New Books in American Studies

Characterized by a search for meaning, Hirsch’s oeuvre connects psychological, scientific, and philosophical implications of form, bringing together ideas in art, science, ecology, and human consciousness. The artworks in multiple and mixed media provide an evolving history of Hirsch’s ideas and craft as they illustrate the progression of her original research on the origin of all alphabets. Her elegant theory about five fundamental shapes in nature that reflect forms of neurons and neural processes of perception and cognition as the source of all letterforms in alphabets ancient to modern has gained acceptance in scientific circles. Her evidence shows that while cultures and languages bring unique beauty and richness to the world, we, as humankind, are more alike than different.Since the 1980s, Hirsch has also been a pioneer in the field of mind/body healing, developing a type of visualization practice that serves as an instrument toward wellness. By organizing seemingly disparate information into a far-reaching scientific theory, Hirsch is recognized internationally for these techniques and has advanced healing practices through the arts.Archaeology of Metaphor: The Art of Gilah Yelin Hirsch (Skira, 2022) connects the artist’s visual themes to her philosophy and ideas, simultaneously encouraging greater awareness of pattern recognition, social dynamics, and interconnectedness.Kirstin L. Ellsworth holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University and is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Aaron Berman's book America's Arab Nationalists: From the Ottoman Revolution to the Rise of Hitler (Routledge, 2022) focuses in on the relationship between Arab nationalists and Americans in the struggle for independence in an era when idealistic Americans could see the Arab nationalist struggle as an expression of their own values. In the first three decades of the twentieth century (from the 1908 Ottoman revolution to the rise of Hitler), important and influential Americans, including members of the small Arab-American community, intellectually, politically and financially participated in the construction of Arab nationalism. This book tells the story of a diverse group of people whose contributions are largely unknown to the American public.The role Americans played in the development of Arab nationalism has been largely unexplored by historians, making this an important and original contribution to scholarship. This volume is of great interest to students and academics in the field, though the narrative style is accessible to anyone interested in Arab nationalism, the conflict between Zionists and Palestinians, and the United States’ relationship with the Arab world.Roberto Mazza is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Sabrina Mittermeier's edited volume Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect Books, 2023) analyzes the fandom of Disney brands across a variety of media including film, television, novels, stage productions, and theme parks. It showcases fan engagement such as cosplay, fan art, and on social media, as well as the company’s reaction to it. Further, the volume deals with crucial issues—race and racism, the role of queerness, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advent of the streaming service Disney+—within the Disney fandom and in Disney texts.The authors come from a variety of disciplines including cultural and media studies, marketing and communications, cultural history, theater and performance studies, and more. In addition to interviews with fan practitioners, the essays feature both leading experts in fan and Disney studies alongside emerging voices in these fields. A vital new addition to the growing subdiscipline of fan studies, it will be popular with scholars of cultural studies, cultural history, and media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Andrew Jewett is the author of Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (2020) and Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (2012). He has taught at Harvard, Yale, NYU, Vanderbilt, and Boston College and held fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the National Academy of Education, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Historian and author Dexter Gabriel talks about his relationship to truth and memory in his fiction and non-fiction writing. Come for his thoughts on what truth we can find in history and stay for his thoughts about George Washington’s teeth and his affection for astrolabes.Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata reflects on the theology of time in this early Hindu text and poses the key question: why does the Krishna avatāra inaugurate the worst yuga? The Sanskrit Mahābhārata describes a massive war facilitated by God and the gods. That war took place between the third and the last ages of a 12,000-year cycle; within the cycle, moral behaviour and human lifespan always decrease in steps before being rebooted for the next cycle (initial lifespan 400 years). Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata-Or, Why Does the Krsna Avatāra Inaugurate the Worst Yuga? (Cardiff UP, 2022) describes and discusses this cycle and tries to explain why God and the gods are said to have descended and acted at that particular point within it. The trigger was the complaint of the Earth, who was suffering on account of the human beings upon her.This book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

What is the difference between global warming and climate change? This episode explores: What led Dr. Wu into STEM, and to the study of climate change. Why the term global warming is misleading, and potentially confusing. Why weather around the world is getting more extreme. What she foresees for the future, and what we can do to change that. Why human choices matter on much a larger scale than most people realize. A discussion of the article “Looking Back on America’s Summer of Heat, Floods, and Climate Change: Welcome to the New Abnormal”. Today’s article is: Looking Back on America's Summer of Heat, Floods, and Climate Change: Welcome to the New Abnormal by Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu, which provides an overview of the record-breaking heat and historic floods of 2022. Dr. Wu discusses how the new abnormal is increasingly seen as the new weather pattern, why it’s dangerous to normalize this, and what we can do change it. “Welcome to the New Abnormal” was published in The Conversation on September 21, 2022.Our guest is: Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu, who is a climate scientist. Dr. Wu uses climate models to project future climate change and its potential impacts on the hydrological cycle, including precipitation, extreme storms and flood risks. She also collaborates with researchers in ice core science and stable isotope geochemistry investigate climate and environmental change in the past ten thousand years. Dr. Wu received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2000 where she studied environmental geography. She joined the University of Dayton department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences in 2004 after completing three-year post-doctoral research at Pennsylvania State University. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact scientific journals, and received close to two million dollars in external funding for her research. Dr. Wu teaches a variety courses mainly in the field of climate change, environmental geosciences, and Geographical Information Systems.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Conversation article: 2022's US Climate Disasters: A tale of too much rain and too little The Conversation article: For a Flooded Midwest Climate Forecasts Offer Little Comfort Bedaso, Z., & Wu, S. Y. (2020). Daily precipitation isotope variation in Midwestern United States: Implication for hydroclimate and moisture source. Science of The Total Environment, 713, 136631. Yuan, W., Wu, S. Y., Hou, S., Xu, Z., & Lu, H. (2019). Normalized Difference Vegetation Index‐based assessment of climate change impact on vegetation growth in the humid‐arid transition zone in northern China during 1982–2013. International Journal of Climatology, 39(15), 5583-5598. Wu, Y., Ji, H., Wen, J., Wu, S.-Y., Xu, M., Tagle, F., Duan, W., Li, J. (2018). The characteristics of regional persistent heavy precipitation events over eastern monsoon China during 1960-2013. Global and Planetary Change, 172, pp.414-427. Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we go inside the academy to learn directly from experts. We embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke UP, 2022), Sarah Imhoff tells the story of an individual full of contradictions. Jessie Sampter (1883-1938) was best known for her Course in Zionism (1915), an American primer for understanding support of a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1919, Sampter packed a trousseau, declared herself "married to Palestine," and immigrated there. Yet Sampter's own life and body hardly matched typical Zionist ideals. Although she identified with Judaism, Sampter took up and experimented with spiritual practices from various religions. While Zionism celebrated the strong and healthy body, she spoke of herself as "crippled" from polio and plagued by sickness her whole life. While Zionism applauded reproductive women's bodies, Sampter never married or bore children; in fact, she wrote of homoerotic longings and had same-sex relationships. By charting how Sampter's life did not neatly line up with her own religious and political ideals, Imhoff highlights the complicated and at times conflicting connections between the body, queerness, disability, religion, and nationalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

What is religious liberty, anyway? What are its origins? What are religious exemptions? What would a jurisprudence of religious liberty based on the idea of natural rights look like? What is distinctive about such an approach and what are some of its pluses and minuses?These are some of the questions addressed in Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses (U Chicago Press, 2022) by Vincent Phillip Muñoz.The book explores the fraught legal and philosophical terrain of religious freedom. It is a meticulous study of the Founders’ common concern for the protection for our inalienable right of religious free exercise and their surprisingly divergent views on how to navigate the relationships of privilege and control between church and state.Muñoz examines the attitudes of the Founding Generation on these topics as reflected in the understudied area of constitution making between 1776 and 1791 in America at the state level. He argues that we have to go beyond the First Amendment’s text to elaborate its meanings. We must, he contends, understand the intellectual and theological milieu of the time.Muñoz provides the historical context of the creation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment and the intellectual underpinnings of their original meanings. He explicates in a thorough but reader-friendly manner what we can and cannot determine about the original meaning of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses.The book is a mixture of legal, intellectual, and political history in which we learn that the Bill of Rights was in many ways an afterthought, designed by the Federalists to counter opposition to the Constitution by Anti-Federalists. Indeed, Muñoz shows that many, if not most, of the individuals who drafted the First Amendment did not even think it was necessary. His detailed examination of the drafting records illuminates the Federalists’ lack of enthusiasm for amendments and says, “the aim of many in the First Congress was to get amendments drafted, not to draft precise amendments.”He concludes the book with a discussion of the impact of natural rights constructions of those clauses. Muñoz contrasts fascinatingly, for example, his approach with those taken by recent Supreme Court justices (notably Samuel Alito) and argues that his novel church-state jurisprudence offers a way forward that could adjudicate First Amendment church-state issues in a legal, fair, coherent and, importantly, more democratic fashion.This book is an outstanding guide to the many schools of thought on religious liberty in the United States and in his argument for an inalienable natural rights understanding as the Founders’ most authoritative view, Muñoz convincingly shows that competing accounts—(e.g., “neutrality,” “accommodation,” “separation,” “non-endorsement,” “minimizing political division,” and “tradition”) do not capture the deepest understanding of the Founders’ thought.Muñoz notes that his constructions correspond to no existing approach. They do not fall into what are usually considered either the “conservative” or “liberal” positions on church-state matters. The aim of the book is to spur more robust conversations about whether we are interpreting the Founders correctly and what evidence is most relevant to develop the First Amendment Religion Clauses consistently with their original design.Let’s hear from Professor Muñoz himself.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Total faith in meritocracy leads to the dangerous belief that all social winners and losers are wholly deserving. Instead, we need an economy of grace.Guests Victor Tan Chen, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies