me: ‘Anthropology should be an ethical project which is dedicated to… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week the Hedgehog and the Fox turn their curiosity on books themselves, indeed on a book entitled The Book by Amaranth Borsuk, which appears in the MIT Essential Knowledge… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I was in Stockholm for the first time a few weeks before Christmas, so I was intrigued when I recently came across a new book about a study that's followed… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first Hedgehog & Fox podcast of 2019, we grapple with some big questions – does history matter? If so, why? And is it, and other forms of knowledge,… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest in this week's programme is Paul Luna, who's the author of a recent book on typography in the Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press. Paul is… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week the Hedgehog and the Fox examine the humble postcard. In fact, when the postcard was new it was anything but humble, as Monica Cure, my guest on today's… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A few weeks ago, I put up an interview with Anne O'Neill-Henry about her book Mastering the Marketplace, which examines the dawn of the era of the bestseller in nineteenth-century… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week the hedgehog and the fox explore literary anonymity in the company of John Mullan – not the sort of anonymity where the author's name has simply been lost… Read More Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.