MSU Press Podcast

On Publishing with Catherine Cocks and Caitlin Tyler-Richards

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 10:00:00 -0400

You can find out more about MSU Press at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Catherine is on Twitter @catherine_msup and Caitlin is @ctredits. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Resources mentioned in the episode include #ASKUP, the UP subject grid, Furnace and Fugue, located at https://furnaceandfugue.org/, and Cut Copy Paste located at https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/cut-copy-paste

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Bkejwanong Dbaajmowinan / Stories of Where the Waters Divide

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 10:00:00 -0400

Bkejwanong means “where the waters part,” but the waters of St. Clair River are not a point of separation. The same waters that sustain life on and around Bkejwanong—formerly known as Walpole Island, Ontario—flow down into Chippewas of the Thames, the community to which author Monty McGahey II belongs. While there are no living fluent speakers of Anishinaabemowin in this community, McGahey has fostered relationships with fluent speakers from nearby Bkejwanong. Bkejwanong Dbaajmowinan is a collection of stories from these elders, who understand the vital importance of passing on the language to future generations in order to preserve the beloved language and legacy of the community. Like the waters of St. Clair River, the relationships between language speakers and learners have continued to nourish Anishinaabe communities in Bkejwanong and Chippewas of the Thames, particularly in language revitalization. With English translations, this resource is essential for Anishinaabemowin learners, teachers, linguists, and historians.

Monty McGahey II is of Anishinaabe and Oneida descent and was raised in Chippewas of the Thames, where he currently works in language revitalization. He is a second-language speaker of Anishinaabemowin and holds a master’s of professional education in Indigenous educational leadership from Western University in London, Ontario.

Monty McGahey’s Bkejwanong Dbaajmowinan/Stories of Where the Waters Divide is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Monty and his wife have a podcast about the challenges of raising their kids in Anishinaabemowin called Enweying (Our Sound) which is available wherever you get your podcasts. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Confessions of a Presidential Speech Writer

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 10:00:00 -0400

An avid high school debater and enthusiastic student body president, Craig Smith seemed destined for a life in public service from an early age. As a sought-after speechwriter, Smith had a front-row seat at some of the most important events of the twentieth century, meeting with Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon, advising Governor Ronald Reagan, writing for President Ford, serving as a campaign manager for a major U.S. senator’s reelection campaign, and writing speeches for a contender for the Republican nomination for president. Life in the volatile world of politics wasn’t always easy, however, and as a closeted gay man, Smith struggled to reconcile his private and professional lives. In in his revealing memoir, Confessions of a Presidential Speech Writer, Smith sheds light on what it takes to make it as a speechwriter in a field where the only constant is change. While bouncing in and out of the academic world, Smith transitions from consultantships with George H. W. Bush and the Republican caucus of the U.S. Senate to a position with Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca. When Smith returns to Washington, D.C., as president and founder of the Freedom of Expression Foundation, he becomes a leading player on First Amendment issues in the nation’s capital. Returning at long last to academia, Smith finds happiness coming out of the closet and reaping the benefits of a dedicated and highly successful career.

Craig Smith’s Confessions of a Presidential Speech Writer is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Craig on the History Rated R podcast and @the_rhetor on Instagram. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Salsa Consciente: Politics, Poetics, and Latinidad in the Meta-Barrio

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 02 May 2022 10:00:00 -0400

Andrés Espinoza Agurrrrto’s new book, Salsa Consciente: Politics, Poetics, and Latinidad in the Meta-Barrio, explores the Salsa consciente movement, a Latino movement of music, poetry, and political discourse that exploded in the 1970s. Largely linked to the development of Nuyo latino popular music, Salsa consciente was brought about, in part, by the mass Latino migration to New York City beginning in the 1950s and the subsequent social movements that were tied to the shifting political landscapes. Defined by its lyrical content, its unique sound, and the political and social issues facing U.S. Latinos and Latin Americans, Salsa consciente evokes the overarching cultural-nationalist idea of Latinidad (Latin-ness). Analysis of over 120 different salsa songs spanning sixty years, the book draws on lyrical and musical perspectives to argue that the urban Latino identity expressed in Salsa consciente was constructed largely from diasporic, de territorialized, and at times imagined cultural memory. From this perspective, Latino / Latin American identity is in part based on African and Indigenous experience, especially as it relates to Spanish colonialism. A unique study of the intersection of Salsa and Latino and Latin American identity, Salsa consciente appeals to scholars of ethnic studies and fans of salsa music alike.

ANDRÉS ESPINOZA AGURTO serves as assistant professor in the Department of Music at Florida Atlantic University. He studied Afro-Cuban percussion at the Escuela Nacional de Arte (Cuba), graduated summa cum laude from Berklee College of Music with a degree in jazz composition, and holds an MA in music from the University of York (England). He received his PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology from Boston University. He is also a composer, musical director, and percussionist for his own group, Ayé, an also a consecrated drummer in the lineage of Añá Ilu Kan and is currently conducting research on the lineage, performance practice, and aesthetics of Afro-Cuban batá drummers and drumming. He is an active participant in the Percussive Arts Society where he serves as the cochair of the World Percussion Committee.

Andrés Espinoza Agurto’s Salsa Consciente: Politics , Poetics, and Latinidad in the Meta-Barrio is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Andres online at aespinozaphd.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Nearly Nuclear: A Mismanaged Energy Transition

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 10:00:00 -0400

When Consumers Power’s plan to build a nuclear power plant in Midland, Michigan, was announced in 1967, it promised to free Michigan residents from expensive, dirty, coal-fired electricity and to keep Dow Chemical operating in the state. But before the plan could be completed, the facility was called an engineering nightmare, a financial disaster, a construction boondoggle, a political headache, and a regulatory muddle. Most locals had welcomed nuclear power eagerly. Why, after almost twenty years and billions of dollars, did this promise of a high-tech, coal-free, prosperous future fail? And what lessons does its failure offer today as Americans try to develop a clean energy economy based on renewable power? To answer these questions, energy consultant and author LeRoy Smith carefully traces the design and construction decisions made by Consumers Power, including its choice of reactor and its hiring of the Bechtel Corporation to manage the project. He also details the rapidly changing regulatory requirements and growing public concern about the environmental risks of nuclear power generation. An examination of both the challenges and importance of renewable energy, this book will be of value to anyone interested in grappling with the complexities of our ongoing efforts to eliminate fossil fuels in favor of clean renewable energy.

LEROY (LEE) SMITH served in the U.S. Navy as an engineering officer and then earned a master of science degree in geology. After leaving graduate school, he spent his entire career in the energy industry. He started as an exploration geologist and subsequently gained business experience serving as a corporate officer in a publicly traded company, a privately held company, and a limited partnership. Smith left his job as vice president of Energy Supply and Marketing at Midland Cogeneration Venture in 2004 to start a consulting firm, Optimal Value Energy. He now lectures and writes on energy topics. He has testified before the Michigan Public Service Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the National Energy Board (since 2019 the Canadian Energy Regulator). He has written articles on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and carbon dioxide sequestration in Michigan. He lives in Midland, Michigan, with his wife, H. J. Smith.

LeRoy Smith’s Nearly Nuclear: A Mismanaged Energy Transition is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix

Michigan State University Press — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 10:00:00 -0400

Remixing is essential to contemporary culture. We see it in song mashups, political remix videos, memes, and even on streaming television shows like Stranger Things. But remixing isn’t an exclusively digital practice, nor is it even a new one. Evidence of remixing even appears in the speeches of classical Greek and Roman orators. Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix, by my guest Scott Haden Church, is the first book to address the remix from a communicative perspective, examining its persuasive dimensions by locating its parallels with classical rhetoric. Church identifies, recontextualizes, mashes up, and applies rhetorical tropes to contemporary digital texts and practices. This groundbreaking book presents a new critical vocabulary for scholars and students to use as they analyze remix culture. Building upon scholarship from classical thinkers, such as Isocrates, Quintilian, Nāgārjuna, and Cicero, as well as contemporary luminaries like Kenneth Burke, Richard Lanham, and Eduardo Navas, Scott Haden Church shows that an understanding of rhetoric offers innovative ways to make sense of remix culture.

SCOTT HADEN CHURCH teaches courses in media studies, communication theory, and popular culture at Brigham Young University, where he is an associate professor in the School of Communications. He has been awarded the Phyllis Japp Scholar award from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the Ruth S. Silver Research Fellowship in Mass Media Ethics from Brigham Young University.

Scott Haden Church’s Turntables and Tropes: A Rhetoric of Remix is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can learn more about the book at scotthadenchurch.com and Scott is on Twitter @scotthchurch. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Louise Erdrich's Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 10:00:00 -0400

Louise Erdrich is one of the most important, prolific, and widely read contemporary Indigenous writers. In Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts, edited by my guests Connie A. Jacobs and Nancy J. Peterson, leading scholars analyze three critically acclaimed recent novels—The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016)—which make up what has become known as Erdrich’s “justice trilogy.” Set in small towns and reservations of northern North Dakota, these three interwoven works bring together a vibrant cast of characters whose lives are shaped by history, identity, and community. Individually and collectively, the essays in this volume illuminate Erdrich’s storytelling abilities; the complex relations among crime, punishment, and forgiveness that characterize her work; and the Anishinaabe contexts that underlie her presentation of character, conflict, and community. The volume also includes a reader’s guide to each novel, a glossary, and an interview with Erdrich that will aid readers as they navigate the justice novels. These timely, original, and compelling readings make a valuable contribution to Erdrich scholarship and, subsequently, to the study of Native literature and women’s authorship as a whole.

CONNIE A. JACOBS is professor emerita at San Juan College and the author of The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People. She is also a coeditor of Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich and a coeditor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature.

NANCY J. PETERSON is professor of English at Purdue University and the author of Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory and Beloved: Character Studies. She is also the editor of Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches and Conversations with Sherman Alexie.

Louise Erdrich’s Justice Trilogy: Cultural and Critical Contexts is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers, including Louise Erdrich’s own Birchbark books in Minneapolis, Minnesota, or online at birchbarkbooks.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Late Self-Portraits

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 10:00:00 -0400

A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction. Weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly, one encounters a blind Jorge Luis Borges with his mother, a glass confessional in the Notre Dame Cathedral, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, ghosts, a neurosurgeon’s prognosis, and Marie Laveau in New Orleans. Whether in a field with Joan of Arc, encountering the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or having dinner with Hades, these are haunting poems of loss and unearthing, equally bold, personal, and tender.

MARY MORRIS is the author of two previous books of poetry, Enter Water, Swimmer and Dear October, which won the New Mexico Book Award. She is a recipient of the Rita Dove Award (2008), Western Humanities Review’s Mountain West Writers’ Prize (2019), the New Mexico Discovery Award (2005), and the National Federation of Press Women’s Communications Contest Award (2021).

Mary Morris’s Late Self-Portraits is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find her online at water400.org where you can find events, poems to read, interviews, and more. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls in Michigan's Upper Peninsula

Michigan State University Press — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 10:00:00 -0400

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is known for its natural beauty and severe winters, as well as the mines and forests where men labored to feed industrial factories elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there were factories in the Upper Peninsula, too, and women who worked in them. In We Kept Our Towns Going, Phyllis Michael Wong tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century all the way into the 1970s.

As the Upper Peninsula’s mines became increasingly exhausted and its stands of timber further depleted, the Gossard Girls’ income sustained both their families and the local economy. During this time the workers showed their political and economic strength, including a successful four-month strike in the 1940s that capped an eight-year struggle to unionize.

Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women. It also illuminates the way the Gossard Girls navigated shifting ideas of what single and married women could and should do as workers and citizens. From cutting cloth and distributing materials to getting paid and having fun, Wong gives us a rare ground-level view of piecework in a clothing factory from the women on the sewing room floor.

PHYLLIS MICHAEL WONG has held roles as a historian, an educator, and thirty-year member of the university level academic world, including as First Lady at Northern Michigan University (2004–12) and San Francisco State University (2012–19).

We Kept Our Towns Going: The Gossard Girls of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Phyllis will be speaking in Gwinn, Michigan, on April 12. On April 13 at 6:30 PM at the Marquette Regional History Center in Marquette, Michigan. On Thursday, April 14, in the afternoon at Northern Michigan University. Please see the show notes for more information about these talks in the show notes.

You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Under a Bad Sun: Police, Politics, and Corruption in Australia

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 10:00:00 -0500

In Under a Bad Sun: Police, Politics, and Corruption in Australia my guest Paul Bleakley asks, Why do police officers turn against the people they are hired to protect? A question that remains urgent in the wake of recent global protests against police brutality. As a historical criminologist, Bleakley addresses this question by examining an intersecting series of cases of police corruption in Queensland, Australia. The protection and extortion of illegal gambling operators and sex workers were only the most visible features of a decades-long, pervasive culture of corruption in the state’s law enforcement agency. Even more dangerous—and far harder to prosecute—was a corrupt bargain between the police and the state’s conservative government, which gave law enforcement free rein to profit from criminalized vice in return for supporting the government’s repression and persecution of its political enemies, such as punk music fans to gay men to left-wing protestors. While intimidating members of the political opposition, the police also protected friends and allies from criminal prosecution, even for offenses as serious as child sex abuse. When journalists and investigators revealed this corrupt bargain in 1987, the premier was forced from office and the police commissioner went to prison. But untangling politics from policing proved—and continues to prove—far more difficult in societies around the world. This true crime story goes beyond the everyday violations of law and ethics to underscore the centrality of honest, equitable policing to a truly democratic society.

PAUL BLEAKLEY is a historical criminologist and former journalist from the Gold Coast, Queensland. He is currently Assistant Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven, in Connecticut, where he teaches a variety of courses focused on policing and theories of criminal behavior.

Paul Bleakley’s Under a Bad Sun: Police, Politics, and Corruption in Australia is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find him @Drbleaks on Twitter, and you can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

The Call: Eloquence in Service of Truth

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 10:00:00 -0500

In The Call: Eloquence in Service of Truth, my guests Craig R. Smith and Michael J. Hyde offer a rare examination of a rhetorical phenomenon referred to as “the call,” which is closely linked to eloquence. They explore this linkage by examining various components of eloquence, including examples of its misuse by George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. The case studies here, include examples drawn from addresses by Barack Obama, Daniel Webster, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Chase Smith, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney. Smith and Hyde examine religious rhetoric, too, including the Epistles of St. Paul, the writings of St. Augustine, and the preaching of Jonathan Edwards. Finally, the book explores eloquence in films and in communication between artists and writers, concluding with a study of how Annie Dillard evokes the sublime with eloquence and awe.

CRAIG R. SMITH is the director emeritus of the Center for First Amendment Studies at California State University, Long Beach, where he taught for twenty-seven years. In 2010 he received the Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award from the National Communication Association for his contributions to rhetorical theory.

MICHAEL J. HYDE is professor and University Distinguished Chair in Communication Ethics at Wake Forest University. He is a distinguished scholar of the National Communication Association, a fellow of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and a recipient of national, state, and university research grants for his work in “the rhetoric of medicine.”

Craig R. Smith and Michael J. Hyde is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Craig on the History Rated R podcast. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Coffin Honey

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 10:00:00 -0500

As I said in the intro, this will be the fifth season of the MSU Press podcast, and I’m excited to share new interviews with MSU Press authors on subjects such as remix culture, nuclear energy, and life in a small town in Michigan’s upper peninsula. We’ll also have native American stories, Australian politics, eloquence in public speech, and plenty of poetry. I hope you’ll come along for the whole season.

Today, we’re discussing Coffin Honey. Todd Davis’s seventh book of poems and his sixth with MSU Press. In the book, Davis explores the many forms of violence we do to each other and to the other living beings with whom we share this planet. Davis dramatizes racism, climate collapse, and pandemic, as well as the very real threat of extinction in intimate portraits of Rust-Belt Appalachia: a young victim of sexually assault struggles with dreams of revenge and the possible solace that nature might provide; a girl whose boyfriend has enlisted in the military faces pregnancy alone; and a bear named Ursus navigates the fecundity of the forest after his own mother’s death, literally crashing into the encroaching human world. The poems in Coffin Honey illuminates beauty and suffering, the harrowing precipice we find ourselves walking along here in the twenty-first century. As in his previous prize-winning books, Davis names the world with love and care, demonstrating what one reviewer describes as his knowledge of “Latin names, common names, habitats, and habits . . . steeped in the exactness of the earth and the science that unfolds in wildness.”

TODD DAVIS is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry as well as a limited-edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, & Snow. His writing has won the Midwest Book Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, the Bloomsburg University Book Prize, and the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver and Bronze Awards.

Todd Davis’s Coffin Honey along with his other poetry collections are available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can learn more about Todd and his work at todddavispoet.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Innovations in Collaborative Modeling

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 10:00:00 -0500

Collaborative applications of a variety of modeling methodologies have multiplied in recent decades due to widespread recognition of the power of models to integrate information from multiple sources, test assumptions about policy and management choices, and forecast the future states of complex systems. However, information about these modeling efforts often is segregated by both discipline and modeling approach, preventing folks from learning from one another. Innovations in Collaborative Modeling addresses the need for cross-disciplinary and cross-methodological communication.

To enhance a shared understanding of systems problems, scientists and stakeholders need strategies for integrating information from their respective fields, dealing with issues of scale and focus, and rigorously investigating assumptions. The chapters in this edited collection first explore modeling methodologies for enhanced collaboration, then offer case studies of collaborative modeling across different complex systems problems. Edited by Laura Schmitt-Olabisi, Miles McNall, William Porter, and Jinhua Zhao, this volume will be useful for experienced and beginning modelers as well as for scientists and stakeholders who work with them.

LAURA SCHMITT OLABISI is an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Sustainability and the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University.

MILES MCNALL is the Director of the Community Evaluation and Research Collaborative at Michigan State University.

Innovations in Collaborative Modeling is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 10:00:00 -0500

Science fiction often operates as either an extended metaphor for human relationships or as a genuine attempt to encounter the alien Other. Both types of stories tend to rehearse the processes of colonialism, in which a sympathetic protagonist encounters and tames the unknown. Despite this logic, Native American writers have claimed the genre as a productive space in which they can critique historical colonialism and reassert the value of Indigenous worldviews.

My guest Miriam C. Brown Spiers book Encountering the Sovereign Other proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding Indigenous science fiction, placing Native theorists like Vine Deloria Jr. and Gregory Cajete in conversation with science fiction theorists like Darko Suvin, David Higgins, and Michael Pinsky. In response to older colonial discourses, many contemporary Indigenous authors insist that readers acknowledge their humanity while recognizing them as distinct peoples who maintain their own cultures, beliefs, and nationhood. The book analyzes four novels: William Sanders’s The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, Stephen Graham Jones’s It Came from Del Rio, D. L. Birchfield’s Field of Honor, and Blake M. Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears.

Demonstrating how Indigenous science fiction expands the boundaries of the genre while reinforcing the relevance of Indigenous knowledge, Brown Spiers illustrates the use of science fiction as a critical compass for navigating and surviving the distinct challenges of the twenty-first century.

MIRIAM C. BROWN SPIERS is an assistant professor of English and interdisciplinary studies at Kennesaw State University. Where she is also the coordinator for Native American and Indigenous studies and teaches in the gender and women’s studies and American studies programs.

Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Ships & Shipwrecks: Stories from the Great Lakes

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 10:00:00 -0500

From the day that French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle launched the Griffin in 1679 to the 1975 sinking of the celebrated Edmund Fitzgerald, thousands of commercial ships have sailed on the vast and perilous waters of the Great Lakes. In a harbinger of things to come, on the return leg of its first trip in late summer 1679, the Griffin disappeared and has never been seen again. Records from the centuries since show that an alarming number of shipwrecks have occurred on the Great Lakes. If vessels that wrecked but were later repaired and returned to service are included, the number certainly swells into the thousands. Most did not mysteriously vanish like the Griffin. Instead, they suffered the occupational hazards of every lake boat: collisions, groundings, strands, fires, boiler explosions, and capsizes. Many of these disasters took the lives of crews and passengers.

The fearsome wrath of the storms that brew over the Great Lakes has challenged and defeated some of the staunchest vessels constructed in the shipyards of port cities along the U.S. and Canadian lakeshores. In Ships & Shipwrecks: Stories from the Great Lakes, my Richard Gebhart tells the tales of some of these ships and their captains and crews, from their launches to their sad demises—or sometimes, their celebrated retirements. This volume is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the maritime history of the Great Lakes, and I’m so excited for the chance to talk with its author today.

Richard Gebhard was director of the White River Light Station lighthouse museum from 1975 to 1980. He has also authored numerous articles of historical interest and essays for journals and newsletters of Great Lakes historical societies.

Richard Gebhart’s book, Ships & Shipwrecks: Stories from the Great Lakes is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg–Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Mid-Michigan Modern: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Googie

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 10:00:00 -0500

From 1940 to 1970, mid‐Michigan created an extensive and varied legacy of modernist architecture. Based on archival research and oral histories, Susan J. Bandes’s Mid-Michigan Modern explores that legacy in both the work of renowned architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Alden B. Dow, and the Keck brothers, and in the buildings of regional architects whose work was strongly influenced by international modern styles. In the growing optimism and increasing economic prosperity following WWII, the automobile industry, state government, and Michigan State University served as economic drivers enormously expanding the Mid-Michigan area. Government, professional associations, and private industry all sought an architectural style that spoke to forward‐looking, progressive ideals. Smaller businesses picked a Prairie style that made people feel comfortable, and modernist houses reflected the increasingly informal American lifestyle rooted in automobile culture.

In this expanded volume that includes 36 new illustrations, readers encounter buildings of various types, from residences to sacred spaces. This new edition also adds over twenty architect-designed residences along the various rivers and creeks that traverse the area as well as on man-made lakes, and it introduces several popular architectural designers not previously discussed. The epilogue briefly considers disappearing modernist inventions and buildings. With a detailed narrative discussing more than 150 buildings and enriched by hundreds of illustrations, Mid-Michigan Modern is a vibrant reclamation of the history of modernist architecture in this part of the state.

The expanded, paperback edition and the original hardcover version of Susan J. Bande’s Mid-Michigan Modern: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Googie are both available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb. For more about Michigan Modern Tours visit: http://www.michiganmodern.org/tours

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Waterfront Porch: Reclaiming Detroit's Industrial Waterfront as a Gathering Place for All

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 10:00:00 -0400

The city of Detroit was the epicenter of the fur trade era, an unparalleled leader of shipbuilding for one hundred years, the Silicon Valley of the industrial age, and an unquestioned leader in the march of democracy. John Hartig’s book Waterfront Porch: Reclaiming Detroit’s Industrial Waterfront as a Gathering Place for All offers a unique history of Detroit as a city of innovation, resilience, and leadership in times to change. Waterfront Porch examines how the city has begun responding to the challenges of climate change, again redefining itself as a national and world leader on the path, this time, toward a more sustainable future. This book details the building of a new waterfront porch alongside the Detroit River called the Detroit RiverWalk, which is meant to help revitalize the city and region and promote sustainability practices. It tells the story of one of the largest, by scale, urban waterfront redevelopment projects in the United States, and gives us hope while it proves that Detroit and its metropolitan region have a bright future.

John Hartig is an award-wining Great Lakes scientist, a former Fulbright Scholar, and the current Great Lakes Science-Policy Advisor for the International Association for Great Lakes Research. His book Bringing Conservation to Cities: Lessons from Building the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge won a gold medal from the Nonfiction Authors Association in the “Sustainable Living” category and a bronze medal from the Living Now Book Awards in the “Green Living” category.

Waterfront Porch: Reclaiming Detroit’s Industrial Waterfront as a Gathering Place for All is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Spit

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 10:00:00 -0400

In a poem called “How to Be A Poet,” Wendell Berry insists, “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.” In many ways an exploration of what makes a place sacred to ourselves and our memories and what might ultimately desecrate a place, Daniel Lassell’s debut collection, Spit, examines the roles we play in the act of belonging.

The first-ever poetry book set on a llama farm, Spit is a portrait of a boy living on a farm populated with chickens sung to sleep by lullabies, captive wolves next door that attack a child, and a herd of llamas learning to survive despite the coyotes and the chaotic family. The collection explores the body in health and illness and how we treat of the earth and others. Trailing a thread of spirituality, the speaker treks into adulthood, yearning for peace amid the decline of his parents’ marriage. Driven by a “wish to visit / some landless landscape,” the speaker eventually leaves his family’s farm, only to find that return is impossible.

After losing the farm and the llama herd to his parents’ divorce, the book’s speaker wrestles with the role of presence as it relates to healing, remarking, “I wish enough, / to have only // these memories I have.” Unflinching at every turn, Spit pushes the boundaries of “home” to arrive upon new meaning, definition, and purpose. As Rebecca Gayle Howell puts it, “Spit is at once a coming-of-age story and an elegy for that so-called coming-of-age, a necessary guidebook for anyone hoping to go home again.”

I’m happy to have Daniel Lassell here to talk about Spit, poetry, home, place, and, of course, llamas. He is also the author of Ad Spot, a limited-edition chapbook. His poems have been published in the Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Puerto del Sol, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. He grew up in Kentucky, where he raised llamas and alpacas. He now lives in New York with his wife and children.

Spit is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find out more about him and his work on Twitter @dlassell and on his website https://www.daniel-lassell.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

A World of Turmoil: The United State, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 10:00:00 -0400

The United States, the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan have danced on the knife’s edge of war for more than seventy years. A work of sweeping historical vision, A World of Turmoil offers five case studies of critical moments in these relationships: the end of World War II and the start of the Long Cold War; the almost-nuclear war over the Quemoy Islands in 1954–55; the détente, deceptions, and denials surrounding the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué; the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995–96; and the rise of postcolonial nationalism in contemporary Taiwan.

In the book, Hartnett explores how each country’s communication style structured these events and reveals that leaders in all three nations have fallen back on crippling stereotypes and self-serving denials in their diplomacy. The first study of its kind, this provocative book merges history, rhetorical criticism, and advocacy in a tour de force of international scholarship. By mapping the history of miscommunication between the United States, China, and Taiwan, A World of Turmoil shows where and how these entwined relationships have gone wrong, clearing the way for renewed dialogue, enhanced trust, and new understandings.

Stephen J. Hartnett is a professor in the communication department at the University of Colorado Denver. He served as the 2017 president of the National Communication Association, and is the co-founder and coorganizer of the Biennial Conference on Communication, Media, and Governance in the Age of Globalization, and the Shenzhen Forum on Communication Innovation, New Media, and Digital Journalism.

Stephen’s book A World of Turmoil: The United States, China, and Taiwan in the Long Cold War is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 10:00:00 -0400

In The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes, Lynne Heasley illuminates an underwater world with a ferocious industrial history. Despite these pressures, the great lakes remain wondrous and worthy of care. From its first scene in a benighted river, where lake sturgeon thrash and spawn, this powerful book takes readers on journeys through the Great Lakes alongside fish and fishers, scuba divers and scientists, toxic pollutants and threatened communities, oil pipelines and invasive species, and Indigenous peoples and federal agencies.

With dazzling illustrations from Glenn Wolff, The Accidental Reef helps us know the Great Lakes in new ways and grapple with the legacies and alternative futures that come from their abundance of natural wealth. Suffused with curiosity, empathy, and wit, The Accidental Reef will not fail to astonish and inspire. As John Hartig puts it, “Heasley leads the reader to see, know, and understand these freshwater seas from different perspectives [which are] essential to developing a stewardship ethic.”

Lynne Heasley is a professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She is also the author of A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley and a coeditor of Border Flows: A Century of the Canadian-American Water Relationship.

Lynne’s book The Accidental Reef and Other Ecological Odysseys in the Great Lakes is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Lynne at lynneheasley.com and you can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Architectural Missionary: D. Fred Charlton in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, 1887-1918

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 11:00:00 -0400

The first and most prolific professional architect to live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, D. Fred Charlton used Lake Superior sandstone to craft distinctive buildings throughout the UP. Born in England and trained as a civil engineer, Charlton arrived in Detroit in the late 1870s. There he sought work as a draftsman. Like many of his peers, Charlton had no formal training as an architect, and he learned his trade at several prominent firms. In 1887, Scott & Company sent him to Marquette to open a branch office. Three years later, Charlton opened his own firm, and over the next twenty-eight years, he designed more than four hundred buildings, including residences, commercial structures, schools, courthouses, and churches throughout the region. These buildings offer valuable insights both into the tastes of Americans before the World War I and into the evolution of the architectural profession. Deftly adapting national trends, Charlton provided Upper Peninsula communities with modern structures worthy of any place in the nation. Many of his buildings remain to this day, monuments to the skill of this English-born architect who made a place for himself upon the shores of Lake Superior. Architectural Missionary is a fascinating and informative history of Charlton’s work and of architecture in the upper Midwest.

Steven C. Brisson to discuss the life and work of D. Fred Charlton. Brisson is the director of Mackinac State Historic Parks, vice chair of the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History, and a former board member of the Michigan Humanities Council.

Architectural Missionary is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg—Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Strains of Dissent: Popular Music and Everyday Resistance in WWII France

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 10:00:00 -0400

During the German Occupation from 1940 to 1944, Resistance fighters, Parisian youth, and French prisoners of war mined a vast repertoire from a long national musical tradition and a burgeoning international entertainment industry, embracing music as a rhetorical resource with which to destabilize Nazi ideology and contest collaborationist Vichy propaganda. After the Liberation of 1944, popular music continued to mediate French political life, helping citizens to challenge American hegemony and recuperate their nation’s lost international standing.

Ultimately, through song, French dissidents rejected Nazi subordination, the politics of collaboration, and American intervention and insisted upon a return to that trinity of traditional French values, liberté, egalité, fraternité. Strains of Dissent recovers the significance of music as a rhetorical means of survival, subversion, and national identity construction and illuminates the creative and cunning ways that individual citizens defied the Occupation outside of formal resistance networks and movements.

Kelly Jakes is Assistant Professor in the department of communication at the College of Charleston. Her research focuses on rhetoric and culture, with special attention to social movements, resistance, and music. In her work, she examines how marginalized or dissident citizens use verbal and nonverbal discourse to build solidarity, reassign political authority, and contest norms of national identity, gender, race, and class.

Dr. Jake’s book Strain’s of Dissent: Popular Music and Everyday Resistance in WWII France, 1940-1945 is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 31 May 2021 10:00:00 -0400

Nothing is off-limits in Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security. This ultimately American text positions big ideas in public spaces, often discovering the absurdity and humor in such connections. Johnson makes poetry of the dizzying influences affecting the post-postmodern American, skipping whimsically from the Pixies to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” from the Confederate flag to unisex public toilets, from eggplant emojis to Vladimir Putin stealing Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring. Rich in voice and character, Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security collects observations that provide a succinct feel for the twenty-first-century American zeitgeist.

Brad Johnson’s first full-length poetry collection, The Happiness Theory, was published in 2013, and his work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, J Journal, and whole host of other publications.

The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 03 May 2021 11:00:00 -0400

The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa is an original and provocative study of contemporary African film and literature. In the book, Vlad Dima investigates how football and cinema express individual and collective fantasies. Shedding new light on both well-known and less familiar films, The Beautiful Skin asks just whose fantasy is articulated in football and African cinema. Answering this question leads Dima to explore body and identity issues through the metaphor of skin: fantasy as a skin; the football jersey as a skin; and ultimately film itself as a skin that has visual, aural, and haptic qualities. In the neocolonial context, the body is often depicted as suffering through processes of being flattened or emptied out. So frequently do African cinema and literature reproduce this image of the hollowed body, the body of all skin, as it were, that it comes to define neocolonialism. Throughout this book, Dima seeks to answer whether the body of film—the depth of both characters and story within the cinematic skin—could carry us into the post-neocolonial era, an era defined by “full” bodies and personal affirmation.

Vlad Dima is Professor of African Cultural Studies and French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Sonic Space in Diop Mambety’s Films and numerous articles, mainly on French and francophone cinemas, but also on francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television. His third book, “Meaning-Less-Ness in Postcolonial Cinema” is also forthcoming from MSU Press.

The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Engaging Social Media in China: Platforms, Publics, and Production

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 11:00:00 -0400

In China today, the party-state increasingly penetrates commercial social media while aspiring to turn its own media agencies into platforms. Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, Engaging Social Media in China, edited by my guest Guobin Yang and Wei WAng, shows the complexity behind the central role the party-state plays in shaping social media platforms. State-sponsored platformization, however, does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party’s desired outcomes. Citizens continue to appropriate social media for creative public engagement at the same time as more people are managing their online settings to reduce or refuse connection, inducing new forms of crafted resistance to hyper-social media connectivity.

The wide-ranging essays presented in this volume explore the mobile radio service Ximalaya.FM, Alibaba’s evolution into a multi-platform ecosystem, livestreaming platforms, the role of Twitter in Trump’s North Korea diplomacy, user-generated content in the news media, social media art projects, and the reluctance to engage with WeChat, among other concerns. Ultimately, readers will find that the ten chapters in this volume contribute significant new research and insights to the fast-growing scholarship on social media in China at a time when online communication is increasingly constrained by international struggles over political control and privacy issues.

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. There he directs the Center on Digital Culture and Society and serves as deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016) and the award-winning book The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009). He is also the editor or coeditor of four other books, including Media Activism in the Digital Age (2017) and China's Contested Internet (2015).

Engaging Social Media in China: Platforms, Publics, and Production is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Goubin is on Twitter @yangguobin. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Resowing the Seeds of War: Presidential Peace Rhetoric Since 1945

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 11:00:00 -0400

Ending a war, as Fred Charles Iklé wrote, poses a much greater challenge than beginning one. In addition to issues related to battle tactics, prisoners of war, diplomatic relations, and cease-fire negotiations, ending war involves domestic political calculations as well. Balancing tides of public opinion against policy needs poses a deep and enduring problem for presidents.

In this first-of-its-kind study, Resowing the Seeds of War explains how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Obama managed the political, policy, and bureaucratic challenges that arise at the end of war via a series of rhetorical choices that reframe, modify, or unravel depictions of national enemies, the cause of the conflict, and the stakes for the nation and world. This end-of-war rhetoric justifies ending hostilities, rationalizes postwar national policy, argues for the construction of postwar security arrangements, and often sustains public support for massive financial investment in reconstruction.

By tracking presidential manipulations of savage imagery from World War II to the War on Terror, Resowing the Seeds of War concludes that even as metaphoric reframing facilitates exit from conflict, the same rhetorical gestures incur unexpected consequences that make national involvement in the next conflict more likely.

Stephen J. Heidt has taught at Florida Atlantic University, California Lutheran University, and California State University, Northridge, focusing on the form and function of presidential rhetoric in policy deliberation. He has published in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, the Southern Communication Journal, and a number of edited volumes.

Resowing the Seeds of War: Presidential Peace Rhetoric since 1945 is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Stephen is @sjhrhetoric on Twitter. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 11:00:00 -0400

The Resistance Network is the history of an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria who helped save the lives of thousands during the Armenian Genocide. The book challenges depictions of Armenians as passive victims of violence and subjects of humanitarianism, demonstrating the key role they played in organizing a humanitarian resistance against the destruction of their people. Piecing together hundreds of accounts, official documents, and missionary records, Mouradian presents a social history of genocide and resistance in wartime Aleppo and a network of transit and concentration camps stretching from Bab to Ras ul-Ain and Der Zor. He ultimately argues that, despite the violent and systematic mechanisms of control and destruction in the cities, concentration camps, and massacre sites in this region, the genocide of the Armenians did not progress unhindered—unarmed resistance proved an important factor in saving countless lives.

Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University, and the editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Armenian Review. In 2020, Dr. Mouradian was awarded a Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant from Columbia University.

The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Khatchig is on Twitter @khatcho and he’s also available on Facebook and Instagram. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Community Engagement Abroad

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 11:00:00 -0400

A landmark in our understanding of international community-engaged learning programs, Community Engagement Abroad invites educators to rethink everything from disciplinary assumptions to the role of higher education in a globalizing world. Tapping the many such programs developed at Michigan State University during the last half-century, the volume develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing study-abroad programs with a community-engagement focus. More than a how-to guide, it also offers seven theoretically framed case studies showing how these experiences can change students, faculty, and communities alike. The book’s authors take readers on a fascinating journey through how they changed as a result of designing and delivering programs in full collaboration with community partners, and as a whole the delivers powerful, persuasive arguments for developing truly reciprocal, mutually beneficial partnerships beyond the academy.

Pat Crawford is the director of the School of Design at South Dakota State University and former Associate Director of Planning, Design, and Construction at Michigan State University. Brett Berquist leads international strategy and operations as director international at the University of Auckland.

Community Engagement Abroad: Perspectives and Practices on Service, Engagement, and Learning Overseas is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with Brett on Twitter @bberquist. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Writing That Breaks Stones

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 10:00:00 -0400

Writing That Breaks Stones: African Child Soldier Narratives is a critical examination of six memoirs and six novels written by and about young adults from Africa who were once child soldiers. It analyzes both how such narratives document human rights violations and how they connect and disconnect from their readers in the global public sphere. It draws on literary scholarship about novels and memoirs, as well as on fieldwork conducted by social scientists about African children in combat situations. The six memoirs analyzed in Writing That Breaks Stones focus on a lone individual’s struggles in a hostile environment, and they use repetition, logical contradictions, narrative breaks, and reversals of binaries in order to tell their stories. By contrast, the novels use narrative ambiguity, circularity, fragmentation, and notions of dystopia in ways that call attention to the child soldiers’ communities and environments. All twelve narratives depict the child soldier’s agency and culpability somewhat ambiguously, effectively reflecting the ethical dilemmas of African children in combat.

JOYA URAIZEE is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of English at Saint Louis University in Missouri. She is the author of This Is No Place for a Woman: Nadine Gordimer, Nayantara Saghal, Buchi Emecheta and the Politics of Gender (2000) and In the Jaws of the Leviathan: Genocide Fiction and Film (2010).

Writing That Breaks Stones: African Child Soldier Narratives is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

On Poetry and Nature with Noah Davis and Derek Sheffield

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 10:00:00 -0400

Selected by Mark Doty for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Books prize, Derek Sheffield’s Not for Luck ushers us into the beauty and grace that comes from giving attention to the interconnections that make up our lives. Through encounters with a herd of deer, a circle of salmon in a mountain creek, and a shiny-eyed wood rat, these poems offer moments of wonder that celebrate our place as one species among many on our only earth. Sheffield is also the author of Through the Second Skin, and he is coeditor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, poetry editor of Terrain.org, and a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College.

A stunning and visceral debut, Noah Davis’s Of this River ushers in a new era of poems from the Allegheny region of Appalachia. In striking stories and scenes, Davis portrays the spiritual cost of deep poverty, the necessity to ask for forgiveness, and the joy in praising the beauty still found in the steep hollows. These poems will cling to you like water on the soles of your boots. Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. His poems and prose have appeared in Best New Poets, Orion Magazine, North American Review, River Teeth Journal, Sou'wester, and Chautauqua, among others.

Of this River and Not for Luck are both available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Derrek on Facebook and at dereksheffield.com. Noah is on Instagram @n.davis21. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Desire

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 10:00:00 -0500

Part of MSU Press’s “Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory” series, Per Bjørnar Grande’s Desire draws on both modern masterpieces and iconic works of contemporary pop culture to shed new light on the frustrating and repetitive nature of human relations in a world of vanishing taboos. In novels and plays by Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Arthur Miller and music by Lana Del Rey, Grande sees desire operating in a complex, slippery way that eludes philosophical and psychoanalytical attempts to pin it down. For Grande, these and other great works of literature corroborate René Girard’s understanding of desire as taking shape “according to the other’s desire.” This mimetic approach frees desire from certain preconceptions of psychology and puts literary criticism in touch with the concrete substance of fictional narratives.

Per Bjørnar Grande is a professor in the Department of Pedagogy, Religion, and Social Studies at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.

Desire: Flaubert, Proust, Fitzgerald, Miller, Lana Del Rey, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Divided Loyalties: Young Somali Americans and the Lure of Extremism

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 10:00:00 -0500

In Divided Loyalties: Young Somali Americans and the Lure of Extremism, Joseph Weber examines the cases of the more than fifty Somali Americans, mostly young men from Minnesota, who made their way to Somalia or Syria, attempted to get to those countries, aided people who did, or financially backed terrorist groups there. Throughout the book, Weber asks why people join violent extremist movements like al-Shabab, al-Qaida, and the Islamic State when so many of those who do end up dead, missing, or imprisoned.

The book also considers those who rejected the temptations of terrorism with a close look at one man from Minneapolis, the American-born son of a couple who fled Somalia, who came dangerously close to answering the ISIS call. From 2014 to 2016, Abdirahman Abdirashid Bashir and a dozen friends—some still in their teens—schemed to find ways to join Bashir’s other friends and cousins with ISIS in Syria. Some succeeded. In the end, Bashir made a different choice. Not only did he reject ISIS’s call, he decided to work with the FBI to spy on his friends and ultimately to testify against them in court. Drawing on extensive interviews for Divided Loyalties, Joseph Weber explains why.

JOE WEBER is the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor of News-Editorial and an Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He worked for thirty-five years in daily and weekly journalism, including twenty-two years in several posts across North America for BusinessWeek, departing as the magazine's chief of correspondents.

Divided Loyalties: Young Somali Americans and the Lure of Extremism, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Sovereign Traces

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:29:00 -0500

Now into two volumes, the Sovereign Traces series merges works of contemporary North American Indian literature with imaginative illustrations by US and Canadian artists. As comics, the Sovereign Traces volumes provide an extended means for audiences to engage with works of Native Literature, including fiction, poetry, and memoir in a variety of exciting forms. The first volume, Not (Just) (An)Other includes text adapted from writers such as Gordon Henry Jr., Gerald Vizenor, Joy Harjo, and Louise Erdrich illustrated by such artists as Delishia Williams, GMB Chomichuk, and Nicholas Burns. The second volume, Relational Constellation, extends the focus of the series to include additional original works that provide a unique opportunity for audiences to hear from myriad Indigenous voices on the meaning of love.

Gordon Henry, Jr. is an Anishinaabe poet, fiction writer, and essayist, and an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation. He is the author of the poetry collection The Failure of Certain Charms (2008) and the novel The Light People (1994), which was the recipient of the American Book Award. A professor of literature and creative writing at Michigan State University, Gordon also serves as editor of MSU Press’s American Indian Studies Series.

Elizabeth LaPensée is an award-winning designer, writer, artist, and researcher. She is Anishinaabe from Baawaating with relations at Bay Mills Indian Community and Métis. She is Assistant Professor of Media & Information and Writing, Rhetoric & American Cultures at Michigan State University, and has contributed to comics as an illustrator, writer, and editor, including Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection and Deer Woman: An Anthology.

The first two volumes of Sovereign Traces are available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Gordon and Elizabeth on Instagram @drpinepoint and @elizabethlapensee. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

Talking Acquisitions & University Press Publishing

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0500

Catherine Cocks is the assistant director and editor in chief of MSU Press you can find her on Twitter @catherine_msup.

Caitlin Tyler Richards acquires in African studies, African diaspora, African American studies, Anthropology, and digital humanities. You can find her @ctredits on Twitter.

Feeding the Elephant: A Forum for Scholarly Communication includes several posts on virtual conferencing, which we discussed in the show.

You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Detroit's Hidden Channels: French Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0500

The hidden channels of Detroit’s French-Indigenous history run backward and forward through time, cutting through and becoming visible in the expanse of the imperial record only to disappear into local story and song. These are seams in Detroit’s history that reveal the contingent and “messy” nature of national borders and local identities. As Sophie White describes it, Detroit’s Hidden Channels is a meticulous and sophisticated analysis of Detroit’s founding era … it offers an important rejoinder to standard imperial histories by parting the curtains for us to see, with more clarity and precision than we have before, the place of Indigenous and French women in the making of Detroit.”

Karen L. Marrero is Associate Professor of early American History at Wayne State University where she teaches courses on early North American and Indigenous history.

Dr. Marrero’s book, Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Cleveland Architecture, 1890-1930

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0500

At the turn of the twentieth century, Cleveland became a model of what could be accomplished by a partnership between the city’s wealthy and the local government to create an architecturally beautiful, livable, industrial city. Inspired by the success of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with its classically inspired Beaux-Arts buildings, Cleveland developed an architectural and urban planning strategy over the next three decades which not only resulted in the Cleveland Group Plan for Public Buildings of 1903 but also inspired an additional quarter century of impressive City Beautiful buildings for all forms of public use.

As Anne Trubek puts it, Cleveland Architecture, 1890-1930 is a stunning accomplishment. At once a history, an encyclopedia, and an analysis of the City Beautiful movement, the book contains startling original research and offers a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in Cleveland, architecture, or history. Gorgeously illustrated in a splendid hardcover format, this is a necessary book and a remarkable service to the city and to scholarship.

Jeannine deNobel Love is an independent art historian focusing on American art and architecture. She has worked at the Detroit Institute of Art and served as Director of the Intermuseum Conservation Association, a regional art conservation center in Ohio. She has written on Frank Lloyd Wright and his collaborators and on John La Farge’s stained glass in Cleveland. She has also contributed to The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art: Guide to the Collections.

Cleveland Architecture, 1890-1930, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

African Diasporic Cinema: Aesthetics of Reconstruction

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 09:00:00 -0500

The African diasporic condition in the Western world is characterized by the intersection of various factors. As a result, quests for the self and self-reconstruction are frequent themes in the films of the African diaspora, and yet the filmmakers refuse to remain trapped in the confines of an assigned, rigid identity. Translated from the French by Melissa Thackway, Daniela Ricci’s African Diasporic Cinema: Aesthetics of Reconstruction analyzes the aesthetic strategies adopted by contemporary African diasporic filmmakers to express the reconstruction of identity.

The book analyzes the contemporary diaspora through the prism of cultural hybridization and the processes of recomposing fragmented identities, out of which new identities emerge. In the words of Francoise Pfaff, African Diasporic Cinema “brilliantly incorporates sociopolitical, psychological, and philosophical tools … Ricci’s well-documented book highlights personal journeys and diverse representations of global issues: migration, exile, biracialism, hybrid cultural identities, exclusion, alienation, and alterity. A must read for researchers in film, African studies, and diaspora studies.”

Daniela Ricci teaches film studies at Paris Nanterre University and the University of Paris 8 in France. She is part of the research laboratory History of Arts and Representations and is a member of the African Federation of Film Critics, the African Studies Association, and the African Literature Association.

Daniela Ricci’s book, African Diasporic Cinema, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find her online at her website, which is linked in the podcast description and on Facebook. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Hats

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 09:00:00 -0400

As Martin Harper, the Global Conservation Director of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds puts it, Hats: A Very UNnatural History is a remarkable book that documents the impact that our obsession with hats has had on the natural world. It outlines how the global trade in fur and feathers evolved and the damage it caused, and highlights how heroic campaigners brought about reform, which in many cases aided recovery of species whose existence was threatened. It is a timely reminder of the consequences of consumerism and why radical changes are needed so our own species learns to live in harmony with nature.

Malcolm Smith is a biologist, a former chief scientist and deputy chief executive at the Countryside Council for Wales, and a former board member of the Environmental Agency, Europe’s largest environmental regulator, for England and Wales. He’s the author of four previous books, including Ploughing a New Furrow: A Blueprint for Wildlife Friendly Farming.

Hats: A Very UNnatural History, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Malcolm @drmalcomsmith on Twitter. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

The Medicine Wheel: Environmental Decision-Making Process of Indigenous Peoples

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 09:00:00 -0400

The medicine wheel built by Indigenous people acknowledges that ecosystems experience unpredictable recurring cycles and that people and the environment are interconnected. The Western science knowledge framework is incomplete when localized intergenerational knowledge is not respected and becomes part of the problem-definition and solution process. If both forms of knowing continue on separate parallel tracks, the decision process will most likely identify the “symptom” of an environmental problem and not the “disease” causing it.

The goal of this book is to lay the context for how to connect Western science and Indigenous knowledge frameworks to form a holistic and ethical decision process for the environment. A collection of essays, interviews, stories, and research, The Medicine Wheel does not just describe the problems inherent to each knowledge framework but offers new insights for how to connect culture and art to science knowledge frameworks. In the words of Doug Decker, The Medicine Wheel is a volume you’ll want to consult time and again, and to share with your peers.

Dr. Mike E. Marchand is a former Chair and Council Member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville, President of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians Economic Development Corporation, and he earned his PhD at the University of Washington Seattle. Kristiina A. Vogt is professor of ecosystem management and holistic assessment of ecosystems at the University of Washington Seattle.

The Medicine Wheel: Environmental Decision-Making Process of Indigenous Peoples, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Dr. Marchand on Facebook, and you can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Re-Membering and Surviving: African American Fiction of the Vietnam War

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 09:00:00 -0400

In the words of Yusef Komunyakaa, Shirley A. James Hanshaw’s Re-Membering and Surviving is a powerful call seeking a response. This superb analytical voice examines literature by four black writers—John A. Williams, Wesley Brown, A. R. Flowers, and George Davis—who are masterful storytellers shaped by the caldron of war. Through her attention to these figures, Hanshaw reveals an American voice that has been kept in obscurity. Here, the historical background illuminates a postmodern imagination. As Jay Watson puts it, “This is an invaluable work that will kindle important scholarship about the Black war experience and its literary representation for years to come. A vital contribution to African American literary criticism and literary history.”

Shirley A. James Hanshaw is professor emerita in the English Department at Mississippi State University where she was instrumental in establishing the first African American Studies Program. She is the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a Danforth Associateship for Outstanding Teaching in the Sciences and Humanities, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

Re-Membering and Surviving: African American Fiction of the Vietnam War, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

The Crisis of School Violence: A New Perspective

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 11:24:00 -0400

The Crisis of School Violence is the only interdisciplinary book about school violence. It presents a broad and in-depth approach to the key questions about why bullying continues at an unprecedentedly high rate and why rampage shootings continue to shock the nation. Based on extensive research, the book investigates human nature and its relation to aggressive behavior, with a special focus on the culture of violence that predicates school violence and perpetuates industries that profit from violence. The Crisis of School Violence presents the considerable psychological and neuroscientific research on the effects of violent entertainment media on the brain and behavior, which clearly reveals a causal connection between exposure to violent media, especially violent video games, and increased violent behavior.

Marianna King’s academic and other professional work focuses on violence and violence prevention. As an educator, she has worked with elementary school children in gang-active communities as well as university students, gang members, and violent offenders. She’s published articles for the National School Boards Association, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and other professional organizations. Because of her groundbreaking work on violence prevention, she was honored with a New Mexico Woman of the Year award in the year 2000.

The Crisis of School Violence: A New Perspective, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can learn more about the book at its website: www.schoolviolencebook.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The Manufacture of Consent: J. Edgar Hoover and the Rhetorical Rise of the FBI

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 09:00:00 -0400

In his new book, The Manufacture of Consent, Dr. Underhill treats J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure as FBI director as a case study in political power, focusing on the rhetorical nature of that power. He analyzes Hoover’s relationship with the presidency, the press, and the film industry to reveal the ways in which Hoover was able to use prevailing discourses of racial, gender, class, and religious hierarchies to dominate the media and to create and sustain the role of the FBI in United States society. Thus, the book illuminates both the history of the FBI and the political and ideological debates of the era. As Ned O’Gorman puts it, the book is a brilliant investigation into the ways J. Edgar Hoover coopted the rhetorical themes and techniques of twentieth-century American liberals and progressives to fortify a virtual American police state.

Dr. Underhill is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Marshall University. He served as the lead reference person for classified FBI and Department of Justice textual records at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland, from 2007 to 2012.

The Manufacture of Consent: J. Edgar Hoover and The Rhetorical Rise of the FBI is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find more information about the book on its Facebook page, and Dr. Underhill is on Twitter @s_m_underhill. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

Academic Journal Publishing and the Journal of Gender and Sexuality Studies

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 09:00:00 -0400

Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades is the journal of the Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies. First published in the spring of 1975 at the University of Colorado, Denver, REGS is one of the earliest academic journals devoted to gender-related issues, women authors, and feminist theory in the contexts of Hispanic literatures and cultures. Published biannually in a mix of Spanish and English, the journal includes critical articles on gender studies topics; unpublished work by Spanish, Latin American, and Latino/a authors, poets, and playwrights; interviews with writers, artists, filmmakers, and critics; and a substantial book review section in every issue.

In addition serving as the editor of REGS, Dr. Quispe-Agnoli is Professor of (Post) Colonial Latin American Studies with affiliations in the American Indian Studies Program and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Michigan State University. Dr. Quispe-Agnoli is also a well-published author of both academic and creative works, most recently Women’s Negotiations and Textual Agency in Latin America, 1500-1799 (Routledge 2017). José Badillo Carlos is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Cultural Studies and is currently finishing his doctoral dissertation on Mexico’s corruption and violence in contemporary cultural productions.

Issues of Revista de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades are available from msupress.org and in jstor and other fine scholarly databases. You can find the journal on Twitter @aegs2018 and on YouTube. Dr. Quispe-Agnoli is on Twitter and Instagram. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb. You can rate and review the show in Apple podcasts or send your feedback to milberg2@msu.edu.

The 16th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 09:00:00 -0400

On the hot summer evening of July 2, 1863, at the climax of the struggle for a Pennsylvania hill called Little Round Top, four Confederate regiments charge up the western slope, attacking the smallest and most exposed of their Union foe: the 16th Michigan Infantry. Terrible fighting has raged, but what happens next will ultimately—and unfairly—stain the reputation of one of the Army of the Potomac’s veteran combat outfits, made up of men from Detroit, Sagniaw, and other Michigan locales.

In the dramatic interpretation of the struggle for Little Round Top that followed the Battle of Gettysburg, the 16th Michigan Infantry would be remember as the one that broke during perhaps the most important turning point in the war. Their colonel, a young lawyer from Ann Arbor, would pay with his life, redeeming his own reputation, while a kind of code of silence about what happened at Little Round Top was adopted by the regiment’s survivors.

From soldiers’ letters, journals, and memoirs, Kim Crawford’s book, The 16th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War, relates their experiences in camp, on the march, and in battle, including their controversial role at Gettysburg, up to the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House. The book has been very well reviewed, including by Military Images and the Michigan Historical Review, According to Civil War News, “This is historical writing at its finest ... a finely crafted regimental history ... [that is] entertaining, informative and well sourced.”

Kim Crawford. Crawford is a retired newspaper reporter and the author of The Daring Trader: Jacob Smith in the Michigan Territory, 1802-1825 and coauthor of The 4th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War. He has written about Michigan Civil War soldiers for Michigan History magazine, served as guest curator for the Flint Sloan Museum’s 2012 Civil War exhibit, “The Brave and the Faithful,” and he has given talks on both the 4th and 16th Michigan Infantry regiments to historical societies and Civil War roundtables.

The 16th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, Donté Smith, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

Anthropology and Radical Humanism

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 09:00:00 -0400

Anthropology and Radical Humanism is based on the work of the famed ethnographer of the Winnebago, Paul Radin. During his three-year appointment at Fisk University in the late 1920s, Radin and a graduate student, Andrew Polk Watson, collected autobiographies and religious conversion narratives from elderly African Americans. Their texts represent the first systematic record of slavery as told by former slaves. Radin regarded each narrative as the unimpeachable self-representation of a unique, thoughtful individual, precisely the perspective marking his earlier Winnebago work. As a radical humanist, Radin was an outspoken critic of racial explanations of human affairs then pervading not only popular thinking but also historical and sociological scholarship, placing him in the vanguard of anti-racist scholarship. Utilizing this material and other archival and published sources, Jack Glazier revisits the Radin-Watson collection and sets Paul Radin’s findings within the broader context of his discipline, African American culture, and Radin’s career-defining work among the Winnebago.

Jack Glazier is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Oberlin College and former president of the Central States Anthropological Society. He is a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Royal Anthropological Institute. His previous books include Been Coming through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky and Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants across America.

Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The Eagle Has Eyes

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 25 May 2020 09:00:00 -0400

The Eagle Has Eyes is the first book of its kind to bring transparency to the FBI’s attempts to destroy the incipient Chicano Movement of the 1960s. The role of the US government in suppressing marginalized racial and ethnic minorities began to be documented with the advent of the Freedom of Information Act, and the book utilizes declassified files from the FBI to investigate the agency’s role in thwarting the efforts of César Chavez’s to build a labor union for farm workers. The book also documents the roles of the FBI, California state police, and local police in assisting those who opposed Chavez. In the words of Eloy García, the book “masterfully connects the dots of US government surveillance ... helping us understand the cowed public silence in the present perilous era of the Orwellian ‘national security’ matrix.”

José Angel Gutiérrez is the author of many other books documenting the Chicano Movement all which are informed by his prominent role as a leader and community organizer. Gutiérrez is Professor Emeritus of the University of Texas at Arlington, where he founded the Center for Mexican American Studies. He maintains a law practice and is the President of the Greater Dallas Legal and Community Development Foundation.

The Eagle Has Eyes: The FBI Surveillance of César Estrada Chavez of the United Farm Workers Union of America, 1965-1975, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Intellectual Populism

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 18 May 2020 09:15:00 -0400

On today’s episode, we’re joined by Paul Stob to discuss his book, Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People. In response to denunciations of populism as undemocratic and anti-intellectual, Intellectual Populism argues that populism has contributed to a distinct and democratic intellectual tradition in which ordinary people assume leading roles in the pursuit of knowledge. Focusing on the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras, the book uses case studies of intellectual figures to trace key rhetorical appeals that proved capable of resisting the status quo and building alternative communities of inquiry. As the book shows, figures like Robert Ingersoll, Mary Baker Eddy, Thomas Davidson, Booker T. Washington, and Zitkala-Sa deployed populist rhetoric to rally ordinary people as thinkers in new intellectual efforts. In sum, Intellectual Populism demonstrates how orators and advocates can channel the frustrations and energies of the American people toward productive, democratic intellectual ends.

Paul Stob is Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. Stob’s research explores the intersection of rhetoric, intellectual culture, and public advocacy in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era United States. In addition to Intellectual Populism, he is author of William James and the Art of Popular Statement and coeditor of Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Intellectual Populism is available from msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find out more about the book at intellectualpopulism.com, and Stob is on Twitter @paulstob. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Blackhood against the Police Power

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 11 May 2020 09:15:00 -0400

Dr. Tryon Woods is Associate Professor of crime and justice studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where he teaches Black Studies and critical approaches to de-disciplining knowledge. In Blackhood against the Police Power, Dr. Woods “addresses the punishment of ‘race’ and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary ‘post racial’ culture of politics."

Blackhood against the Police Power, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find him online at tryonpwoods.wixsite.com/mysite. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

(New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 04 May 2020 09:15:00 -0400

In (New) Fascism, Dr. Lawtoo discusses the new forms of fascism haunting our contemporary political scene. He reads this new style of fascism and crowd psychology through the lens of mimetic theory and traces the genealogy of (new) fascism back to the three related mimetic concepts of contagion, community, and myth. These concepts were once central to the spread of fascism in Europe and are now proving central to the rise of new fascisms as well. As Dr. Lawtoo writes, “A protean figure ... is now occupying the leading role on the political stage, [one that] relies on ‘falseness,’ ‘simulation,’ ‘appearance,’ and ‘an excess of the capacity for all kinds of adaptations.’ In the process, [this (new) fascist] gives voice to hypernationalist, racist, and militaristic tendencies constitutive of the myth of greatness that is attainable for few, yet generates mass enthusiasm in the many as well.”

Today we’re here to discuss the phenomenon of (new) fascism, what collision of narcissism and the madness of crowds brought us to this moment, and where we’re heading in the wake of an oppressive global pandemic. I’m excited to be joined for this discussion by Nidesh Lawtoo, who is Professor of English and Philosophy at KU Leuven in Belgium. Dr. Lawtoo received his PhD in Comparative Literature & Critical Theory from the University of Washington and his areas of specialization include modernism, postcolonial literature, film studies and Continental Philosophy with special focus on the theories of mimesis, imitation, and simulation. (New) Fascism: Contagion, Community, Myth is his most recent book with MSU Press, and it was published in our Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory Series.

(New) Fascism Contagion, Community, Myth, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. As Dr. Lawtoo stated, the book is part of a larger project funded by the European Research Council titled Homo Mimeticus. You can learn more about that project at homomimeticus.eu, @hom_project on twitter, and on facebook at homprojecterc, and Professor Lawtoo is on twitter @nidesh.lawtoo. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

Toward the Wild Abundance

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 09:15:00 -0400

Toward the Wild Abundance received the Wheelbarrow Books Prize for Poetry from Center for Poetry at the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities here at MSU in 2018. In her introduction to the volume, the contest’s judge, Sarah Bagby, says the book “conjures emotions initiated by the frailty and wonder of our lives. ... These kaleidoscopic poems also shine brilliance on themes of memory and the passage of time. They fluidly transport us from past to present and into the imagination to pose questions about how our experiences inform identity and meaning.” The book is full of light, paintings, flowers, and quiet moments of reflection. In the words of Jack Ridl, Toward the Wild Abundance is an “elegantly down-to-earth collection” that “longs for lives where we love wastefully and stand in awe.”

Kristin Brace writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Fence, Patio, Blessed Virgin and Each Darkness Inside. Brace earned an MFA in writing from Spalding University and her work has appeared in journals such as Fiction Southeast, Water-Stone Review, and The Other Journal.

Toward the Wild Abundance, is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find her at kristinbrace.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find our host @kurtmilb.

Once Upon a Time at the Opera House

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 09:15:00 -0400

Once Upon a Time at the Opera House explores the importance of opera houses to the cultural and community life of nonmetropolitan areas in Michigan. As both the civic and arts center for the community, the local opera house was a venue for community meetings, political rallies, concerts, lectures, and theatrical entertainments. The well-illustrated and often humorous stories readers encounter in the book are based on historical facts, anecdotes, urban legends, and tall tales associated with three of the more than one hundred opera houses that existed in Michigan in the period spanning the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. A kind of storybook about the Golden Age of Opera Houses in many of America’s rural regions, Once Upon a Time at the Opera House is a truly fascinating compendium of American entertainment culture, architecture, and civic life as specifically expressed in the history of three Michigan buildings.

You can learn more about the theaters we discuss in this episode following the links below:

The Tibbits Theatre: https://tibbits.org/
The Ramsdell Theatre: https://ramsdelltheatre.org/
The Calumet Theatre: http://www.calumettheatre.com/

James Berton Harris. Active in both academic and professional theatre for forty-five years, Harris is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and he has been a member of the theatre faculty at the University of Michigan and Boston University. He has worked extensively as a costume designer at regional theatres and Shakespeare festivals across the country, and his New York credits include on and off Broadway, as well as at Circle Repertory Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Once Upon a Time at the Opera House: Drama at Three Historic Michigan Theatres, 1882-1928, is available at msupress.org, your local bookstore, or wherever else you get your books. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 09:15:00 -0400

RESPECT is a massive collection of poems and lyrics, a monument that shows the global impact of Detroit’s music scene. Its contents span genres from jazz and Motown and R&B to hip-hop, rap, rock, and even techno and electronica. The book’s contributors are Grammy winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, and poets laureate. In its nearly 450 pages appear pieces by Eminem, June Jordan, Rita Dove, Jack White, Nikki Giovanni, Patricia Smith, Billy Bragg, and many more. Check out the RESPECT Spotify playlist for a great soundtrack to the book.

RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Jim Daniels’s author page on Facebook and M. L. Liebler at mlliebler.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

A Detroit native and prize winning poet, Jim Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He is the author of many collections of fiction and poetry, as well as four produced screenplays. Daniels has also edited five anthologies, including Challenges to the Dream: The Best of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Writing Awards.

M. L. Liebler is an internationally known and widely published Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist, and arts organizer. Author of fifteen books, Liebler has been a member of the English department faculty at Wayne State University since 1980, and he is currently the President of the Detroit Writers’ Guild. In 2018, Liebler received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles literary award and the Murray E. Jackson Scholar in the Arts Award at Wayne State.
RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers.

James D. Diamond on Healing after Rampage Shootings

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 09:15:00 -0400

In this episode, James D. Diamond discusses his book After the Bloodbath: Is Healing Possible in the Wake of Rampage Shootings. Topics include Indigenous justice traditions, restorative justice, the effects of rampage shootings on victims and families, and potential changes to the US legal system to encourage healing in the wake of tragedy.

After the Blood Bath, “examines the typical American reaction to the tragedy of rampage killings,” the “interplay between offenders and their families and victims and their families,” and “an emerging and unreported trend”: the desire for reconciliation and healing between families of rampage offenders and the families of their victims. In this work, Diamond draws on “a distinct difference in how some American Indian communities treat rampage killers and their families” to ask what the Western justice system might learn about restorative justice from other traditions.

James Diamond, has spent more than twenty-five years as a criminal lawyer, with experience as both a state prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney. He is the former director of the Tribal Justice Clinic at James E. Rogers College of Law and Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona. You can find him online at https://jamesddiamond.com/.

You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

About MSU Press and University Press Publishing

Michigan State University Press — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 09:15:00 -0400

In this episode, the press's director, Gabe Dotto, and the press's editor-in-chief, Catherine Cocks, join us to talk about the history and future of MSU Press and some of the challenges facing university press publishers today. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.