The SOF/Heyman Bookshelf

Host highlights Rob King's Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger. Rob King uses Metzger’s work to explore what taste means and how it works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing frontiers of cultural acceptability.

In the final episode of the 2025 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials by Julie Stone Peters. This book shows that judges and accusers turned to performance, staging to create doctrines of proof: catching the criminal “in the acte”; establishing “notoriety of the fac...

Host highlights Hannah Weaver's Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past. In this volume, Weaver examines the medieval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorized as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy.

Host highlights Joseph Albernaz's Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community. With sharp close readings, new historical constellations, and innovative theoretical paradigms, Common Measures recasts the relationship of the Romantic period to the basic terms of modernity.

In our first episode of the 2025 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Ying Qian's Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China. This work studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements.

In the final episode of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights The Persian Prince: The Rise and Resurrection of an Imperial Archetype by Hamid Dabashi. This book articulates a bold new idea of the Persian Prince—a metaphor of political authority, a figurative ideal deeply rooted in the collective memories of multiple nations, and a literary construct that connected Muslim...

In episode six of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400–1600 by Alessandra Russo. Original and convincing, A New Antiquity is a pathbreaking study that disrupts existing conceptions of Renaissance art and early modern humanity.

In episode five of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967) by Ana Fernández-Cebrián. This book examines cultural fictions and social life at the time when Spain turned from autarchy to the project of industrial and tourist development.

In episode four of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives.

In episode three of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt by Ellen Morris. This work covers the creation and curation of social memory in pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt. Ancient, Classical, Medieval, and Ottoman sources attest to the horror that characterized catastrophic famines.

In episode two of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast by Ryan Carr. In this groundbreaking book, Ryan Carr argues that Occom’s writings were deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions of hospitality, diplomacy, and openness to strangers

In episode one of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Eleanor Johnson's Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England. The latest from the new SOF/Heyman board member is a groundbreaking examination of ecological thought in medieval England.

In episode nine of the second season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Marie Myung-Ok Lee's The Evening Hero. This sweeping, lyrical novel follows a Korean immigrant pursuing the American dream who must confront the secrets of the past or risk watching the world he’s worked so hard to build come crumbling down.

In episode eight of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Sarah Zukerman Daly's Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections. Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, Violent Victors links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war.

In episode seven of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation by Annie Pfeifer. Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past.

Michele M Moody-Adams's Making Space For Justice In episode six of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope by Michele M Moody-Adams. With this work, Dr. Moody-Adams contends that the insights arising from social movements are critical to bridging the gap between discerning theory and effectiv...

In episode five of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater: Stage Spectacle and Audience Response by Lauren Robertson. This original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular.

In episode four of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Bruce Robbins's Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction. This accessible introduction to cultural theory asks, "What is criticism for?" and presents an answer in the form of an original polemic about the purpose of criticism.

In episode three of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Andreas Huyssen's Memory Art in the Contemporary World: Confronting Violence in the Global South. Andreas Huyssen deals with the ever-expanding field of transnational memory art, which has emerged from a political need to come to terms with traumatic historical pasts, from the Holocaust to apartheid, colonialism, state...

In episode two of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Nadia Abu El-Haj's Combat Trauma. Nadia Abu El-Haj argues that in the American public’s imagination, the traumatized soldier stands in for destructive wars abroad, with decisive ramifications in the post-9/11 era.

In episode one of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Isabel Huacuja Alonso's Radio For The Millions. This stunning debut examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s

In episode seven of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics by Mae M. Ngai. The Chinese Question chronicles how Chinese migration to the world’s goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race.

In episode six of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China by: Nicholas Bartlett. Drawing on more than 18 months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of heroin recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present.

In episode five of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights American Comics: A History by Jeremy Dauber. American Comics is a rich chronicle of the last 150 years of American history through the lens of its comic strips, political cartoons, superheroes, graphic novels, and more.

In episode four of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading by Arden Hegele. Romantic Autopsy considers how the poetry and prose of British Romanticism was written in conversation with the field of medicine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.