Best Deanna Williams Podcasts (2024)

1
Deborah Parker, "Becoming Belle Da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters" (Villa I Tatti, 2024) 58:58

14m ago58:58

58:58

In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters (Harvard University Press, October 2024), Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal libraria…

1
Hannah Pollin-Galay, "Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) 1:00:00

1h ago1:00:00

1:00:00

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanisation of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurb…

1
Tyler W. Williams, "If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi" (Columbia UP, 2024) 44:32

3h ago44:32

44:32

In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with writ…

1
Vaughn Scribner, "Merpeople: A Human History" (Reaktion Books, 2020) 50:00

1d ago50:00

50:00

Vaughn Scribner joins Jana Byars on the occasion of the paperback edition of Merpeople: A Human History (Reaktion, 2024) People have been fascinated by merpeople and merfolk since ancient times. From the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and the film Splash, myths, stories, and legends of half-human, half-fis…

1
Sharonah Esther Fredrick, "An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript" (U Nebraska Press, 2024) 59:58

4d ago59:58

59:58

An Unholy Rebellion, Killing the Gods: Political Ideology and Insurrection in the Mayan Popul Vuh and the Andean Huarochiri Manuscript (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive comparison of two of the greatest epics of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America: the Popul Vuh of the Quiché Maya of Guatemala and the Huarochiri Ma…

1
Mary Lindemann and Deanna Shemek, "Redreaming the Renaissance: Essays on History and Literature in Honor of Guido Ruggiero" (U Delaware Press, 2024) 41:17

4d ago41:17

41:17

Redreaming the Renaissance: Essays on History and Literature in Honor Guido Ruggiero (University of Delaware Press, 2024) seeks to remedy the dearth of conversations between scholars of history and literary studies by building on the pathbreaking work of Guido Ruggiero to explore the cross-fertilization between these two disciplines, using the text…

1
Non-literary Fiction 14:30

5d ago14:30

14:30

In this episode of High Theory, Esther Gabara talks with us about Non-Literary Fiction, that is, works of fiction that belong to the world of contemporary art, rather than the world of contemporary literature. She focuses on literary and narrative strategies used by Latin American and Indigenous American artists to make “non-objective” forms of vis…

1
Texas Book Festival 2024: November 16-17 32:09

6d ago32:09

32:09

I spoke with Hannah Gabel, Literary Director of the Texas Book Festival. The Festival first began in 1995, and has since donated over $3.5 million to Texas public libraries and hundreds of thousands of books to students across the state. This year, more than 250 authors will speak and 40,000 people are expected to attend. The festival takes place i…

1
Roni Henig, "On Revival: Hebrew Literature Between Life and Death" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) 53:10

7d ago53:10

53:10

On Revival: Hebrew Literature Between Life and Death (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is a critique of one of the most important tenets of Zionist thinking: "Hebrew revival," or the idea that Hebrew--a largely unspoken language before the twentieth century--was revitalized as part of a broader national "revival" which ultimately led to the establishmen…

1
8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP) 30:20

7d ago30:20

30:20

What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Mad…

1
Roberto Morales-Harley, "The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater” (Open Book, 2024) 38:53

7d ago38:53

38:53

The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater (Open Book, 2024) presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recre…

1
Ep 210: A Narrator By Any Other Name (w/ Lessa Lamb) 1:11:09

9d ago1:11:09

1:11:09

Narrators work in an industry in which using a pseudonym is common practice. How common? And why? Lessa Lamb joins us at The Narrator Roundtable to discuss privacy, branding, and the outside pressures that influence narrator decision-making. View the results of the Narrator Pseudonym Survey. Find The Narrator Roundtable Website | BlueSky | X (Twitt…

1
Filippo Gianferrari, "Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Poetics" (Oxford UP, 2024) 51:29

8d ago51:29

51:29

In fourteenth-century Italy, literacy became accessible to a significantly larger portion of the lay population (allegedly between 60 and 80 percent in Florence) and provided a crucial means for the vernacularization and secularization of learning, and for the democratization of citizenship. In Dante's Education: Latin Schoolbooks and Vernacular Po…

1
Doyle D. Calhoun, "The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire" (Duke UP, 2024) 1:13:07

8d ago1:13:07

1:13:07

A note about content: This episode involves discussion of suicide, specifically in the contexts of slavery, colonization and empire. Please use your discretion and take care if you decide to listen. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, you are not alone. You can reach out to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 …

1
Hannah Weaver, "Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past" (Cornell UP, 2024) 53:49

10d ago53:49

53:49

In Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. Hannah Weaver examines the mediaeval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorised as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy. Instead, Weaver promot…

1
Jonathan A. Allan, "Uncut: A Cultural Analysis of the Foreskin" (U Regina Press, 2024) 32:51

12d ago32:51

32:51

The “uncut” penis is viewed by some as attractive or erotic, and by others as ugly or undesirable. Secular parents of male infants worry about whether or not the foreskin should be removed so their little boy can grow up to “look like dad” or to avoid imagined bullying in the locker room. Medical experts and public health organisations argue back a…

1
Thinking Machines: The First AI Takeover Story 33:50

12d ago33:50

33:50

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920). Čapek’s play invented the word “robot” and pioneered the genre of the AI uprising. The play - a clear influence on works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica – is a deep ruminatio…

1
The Case of Takara Hightower/Gregory HighTower 8:36

14d ago8:36

8:36

This episode is about Takara Hightower who was fatally shot by her husband Gregory Hightower as she was filing a domestic violence complaint against him as she held their baby . Follow along as I dive into the details of this case and what led to the murder of Takara Hightower Support the show Facebook ( Podcast Social media Link) Home / X(Podcast …

1
Jeff Walker 53:28

13d ago53:28

53:28

Get ready to dive deep into the mind of J. Walker, a multi-talented artist making waves in the hip-hop world. Not only a gifted rapper with a unique lyrical flow, Jeffrey is also a prolific writer, using his words to paint vivid pictures and explore the complexities of the human experience. This is a conversation you won't want to miss. Tune in to …

1
Georgia Henley, "Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales" (Oxford UP, 2024) 45:42

13d ago45:42

45:42

Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Georgia Henley considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of polit…

1
Angel Daniel Matos, "The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature" (Routledge, 2024) 1:16:54

13d ago1:16:54

1:16:54

The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature (Routledge, 2024) is a provocative meditation on emotion, mood, history, and futurism in the critique of queer texts created for younger audiences. Given critical demands to distance queer youth culture from narratives of violence, sadness, and hurt that have haunted the queer imagination, this…

1
Ghosts In Our Fields 28:15

13d ago28:15

28:15

High Theory returns with a series of haunting concepts, places, and figures from our former guests. We asked folks to call in with something spookworthy (neologism!) from their fields – real or imagined specters, scary ideas, anything that could haunt, disorient, unsettle, horrify. And we got a full seance worth of ghosts. Listen if you dare! This …

1
Alistaire Tallent, "Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France" (U Delaware Press, 2023) 49:03

14d ago49:03

49:03

Alistaire Tallent joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France (University of Delaware Press, 2024). Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from t…

1
The Case of Deanna Cooks 7:22

15d ago7:22

7:22

This episode is about the case of Deanna Cooks a texas woman who was found dead 2 days after calling 911 about an attack. The suspect in her death was her ex-husband Delvecchio patrick. Follow along as I dive into the details of this case and what led to the murder of Deanna Cooks. Support the show Facebook ( Podcast Social media Link) Home / X(Pod…

1
Ep 209: The Talky Horror Podcast Show (w/ Nicky Endres) 1:03:51

16d ago1:03:51

1:03:51

It’s spooky season, so we’ve gathered around The Narrator Roundtable with guest host Nicky Endres to celebrate all things horror. Who loves it? Who hides from it? How do we approach the horror genre as narrators? And how does this underrated category of fiction intersect with our own lived experiences? Find The Narrator Roundtable Website | BlueSky…

1
Lennard J. Davis, "Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It" (Duke UP, 2024) 32:24

15d ago32:24

32:24

For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, or James Agee. This has resulted in overwhelming depictions of poor people as living abject, violent lives in filthy and degrading conditions. In Poor Things: How Those with Money D…

1
Bihani Sarkar, "Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India" (I. B. Tauris, 2021) 1:24:55

15d ago1:24:55

1:24:55

It is often assumed that classical Sanskrit poetry and drama lack a concern with the tragic. However, as Bihani Sarkar makes clear in Classical Sanskrit Tragedy: The Concept of Suffering and Pathos in Medieval India (I. B. Tauris, 2021), this is far from the case. In the first study of tragedy in classical Sanskrit literature, Sarkar draws on a wid…

1
The Case of Loren High/ Porsche Humphrey 14:58

16d ago14:58

14:58

This episode is about the murder of Loren High. On February 5th 2017 Loren High was found dead from a gunshot wound to the chest in his Milwaukee home by his friend Curtis Peterson. His Ex-girlfriend Porscha Humphrey is the prime suspect in his murder. Follow along as I dive deeper into this case and what led to the murder of Loren High. Support th…

1
Sarah Dimick, "Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures" (Columbia UP, 2024) 55:03

16d ago55:03

55:03

As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earli…

1
Kristopher Jansma, "Our Narrow Hiding Places" (Ecco, 2024), "Revisionaries" (Quirk Books, 2024) 49:19

17d ago49:19

49:19

Kristopher grew up in Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels, OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES (Ecco/2024) WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY (Viking/2016) and THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, (Viking/2013…

1
Dennis Wuerthner, "Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo" (U Hawaii Press, 2024) 1:37:55

17d ago1:37:55

1:37:55

Dr. Dennis Wuerthner’s Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo (U Hawaii Press, 2024) is the first complete English translation of one of the oldest extant Korean source materials. The scholar, Yi Illo (1152–1220), filled this collection with poetry by himself and diverse writers, ranging from Chinese master poets and Kory…

1
Eve Dunbar, "Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation" (U Minnesota Press, 2024) 46:55

18d ago46:55

46:55

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: Black Women Writing Under Segregation (U Minnesota Press, 2024) offers new and insightful readings of African American women's writings in the 1930s-1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women's satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integratio…

1
To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW) 48:11

20d ago48:11

48:11

An unforgettable horse gallops through the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s best-selling novel Martyr! (2024), but it is a figurative hastening toward failure and the limitations of language that Akbar discusses with critic Pardis Dabashi. In their conversation, Kaveh considers writing both as an escape from the confines of the self and as a vehicle for expr…

1
Ep 208: We (Can) Contain Multitudes (w/ Yinka Ladeinde) 1:08:24

22d ago1:08:24

1:08:24

Audiobook narrators are voice actors, but sometimes we feel like distant cousins to our commercials and video game peers. With Yinka Ladeinde, we’ll talk about what it’s like walking across these worlds, question why they’re considered different in the first place, and maybe build some bridges in the process. Find The Narrator Roundtable Website | …

1
Seth Kimmel, "The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain" (U Chicago Press, 2024) 47:20

24d ago47:20

47:20

In The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (U Chicago Press, 2024) Seth Kimmel explores the material history of libraries to challenge debates about the practice and politics of information management in early modern Europe. Ancient bibliographers and medieval scholastics, Kimmel reminds us, imagined the library as a mic…

1
Benjamin Bergholtz, "Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel" (U Nebraska Press, 2024) 52:08

26d ago52:08

52:08

Swallowing a World: Globalization and the Maximalist Novel (U Nebraska Press, 2024) offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it’s typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a s…

1
Sonja Stojanovic, "Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French" (Liverpool UP, 2023) 1:06:47

27d ago1:06:47

1:06:47

Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contempora…

1
Amy Reading, "The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker" (Mariner Books, 2024) 56:35

29d ago56:35

56:35

In the summer of 1925, Katharine Sergeant Angell White walked into The New Yorker's midtown office and left with a job as an editor. The magazine was only a few months old. Over the next thirty-six years, White would transform the publication into a literary powerhouse. The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at The New Yorker (Mariner Books, 2024…

1
Christopher Smith, "Samurai with Telephones: Anachronism in Japanese Literature" (U Michigan Press, 2024) 42:02

29d ago42:02

42:02

What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching in a present-day schoolroom? Rather than regarding such anachronisms as errors, Samurai with Telephones: Anachronism in Japanese Literature (U Michigan Press, 2024) develops a theory of how texts can u…

1
Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP) 29:44

30d ago29:44

29:44

Beth Blum, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own…

1
Suganya Anandakichenin, "The Monsoon Cloud: Poet Kāḷamēkam and His Irreverent Poetry" (Primus, 2024) 35:36

1M ago35:36

35:36

A wordsmith, an extempore poet and a satirist, Kāḷamēkam (also known as Kāḷamēka Pulavar; fifteenth century) is widely known for his taṉippāṭals or 'self-contained verses', on a panoply of topics. These splendid but notoriously provocative verses were composed during a transitional phase of Tamil literature, by now in deep conversation with Sanskri…

1
Ep 207: There Is A Lot Of Jambalaya (w/ Patryce Williams) 1:06:29

30d ago1:06:29

1:06:29

Existing while narrating. Whether we identify as single, as coupled, or as otherwise entangled, we are all endeavoring to live a life while doing this beautiful work of audiobook narration. Patryce Williams joins our hosts on this episode of The Narrator Roundtable to discuss how creating time and space for life outside the booth can be a challenge…

1
Psychoanalytic Defense Mechanisms in James Baldwin’s "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" 41:36

1M ago41:36

41:36

This podcast describes a short history of a man who did something we’ve lost in America. That man was James Baldwin who insisted on telling the truth. He confronted the harsh realities of racism, believing that exposing its ugliness was necessary for progress. He rejected simplistic solutions, arguing that racism was deeply rooted in American consc…

1
V. Domontovych, "On Shaky Ground" (CEU Press, 2024) 28:10

1M ago28:10

28:10

In this episode host, Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sits down with Oksana Rosenblum, the translator of the new addition to our CEU Press Classics series, On Shaky Ground by V. Domontovych. We talk about Domontovych’s background, the process of translation, and about Oksana’s own memories of reading the book for the first time in the early 1990s. On Sh…

1
P. Djèlí Clark on Why He Writes 29:55

1M ago29:55

29:55

P. Djèlí Clark is the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved Dead Djinn universe books, Ring Shout, and his most recent, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. We speak with him about why he writes, how he sees speculative fiction as a genre, whether we can expect to see more Dead Djinn books, the origins of his a…

1
Helena Taylor, "Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2024) 1:01:25

1M ago1:01:25

1:01:25

Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at various female novelists, tra…

1
Eunsong Kim, "The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property" (Duke UP, 2024) 1:18:50

1M ago1:18:50

1:18:50

In The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press, 2024), Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good t…

1
Cami D. Agan, "Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien's Legendarium" (Mythopoeic Press, 2024) 39:10

1M ago39:10

39:10

The 13 essays collected in Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien's Legendarium (Mythopoeic Press, 2024) foreground processes of making and constructing Arda -- either within the Secondary world or for readers/viewers -- and thus continually assert that the habitations form a vital part of the tales within that…

1
Satoru Hashimoto, "Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea" (Columbia UP, 2023) 1:13:16

1M ago1:13:16

1:13:16

When East Asia opened itself to the world in the nineteenth century, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean intellectuals had shared notions of literature because of the centuries-long cultural exchanges in the region. As modernization profoundly destabilized cultural norms, they ventured to create new literature for the new era. Satoru Hashimoto offers a n…

1
Kanupriya Dhingra, "Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 55:01

1M ago55:01

55:01

Old Delhi's Parallel Book Bazaar (Cambridge UP, 2024) looks at Old Delhi's Daryaganj Sunday Book Market, popularly known as Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar, as a parallel location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities. The first section studies the bazaar's spatiality - its location, relocation, and spatialization. Three actors p…

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