Podcasts from Columbia University's The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, where we feature talks with professors about their recent work, publications, novels, and more. Constantine Lignos hosts. Previous seasons were hosted by Olivia Branscum and Timothy Lundy. We also feature The Trilling Tapes. In this podcast series, we mine the recorded Trilling archives to uncover and contextualize more than forty years of exceptional critical thought.
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Ellen Morris's Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt
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In 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.…
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In 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…
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In 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.By SOF/Heyman
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In 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.…
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In 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 lif…
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Annie Pfeifer's To The Collector Belong The Spoils
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In 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 preocc…
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Michele M Moody-Adams's Making Space For Justice
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Michele M Moody-Adams's Making Space For JusticeIn 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 bridgi…
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Lauren Robertson's Entertaining Uncertainty In The Early Modern Theatre
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In 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…
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In 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.…
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Andreas Huyssen's Memory Art in the Contemporary World
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In 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, f…
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In 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.By SOF/Heyman
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Isabel Huacuja Alonso's Radio For The Millions
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In 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 1980sBy SOF/Heyman
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In 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.By SOF/Heyman
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In episode six of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era Chinaby: 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.…
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In 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.By SOF/Heyman
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In 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.…
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In 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 Mo…
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In 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.By SOF/Heyman
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Susan Bernofsky's Clairvoyant of the Small
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In 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.…
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Frank Andre Guridy's The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics
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In 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 …
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Chris Washburne's Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz
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Jazz 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 re…
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Kaiama L. Glover's A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being
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Hosted 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, Ren…
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Dustin Stewart's Futures of Enlightenment Poetry
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This 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 cla…
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Jack Halberstam's Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire
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In 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 illumi…
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Matthew Hart's Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction
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The 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 internati…
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Eugenia Lean's Vernacular Industrialism in China
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In 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 rap…
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Casey Blake, Daniel H. Borus, and Howard Brick's At the Center
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At 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…
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In 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 …
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Elleni Centime Zeleke's Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016
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Between 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, toge…
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Maggie Cao's The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America
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New 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, mou…
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Adam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
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New 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 …
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Wael Hallaq's Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge
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New 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 scapegoa…
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Adam Reich and Peter Bearman's Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart
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New 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…
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Claudio Lomnitz's Nuestra América: utopía y persistencia de una familia judía
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New 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 reflectio…
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Maria Victoria Murillo & Ernesto Calvo's Non-Policy Politics
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New 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, co…
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Will Slauter's Who Owns the News: A History of Copyright
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New 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 th…
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Ilana Feldman's Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics
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New 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 seven…
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Murad Idris' War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought
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New 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 pea…
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New 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…
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Mariusz Kozak's Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music
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New 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 n…
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Jennifer Wenzel's The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature
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New 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 so…
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Stephanie McCurry's Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War
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New 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 vit…
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Marianne Hirsch & Leo Spitzer's School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference
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New 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…
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Sarah Cole's Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century
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New 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 resona…
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Brendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi's Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, & the Pursuit of Justice
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New 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…
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New 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…
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Stathis Gourgouris' The Perils of the One
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New 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 politi…
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Nara B. Milanich's Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father
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New 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 fa…
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James Zetzel's Critics, Compilers, and Commentators: An Introduction to Roman Philology
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New 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 Lati…
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Nico Baumbach's Cinema/Politics/Philosophy
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New 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 critiquin…
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