Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

In the 1970s surfing and smoking pot went hand in hand. As surfers traveled the world in search of perfect waves in places like Bali, Indonesia, some of them encountered high quality Afghan hashish and a potent but cheap strain of marijuana from the Isaan region of Thailand and Laos. Tied to a stick and notable for their sticky and potent buds, these “Thai Sticks” became the most sought-after stra...

In his recent book, Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra, the Ruling Elite, and the Emergence of a Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2019), Geoffrey Goble examines the emergence and early history of esoteric Buddhism in China. In contrast to earlier scholarship, Goble contends that it was really Amoghavajra (rather than the two patriarchs preceding him in the lineage) who systematized esoter...

The Philippine Revolution of 1896-1905, which began against Spain and continued against the United States, took place in the context of imperial subjugation and local resistance across Southeast Asia. Yet scholarship on the revolution and the turn of the twentieth century in Asia more broadly has largely approached this pivotal moment in terms of relations with the West, at the expense of understa...

“Imagine you live in a freewheeling city like New York or London – one of the world’s leading financial, educational, and cultural centres. Then imagine that one of the world’s most infamous authoritarian regimes makes direct control over your city, introducing secret police, warrant less surveillance and searches, massive repression and the arrest of protestors, and aggressive prosecution… This i...

What is the history of equal rights in Hollywood? In A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood (Columbia UP, 2019), Eithne Quinn, a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, explores the transitional years following the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in order to chart the struggle by Black film makers for rights, recognition and representa...

Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores how texts—literary and visual—help us engage with the space that goes beyond the limits of visible geographical borders and legal regulations. By drawing attention to the loci that produce borderline experiences (detention camps, consulates, international waters), Matthew Hart guides his read...

Joan Scott’s groundbreaking work in gender and French history is essential reading for any aspiring historian. Indeed, she last joined us on New Books in French Studies to talk about her 2017 book Sex and Secularism. But her latest work, On the Judgment of History (Columbia UP, 2020), is a markedly different endeavor. Drawing on three starkly different case studies from modern history, Scott criti...

Since the dawn of the industrial age, we have unleashed a bewildering number of potentially harmful chemicals. But out of this vast array, how do we identify the actual threats? What does it take to prove that a certain chemical causes cancer? How do we translate academic knowledge of the toxic effects of particular substances into understanding real-world health consequences? The science that ans...

In The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia UP 2020), Jill Richards radically rewrites our understanding of first-wave feminism by demonstrating its proximity to international avant-garde movements including surrealism, Dada, and futurism. Using case studies including the movement for a proletarian birth strike, the anti-Nazi pranks of Claud...

Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as...

In China, chiles are everywhere. From dried peppers hanging from eaves to Mao’s boast that revolution would be impossible without chiles, Chinese culture and the chile pepper have been intertwined for centuries. Yet, this was not always the case. In The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography (Columbia University Press, 2020), Brian Dott explores the evolution of the chile pepper from an obscu...

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a critical feature of the modern international system. It binds the global hegemon to a region on the other side of the planet. And it has facilitated capitalist-led globalization. However, as both the US and and Saudi governments have tried to hide the relationship from their respective citizens, it also has been poorly understood. Vi...

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a critical feature of the modern international system. It binds the global hegemon to a region on the other side of the planet. And it has facilitated capitalist-led globalization. However, as both the US and and Saudi governments have tried to hide the relationship from their respective citizens, it also has been poorly understood. Vi...

Capitalism seems to many to be in a sort of constant crisis, leaving many struggling to make ends meet. This desperation was intensified in 2008, and for many never went away in spite of claims of a general economic ‘recovery.’ More recently, the tensions and shortcomings of our current socioeconomic system have been exacerbated by the COVID-crisis, with poorly compensated frontline workers strugg...

The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō) is the masterwork of Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist sect in Kamakura-era Japan. It is one of the most important Zen Buddhist collections, composed during a period of remarkable religious diversity and experimentation. The text is complex and compelling, famed for its eloquent yet perplexing manner of expressing the core precepts...

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Philip Thai about his book, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast (Columbia University Press, 2018). Thai is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is a historian of Modern China with research and teaching interests that include legal history, economic history, and diplomatic history. Smuggling...

The American attitude towards outsiders has always been ambivalent. The United States, it is commonly said, is a nation of immigrants; today, it’s the most demographically diverse great power. But on the other side of that spectrum have been anxiety about and hatred for the foreign. And there’s no shortage of this: from the English-only movements of the 1980s and 90s to the continued power of Amer...

Beginning in the 1950s, a group of academics, businesspeople, and politicians set out on an ambitious project to remake North Carolina’s low-wage economy. They pitched the universities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as the kernel of a tech hub, Research Triangle Park, which would lure a new class of highly educated workers. In the process, they created a blueprint for what would become known...

Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013), offers an alternative history of East Africa in the Indian Ocean world. Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai highlights many complexities in the history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colo...

In A Śabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought (Columbia University Press, 2019), Johannes Bronkhorst, emeritus professor at the University of Lausanne, makes the case through an extensive introduction and select translations of important Indian texts that language has a crucial role in Indian thought. Not only does it form the subject of inquiry for grammarians, philosophers, and aesthet...

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technol...

How did Buddhist women access religious experience and transcendence in a Confucian patriarchal system in imperial China? How were Buddhist practices carried out in the intimate settings of a boudoir? In Dr. Yuhang Li’s recent monograph, Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press), the answers to these questions can be found in creative...

What do psychoanalysts do with bodies, and what do they do with them now? Jamieson Webster has been thinking and writing on these questions as they impact her in her practice and her life. In this interview, we explore her latest book, Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis, alongside her recent article in the New York Review of Books on her volunteer work in a hospital with...

In Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment (Columbia University Press, 2020), Minou Arjomand provides a startling account of the many intersections between theatre and trials in Germany and the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s. Through case studies of Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, and Edwin Piscator, Arjomand explores the use of trials as a theatrical form,...

How are we going to address inequality and put the economy on a sounder footing? Today I talked to Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth about their new book Angrynomics (Agenda Publishing/Columbia University Press, 2020). Lonergan is an economist and macro fund manager in London whose writings often appear in The Financial Times. Blyth is a political economist at Brown University who received his PhD in p...