Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. These are iconic elements of film noir visual style. Long after its 1940s heyday, noir hallmarks continue to appear in a variety of new media forms and styles. What has made the noir aesthetic at once enduring and adaptable? Sheri Chinen Biesen's Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style (Columbia UP, 2024) explores how the dark cinematic noir style has evolved across eras, from classic Hollywood to present-day streaming services. Examining both aesthetics and material production conditions, she demonstrates how technological and industrial changes have influenced the imagery of film noir. Biesen considers the persistence of the noir legacy, discussing how neo-noirs reimagine iconic imagery and why noir style has become a touchstone in the streaming era. Drawing on a wealth of archival research, she provides insightful analyses of a wide range of works, from masterpieces directed by Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock to New Hollywood neo-noirs, the Coen brothers' revisionist films, and recent HBO and Netflix series.

In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. What had sustained a civilization for more than two millennia was suddenly recast as the root cause of an ongoing cultural suicide. China needed a new script to survive in the modern world.Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2023) explores the global history of Chinese script reforms--efforts to alphabetize or simplify the writing system--from the 1890s to the 1980s. Examining the material conditions and political economy underlying attempts to modernize scripts, Uluğ Kuzuoğlu argues that these reforms were at the forefront of an emergent information age. Faced with new communications technologies and infrastructures as well as industrial, educational, and bureaucratic pressures for information management, reformers engineered scripts as tools to increase labor efficiency and create alternate political futures.Kuzuoğlu considers dozens of proposed scripts, including phonetic alphabets, syllabaries, character simplification schemes, latinization, and pinyin. Situating them in a transnational framework, he stretches the geographical boundaries of Chinese script reforms to include American behavioral psychologists, Soviet revolutionaries, and Central Asian typographers, who were all devising new scripts in pursuit of informational efficiency. Codes of Modernity brings these experiments together to offer new ways to understand scripts and rethink the shared experiences of a global information age.

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker.In this third episode, he talks to Wyatt Wells – author of Economist in an Uncertain World – Arthur F. Burns and The Federal Reserve, 1970–1978 (Columbia University Press, 1994). Burns has had a bad press - so bad that Chris Hughes, one of Facebook's founders, was moved to rehabilitate him. Leading the Fed from 1970 to 1978 when inflation averaged 9%, Burns was an accomplished business-cycle economist but also a politically partisan Chair intensely loyal to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Going far beyond his remit as a central banker, Burns oversaw government efforts to control prices and wages as an alternative to monetary policy.“If you couple an incomes policy with a tight fiscal and monetary policy, it can work. The problem is that it often becomes an excuse for not doing that,” says Wells. “Burns found himself trapped in this position where he felt he couldn't raise interest rates without wrecking the controls programme and possibly his own career – his own position at the Fed. It's clear in ‘73, he knows interest rates need to go up. They're trying to raise them but he's got these political concessions and he's doing this sort of dance, trying to square the circle … And of course: ‘I'm the smartest guy in the room. Therefore, I should play a key role in this effort to balance everything’. I think there are very few Federal Reserve chairmen who have elbowed their way into other areas in the way that Burns did. Maybe none”.An economic historian, Wyatt Wells has been Professor of History at Auburn University, Montgomery, since 1997.

A number of converts to Buddhism report paranormal experiences. Their accounts describe psychic abilities like clairvoyance and precognition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and encounters with other beings such as ghosts and deities, and they often interpret these events through a specifically Buddhist lens. Paranormal States: Psychic Abilities in Buddhist Convert Communities (Columbia UP, 2024) is a groundbreaking exploration of these phenomena and their implications for both humanistic and scientific study of the paranormal.D. E. Osto examines accounts of paranormal phenomena experienced by convert Buddhists from around the world collected through an online survey and interviews, placing them in the context of Indian Buddhist sources and recent scientific research. They focus in detail on the life stories of two interviewees and the important role the paranormal has played in their lives. These contemporary first-person narratives demonstrate the continued importance of the psychic and paranormal within the Buddhist tradition, and they can be interpreted as a living Buddhist folklore. Osto considers the limitations of both traditional religious views and Western scientific studies of the paranormal and proposes instead a new Buddhist phenomenological approach. Ultimately, Paranormal States contends, these deeply mysterious and extraordinary experiences exceed current understandings--and they can help bridge the gap between religious and scientific worldviews.

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, they harness the longstanding practices and values of cooperatives: self-determination, democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and respect for the environment.Bernard E. Harcourt develops a transformative theory and practice that builds on worldwide models of successful cooperation. He identifies the most promising forms of cooperative initiatives and then distills their lessons into an integrated framework: Coöperism. This is a political theory grounded on recognition of our interdependence. It is an economic theory that can ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, it is a social theory that replaces the punishment paradigm with a cooperation paradigm.A creative work of normative critical theory, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023) provides a positive vision for addressing our most urgent challenges today. Harcourt shows that by drawing on the core values of cooperation and the power of people working together, a new world of cooperation democracy is within our grasp.Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. An editor of Michel Foucault’s work in French and English, Harcourt is the author of several books, including Critique and Praxis (Columbia, 2020). He is a social-justice litigator and the recipient of the 2019 Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Bar Association for his longtime representation of death row prisoners.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024) is a fascinating study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. This book takes as its core subject matter six court cases from Qing China that involve people who moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth. Focusing on this movement, Matthew H. Sommer looks at the transgender paradigms and literary tropes through which gender-transing was understood, ultimately revealing how acts of gender-crossing and gender boundaries were perceived. This book is an effortless blend of social, legal, and cultural history, and it is filled with captivating legal cases involving forgery and impersonation, fox-spirit mediums, midwives, and those living on the margins of late imperial China. This is definitely a must-read for those interested in Chinese history and gender history, as well as any scholars who need inspiration for what can be done with interesting sources that don't quite fit in existing projects. To find out more about Matthew Sommer’s work, head to his website, or you can listen to his previous appearance on the New Books Network here.

After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act loosened discriminatory restrictions, people from Northeast Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and eventually China immigrated to the United States in large numbers. Highly skilled Asian immigrants flocked to professional-managerial occupations, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math. Asian American literature is now overwhelmingly defined by this generation’s children, who often struggled with parental and social expectations that they would pursue lucrative careers on their way to becoming writers.In Asian American Fiction After 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility (Columbia UP, 2024), Christopher T. Fan offers a new way to understand Asian American fiction through the lens of the class and race formations that shaped its authors both in the United States and in Northeast Asia. In readings of writers including Ted Chiang, Chang-rae Lee, Ken Liu, Ling Ma, Ruth Ozeki, Kathy Wang, and Charles Yu, he examines how Asian American fiction maps the immigrant narrative of intergenerational conflict onto the “two cultures” conflict between the arts and sciences. Fan argues that the self-consciousness found in these writers’ works is a legacy of Japanese and American modernization projects that emphasized technical and scientific skills in service of rapid industrialization. He considers Asian American writers’ attraction to science fiction, the figure of the engineer and notions of the “postracial,” modernization theory and time travel, and what happens when the dream of a stable professional identity encounters the realities of deprofessionalization and proletarianization. Through a transnational and historical-materialist approach, this groundbreaking book illuminates what makes texts and authors “Asian American.”Christopher T. Fan is an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, in the Departments of English, Asian American Studies, and East Asian Studies. He is a cofounder and senior editor of Hyphen magazine.

How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or resist? Based on an original survey from Baghdad alongside key interviews in the field Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq (Columbia University Press, 2024) offers an insightful account of how Iraqis in different areas of the country responded to the rise and fall of the Islamic State.Dr. Austin J. Knuppe argues that people adopt survival repertoires—a variety of social practices, tools, organized routines, symbols, and rhetorical strategies—to navigate wartime violence and detect threats. He traces how repertoires varied among different communities over the course of the conflict. In areas insulated from insurgent control, such as cosmopolitan Baghdad, local residents had the flexibility to support coalition forces while also voicing opposition to government policies. For Iraqis in rural communities confronting insurgent control, collaboration and resistance entailed significant risks. In Sunni-majority communities in the western desert, passive acquiescence and active cooperation temporarily insulated Iraqis from insurgent victimization. For ethnic and religious minorities in the north, however, flight or resistance proved the only viable options. In many communities, local residents mobilized neighborhood self-defense groups and militias loosely aligned with coalition forces once the tides turned against the Islamic State.Beyond contributing to academic and policy debates about civilian protection during wartime, Surviving the Islamic State foregrounds everyday people’s experiences while modeling an ethical approach for conducting field research in conflict-affected communities.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Departing from the conventional association of modernism with the city, Hannah Freed-Thall's Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (Columbia University Press, 2023) makes a case for the coastal zone as a surprisingly generative setting for twentieth-century literature and art. An unruly and elusive confluence of human and more-than-human forces, the seashore is also a space of performance--a stage for loosely scripted, improvisatory forms of embodiment and togetherness. The beach, Hannah Freed-Thall argues, was to the modernist imagination what mountains were to Romanticism: a space not merely of anthropogenic conquest but of vital elemental and creaturely connection. With an eye to the peripheries of capitalist leisure, Freed-Thall recasts familiar seaside practices--including tide-pooling, beachcombing, gambling, and sunbathing--as radical experiments in perception and sociability. Close readings of works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Claude McKay, Samuel Beckett, Rachel Carson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, explore the modernist beach as a queer refuge, a precarious commons, a scene of collective exhaustion and endurance, and a visionary threshold at the end of the world. Interweaving environmental humanities, queer and feminist theory, and cultural history, Modernism at the Beach offers new ways of understanding twentieth-century literature and its relation to ecological thought.About the guest: Hannah Freed-Thall is an Associate Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYUAbout the host: Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. 

Yanagawa Seigan (1789–1858) and his wife Kōran (1804–79) were two of the great poets of nineteenth-century Japan. They practiced the art of traditional Sinitic poetry—works written in literary Sinitic, or classical Chinese, a language of enduring importance far beyond China’s borders. Together, they led itinerant lives, traveling around Japan teaching poetry and selling calligraphy. Seigan established Edo-period Japan’s largest poetry society and attained nationwide renown as a literary figure, as well as taking part in stealthy political activities in the years before the Meiji Restoration. Kōran was one of the most accomplished female composers of Sinitic poetry in Japanese history. After her husband’s death, she was arrested and imprisoned for six months as part of a crackdown on political reform. Seigan and Kōran’s works at once display mastery of a poetic tradition and depict Japan on the brink of monumental change.The Same Moon Shines on All: The Lives and Selected Poems of Yanagawa Seigan and Kōran (Columbia UP, 2024) explores the world of Seigan and Kōran, pairing an in-depth account of their lives and times with an inviting selection of their poetry. The book features eminent Sinologist Jonathan Chaves’s translations of more than 130 poems by Seigan and more than 50 by Kōran, each annotated and followed by the original Chinese text. An introduction by Matthew Fraleigh, a specialist in Japan’s Sinitic literature, offers insight into the historical and literary context as well as the poems themselves. Approachable and delightful, this book makes the riches of Japanese Sinitic poetry available to a range of readers.