The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature (UP of Mississippi, 2024) theorizes the child gaze as a narrative strategy for social critique in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US literature for children and adults. Through a range of texts, including James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man, Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear…

Today’s guest is Dr Thomas Sutherland, author of the Bloomsbury title, Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason (Bloombury, 2024), lecturer in digital media at the University of Southampton, and researcher into digital culture and the humanities, the history of philosophy and contemporary continental philosophy, an…

Ahmed M. Abozaid’s Counterterrorism Strategies in Egypt: Permanent Exceptions in the War on Terror (Routledge, 2021) reveals how counterterrorism discourses and practices became the main tool of a systematic violation of human rights in Egypt after the Arab Uprising. It examines how the civic and democratic uprising in Egypt turned into robust auth…

This detailed study traces the history of the Soviet-Polish War (1919-20), the first major international clash between the forces of communism and anti-communism, and the impact this had on Soviet Russia in the years that followed. It reflects upon how the Bolsheviks fought not only to defend the fledgling Soviet state, but also to bring the revolu…

World War II as an Identity Project (Ibidem, 2022) explores the relationship between history, legitimacy, and violence in the building and breaking of nations and states on the territory of contemporary Ukraine during the Second World War and in its aftermath. At its center are various institutions of the Soviet state. Other states and rival politi…

Afterthought: A Family Story (Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Publishing, 2025) by Dr. Heather Akou focuses on the life of her grandmother, Lila Slaback, who grew up in a dysfunctional, working-class family in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in the 1930s. In her short adult life, she gave birth to seven children with at least four different men and …

In his most recent book, Human Rights in a Divided World: Catholicism as a Living Tradition (Georgetown UP, 2024), Jesuit scholar and Georgetown professor, Fr David Hollenbach explains the Judeo-Christian roots of our concept of human rights and the contributions of secular institutions like the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights …

In our lovely interview, Audrey Perrott talks about her new book, A Hate for a House: One Storm, Many Helpers, illustrated by Druscilla Santiago and published by G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers (November 12, 2024).We also talk about Audrey's writing career, starting when she was six years old, stapling papers together and scribbling stor…

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college footba…

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 …

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 …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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 …