Thomas Dekeyser is a filmmaker and lecturer in human geography at the University of Southampton and author of Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine.

Sarah Sharma is acting Vice Dean, Research and Program Innovation at the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, where she is also professor of media theory at the ICCIT/Faculty of Information and director of the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology. Sharma is author of Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech and In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics.

Brian Merchant is author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech and The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. He is a reporter in residence at the AI Now Institute, former technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times, co-founder and editor of Vice’s speculative fiction outlet TERRAFORM, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Fast Company.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985 essay)

Film: Machines in Flames

Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine by Thomas Dekeyser is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Umayyah Cable is assistant professor of American culture and film, television, and media at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of Mainstreaming Palestine: Cinematic Activism and Solidarity Politics in the United States.

Evelyn Alsultany is professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College and author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion and Arabs and Muslims in the Media.

Keith Feldman is associate professor in the department of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley and author of A Shadow over Palestine.

Melani McAlister is professor of American Studies and international affairs and director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. McAlister is author of Promises, Then the Storm, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders, and Epic Encounters.

REFERENCES:

-AAUG: Association of Arab American University Graduates

-Telegram/Yasser Arafat

-Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival

-Erella Shadmi, “Women, Palestinians, Zionism: A Personal View.”

-Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”

-Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art

-Jean Baudrillard’s four stages of representation

-Jonathan Glazer’s 2024 Oscar acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest

-Film Workers for Palestine

-BDS: Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

FILM REFERENCES:
David Koff’s Occupied Palestine

Jan Haaken and Jennifer Ruth’s The Palestine Exception

Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker’s The Encampments

Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land

Mainstreaming Palestine: Cinematic Activism and Solidarity Politics in the United States by Umayyah Cable is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Brian Bartell teaches courses on politics and aesthetics, media studies, and race and technology studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles and at the California Institute of Technology. Bartell is author of On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution: Black Power and Capitalism in the 1960s.

John Elrick is visiting assistant professor of geography at Vassar College. 

EPISODE REFERENCES:

-From Counterculture to Cyberculture / Fred Turner

-“The Negro and Cybernation,” James Boggs, speech delivered at the First Annual Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution, 1964.

-Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution (AHC), The Triple Revolution (pamphlet), 1964.

-National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, Report Vol. 1: Technology and the American Economy, 1966

-Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century / Grace Lee Boggs

-Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth, 1972

-Ten Point Program, 1966 and 1972 (presented at Community Survival Conference, Oakland, CA); particularly, “People’s Community Control of Modern Technology” and Huey P. Newton’s “The Technology Question” within.

-The Chosen Place, the Timeless People / Paule Marshall

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"Incisive, original, and beautifully written, On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution exposes the interconnections between race, technology, and capitalism. Brian Bartell shows that the cybercultural revolution was central to the Black Power movement as it opened up avenues for envisioning freedom from the conditions of reproduction and labor under racial capitalism."
—Neda Atanasoski

"Highly relevant to the present moment, On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution presents a vital argument about the Black Power movement’s insights into the relationship between capitalism, technology, and racism. In so doing, Brian Bartell makes a fascinatingly original contribution to conversations about the role of automation in the ‘technocapitalist present.’"
—Jonathan Flatley

On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution: Black Power and Capitalism in the 1960s by Brian Bartell is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Anna Terwiel is assistant professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and codirector of Trinity’s Prison Education Project. Terwiel is author of Prison Abolition for Realists. 

Kirstine Taylor is associate professor of political science and the Center for Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio University. Taylor is author of Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Foucault / Discipline and Punish

Prison Information Group

Prison+Neighborhood Arts/Education Project

Nils Christie

Louk Hulsman

Angela Davis

Liat Ben-Moshe / Decarcerating Disability

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Thomas Mathiesen

W. E. B. Du Bois

Mariame Kaba

Erin R. Pineda / Seeing Like an Activist

Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA)

Praise for the book:

“Both clearly written and timely in its subject matter, Prison Abolition for Realists offers a cogent way of thinking about abolition. Anna Terwiel intervenes in the debate over whether abolition is utopian in its aims and excellently frames her argument in the tradition of political realism.”

—Ali Aslam, coauthor of Earthborn Democracy: A Political Theory of Entangled Life

Prison Abolition for Realists by Anna Terwiel is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

David Hakensen is an award-winning public relations executive with more than forty years of experience. He has served on several nonprofit boards and was president of the executive council of the Minnesota Historical Society from 2018-2023.

Annette Atkins is a scholar, teacher, public historian, and professor emerita at Saint John's University and the College of Saint Benedict in Collegeville, Minnesota. Atkins is author of Creating Minnesota: A History from the Inside Out.

Praise for the book:

"None of it was easy. None of it was a straight line. Much was laced with human paradox and contradiction and courage. David tells Helen’s remarkable story with grace and understanding, helping readers to discover the real woman behind the myth and why her place in the woods is still the stuff of dreams."
—Douglas Wood, author of A Wild Path

"A compelling portrait of an uncompromising artist. It is an excellent companion to her works and will surely assist a long-overdue Helen Hoover revival."
—Ann McCutchan, author of The Life She Wished to Live

Her Place in the Woods: The Life of Helen Hoover is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Thank you for listening.

Erica Rand is professor of art and visual culture and of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College. She is author of several books, including Skating Away from the Binary ; Barbie’s Queer Accessories; The Ellis Island Snow Globe; Red Nails Black Skates: Gender, Cash, and Pleasure On and Off the Ice; and The Small Book of Hip Checks On Queer Gender, Race, and Writing. She has served on the editorial boards of Radical Teacher and Salacious and co-edits the series Writing Matters! for Duke University Press. In a piece for Global Sports Matters called “Skating Out of the Binary” and in “At the Ice Rink, My Feet End in Knives,” she describes training in a gender non-conforming adult figure skating pairs team, with pairs partner Anna Kellar of the Future of Figure Skating podcast, as they participate in growing efforts to expand inclusion in the sport—a sport mired in racialized heteronormativity that is also being transformed through critically engaged practice and institutional change.

Mary Louise Adams is a retired professor from the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Adams is author of Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity and the Limits of Sport and The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality.

Travers is a professor of sociology at Simon Fraser University. They are author of The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution; Transgender Athletes in Competitive Sports; and Writing the Public in Cyberspace: Redefining Inclusion on the Net.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Podcast, Anna Kellar, The Future of Figure Skating

Danya Lagos, American Journal of Sociology: “Has There Been a Transgender Tipping Point?”

Eric A. Stanley, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Gender Self-Determination

Skating Away from the Binary by Erica Rand is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at manifold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening. 

Jessica Lopez Lyman is an interdisciplinary performance artist and Xicana feminist scholar, assistant professor in the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota, and author of Place-Keepers: Latina/x Art, Performance, and Organizing in the Twin Cities.

Kristie Soares is associate professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies at University of Colorado Boulder. Soares is author of Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media.

Karma Chávez is Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and Chair of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Chavez is author of The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance; Palestine on the Air; and Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities. 

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Laurie Carlos

María Isa Pérez-Vega

Stephanie Lee Batiste

Methodology of the Oppressed / Chela Sandoval

FEATURED ARTISTS in Place-Keepers:

Teresa Ortiz

Guadalupe Castillo (La Lupe)

Deborah Ramos

Adriana Rimpel (Lady Midnight)

María Isa Pérez-Vega

Lorena Duarte

Olivia Levins Holden

Magdalena Kaluza

Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra

Maria Cristina Tavera

NOTE: This podcast episode was recorded in December 2025. More recently, Jessica Lopez Lyman spoke with Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan on LitHub’s fiction/non/fiction podcast about the history of state violence in Minnesota.

Place-Keepers: Latina/x Art, Performance, and Organizing in the Twin Cities by Jessica Lopez Lyman is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Maria Janion (1926–2020) was the greatest Polish leftist intellectual of her generation. The author of twenty-three books and hundreds of articles and essays, she mentored and inspired several generations of Eastern European scholars and political activists. During her life, Janion held appointments at several Polish academic institutions, including the University of Gdańsk and the Institute of Literary Studies in Warsaw.

Marta Figlerowicz is professor of comparative literature at Yale University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and author of Flat Protagonists and Spaces of Feeling as well as more than a hundred articles, reviews, and essays. Her translations from Polish have appeared in PMLA and The Paris Review.

Noah Feldman is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University. Feldman is author of ten books, including To Be a Jew Today, and host of the podcast Deep Background with Noah Feldman.

Episode references:
Adam Mickiewicz

Olga Tokarczuk

Edward Said

Isaiah Berlin

Praise for the book:
“Maria Janion’s writing is foundational to so many currents of contemporary Central European thought—around nations and nationalism, gender and genre, everyday politics and the political writ large—that her invisibility in English has long struck those of us privileged to know her work as a tragedy, if not a crime. This book belongs on the shelf of every humanist.”

—Benjamin Paloff, author of Worlds Apart

“The remarkable creativity, energy, and erudition of Maria Janion shine forth in these essays.”

—Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago

The Bad Child: A Maria Janion Reader, edited by Marta Figlerowicz, available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Christina Jerne is associate professor in the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Experience Economy at Aarhus University, Denmark. Jerne is author of Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism and coeditor and translator of Against the Mafia: The Classic Italian Writings.

Deborah Puccio-Den is a political anthropologist and research professor at the National Center for Scientific Research and the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. She is author of Mafiacraft: An Ethnography of Deadly Silence.

Trine Mygind Korsby is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and currently a Marie Curie fellow at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).

REFERENCES:

Mafiacraft: An Ethnography of Deadly Silence / Deborah Puccio-Den

Umberto Santino

Giovanni Falcone

Audre Lorde

J. K. Gibson-Graham

Bruno Latour

Jean Luc Nancy

Gabriel Tarde

Gilles Deleuze

Felix Guattari

Addiopizzo

Praise for the book:
"Placing human experience at the center of collective action, Opposition by Imitation presents radically new directions for thinking about social movements. Christina Jerne captures both the fragility and strength of the struggle against mafia economies, powerfully demonstrating how anti-mafia activism opens up space for non-mafia relationships and economies to flourish."
—Kevin McDonald, Middlesex University

Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism by Christina Jerne is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

More about Armato's acquisitions, collaborations, and retirement news: z.umn.edu/DA27.
More about the Press's 100-year history and influence: z.umn.edu/wordfactory100.
This is a University of Minnesota Press production. Thank you for listening.

Episode chapters:

• 02:30: What has scholarly publishing gained, and what has it lost, since we started in the business?
• 05:08: Side hustles to sustain the bottom line.
• 10:02: Are university presses and university libraries still close allies?
• 17:52: How is the outside world meant to understand what a university press does?
• 22:45: It's a job for hopeless romantics willing to fall in love with ideas (and not necessarily ones you even like).
• 28:40: Whither AI? How is the AI tsunami different from or similar to past massive paradigm changes for publishing, such as the Internet and e-books?
• 35:22: In a world of e-books, does a book need to go out of print? Should books go out of print?
• 41:00: What is the ideal role for scholarly publishers with regard to tenure decisions?
• 48:24: Memories and anecdotes about working with Doug Armato.

At nineteen, a breakthrough in medical technology restored the sight in his right eye, and James recognized his unique perspective on the struggles of the disabled and marginalized in American life—and his intense will to make a difference. Here, James is joined in conversation with Beverly Daniel Tatum and Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe. Access a transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/f9782d31

James Francisco Bonilla (he/him) is a New York–born Puerto Rican writer and retired professor of Hamline University in St. Paul. He has written and presented nationally and internationally on diversity, cultural competence, and leadership, especially on how to diversify environmental organizations. 

Beverly Daniel Tatum (she/her) is an award-winning educational leader, best-selling author, expert on the psychology of racism, and longtime social justice educator.

Charmaine Wijeyesinghe (she/her) is a consultant and author with 40 years of experience working with colleges, universities, and public and private organizations on diverse social justice areas and organizational change.

REFERENCES:
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma / Stephanie Foo

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (film)

The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight / Andrew Leland

Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times / Beverly Daniel Tatum

Promoting Diversity and Social Justice: Educating People from Privileged Groups / Diane J. Goodman

Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living / John McQuiston

Praise for the book:

“With its intersectional analysis of racism, mental illness, and disability, this memoir brings a fresh and inspiring voice to the world of social justice literature.”
—Beverly Daniel Tatum

“This memoir is the essence of what I still seek to share with youth in all communities.”
—J. Herman Blake, professor emeritus, Iowa State University

“James Francisco Bonilla shows that hope and healing can be found through advocacy and community.”

—Sue Abderholden, former executive director, NAMI Minnesota

“This inspiring memoir encourages a new generation to confront biases and champion social justice.”

—Madeline L. Peters, disability consultant

An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness by James Francisco Bonilla is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Rebecca Monteleone is associate professor of disability and technology at the University of Toledo and author of The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority. 
 

Ashley Shew is a professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and author of Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

-Ally Day

-“Transmobility: Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) Bodies,” Mallory Kay Nelson, Ashley Shew, and Bethany Stevens / Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 

-Jackie Leach Scully

-Dana Lewis

-Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. / Adele E. Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, Janet K. Shim, editors

Praise for the book:
"A generous, timely, and essential contribution to understanding the current politics that shape medical technology and disability in the context of neoliberal ableism. A book that I will be thinking-making-feeling with for many years to come!"
—Laura Forlano, Northeastern University
 

The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority by Rebecca Monteleone is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, archivist, and assistant professor in the departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he also serves as faculty with the Digital Humanities Program, the UCLA Game Lab, and the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies. He is author of multiple volumes of experimental poetry and poetics, including Elden Poem, Apocalypse Reliquary, and EXE TXT.

Vicki Bennett is a multidisciplinary British artist working under the name People Like Us. 

Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah.

Luca Messarra is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University, and founder of Undocumented Press.

EPISODE REFERENCES:
Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database

Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, “Deformance and Interpretation" (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Deformance.pdf)

We Edit Life, film (People Like Us/Vicki Bennett; partnership with Lovebytes)

Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (Internet Archive, 2024, eds. Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland, Juliya Ziskina)

Eclipse, an image-based archive of small press poetry books and magazines

PennSound, a site distributing audio recordings of poetry readings

UbuWeb, a collection of experimental film and video art

Allen Institute for AI

C4/Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus

Christopher Kelty, "The Internet We Could Have Had"

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine (ed. Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews)
L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E magazine (ed. Danny Snelson)

Christian Marclay, The Clock

Johanna Drucker

Memory of the World archive

Future Knowledge podcast
Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan, Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface 

Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying 

Praise for the book:
“The Little Database is an incredibly powerful intervention into twenty-first-century experimental poetics and avant-garde media practices.”
—Stephanie Boluk

“The Little Database opens new ground for close reading in an environment that heavily promotes big data techniques and the neoliberal ideologies that accompany it in the new economy of attention.”
—Leonardo Reviews

“Snelson targets the fundamental assumption underlying much of contemporary DH work: that meaningful interpretation necessarily depends on the deployment of massive amounts of data.”
—Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“This book, while short in length, is certain to be long in influence, as it lays groundwork for future scholars, artists, readers, website makers, and archivists. The twists and turns, both in methodology and in specific analyses, are far more exciting than any summary, or even multiple readings of them, could serve.”
—Digital Humanities Quarterly

The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats by Daniel Scott Snelson is available from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at Manifold. 

Karrmen Crey is associate professor of Aboriginal communication and media studies in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Crey is author of Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and coeditor (with Joanna Hearne) of By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America.

William Lempert is Osterweis Family Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College and author of Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema.

REFERENCES/MEDIA:

Donna’s Story (film)

Indians + Aliens (reality television series)

The Visit (animated documentary short)

Tjawa Tjawa (film)

Rutherford Falls (sitcom)

REFERENCES/PEOPLE:

Mark Moora

Faye Ginsburg

Jesse Wente

Doug Cuthand

Donna Gamble

Lisa Jackson

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Jeff Barnaby

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Cynthia Lickers-Sage

Taiko Waititi

Foucault

Coulthard

Audra Simpson

REFERENCES/OTHER

Mark Rifkin / Beyond Settler Time

ImagiNATIVE Australia

Karrmen Crey’s Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada and By Their Work: Indigenous Women’s Digital Media in North America (a collection co-edited with Joanna Hearne) are available from University of Minnesota Press. Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema by William Lempert is available from University of Minnesota Press, and has an open-access edition through Manifold. 

Joyce Cheng is associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon and author of The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject.

Jonathan Eburne is J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He is author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas and Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry.    

REFERENCES:

Michael Stone-Richards

James Clifford / The Predicament of Culture

Natalya Lusty

Effie Rentzou

James Leo Cahill / Zoological Surrealism

Georges Bataille / Documents

Vincent Debaene / Far Afield

Severed hand collages

Marcel Mauss

Hannah Arendt

Johannes Fabian / Time and the Other

Malkam Ayyahou

The Persistence of Masks: Surrealism and the Ethnography of the Subject by Joyce Suechun Cheng is available from University of Minnesota Press and is the first book in its Surrealisms series. The University of Minnesota Press is also publisher of the International Journal of Surrealism.

Pernille Ipsen is author of My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women's Movement and professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ipsen is a historian of gender, women, feminism, race and colonialism in Scandinavia and the larger Atlantic world.

Adriane Lentz-Smith is associate professor of history, African American studies, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University. Lentz-Smith is author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I.

Praise for the book:

"This book is a treasure, especially for a second-wave American feminist who was thrilled to learn of the boldness and courage of our Danish sisters at the very start of the 1970s women’s movement. I can’t recommend it highly enough."

—Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City

"My Seven Mothers certainly is not all happiness and light, but that makes it even more moving, and as an American feminist I felt a sense of recognition infused with my own memories."

—Linda Gordon, author of Seven Social Movements That Changed America

"Compulsively readable and historically insightful, My Seven Mothers reveals the spirit, courage, and tenacity required of the women who paved the way for second-wave feminist organizing in Denmark."

—Birgitte Søland, author of Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s

My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movement by Pernille Ipsen is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University. He is author of Nonbinary Jane Austen and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.

Marquis Bey is professor of black studies and gender and sexuality and critical theory at Northwestern University. Bey is author of several books including Cistem Failure, Black Trans Feminism, and The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender.

Christopher Breu is author of several books including In Defense of Sex, Insistence of the Material, Hard-Boiled Masculinities, and coeditor of Noir Affect. Breu is professor of English at Illinois State University. 

Alison Sperling is assistant professor of literature, media, and culture at Florida State University, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin.

REFERENCES:

Derrida’s Of Grammatology

Foucault

Trans Femme Futures / Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift

The Anthropocene Unconscious / Mark Bould; Alison Sperling review in Los Angeles Review of Books

The Matrix film

Black on Both Sides / C. Riley Snorton

Fred Moten

Judith Butler

We Are All Nonbinary (essay) / Kadji Amin

Edward Said

Histories of the Transgender Child / Jules Gill-Peterson

S. Pearl Brilmyer / “The Ontology of the Couple” issue of GLQ

A Mercy / Toni Morrison

Sojourner Truth

Nonbinary Jane Austen is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at manifold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening.

Andrea Righi is a cultural theorist and professor of European studies and Italian at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Righi is author of Three Economies of Transcendence; The Other Side of the Digital: The Sacrificial Economy of New Media; and coeditor with Cesare Casarino of Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism.

Michael Lewis is senior lecturer in philosophy at University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and editor of the Journal of Italian Philosophy.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

René Girard

Adriana Cavarero

Emanuele Severino

Hannah Arendt

Paolo Virno

Jacques Lacan

Ministry for the Future / Kim Stanley Robinson

Fredric Jameson

Hardt and Negri

Three Economies of Transcendence by Andrea Righi is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

Adam Kotsko teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College and runs an active, free-to-read Substack. He is author of many books including Late Star Trek, Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory, Neoliberalism’s Demons, and What Is Theology? 

David Seitz is associate professor of cultural geography at Harvey Mudd College. He is author of A Different Trek and A House of Prayer for All People.

REFERENCES:
Shawna Kidman

Frederic Jameson

Anna Kornbluh

Christopher L. Bennett

Kirsten Beyer

David Mack

Michael Chabon

Lauren Berlant / On the Inconvenience of Other People

Star Trek references include:

Deep Space Nine

Enterprise

Nemesis

Discovery

Praise for the book:

​​”Combining the rigorous critical eye of a literary and political theorist with the encyclopedic knowledge of a devoted fan, Adam Kotsko offers an original, persuasive, ethical, funny, grim, and nevertheless hopeful examination of Star Trek’s twenty-first-century incarnations. Late Star Trek is a salutary intervention, a sustained, cogent analysis of what’s gone wrong, what’s gone right, and what possibilities remain for creative and critical storytelling in our late-neoliberal streaming era.”

—David Seitz

“Adam Kotsko has written an eminently readable and deeply researched book on twenty-first-century Star Trek, providing an analysis that is both timely and long overdue. A must-read for anyone teaching, doing research on, or just thinking about this ever-growing franchise.”

—Sabrina Mittermeier, coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek and Fighting for the Future: Essays on “Star Trek: Discovery”

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era by Adam Kotsko is the inaugural volume in the University of Minnesota Press’s Mass Markets series.

Derek Lee is author of Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal and assistant professor of literature at Wake Forest University.

Alicia Puglionesi is a lecturer in the medicine, science, and humanities program at Johns Hopkins University and is author of Common Phantoms and In Whose Ruins: Power, Possession, and the Landscapes of American Empire and Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science.

REFERENCES:

Society for Psychical Research

Roger Luckhurst

Stargate Project

Ingo Swann

Star Fire / Ingo Swann

Psitron

Adrian Dobbs

Philip K. Dick

William Butler Yeats

Joseph E. Uscinski

Praise for the book:

“Derek Lee engages the ‘pseudoscience’ moniker, that ultimate rhetorical insult, and seeks to replace it with a more accurate ‘parascience’—a place where science and that which is other than science meet and express themselves in literally global pathways as distinct as pulp and science fiction, environmental thought, Asian and Indigenous ways of knowing, U.S. secret espionage, and ethnic fiction. Lee shows all of this with consummate skill and rigor, pushing us beyond our present impasses. This thing is not going away. This is a revolution.”

—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly

“Derek Lee delves into the rich history of the paranormal to instigate a captivating discussion of its influence on literature and science into the twenty-first century through SF and ethnic fictions with the unproven concepts of parascience—precognition, telekinesis, clairvoyance, spectral communication, and telepathy. A classic in the making!”

—Isiah Lavender III, author of Afrofuturism Rising

Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal by Derek Lee is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Sasha Davis is an activist and professor in the Department of Environmental and Sustainability Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire. He is author of Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail; Islands and Oceans: Reimagining Sovereignty and Social Change; and The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific.

Laurel Mei-Singh is assistant professor of geography and Asian American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow and the Co-Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

REFERENCES:

J. K. Gibson-Graham

Haunani-Kay Trask

Military Geographies / Rachel Woodward

Cooperation Jackson

Michel Foucault / biopower

Praise for the book:

“As the United States is being destroyed, millions of spaces are opening up for something new to emerge. Offering urgent lessons and insights, Replace the State explores relational governance as an alternative to systems that no longer serve. Sasha Davis shows how we can move forward to create and claim a truly inclusive, sustainable world.”

—Lisa Fithian, author of Shut It Down: Stories from a Fierce, Loving Resistance

Replace the State: How to Change the World When Elections and Protests Fail by Sasha Davis is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Joshua Gooch is professor of English at D’Youville University in Buffalo, New York. He is author of Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film; Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity and The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy.

Johanna Isaacson is professor of English at Modesto Junior College and author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Sianne Ngai

Michael Löwy / “critical irrealism”

Linda Williams on Psycho, essay in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: A Casebook

Søren Mau

Nancy Fraser

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Silvia Federici

Amitav Ghosh

Kim Stanley Robinson

Jason W. Moore

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Sophie Lewis

M. E. O’Brien

Kathi Weeks

Lauren Berlant

FILMS DISCUSSED:

Psycho

Dracula

Nosferatu

Candyman

Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell

Joe Lynch’s Mayhem

Robert Eggers’s The Witch

Gillian Wallace Horvat’s I Blame Society

Rose Glass’s Saint Maud

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook

Ari Aster’s Hereditary

Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Jordan Peele’s Us

Mariame Diallo’s Master

Tim Story’s The Blackening

Timothy Covell’s Blood Conscious

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance

Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
Lamberti Bava’s Demons

The Ring

Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Praise for the book:
"Fiercely smart." —Annie McClanahan, author of Dead Pledges

"This is a book not just for fans of horror but for everyone interested in the ways films embed and communicate values, judgments, and affects." —Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, author of Gothic Things

Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film by Joshua Gooch is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Jessica D. Brier is curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. She is author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, editor of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print and coeditor of Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna.

Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, writer, and curator who has authored many books about design, including Thinking with Type and Extra Bold, and teaches design theory at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

REFERENCES:

Painting, Photography, Film / László Moholy-Nagy

Jan Tschichold

Walter Benjamin

El Lissitzky

Never Use Futura / Douglas Thomas

Paul Renner

Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucker

Bauhaus

Praise for the book:

“A novel interplay between text and image, Typophoto fused—as Jessica D. Brier demonstrates in this insightful account—the interests of advertisers with those of the avant-garde, thus instigating a process that ultimately resulted in the ubiquitous pixelated imagery of our own day.

—Kathleen James-Chakraborty, author of Modernism as Memory

“Deeply researched . . . highlights the ways new print technologies enabled photography to become the central medium of modernist visual culture. “
—Paul Stirton, author of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography

Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography by Jessica D. Brier is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Adam R. Rosenthal is associate professor of French and global studies at Texas A&M University. Rosenthal is author of Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life and Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida.

David Wills is professor of French studies at Brown University and author of Prosthesis. 

Deborah Goldgaber is assistant professor of philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Speculative Grammatology: Deconstruction and the New Materialism.

REFERENCES:

Plato 

Homer

Descartes

Heidegger (the Dasein)

Derrida

Geoffrey Hinton

Hegel

Nick Bostrum

Dolly the sheep

David Chalmers

Aubrey de Grey

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Praise for the book:

“Rigorous, compelling, and beautifully written, Prosthetic Immortalities is at the vanguard of the new wave in Derrida studies.”

—Nicole Anderson, founding editor, Derrida Today Journal

“Adam R. Rosenthal conjures up the ghosts of metaphysics that return today through the promises of indefinite life from medical science and transhumanist speculations, moving brilliantly between science and science fiction.”

—Francesco Vitale, author of Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences

Prosthetic Immortalities: Biology, Transhumanism, and the Search for Indefinite Life by Adam R. Rosenthal, with foreword by David Wills, is available from University of Minneota Press. Thank you for listening.

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature and Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

April Anson is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Anson writes and teaches at the intersection of the environmental humanities, Indigenous and American studies, and political theory. Anson is cofounder of the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative and coauthor of Against the Ecofascist Creep.

Kyle Boggs is associate professor of rhetoric and community engagement in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Boise State University and author of Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors.

REFERENCES:
Anti-Creep Climate Initiative

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy

Tommy Pico

Jeff Mann

Gloria Anzaldua

Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God

Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence

Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog

Theodore Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia

Ketan Joshi on lazy ecofascism

Mark Rifkin’s Settler Common Sense

Emily Martin’s Flexible Bodies

Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Rose Miron is vice president of research and education at Newberry Library in Chicago and author of Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, winner of the National Council for Public History Book Award and the Book of Merit Award from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Jennifer O’Neal is assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon.

Praise for the book:

“A necessary volume on the intersection of Indigenous knowledge loss, recovery, and production in the context of settler colonialism.”
—Jacki Thompson Rand, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“a must-read for archivists, researchers, and tribal historians working with/in Indian Country.”
—Shannon Martin, Lynx Clan, Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians; former director, Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways

Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory by Rose Miron is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Several contributors to this book are gathered here in conversation:

Vinay Gidwani is professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India.

Hemangini Gupta is lecturer in gender and global politics and associate director of GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India and coeditor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader.

Kaveri Medappa is a postdoctoral researcher in human geography at the University of Oxford. 

Swathi Shivanand is assistant professor at the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, India.

Michael Goldman is associate professor of sociology and global studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization.

Praise for Chronicles of a Global City:

“A nuanced investigation into the precise nature in which Bengaluru (and the global sphere) has embraced what the authors have dubbed 'speculative urbanism', a capital-led paradigm that has monopolised the imagination over public spaces and city-building.”
—Frontline Magazine

Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Tamara Dean is an educator and writer, author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless and The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. Her essays and stories have been published in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, Orion, and The Progressive.

Curt Meine is a conservation biologist, environmental historian, and writer. Meine is the award-winning author of the first biography of Aldo Leopold and has written and edited many books on conservation, including The Driftless Reader.

REFERENCES:
The Land Remembers / Ben Logan

Order Upon the Land / Hildegard Binder Johnson

Aldo Leopold

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"Dean writes with a clarity and wisdom that illuminates the past, the present, and the future. Shelter and Storm is an essential book for our time."
—Jane Hamilton, award-winning author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World

"In this remarkable collection of essays, Tamara Dean conveys the depth of our connection to the natural world with careful research and gentle words."
—Joan Maloof, author of Teaching the Trees

"There is so much to admire in these beautifully written essays, but foremost are Tamara Dean’s sense of awe in the natural world, her citizen science undertakings, and her deep research into both history and biology."
—Nancy Lord, former Alaska State Writer Laureate and author of Early Warming

Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless by Tamara Dean is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

David Prytherch is professor of geography at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is author of Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets; Law, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Way: Imagining a More Just Street; and coeditor of Transport, Mobility, and the Production of Urban Space. 

Mimi Sheller is Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Sheller is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, founding co-director of the Centre for Mobilities at Lancaster University, England, and past president of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. Sheller is author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.

Peter Norton is associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. He is author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City and Autonorama: The Illustory Promise of High-Tech Driving.

REFERENCES:
John Urry

The Death and Life of Great American Cities / Jane Jacobs

People for Mobility Justice

Robert Moses

Complete Streets

The Untokening

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Praise for the book:
"Reporting from the front lines of recent post-pandemic physical and cultural transformations of public space in nine major American cities, David L. Prytherch raises profound questions about what streets are for and how they might be equitably shared. The result is a fresh, hopeful vision for intersectional mobility justice and public placemaking."

—Mimi Sheller, author of Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes

"David L. Prytherch gives a crisp, clear, and accessible narrative of the movement to reclaim public streets after one hundred years of domination by private automobile interests. Steering us through the politics of streets during the Covid-19 pandemic and recovery, this is a refreshingly innovative and optimistic book for anyone concerned about our urban mobility future."

—Jason Henderson, coauthor of Street Fights in Copenhagen: Bicycle and Car Politics in a Green Mobility City

Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets by David L. Prytherch is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Tessa Laird is an artist, writer, and senior lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her books include a fictocritical exploration of color, A Rainbow Reader, and a cultural history of bats, Bat, in Reaktion Books’ celebrated Animal series.

Giovanni Aloi teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is author or editor of many books on the nonhuman and art.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and founder of the Green Lantern Press.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

The Animal That Therefore I Am / Jacques Derrida

Donna Haraway

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

Michael Taussig

Monocultures of the Mind / Vandana Shiva

What Animals Teach Us about Politics / Brian Massumi

Len Lye, New Zealand modernist artist

Sergei Eisenstein

Electric Animal / Akira Lippit

Baptiste Marizot

Undrowned / Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Sriwhana Spong

Praise for the book:

“Original, erudite, and playful all in one, Cinemal is not only a joy to read but estranges the very idea of cinema, and therefore of life, in ways wondrous and wise.”
—Michael Taussig, Columbia University

“A sparkling, engaging book, a virtuosic and thrilling interleaving of experimental cinema, philosophies of the more-than-human, and stories of animal encounters. Celebrating the variety and inventiveness of cinematic experimentation, Tessa Laird calls for us to remake our human senses in order to align better with the needs of the planet.”
—Laura U. Marks, author of The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos

Art after Nature is a series edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard that explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities.

Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film by Tessa Laird is available from University of Minnesota Press.

This book is an important contribution to the studies of Deleuze and Guattari, and here, Andrew Culp (Dark Deleuze) and Protevi (“joyous Deleuze”) dig into myriad shades of human expression from philosophical and cultural perspectives. Access the transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/f0f5eb7f

John Protevi is professor of French studies and philosophy at Louisiana State University and author of Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology; Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic; Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences; and Edges of the State.

Andrew Culp is director of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at California Institute of the Arts and author of Dark Deleuze and A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal. 

Episode references:

Francisco Varela

Evan Thompson

Esequiel Di Paolo

Hanne De Jaegher

Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson / The Embodied Mind

Wilhelm Reich

Baruch Spinoza

Sigmund Freud 

Gustave Le Bon

Jeremy Gilbert / Common Ground

Rodrigo Nunes / Neither Vertical nor Horizontal

Manuel DeLanda / War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Manuel DeLanda / A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

Deleuze and Guattari / Anti-Oedipus

Bataille

Nietzsche

Marx

Freud

Deleuze and Guattari / A Thousand Plateaus

Claude Lévi-Strauss / Wild Thought

Lisa Adkins / The Time of Money

Arline T. Geronimus / Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society

Andrew Culp / Dark Deleuze

Deleuze and Guattari / What Is Philosophy?

Suzanne de Brunhoff / Marx on Money

Quentin Badaire

Quentin Badaire’s book review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

Lewis Henry Morgan

Hobbes

Locke

Daniel Luban / Hobbesian Slavery (essay in Political Theory)

Rousseau

Case studies discussed in this episode:

Berserkers

Esprit de Corps

Robert Bales

Shenetta White-Ballard

Praise for the book:
"A brilliant and novel political anthropology that updates our most entrenched philosophical biases and looks to a politics of joy beyond the relations of command."
—Davide Panagia

Regimes of Violence: Toward a Political Anthropology by John Protevi is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Peter Simons is a historian in upstate New York and author of Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm.

Michael Lansing is a professor of history at Augsburg University and author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics. 

EPISODE REFERENCES:

Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century / Hendrik Meijer

The Heartland: An American History / Kristin Hoganson

Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the US Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies / Molly P. Rozum

Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region / Flannery Burke

Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race / Shane Hamilton

Nuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right / Catherine McNicol Stock

Lester E. Helland Papers, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Madison

Praise for the book:

“From Lend-Lease to Food for Peace, Global Heartland reveals how rural Midwesterners came to see their farms as being at the heart of the world.”
—Kristin Hoganson

“This rich and revealing book transforms the way we think about the rural heartland.”
—Michael Lansing

Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm by Peter Simons is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Talia Mae Bettcher is professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, and author of Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy and coeditor of Trans Philosophy.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are author of several books including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and, most recently, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Praise for the book:

"It's a beautiful book. Challenging, crucial, indispensable to our times."
—Judith Butler (in this episode)

"Profound and provocative . . . broadly relevant to many disciplines and social movements."
—Susan Stryker, Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University

Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Lisa Yin Han is assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College and author of Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is a scholar of visual culture, media studies, and science and technology studies, assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and the Security in the War on Microbes. 

Episode references:

Melody Jue

Celina Osuna, desert humanities

Nicole Starosielski

Christopher P. Heuer / Into the White

Andrea Ballestero

Adriana Petryna / Life Exposed

Celia Lowe

Stefan Helmreich / Alien Ocean

James Hamilton-Paterson / Seven-Tenths

Deepwater Alchemy and Microbial Resolution are available from University of Minnesota Press.

Melody Jue is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jue is author of Coralations and Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater and coeditor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics with Rafico Ruiz.

Ann Elias is professor emerita of visual culture at the University of Sydney. Elias is author of many books including Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity.

REFERENCES:

Coral Whisperers (Irus Braverman)

Situated Knowledges (Donna Haraway, in the journal Feminist Studies)

Her Seal Skin Coat (Lauren Beukes, short story)

Sylvia Earle

Jacques Cousteau

California Against the Sea (Rosanna Xia)

Jean Painlevé

Zoological Surrealism (James Leo Cahill)

Alien Ocean (Stefan Helmreich)

Chasing Coral documentary

Coralations by Melody Jue is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

How about another serendipitous milestone: this podcast, est. 2020, is releasing its 100th episode right here, right now. The past 99 episodes have focused on our authors. Between authorship and publication, a book passes through more than a few hands, and today we are getting into it with people who have dedicated their days, years, and decades in service of books and research. About half of our staff are represented here. Without further adieu, come meet (half of) the Press!

People appearing in this episode include:

Douglas Armato, director of University of Minnesota Press

Susan Doerr, associate director

Emily Hamilton, associate director for book publishing

Laura Westlund, managing editor and development officer

Jason Weidemann, editorial director

Pieter Martin, senior editor

Michael Stoffel, managing editor–scholarly books

Heather Skinner, publicity director and assistant marketing manager

Rachel Moeller, assistant production manager and art director

Erik Anderson, senior acquisitions editor

Maggie Sattler, digital marketing manager

Eric Lundgren, development and outreach manager

Eliza Edwards, production assistant

Emma Saks, editorial assistant

Carina Bolaños Lewen, exhibits and marketing assistant

Anthony Silvestri, journals manager

Zack Stewart, journals production specialist

Alena Rivas, publicity associate

Keep up with our centennial at z.umn.edu/ump100.

Thank you for listening.

Access the transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/e461a9dc

Abigail A. Van Slyck is the Dayton Professor Emeritus of Art History at Connecticut College and author of Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood; A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960; and Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920.

Annmarie Adams is an architectural historian at McGill University in Montreal. Adams is author of Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943; Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900; and coauthor of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession.

Marta Gutman is dean and professor in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Gutman is author of A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950.

Kate Solomonson is architectural historian and professor emeritus in the Department of Architecture at the University of Minnesota. Solomonson is coeditor, with Van Slyck, of the Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture series with University of Minnesota Press.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

-Hanover estate: Osborne (Swiss Cottage), Isle of Wight, UK. For Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

-Vanderbilt estate: The Breakers, Newport, Rhode Island. For Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt.

-Dow estate: Foxhollow Farm (Fallsburgh), Rhinebeck, New York. For Tracy Dows and Alice Olin Dows.

-Whitney estate: Greentree, Manhasset, Long Island. For Payne Whitney and Helen Hay Whitney.

-Dodge estate: Meadow Brook Hall (since 1929, Knole Cottage; before 1929, Hilltop Lodge), Rochester, Michigan. For Alfred Wilson and Matilda Dodge Wilson.

-Ford estate: Gaukler Pointe, Grosse Pointe, Michigan. For Edsel Ford and Eleanor Clay Ford.

Designing the Creative Child / Amy F. Ogata

Pastoral Capitalism / Louise Mozingo

The research of Barbara Penner (Bartlett School of Architecture, London)

Praise for the book:

"Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and profusely illustrated, Playhouses and Privilege is a must-read for anyone interested in the study of children, architecture, privilege, and play."
—Marta Gutman, dean, Spitzer School of Architecture, CUNY

"Small spaces can host big stories. In charting the spatial components of social prestige, Abigail A. Van Slyck delineates shifting conceptions of childhood, modulating gender politics, charged interactions between parents and children, and popular representations of youthful celebrity. This is a riveting read—focused and yet expansive, innovative, and insightful at every turn."
—Simon Sleight, coeditor of A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood by Abigail A. Van Slyck is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Michael Orlando Yaccarino is a writer specializing in international genre film, fashion, music, and unconventional historic figures. Scot D. Ryersson (1960–2024) was an award-winning writer, illustrator, and graphic designer. Michael and Scot collaborated on many projects, are coauthors of Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, The Ultimate Edition, and are founders of the Casati Archives. www.marchesacasati.com

Valerie Steele is a fashion historian and director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Steele is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including Paris Fashion, Fetish, and Fashion Designers A-Z.

Joan Rosasco taught at Smith College, Columbia University, and New York University, with focus on European art and culture, French literature, and the Belle Époque period. She is author of numerous publications including The Septet.

Francesca Granata is associate professor of fashion studies at Parsons School of Design. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary visual culture, fashion history and theory, and gender and performance studies. Granata is editor of Fashion Criticism and author of Experimental Fashion, and wrote the afterword to Infinite Variety.

Praise for the book:

"Ryersson and Yaccarino are judicious historians of frivolity who capture the tone of a life that was obscenely profligate yet strangely pure."
—The New Yorker

"A meticulously researched biography, Infinite Variety is as much art history as chronicle of personal obsession."
—The New York Times

"Fascinating . . . with or without her cheetahs, the Marchesa Casati’s circus of the self makes her a natural for the new millennium."
—Vanity Fair

Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of Marchesa Casati, The Ultimate Edition is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Amber Benezra is assistant professor of science and technology studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and is author of Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes, a finalist for the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science.

Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is assistant professor of media and culture at the University of California, Riverside, and is author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War against Emerging Microbes.

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer is professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic University, and is author of American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within; The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life; Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology; and Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age. 

Praise for the books:

“We learn from microbes—and the messy, fragile, tenacious humans that study them—how much the minute details of mundane life matter. Alternately hopeful and unsettling, Gut Anthro is a book that expertly does what microbes have always done: change how we see, how we collaborate, and who we are.”
—Emily Yates-Doerr, author of The Weight of Obesity

“Gloria Chan-Sook Kim’s visual methodology proposes a clear optic for understanding how global health responses to microbial threats will fail unless we wrestle with the systems that perpetuate the conditions for the next mutant microbe on the horizon.”
—Stefanie R. Fishel, author of The Microbial State

“American Disgust pushes readers to think beyond individual taste to consider how whiteness shapes what is acceptable or profane and how to grow our capacity for the unfamiliar. It is a refreshing take on a long-debated concept.”
—Ashanté M. Reese, coeditor of Black Food Matters

Books by Amber Benezra, Gloria Chan-Sook Kim, and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer are available from University of Minnesota Press.

More about the book: Creature Needs is published in collaboration with the nonprofit organization Creature Conserve. The following writers contributed new literary works inspired by scientific articles: Kazim Ali, Mary-Kim Arnold, Ramona Ausubel, David Baker, Charles Baxter, Aimee Bender, Kimberly Blaeser, Oni Buchanan, Tina Cane, Ching-In Chen, Mónica de la Torre, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Thalia Field, Ben Goldfarb, Annie Hartnett, Sean Hill, Hester Kaplan, Donika Kelly, Robin McLean, Miranda Mellis, Rajiv Mohabir, Kyoko Mori, David Naimon, Craig Santos Perez, Beth Piatote, Rena Priest, Alberto Ríos, Eléna Rivera, Sofia Samatar, Sharma Shields, Eleni Sikelianos, Maggie Smith, Juliana Spahr, Tim Sutton, Jodie Noel Vinson, Asiya Wadud, Claire Wahmanholm, Marco Wilkinson, Jane Wong.

About the editors:

Christopher Kondrich, poet in residence at Creature Conserve, is author of Valuing, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Contrapuntal. His writing has been published in The Believer, The Kenyon Review, and The Paris Review.

Lucy Spelman is founder of Creature Conserve, a nonprofit dedicated to combining art with science to cultivate new pathways for wildlife conservation. A zoological medicine veterinarian, she teaches biology at the Rhode Island School of Design and is author of National Geographic Kids Animal Encyclopedia and coeditor of The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes.

Susan Tacent, writer in residence at Creature Conserve, is a writer, scholar, and educator whose fiction has been published in Blackbird, DIAGRAM, and Tin House Online.

Episode references:

The Lord God Bird by Chelsea Steubayer-Scudder in Emergence Magazine

Thinking Like a Mountain by Jedediah Purdy in n+1

Praise for the book:

A thought-provoking and emotionally resonant read that stands out for its lyrical prowess and formal innovation, making it a significant contribution to contemporary literature as well as a key volume bridging the gap between the worlds of science and art.”
—Library Journal

Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Ujju Aggarwal is assistant professor of anthropology and experiential learning at The New School. She is author of Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education and coeditor of What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality.

Sabina Vaught is professor at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Kinloch Commons for Critical Pedagogy and Leadership. Vaught is coauthor of The School-Prison Trust and author of Compulsory: Education and the Dispossession of Youth in a Prison School.  

Episode references:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Christina Heatherton

Cindy Katz

Selma James

João Costa Vargas

Morgan Talty / Fire Exit

Praise for the book:

“A must-read to understand the racialized violence inherent within one of the most fundamental aspects of education in the United States: the logic of choice.”
—Damien Sojoyner

“Read this book, and be moved and transformed.”
—Sabina Vaught

Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education by Ujju Aggarwal is available from University of Minnesota Press.