Shows
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfYing Qian's Revolutionary BecomingsIn 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.
2025-11-2433 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfHamid Dabashi's The Persian PrinceIn 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 empires across time and space.
2024-09-2331 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAlessandra Russo's A New AntiquityIn 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.
2024-09-1629 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAna Fernández-Cebrián's Fables of DevelopmentIn 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.
2024-09-0928 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAnoordha Iyer Siddiqi's Architecture of MigrationIn 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.
2024-08-2633 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfEllen Morris's Famine and Feast in Ancient EgyptIn 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.
2024-08-1929 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfRyan Carr's Samson OccomIn 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
2024-08-1230 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfEleanor Johnson's Waste and the WastersIn 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.
2024-08-0531 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMarie Myung-Ok Lee's The Evening HeroIn 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.
2023-09-1132 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfSarah Zukerman Daly's Violent VictorsIn 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.
2023-09-0530 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAnnie Pfeifer's To The Collector Belong The SpoilsIn 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.
2023-08-2832 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMichele M Moody-Adams's Making Space For JusticeMichele 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 effective practice—and should be transformative for political thought as well as for political activism.
2023-08-2129 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfLauren Robertson's Entertaining Uncertainty In The Early Modern TheatreIn 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.
2023-08-1429 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfBruce Robbins's Criticism and PoliticsIn 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.
2023-08-0731 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAndreas Huyssen's Memory Art in the Contemporary WorldIn 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 terror, and civil war.
2023-07-3130 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfNadia Abu El-Haj's Combat TraumaIn 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.
2023-07-2429 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfIsabel Huacuja Alonso's Radio For The MillionsIn 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
2023-07-2427 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMae Ngai's The Chinese QuestionIn 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.
2023-02-0627 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfNicholas Bartlett's Recovering HistoriesIn 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.
2023-01-2320 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfJeremy Dauber's American ComicsIn 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.
2023-01-1725 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfArden Hegele's Romantic AutopsyIn 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.
2023-01-0930 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfRoosevelt Montás's Rescuing SocratesIn episode three of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Roosevelt Montás's Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum and how four authors had a profound impact on Montás’s life.
2023-01-0227 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfDavid Freedberg's IconoclasmIn episode two of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights David Freedberg's Iconoclasm. Freedberg combines fresh thinking with deep expertise to address the renewed significance of iconoclasm, its ideologies, and its impact.
2022-12-2625 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfSusan Bernofsky's Clairvoyant of the SmallIn episode one of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Susan Bernofsky's Clairvoyant of the Small. In an immaculately researched and beautifully written biography, Susan Bernofsky sets Robert Walser in the context of early twentieth-century European history, establishing him as one of the most important modernist writers.
2022-12-1925 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfFrank Andre Guridy's The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American AthleticsIn the 1960s and 1970s, America experienced a sports revolution. New professional sports franchises and leagues were established, new stadiums were built, football and basketball grew in popularity, and the proliferation of television enabled people across the country to support their favorite teams and athletes from the comfort of their homes. At the same time, the civil rights and feminist movements were reshaping the nation, broadening the boundaries of social and political participation. The Sports Revolution tells how these forces came together in the Lone Star State.
Tracing events from the end of Jim Crow to the 1980s, Frank Guridy...
2021-06-0930 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfChris Washburne's Latin Jazz: The Other JazzJazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.
2021-05-2639 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfKaiama L. Glover's A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly BeingHosted by Olivia Branscum and Timothy Lundy, this week's episode features Kaiama L. Glover's A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being.
In A Regarded Self Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation. The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the co...
2021-03-2425 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfDustin Stewart's Futures of Enlightenment PoetryThis book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice.
2021-03-0329 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfJack Halberstam's Wild Things: The Disorder of DesireIn Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity's orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide variety of texts, practices, and cultural imaginaries—from zombies, falconry, and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and the career of Irish anticolonial revolutionary Ro...
2021-02-1735 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMatthew Hart's Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary FictionThe future of fiction is neither global nor national. Instead, Matthew Hart argues, it is trending extraterritorial. Extraterritorial spaces fall outside of national borders but enhance state power. They cut across geography and history but do not point the way to a borderless new world. They range from the United Nations headquarters and international waters to CIA black sites and the departure zones at international airports. The political geography of the present, Hart shows, has come to resemble a patchwork of such spaces.
Hart reveals extraterritoriality’s centrality to twenty-first-century art and fiction. He shows how extraterritorial fictions expose the wa...
2021-01-2725 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfEugenia Lean's Vernacular Industrialism in ChinaIn 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 technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a cult...
2021-01-1434 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfCasey Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick's At the CenterAt a time when American political and cultural leaders asserted that the nation stood at “the center of world awareness,” thinkers and artists sought to understand and secure principles that lay at the center of things. From the onset of the Cold War in 1948 through 1963, they asked: What defined the essential character of “American culture”? Could permanent moral standards guide human conduct amid the flux and horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self emerge through the life cycle? Could scientific method rescue truth from error, illusion, and myth? Are there key elements to democracy, to the integrity of a soc...
2020-12-1639 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfDeborah Paredez's Year of the DogIn the tradition of women as the unsung keepers of history, Deborah Paredez’s second poetry collection tells her story as a Latina daughter of the Vietnam War. The title refers to the year 1970—the Year of the Metal Dog in the lunar calendar—which was the year of the author’s birth, the year her father prepared to deploy to Vietnam along with many other Mexican-American immigrant soldiers, and a year of tremendous upheaval across the United States. Images from iconic photographs and her father’s snapshots are incorporated, fragmented, scrutinized, and reconstructed throughout the collection as Paredez recalls untold sto...
2020-12-0929 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfElleni Centime Zeleke's Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals where they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement’s afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society in order to ask: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and indigenization of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context; and, importantly, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Af...
2020-12-0236 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMaggie Cao's The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century AmericaNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America examines the dissolution of landscape painting in the late nineteenth-century United States. Maggie M. Cao explores the pictorial practices that challenged, mourned, or revised the conventions of landscape painting, a major cultural project for nineteenth-century Americans. Through rich analysis of artworks at the genre’s unsettling limits—landscapes that self-destruct, masquerade as currency, or even take flight—Cao shows that experiments in landscape played a crucial role in the American encounter with m...
2020-10-2120 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAdam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the WorldNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
From a prizewinning economic historian, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today.
In September 2008 President George Bush could still describe the financial crisis as an incident local to Wall Street. In fact it was a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and...
2020-10-1429 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfWael Hallaq's Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern KnowledgeNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
In this landmark theoretical investigation, Wael B. Hallaq reevaluates and deepens the critique of Orientalism in order to deploy it for rethinking the foundations of the modern project. Refusing to isolate or scapegoat Orientalism, Restating Orientalism extends the critique to other fields, from law, philosophy, and scientific inquiry to core ideas of academic thought such as sovereignty and the self. Hallaq traces their involvement in colonialism, mass annihilation, and systematic destruction of the natural world, interrogating and historicizing the...
2020-10-0724 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAdam Reich and Peter Bearman's Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at WalmartNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce—young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one possible future of work—Walmartism—in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers’ ability to control their working conditions and their lives.
In Working for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how workers make sense of their jobs at places l...
2020-09-3027 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfClaudio Lomnitz's Nuestra América: utopía y persistencia de una familia judíaNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Claudio Lomnitz's most recent book, Nuestra América, is an essay on the story of his maternal grandparents-- and to some degree the story of his father. It starts with a shipwreck, a story of language loss. A reflection on why he lacks four of the languages that would have been of great use to properly write this book. And it works from that low point toward reunion with his past, in a sustained reflection on Jewish history, the d...
2020-09-2336 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMaria Victoria Murillo & Ernesto Calvo's Non-Policy PoliticsNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Calvo and Murillo consider the non-policy benefits that voters consider when deciding their vote. While parties advertise policies, they also deliver non-policy benefits in the form of competent economic management, constituency service, and patronage jobs. Different from much of the existing research, which focuses on the implementation of policy or on the delivery of clientelistic benefits, this book provides a unified view of how politicians deliver broad portfolios of policy and non-policy benefits to their constituency. The authors' theory...
2020-09-1626 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfWill Slauter's Who Owns the News: A History of CopyrightNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
You can't copyright facts, but is news a category unto itself? Without legal protection for the "ownership" of news, what incentive does a news organization have to invest in producing quality journalism that serves the public good? This book explores the intertwined histories of journalism and copyright law in the United States and Great Britain, revealing how shifts in technology, government policy, and publishing strategy have shaped the media landscape.
Publishers have long sought to treat news as exclusive...
2020-09-0940 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfIlana Feldman's Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee PoliticsNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Palestinian refugees’ experience of protracted displacement is among the lengthiest in history. In her breathtaking new book, Ilana Feldman explores this community’s engagement with humanitarian assistance over a seventy-year period and their persistent efforts to alter their present and future conditions. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic field research, Life Lived in Relief offers a comprehensive account of the Palestinian refugee experience living with humanitarian assistance in many spaces and across multiple generations. By exploring the complex world cons...
2020-09-0223 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMurad Idris' War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic ThoughtNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Peace is a universal ideal, but its political life is a great paradox: "peace" is the opposite of war, but it also enables war. If peace is the elimination of war, then what does it mean to wage war for the sake of peace? What does peace mean when some say that they are committed to it but that their enemies do not value it? Why is it that associating peace with other ideals, like justice, friendship, security, and...
2020-09-0218 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfGil Eyal's The Crisis of ExpertiseNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of th...
2020-08-2627 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMariusz Kozak's Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New MusicNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
What is musical time? Where is it manifested? How does it enter into our experience, and how do we capture it in our analyses? A compelling approach among works on temporality, phenomenology, and the ecologies of the new sound worlds, Enacting Musical Time argues that musical time is itself the site of the interaction between musical sounds and a situated, embodied listener, created by the moving bodies of participants engaged in musical activities. Author Mariusz Kozak describes musical time...
2020-08-1926 min
The Palestine PodcastPalestine Podcast #46: ‘Systemic Racism in the US and Israel’In this episode of The Palestine Podcast we hear an urgent, informative and disturbing discussion between Nadia Abu El-Haj, Johanna Fernández, Maha Nassar and Nahla Abdo about racial policing, systemic racism and settler-colonial repression in the United States and the Apartheid state of Israel.
Recent police violence in the US has sparked anti-racism protests around the world and ignited a discussion of systemic racism within many societies and political systems. Despite major differences in the regimes of oppression and discrimination in the US and Israel, certain parallels exist and serve to shed light on both systems. I...
2020-07-211h 34
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfJennifer Wenzel's The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World LiteratureNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming.The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world...
2020-06-1827 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfStephanie McCurry's Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil WarNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
When the war broke out, Union soldiers assumed Confederate women would be innocent noncombatants. Experience soon challenged this simplistic belief. Through a trio of dramatic stories, Stephanie McCurry reveals the vital and sometimes confounding roles women played on and off the battlefield. We meet Clara Judd, a Confederate spy whose imprisonment for treason sparked heated controversy, defying the principle of civilian immunity and leading to lasting changes in the laws of war. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved women escaped...
2020-06-1226 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMarianne Hirsch & Leo Spitzer's School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing DifferenceNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even in repressive historical and political contexts. School Photos in Liquid Time offers a closer look at this genre of vernacular photography, tracing how photography advances ideologies of social assimilation as well as those of hierarchy and exclusion. In Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s de...
2020-06-0529 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfSarah Cole's Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth CenturyNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
In Inventing Tomorrow, Sarah Cole provides a definitive account of Wells’s work and ideas. She contends that Wells casts new light on modernism and its values: on topics from warfare to science to time, his work resonates both thematically and aesthetically with some of the most ambitious modernists. At the same time, unlike many modernists, Wells believed that literature had a pressing place in public life, and his works reached a wide range of readers. While recognizing Wells’s li...
2020-05-2934 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfBrendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi's Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, & the Pursuit of JusticeNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Shadows of Doubt reveals how deeply stereotypes distort our interactions, shape crime, and deform the criminal justice system. If you’re a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a police officer, how afraid are you of the young man you’re about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial detention? As a juror, does the defendant seem guilty to you? Your answ...
2020-05-2220 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfSharon Marcus' The Drama of CelebrityNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
In this fascinating and deeply researched book, Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession with fame. Icons are not merely famous for being famous; the media alone cannot make or break stars; fans are not simply passive dupes. Instead, journalists, the public, and celebrities themselves all compete, passionately and expertly, to shape the stories we tell about celebrities and fans. The result: a high-stakes drama as endless as it is unpredictable.
2020-05-1523 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfStathis Gourgouris' The Perils of the OneNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
In The Perils of the One, Stathis Gourgouris offers a philosophical anthropology that confronts the legacy of “monarchical thinking”: the desire to subjugate oneself to unitary principles and structures, whether political, moral, theological, or secular. In wide-ranging essays that are at once poetic and polemical, intellectual and passionate, Gourgouris reads across politics and theology, literary and art criticism, psychoanalysis and feminism in a critique of both political theology and the metaphysics of secularism. He engages with a range of figu...
2020-05-0828 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfNara B. Milanich's Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the FatherNew Books at SOF/Heyman: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
The new science of paternity, with methods such as blood typing, fingerprinting, and facial analysis, would bring clarity to the conundrum of fatherhood—or so it appeared. Suddenly, it would be possible to establish family relationships, expose adulterous affairs, locate errant fathers, unravel baby mix-ups, and discover one’s true race and ethnicity. Tracing the scientific quest for the father up to the present, with the advent of seemingly foolproof DNA analysis, Nara Milanich shows that the effort to esta...
2020-05-0143 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfJames Zetzel's Critics, Compilers, and Commentators: An Introduction to Roman PhilologyNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
"To teach correct Latin and to explain the poets" were the two standard duties of Roman teachers. Not only was a command of literary Latin a prerequisite for political and social advancement, but a sense of Latin's history and importance contributed to the Romans' understanding of their own cultural identity. Put plainly, philology-the study of language and texts-was important at Rome. Critics, Compilers, and Commentators is the first comprehensive introduction to the history, forms, and texts of Roman...
2019-09-0450 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfNico Baumbach's Cinema/Politics/PhilosophyNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies film theory to reconsider: What...
2019-09-0439 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfPier Mattia Tommasino's The Venetian Qur'an: A Renaissance Companion to IslamNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
An anonymous book appeared in Venice in 1547 titled L'Alcorano di Macometto, and, according to the title page, it contained "the doctrine, life, customs, and laws [of Mohammed] . . . newly translated from Arabic into the Italian language." Were this true, L'Alcorano di Macometto would have been the first printed direct translation of the Qur'an in a European vernacular language. The truth, however, was otherwise. As soon became clear, the Qur'anic sections of the book—about half the volume—were in fact...
2019-08-0721 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfKonstantina Zanou's Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean investigates the long process of transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states by narrating the biographies of a group of people who were born within empires but came of age surrounded by the emerging vocabulary of nationalism, much of which they themselves created.
It is the story of a generation of intellectuals and political thinkers from the Ionian Islands who experienced the collapse of the Republic of Venice and...
2019-07-2419 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfHamid Dabashi's The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World LiteratureNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature
By: Hamid Dabashi
The Shahnameh, an epic poem recounting the foundation of Iran across mythical, heroic, and historical ages, is the beating heart of Persian literature and culture. Composed by Abu al-Qasem Ferdowsi over a thirty-year period and completed in the year 1010, the epic has entertained generations of readers and profoundly shaped Persian culture, society, and politics. For a millennium, Iranian and Persian-speaking people around the globe have read, memorized...
2019-07-1032 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfBrinkley Messick's Shari'a Scripts: A Historical AnthropologyNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Shari'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology
By: Brinkley Messick
A case study in the textual architecture of the venerable legal and ethical tradition at the center of the Islamic experience, Sharīʿa Scripts is a work of historical anthropology focused on Yemen in the early twentieth century. There—while colonial regimes, late Ottoman reformers, and early nationalists wrought decisive changes to the legal status of the sharīʿa, significantly narrowing its sphere of relevance—the Zaydī school of jurisprudence, rooted in...
2019-06-2628 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfThe Trilling Tapes: Lauren BerlantIn the first episode of "The Trilling Tapes," the scholar Lauren Berlant talks live about her new project: an analysis about the affect of humorlessness in politics. Featuring the scholar Bruce Robbins as a guest interlocutor and host Olivia Rutigliano.
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University is home to the Lionel Trilling Seminars, established in 1976 to honor one of the most prominent cultural critics of the twentieth century and his decades-long career at Columbia. Trilling's legacy represents a broad-ranging critical engagement with literature and culture. Speakers in the series include such formidable public...
2019-06-2415 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAlan Stewart's The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early ModernNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
The Oxford History of Life Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern
By: Alan Stewart
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing.
2018-12-1123 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfEric Klinenberg's Palaces for the People (full event audio)New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn’t seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together, to find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done?
In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on...
2018-12-041h 35
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAna Paulina Lee's Mandarin Brazil; Race, Representation, and MemoryNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Mandarin Brazil; Race, Representation, and Memory
By: Ana Paulina Lee
In Mandarin Brazil, Ana Paulina Lee explores the centrality of Chinese exclusion to the Brazilian nation-building project, tracing the role of cultural representation in producing racialized national categories. Lee considers depictions of Chineseness in Brazilian popular music, literature, and visual culture, as well as archival documents and Brazilian and Qing dynasty diplomatic correspondence about opening trade and immigration routes between Brazil and China. In so doing, she reveals...
2018-12-0428 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfA Conversation with Cory Doctorow (full event audio)New Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
A special edition of our series, hear the full event featuring Cory Doctorow from September 2018.
Cory Doctorow and Dennis Tenen, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, have a conversation about science fiction, the changing material conditions of contemporary authorship, copyright, and surveillance.
2018-11-281h 05
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfSouleymane Bachir Diagne's Open to ReasonNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition
By: Souleymane Bachir Diagne
What does it mean to be a Muslim philosopher, or to philosophize in Islam? In Open to Reason, Souleymane Bachir Diagne traces Muslims’ intellectual and spiritual history of examining and questioning beliefs and arguments to show how Islamic philosophy has always engaged critically with texts and ideas both inside and outside its tradition. Through a rich reading of classical and modern Muslim philosophers, Di...
2018-11-2835 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfJoseph Howley's Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading CultureNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture: Text, Presence, and Imperial Knowledge in the Noctes Atticae
By: Joseph Howley
Long a source for quotations, fragments, and factoids, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius offers hundreds of brief but vivid glimpses of Roman intellectual life. In this book Joseph Howley demonstrates how the work may be read as a literary text in its own right, and discusses the rich evidence it provides for the ancient history of reading, thought, and...
2018-11-2832 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfErik Gray's The Art of Love PoetryNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
The Art of Love Poetry
By: Erik Gray
-The first volume to offer an integral theory of love poetry that explores why poetry is consistently associated with romantic love
-Offers close readings of numerous love poems to guide readers to a deeper appreciation of some of the world's most beautiful love lyrics
-Covers topics such as the poetic kiss, the lyric of conjugal love, and the role of animals in love poetry
-All non-English poems are given in...
2018-10-0919 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfCaitlin Gillespie's Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman BritainNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain
By: Caitlin Gillespie
In AD 60/61, Rome almost lost the province of Britain to a woman. Boudica, wife of the client king Prasutagus, fomented a rebellion that proved catastrophic for Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium (London), and Verulamium (St Albans), destroyed part of a Roman legion, and caused the deaths of an untold number of veterans, families, soldiers, and Britons. Yet with one decisive defeat, her vision of freedom was destroyed, and the Iceni never...
2018-10-0919 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfMark Taylor's Last Works: Lessons in LeavingNew Books at the Heyman Center: a podcast featuring audio from events at Columbia University, and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Living in the shadow of death may enhance the gift of life.
In 2006, Taylor (Religion/Columbia Univ.; Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left, 2014, etc.) developed an infection after a biopsy, resulting in septic shock that took a month to stabilize; five months later, he underwent surgery for cancer. That life-threatening experience, he reflects, was like “dying without dying,” and the last 10 years have seemed like “life after death for me,” a reprieve that mad...
2018-10-0927 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfJack Halberstam's Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender VariabilityNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability
by: Jack Halberstam
In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political...
2018-08-1556 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfBernard Harcourt's The CounterrevolutionNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States–one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of...
2018-08-1538 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfAndreas Wimmer's Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall ApartNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart
by: Andreas Wimmer
Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the forces that encourage political...
2018-08-1435 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfJenny Davidson's Reading Jane AustenNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Reading Jane Austen
by Jenny Davidson
Whether you're new to Austen's work or know it backwards and forwards already, this book provides a clear, full and highly engaging account of how Austen's fiction works and why it matters. Exploring new pathways into the study of Jane Austen's writing, novelist and academic Jenny Davidson looks at Austen's work through a writer's lens, addressing formal questions about narration, novel writing, and fictional composition...
2018-08-1432 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfDennis Tenen's Plain Text: The Poetics of ComputationNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation
by Dennis Tenen
This book challenges the ways we read, write, store, and retrieve information in the digital age. Computers—from electronic books to smart phones—play an active role in our social lives. Our technological choices thus entail theoretical and political commitments. Dennis Tenen takes up today's strange enmeshing of humans, texts, and machines to argue that our most ingrained intuitions about texts are prof...
2018-08-1452 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfBruce Robbins' The BeneficiaryNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
The Beneficiary
by Bruce Robbins
From iPhones and clothing to jewelry and food, the products those of us in the developed world consume and enjoy exist only through the labor and suffering of countless others. In his new book, Bruce Robbins examines the implications of this dynamic for humanitarianism and social justice. He locates the figure of the "beneficiary" in the history of humanitarian thought, which asks the prosperous to help...
2018-08-1323 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfNaor Ben-Yehoyada's The Mediterranean IncarnateNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
The Mediterranean Incarnate
by Naor Ben-Yehoyada
In The Mediterranean Incarnate, anthropologist Naor Ben-Yehoyada takes us aboard the Naumachos for a thirty-seven-day voyage in the fishing grounds between Sicily and Tunisia. He also takes us on a historical exploration of the past eighty years to show how the Mediterranean has reemerged as a modern transnational region. From Sicilian poaching in North African territory to the construction of the TransMediterranean gas pipeline, Ben-Yehoyada...
2018-08-0130 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfIrina Reyfman's How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of RanksNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks
by Irina Reyfman
In the eighteenth century, as modern forms of literature began to emerge in Russia, most of the writers producing it were members of the nobility. But their literary pursuits competed with strictly enforced obligations to imperial state service. Unique to Russia was the Table of Ranks, introduced by Emperor Peter the Great in 1722. Noblesse oblige was no...
2017-12-1226 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfLiza Knapp's Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy’s Labyrinth of PlotsNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy’s Labyrinth of Plots
by Liza Knapp
With its complex structure, Anna Karenina places special demands on readers who must follow multiple plotlines and discern their hidden linkages. In her well-conceived and jargon-free analysis, Liza Knapp offers a fresh approach to understanding how the novel is constructed, how it creates patterns of meaning, and why it is much more than Tolstoy’s version of an adultery stor...
2017-12-1224 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfPhilip Kitcher and Evelyn Fox Keller's The Seasons AlterNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
The Seasons Alter
by Philip Kitcher and Evelyn Fox Keller
A landmark work of environmental philosophy that seeks to transform the debate about climate change.
As the icecaps melt and the sea levels rise around the globe―threatening human existence as we know it―climate change has become one of the most urgent and controversial issues of our time. For most people, however, trying to understand the science, politics, and arguments on e...
2017-09-2027 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfTurkuler Isiksel's Europe’s Functional Constitution: A Theory of Constitutionalism beyond the StateNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Europe’s Functional Constitution: A Theory of Constitutionalism beyond the State
by Turkuler Isiksel
Constitutionalism has become a byword for legitimate government, but is it fated to lose its relevance as constitutional states relinquish power to international institutions? This book evaluates the extent to which constitutionalism, as an empirical idea and normative ideal, can be adapted to institutions beyond the state by surveying the sophisticated legal and political system of the Eu...
2017-05-1228 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfSouleymane Bachir Diagne's The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in AfricaNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa
by Souleymane Bachir Diagne
Discussant: Gary Wilder
What are the issues discussed today by African philosophers? Four important topics are identified here as important objects of philosophical reflection on the African continent. One is the question of ontology in relation to African religions and aesthetics. Another is the question of time and, in particular, of prospective thinking and development. A third...
2017-05-1245 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfJosef Sorett's Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial AestheticsNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics
by Josef Sorett
This edition features Associate Professor of Religion and African-American Studies Josef Sorett's new book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. Anne discusses Professor Sorett's book with Courtney Bender, Professor of Religion at Columbia University.
Most of the major black literary and cultural movements of the twentieth century have been understood and interpreted as secular...
2017-05-1227 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfThe Unplugged Soul: "Keynote Conversation With Chris Lydon And Dave Winer"A series of unprecedented freedoms – on demand software, discrete audiences, portable devices, cheap production costs, the bypassing of broadcast infrastructure and with it content restrictions – liberates the podcast from mass media's customary limitations, and podcasters are now making the most of their new territory. This conference ranges wide in its exploration of what amounts to a burgeoning new art form captivating listeners worldwide: the "impact bar" has never been higher in a culture brimming with content, but podcasters and producers have latched on to ancient verities of storytelling and the new mores of disclosure to win us over – to unplug the hy...
2017-04-131h 09
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfThe Unplugged Soul: A Conference on the Podcast: "In Microphones Begin Responsibilities"Hillary Frank (The Longest Shortest Time), “Podcasts Can Change the World (At Least a Little)”
Devon Taylor (Millennial), “New Ears”
Rachel Zucker (Commonplace), “Less and Less and Less Alone”
A series of unprecedented freedoms – on demand software, discrete audiences, portable devices, cheap production costs, the bypassing of broadcast infrastructure and with it content restrictions – liberates the podcast from mass media's customary limitations, and podcasters are now making the most of their new territory. This conference ranges wide in its exploration of what amounts to a burgeoning new art form captivating listeners worldwide: the "impact bar" has never been higher in a culture brimmi...
2017-04-121h 45
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfThe Unplugged Soul: "Get Close. Now Get Closer... Creating Audio Movies For The Mind"Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson (The Kitchen Sisters), “Get Close. Now Get Closer… Creating Audio Movies for the Mind"
A series of unprecedented freedoms – on demand software, discrete audiences, portable devices, cheap production costs, the bypassing of broadcast infrastructure and with it content restrictions – liberates the podcast from mass media's customary limitations, and podcasters are now making the most of their new territory. This conference ranges wide in its exploration of what amounts to a burgeoning new art form captivating listeners worldwide: the "impact bar" has never been higher in a culture brimming with content, but podcasters and producers have latched...
2017-04-1236 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfThe Unplugged Soul: A Conference on the Podcast: "Disrupting Story"Jeff Emtman (Here Be Monsters), “The Cult of the Story”
Bethany Jo Denton (Here Be Monsters), “A Case for the Minimalist Narrator”
Jonathan Hirsch (ARRVLS), “Storytelling vs Stenography: Truth and Narrative in the Age of Alternative Facts”
A series of unprecedented freedoms – on demand software, discrete audiences, portable devices, cheap production costs, the bypassing of broadcast infrastructure and with it content restrictions – liberates the podcast from mass media's customary limitations, and podcasters are now making the most of their new territory. This conference ranges wide in its exploration of what amounts to a burgeoning new art form captivating listeners worldwide: the "impact bar"...
2017-04-121h 19
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfRecent Work by Elizabeth Povinelli and Lila Abu-LughodNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, 30th Anniversary Edition, with a New Afterword by Lila Abu-Lughod
&
Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth Povinelli
This edition features Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology Elizabeth Povinelli's new book, "Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism," alongside the 30th Anniversary Edition of Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Anthropology Lila Abu-Lughod's book "Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society." Anne...
2017-03-0834 min
The SOF/Heyman BookshelfManan Ahmed's A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South AsiaNew Books in the Arts and Sciences at Columbia University: a podcast featuring audio from the New Books Series at Columbia University and interviews with the speakers and authors.
A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia
by Manan Ahmed
The question of how Islam arrived in India remains markedly contentious in South Asian politics. Standard accounts center on the Umayyad Caliphate’s incursions into Sind and littoral western India in the eighth century CE. In this telling, Muslims were a foreign presence among native Hindus, sowing the seeds of a mutual animosity that presaged the su...
2017-03-0829 min