From the Square: An NYU Press Podcast

Women get into stripping for money, writes Dr. Bernadete Barton, and the experience the girls have throughout their career in exotic dancing varies. Dr. Barton uses Stripped: More Stories from Exotic Dancers, Completely Revised and Updated Edition (NYU Press, 2017) to take readers inside countless strip bars and clubs, from upscale to back road and specialty lap dancing, table dancing, topless onl...

Since the late 1990s Thai cinema has come to global attention with movies like the famous ghost film, Nang Nak, and more recently the evocative films of director Aphichatpong Weerasethakul, who won a Palme D’Or award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. A perennially popular theme in Thai cinema is that of haunting by a female ghost. In this unique, unusual book, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and...

In his most new book Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2018), Clarence Taylor, dean of the history of the civil rights movement in New York, looks at black resistance to police brutality in the city, and institutional efforts to hold the NYPD accountable, since the late 1930s and '40s. ​“Many people think that police brutality...

How and why did public opinions about gay marriage shift? In his new book, The Gay Marriage Generation: How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture (New York University Press, 2018), Peter Hart-Brinson explores this question and more through public opinion data and interviews with two generations of Americans. By using these mixed methods of analysis, Hart-Brinson dissects generational cha...

From Dancing with the Stars to the high-profile airport abandonment of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev by his American adoptive parents in April 2010, popular representations of post-Soviet immigrants in America span the gamut of romantic anti-Communist origin stories to horror stories of transnational adoption of children from Russia. In her latest...

The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to g...

In his new book, Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (NYU Press, 2018), James Bielo, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, goes behind the scenes at Grant County, Kentucky’s creationist theme park, which opened in July 2016. Entertainment has long been understood as important aspect of Christianity in the US, but the theme park, which includes a re-creation of...

The story of Muslims in America has primarily been told through the experiences of men and often revolves around narratives of immigration. Sylvia Chan-Malik, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, expands upon and challenges this scholarly pattern in Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (NYU Press, 2018). Chan-Ma...

Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York University Press, 2018), edited by Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross, examines the conflict and interplay between settler and indigenous laws in the New World. As British and Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and legality played out against on...

How are the vulnerabilities of older adults in need of care and their care workers intertwined? In Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care (New York University Press, 2018), Elana Buch considers this question and more. Using ethnographic methods, Buch enters the homes and lives of older adults who are receiving home care services in addition to becoming a part of two...

Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man is a milestone of American literature and the idea of invisibility has become a key way for understanding social marginalization. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press, 2017), M. Cooper Harriss, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, explores the theological dimensions of invisibility within the intersec...

A wave of religious leaders in black communities in the early twentieth-century insisted that so-called Negroes were, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or a raceless children of God. In New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017), historian of religion Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay in how they reje...

The café, long a European institution, was also a stimulant and a refuge for European Jewish culture. In cities across Europe, and later in Palestine, Israel, and the United States, Jewish journalists, poets, and thinkers gathered in cafés to socialize, argue, create, and simply to be in a space that welcomed them. In A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press, 2018), Shachar...

In Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India (NYU Press, 2016), Daisy Deomampo explores relationships between Indian surrogates, their families, aspiring parents from all over the world, egg donors and doctors in a setting marked by hierarchies of income, race, nationality and gender. Based on three years of fieldwork in Mumbai, India, Deomampo shows how assisted...

A rapidly growing number of Americans are embracing life outside the bounds of organized religion. Although the United States has long been viewed as a fervently religious Christian nation, survey data shows that more and more Americans are identifying as “not religious.” Drs. Joseph Baker and Buster Smith claim that despite there being more non-religious Americans than ever before, social scienti...

Today we are joined by Gregory Snyder, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), and author of Skateboarding LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding (New York University Press, 2017). In Skateboarding LA, Snyder explores the world of professional street skateboarding in order to explain...

In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationsh...

Christopher Grobe’s The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (New York University Press, 2017) traces the ways the performance of confession permeated and transformed a wide range of media in postwar America. Grobe explores how confession—from the confessional poets of the 1960s to contemporary reality TV—is both constructed and authentic, artful even in its...

In Keywords for Latina/o Studies (NYU Press, 2017) editors Deborah Vargas, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes engage many of the fields top scholars in a critical and generative dialogue surrounding the primary concepts and themes that shape the dynamic and interdisciplinary field of Latina/o Studies. Through sixty-three short but informative essays, Keywords for Latina/o Studie...

In her book, Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead (NYU Press, 2017), Jessica M. Fishman examines how death is presented in the media. Researching how media outlets present images of death over the past 30 years, Fishman explores the controversial practice of picturing the dead. Fishman presents the varying ways the press selects the images they choose to use, the way the...

There is no such thing as religious freedom, or at least just one understanding of what that means. That’s the crux of the argument in Finbarr Curtis’ (Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University), The Production of American Religious Freedom (NYU Press, 2016). Americans are fixated on freedom and saturated in religion but define the concepts in various ways. The production of religious fre...

Citizenship, identity, and legitimacy are the cornerstones of Ricardo A. Herrera’s book, For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861 (New York University Press, 2015). Drawing from hundreds of letters, memoirs, editorials, and contemporary books, Herrera examines why America’s first generations of soldiers–regulars, volunteers, and militia–were compelled to serve, and...

Is there one principal avenue of exploration that could lead to the very heart of the religious experience? For David L. Weddle, professor emeritus of Religion at Colorado College, that way in is the practice of ritual sacrifice. In his new book, Sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York University Press, 2017) Weddle conducts a comparative study of the practice and the social signif...

Why do we have sex-segregated restrooms? Are they necessary? What about your drivers license? Have you thought of why your designated sex category is listed, despite your picture and all other relevant information present? Heath Fogg Davis, in his new book Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter? (New York University Press, 2017) , argues that these policies are not only unnecessary but harmful to achiev...

In this podcast I talk with Tracy A. Thomas about her book Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law (New York University Press, 2016). Professor Thomas is the John F. Seiberling Chair of Constitutional Law and Director of the Constitutional Law Center at the University of Akron School of Law. She is also editor of the Gender and the Law Prof Blog.