The University of Chicago Press Podcast

Is the existence of truth coming to a screeching halt? Does truth still exist? In Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dr. Thomas F. Gieryn takes time to explain how place informs truth. During this interview Dr. Gieryn offers an in-depth explanation of how history and biography have fed the narratives told about truth-spots. Dr. Gieryn presents us with...

With at least one new billionaire in the 2020 presidential race, the politics of the one percent are with us again. What do billionaires believe? And do they believe the same things as the average American? Answering these questions has until now been frustrated by the difficulty of fielding surveys of the very rich. Just finding where they live is hard enough. But a new book has solved part of th...

Music lovers and researchers alike have long been fascinated by the story of Ludwig van Beethoven who became profoundly deaf as an adult and could not hear some of his most famous compositions including the Ninth Symphony. Many people have written about Beethoven’s deafness and speculated how he might have been able to compose despite his disability. Robin Wallace, however, is the first musicologi...

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. In Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2018), anthropologist Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the Malaysian state, led by the central bank, is seeking to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur the central node of global financial activity co...

At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Pamela E. Klassen retalls Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment in her newest book, The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary's Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Following D...

As public knowledge grows of the Chinese state’s subjugation of the central Asian region of Xinjiang, many may find themselves wondering what Beijing’s interest in this distant region is in the first place. Judd Kinzley’s new book Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands(University of Chicago Press, 2018) goes a long way to answering this and many other relat...

In what is sure to become a classic, Radhika Govindrajan’s Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (University of Chicago Press, 2018) mobilizes the thematic of “interspecies relatedness” to explore a variety of human/non-human animal encounters in contemporary India. Animal Intimacies is a path paving work that combines theoretical innovation and playfulness, ethn...

I don’t mean to make a scene, but please open your eyes and look around. There are complex scenes everywhere and we have all served witness to them. A scene is an experience in which we feel connected to other people. Scenes also cultivate skills, create ambiances, and nourish communities. In Scenescapes: How Qualities of Place Shape Social Life(University of Chicago Press, 2016), Daniel Aaron Sil...

Few who have visited India in the past two decades will have failed to noticed the sudden and spectacular urban transformation that has taken place in many of its cities. Gated residential complexes with tennis courts and indoor gyms, glitzy office buildings, gleaming five-star hotels, and of course air-conditioned malls have become ubiquitous as the new face of a “new” India, often understood as...

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question American physiologist Walter Cannon first asked in 1926: “Why don’t we die daily?” In the erudite chapters that follow, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers explore how practitioners and theorists working durin...

It is certain that we all will experience death in our life. What is less certain is how and where our bodies will be disposed of. In Is the Cemetery Dead? (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Dr. David Charles Sloane discussed how cemeteries have transformed across time and place. He also explores alternative methods to dispose of the human body and commemorate loved ones. Dr. Sloane explores the...

In Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Shobita Parthasarathy takes us through a thirty year history of the legal debates around patents. This is an understudied area of STS that Parthasarathy carefully navigates in order to understand how knowledge production interacts with law. The reader learns the dif...

Magical thinking lies at the heart of J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood’s new book, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Oliver is professor of political science at the University of Chicago and Wood is assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University. In the book, they argue that our intuitions and differences in whe...

Today we talked with Ching Kwan Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has just published The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2018), an amazing new book based on her field study in Africa where she investigated the Chinese investments. The book is extremely interesting for its methodolog...

Most people have heard of the Masters of Fine Arts–“MFA”–degree, but few know about the grueling process one must undergo to complete one. In Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education (University of Chicago Press, 2018), sociologist and ethnographer Dr. Gary Alan Fine asks how MFA students learn to make art and to speak intelligently about their work, how th...

Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2018) charts a “profound shift in attitude toward foreign technology” between the 16th century (when European devices arrived in Japan) and reforms to the tradit...

Compared to the provinces’s native Uyghur population, Han Chinese settlers in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have not attracted as much scholarly or indeed journalistic attention of late. But in a profoundly troubled and troubling present for Xinjiang, one that is thankfully now gaining somewhat more notice from concerned parties... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a...

Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018) curates fifteen objects that might serve as evidence of a future past. From a jar of sand to a painting of a goanna, the contributions to this edited collection invite curiosity, care and wonder in their meditations on these objects of the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Res...

Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of being strongly narrative-driven. Peter James Hudson’s Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (University of Chicago Press, 2017) defies this stereotype. An examination of private lending in the Caribbean by North American bankers be...

On this American Political Science Association special podcast, we welcome a special guest host – and former guest of the podcast – Andy Lewis. In addition to his recent book, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics, Andy is a contributor to the Religion in Public blog and is associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. Andy and I had the real pleasure to ta...

How did prisons become a tool of racial inequality? Using historical data, Heather Schoenfeld’s new book Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2018) “answers how the United States became a nation of prisons and prisoners” (p. 5). Schoenfeld exposes the reader to the historical development of prisons and policy development. She focuses...

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, 2017) examines the social and political history of how agricultural knowledge was created in the 19th century. Over the course of the 19th century, rural America transformed into the familiar arrangement of large scale, mechanized mono-cropping for distant markets. Nowhere was this more evident than in...

Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening back to the aspirations of Enlightenment empiricists, who sought to establish for the collection of sense data what astronomers had done for the movements of heavenly bodies, they appeal to a general consensus that the acceleration of data collection...

Ever go backpacking through Europe? In Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Richard Ivan Jobs traces the postwar cultural history of the making of Europe through the stories and perspectives of the young people who moved across the continent’s borders. A history of European integration from the end of the Second World War to the 1992 Treaty...

How should we understand our new golden age of television? In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Martin Shuster, Director of Judaic Studies and Assistant Professor at Goucher College, interrogates New Television and offers both a defense and critique. Drawing on the work of the late Stanley Cavell, along with others including Hannah Arendt,...