From the late 1940s to the mid 1960s, Peru’s rapid industrialization and anti-communist authoritarianism coincided with the rise of mass-produced cookbooks, the first televised cooking shows, glossy lifestyle magazines, and imported domestic appliances and foodstuffs. Amy Cox Hall’s The Taste of Nostalgia (U Texas Press, 2025) uses taste as a thema…

Uncovers what Christian seminaries taught about Islam in their formative years Throughout the nineteenth century, Islam appeared regularly in the curricula of American Protestant seminaries. Islam was not only the focus of Christian missions, but was studied as part of the history of the Church as well as in the new field of comparative religions. …

Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans. Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2025), two centuries of history and the 25 years since the fall of Slobodan Milošević tell a more nuanced…

Second Temple Judaism is one of the more exciting burgeoning fields in biblical studies. Now, with T&T Clark's two-volume Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism, anyone can have a wealth of knowledge literally at their fingertips. Tune in as we speak with Daniel Gurtner, an editor and contributor to the encyclopedia, as we speak about this outstandi…

Boaters of London is an ethnography that delves into the process of becoming a boater, adopting an alternative lifestyle on the water and the political impact that this travelling population has on the state. London and the Southeast of England in general is home to many people and families who live on narrowboats, cruisers and barges, along a netw…

This book poses the question: How relevant is the concept of war today? Professor Andrew Clapham of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva examines how notions about war continue to influence how we conceive rights and obligations in national and international law. It considers the role international law plays in …

In this episode of Radio ReOrient, Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan spoke to Dr Yunis Alam about cars, class and race. They discussed the role that cars play in signifying meaning in terms of status, wealth and taste. These conversations extended to the racialization of car culture in cities like Bradford (UK) and the relationship to criminalization …

In this exciting interview, I talk to author-illustrator Selina Alko about the new book which she illustrated, The Keeper of Stories (Simone & Schuster, 2025), written by Caroline Kusin Pritchard), her own picture book celebrating the life and art of Joni Mitchell (Joni: The Lyrical Life of Joni Mitchell (HarperCollins, 2020)), her upcoming books, …

We kick off Season 9: TECH by talking with our very own Aarthi Vadde, the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Hosts and co-producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Aarthi about the role of the novel in relation to the mass writing platforms that dominate our digital lives. Aarthi is at work on a book called We the Pla…

In 1945 to 1946, postwar India was enthralled by the treason trial of three officers—formerly of the Indian National Army, who fought against the British in the Second World War. The trial sparked outrage across the country, among ordinary people, members of the pro-independence movement and, worryingly for the British Raj, members of the Indian ar…

The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The busiest container port in the Western hemisphere, it claims one-sixth of all US ocean shipping. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected …

Peter Brown's fascinating Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton UP, 2014) chronicles the changing conceptions of wealth and treasure in late antiquity and the first centuries of Christianity. For our 2020 series in the rise of money (we also spoke to Thomas Piketty a…

Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain (Bloomsbury, 2021) provides a multifaceted and approachable introduction to theoretical neuroscience. It discusses some major topics of the field, including both the milestones from their history and the currently open questions. It's accessible …

In Anatomy of a Psychotic Experience (Ipbooks, 2022), psychoanalyst Richard Reichbart recounts a psychotic experience when he was in his thirties juxtaposing an account written a few years after the experience with reflections made decades later. This unique work captures both the subjective experience of a particular kind of psychosis, and the ana…

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited one of her co-editors, Dr Ian Rowen, to talk about their forthcoming book publication, A Taiwanese Eco-literature Reader, soon to be published by Columbia University Press. This anthology brings together translations of nine compelling stories from Taiwan, examining Taiwan’s most vibrant literary genre and…

Sri Krishna Prem: A Wing and a Prayer is an in-depth, spiritual biography of a British fighter pilot (WW I), Ronald Nixon (1898-1965). Raised in an intellectually vibrant family, educated at Cambridge, he had a religious experience during one of his flights as a RAF pilot, and when the war ended, he embarked on a religious/philosophical journey tha…

Our book is: Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized (U Michigan Press, 2025), by Dr. Shiri Noy, which tackles the how, what, and why of project management. It offers step-by-step guidance on choosing tools and developing a personalized system that will help the reader manage and organize their resear…

In The People of the Book and the Camera: Photography in the Hebrew Novel (Syracuse UP, 2022), Amihay offers a pioneering study of the unique nexus between literature and photography in the works of Hebrew authors. Exploring the use of photography--both as a textual element and through the inclusion of actual images-- Amihay shows how the presence …

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat and Neil Roberts have edited a new collection of essays, Creolizing Hannah Arendt. This edited volume dives into Hannah Arendt’s thinking while also pushing the understanding and ways that Arendt has influenced political theory, philosophy, and politics. The idea of “creolizing,” especially philosophic or theoretical work, is t…

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing …

Questions about the meaning of womanhood and femininity loomed large in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French culture. In Playing Cleopatra: Inventing the Female Celebrity in Third Republic France (LSU Press, 2024), Dr. Holly Grout uses the theater—specifically, Parisian stage performances of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra by Sarah Bern…

This week on Madison’s Notes, we continue our discussion with Stephen Macedo, co-author of In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton UP, 2025). The book examines the institutional failures during the pandemic, including the politicization of science, inconsistent messaging, and the disproportionate impacts of policies. We cover key que…

A panoramic new history of the revolutionary decades between 1760 and 1825, from North America and Europe to Haiti and Spanish America, showing how progress and reaction went hand in hand. The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, top…

The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) offers readers new ways to talk about the climate crisis that will help get fossil fuels out of our economy and save our planet. It's an analysis of the current discourse of American climate politics, but also a critical history of the terms that most directly influence the way not just conservativ…

From Cape Town to Bristol and Richmond, statues have become sites of resistance and contestation of our imperial past and postcolonial present. The Psychic Lives of Statues by Rahul Rao offers an insightful exploration of these global controversies, demonstrating that beneath their surface lie deeper struggles over race, caste, and the politics of …

Punjab Sounds (Routledge, 2024) nuances our understanding of the region's imbrications with sound. It argues that rather than being territorially bounded, the region only emerges in 'regioning', i.e., in words, gestures, objects, and techniques that do the region. Regioning sound reveals the relationship between sound and the region in three interl…

Over the past decade Micaiah Carter has established himself as one of the most exciting and admired young photographers working in the field of portraiture and fashion. With a vision all his own, Carter's images are preternaturally sophisticated. His lighting is intentional but not attention-seeking, and his subjects always seem fully themselves, w…