University of Minnesota Press

Some attributes of the paranormal mind are dismissed as nonsense, but what can an exploration of pseudoscientific phenomena tell us about accepted scientific and cultural thought? In Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal , Derek Lee traces the evolution of psi epistemologies and uncovers how these ideas have migrated into scientific fields such as quantum physics an...

Sasha Davis, an activist and scholar of radical environmental advocacy, brings new hope for social justice movements by looking to progressive campaigns that have found success by unconventional means. From contesting environmental abuse to reasserting Indigenous sovereignty, these movements demonstrate how people can collectively wrest control over their communities from oppressive governments an...

From Get Out to The Babadook to Saint Maud : In his new book, Josh Gooch uses the horror film genre to expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism, drawing connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease. Here, Gooch is joined in conversation with Jo Isaacson. This episode contains spoilers for multiple films (list below). Access a transcript: http...

Between the World Wars, ideas about meaning, truth, and the ethics of persuasion informed newly articulated principles for combining word and image. The young field of graphic design developed quickly during this period, and photography played a central role as a visual language of modern life. The concept Typophoto was coined by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in...

From Plato and Derrida to anti-aging treatments, cryogenics, cloning, and whole-brain uploads, the dream of indefinite life is technological and, as Adam Rosenthal shows in Prosthetic Immortalities : a matter of prosthesis, the transformation of the original being. There can be no certainty of immortality and yet, the problem of immortality continues to haunt the soul. Rosenthal engages David Will...

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Alexander Menrisky, author of Everyday Ecofascism , shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. He illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of p...

The story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee—and its fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history—is the focus of Rose Miron’s award-winning book Indigenous Archival Activism . Miron’s research and writing are shaped by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations as part of her more-than-a-decade-long reciprocal relationship with the St...

Society has yet to fully grapple with the administrative chaos that has ensued from the growth of the urban. One such city allows tremendous insight into the process of urbanization in the new millennium: Bengaluru. During the past two decades, Bengaluru’s real estate sector and infrastructure investments have exploded in a massive transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded gr...

Tamara Dean's quest to live lightly on the planet in the midst of the environmental crises of our time led her to a landscape unlike any other: the Driftless area of Wisconsin, a region untouched by glaciers, marked by steep hills and deeply carved valleys, capped with forests and laced with cold, spring-fed streams. There she confronted, in ways large and small, the challenges of meeting basic ne...

Cities across the US are rethinking streets, going beyond sidewalks and bike lanes to welcome nonmotorists to share the roadway. David L. Prytherch, author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets , traces the historical evolution of America’s streets and explores contemporary movements to retake them from cars for diverse forms of mobility and community life. Can we design...

Cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the desire to write about animals and to write about art, juxtaposing the two and burrowing into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals. Here, Laird is joined in conversation with Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard, editors of the A...

“There is no such thing as a raw, natural, aggressive urge that underlies human violence. While we inherit defense mechanisms, they work only when triggered culturally.” So opens John Protevi’s Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology , which takes as its biocultural basis that social practices shape our bodies and minds, and analyzes human aggression throughout history: early nomadic...

Scholars have long challenged the common assumption of midwestern isolationism. In Global Heartland , historian Peter Simons reorients the way we look at the critical period in US history from the 1930s through 1950s, showing how farmers across the Midwest understood their work as contributing to an era of international upheaval, geographical reimagination, and global ecological thinking. Here, Si...

Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Arguing that the tense relation between trans oppression and resistance is mediated through the complex social phenomenon of gender make-believe, Bettcher introduces the groundbreaking theory of interperson...

​"Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks." How do we visualize something that cannot be physically seen? What limitations do existing knowledge structures impose that reverberate through planetary problem-solving processes, including public health and environmental crises? This episode brings together two scholars who think elementally: Lisa Yin Han, who operates in the blue humanities or oce...

There's living coral, and then there's Coral—the iconicity and imaginary of living coral. As Melody Jue writes in Coralations , coral alternates between signifying an organism and signifying an environment, all too often imagined as a tourist destination. In rethinking the limitations of Coral, Jue opens up possibilities for a more expansive sense of environmental media, more inclusive goals for m...

University of Minnesota Press, est. 1925, turns 100 this year. Yes, we are twice as old as Saturday Night Live. And just as old as The New Yorker and The Great Gatsby. The Press has had only five directors in its history, and many current staff have been on for more than a few decades. How about another serendipitous milestone: this podcast, est. 2020, is releasing its 100th episode right here, ri...

Between the 1850s and 1930s, before playhouses for children reached the mainstream, they were often fully functional cottages designed by well-known architects for British royalty, American industrialists, and Hollywood stars. Recognizing the playhouse in this era as a stage for the purposeful performance of upper-class identity, Abigail A. Van Slyck illuminates their role as carefully planned arc...

“If the public can predict you, it starts to like you. But the Marchesa didn’t want to be liked.” For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Marchesa Luisa Casati astounded Europe. Artists such as Man Ray painted, sculpted, and photographed her; writers such as Ezra Pound and Jack Kerouac praised her strange beauty. An Italian woman of means who questioned the traditional gender cod...

Microbes: We can’t see them, but we have no choice but to live with them. Microbes have significant, enduring impacts on human health and remind us to resist the abstraction of crucial forces in our everyday lives. Welcome to a multidisciplinary conversation about microbes, featuring Amber Benezra ( Gut Anthro ), Gloria Chan-Sook Kim ( Microbial Resolution ), and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer ( American D...

Humans are one species on a planet of millions of species. The literary collection Creature Needs is a project that grew out of a need to do something with grievous, anxious energy—an attempt to nourish the soul in a meaningful way, and an attempt to start somewhere specific in the face of big, earthly challenges and changes, to create a polyvocal call to arms about animal extinction and habitat l...

Public schools are one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—and are also some of our most unequal institutions. In Unsettling Choice , Ujju Aggarwal explores how the expansion of choice-based programs led to greater inequality and segregation in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood during the years following the Great Recession, mobilizing mechanisms rooted in mark...

The first major neo-Nazi party in the US was led by a science fiction fan. So opens Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness , a book that traces ideas about white nationalism through the entangled histories of science fiction culture and white supremacist politics, showing that debates about representation in science fiction films and literature are struggles over who has the right to imagine an...

Policy expert and climate scientist Anna Farro Henderson explores how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined in her new book, Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood . Grounded in her experience as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton, Henderson brings readers behind the closed doors of discovery a...

In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia, who passed away in 2023, traced how digital evangelism has driven a world...