The University of Chicago Press Podcast

Niels Bohr was a central figure in quantum physics, well known for his work on atomic structure and his contributions to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. In From Data to Quanta: Niels Bohr’s Vision of Physics (U Chicago Press, 2021), philosopher of science Slobodan Perović explores the way Bohr practiced and understood physics, and analyzes its implications for our understanding of modern science. Perović develops a novel approach to Bohr’s understanding of physics and his method of inquiry, presenting an exploratory symbiosis of historical and philosophical analysis that uncovers the key aspects of Bohr’s philosophical vision of physics within a given historical context.Ana Georgescu studied astrophysics and physics at Harvard University and is now a science consultant and writer based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Second World War, locals in Australia and Britain described American GIs as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But this conflict between civilians and the military didn’t only take place abroad. Civil-military tensions could be seen at ‘home’ too. Nearly three-quarters of servicemen in the months leading up to D-Day were stationed domestically, while one in four never went abroad at all. In other words, a lot of GIs spent a lot of time in the continental United States. Their presence, combined with the anti-civilian culture that the US military cultivated during the war, made places like Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard, and Coney Island look like occupation zones.A new book tells this important yet overlooked history of the Second World War. In Taking Leave, Taking Liberties: American Troops on the World War II Home Front (U Chicago Press, 2020), Aaron Hiltner follows GIs as they traveled through transport hubs, trained at domestic military bases, and took leave in ‘liberty ports,” such as Boston and San Francisco. By doing so, Hiltner, a lecturer at University College London, shows how theft, assault, catcalling, murder, rape, drunkenness, harassment, rackets, and fist fights were a part of the everyday domestic wartime experience. The book, therefore, challenges our tendency to isolate the home front from the war and makes us rethink where US foreign relations take place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Madagascar is a place of change. A biodiversity hotspot and the fourth largest island on the planet, it has been home to a spectacular parade of animals, from giant flightless birds and giant tortoises on the ground to agile lemurs leaping through the treetops. Some species live on; many have vanished in the distant or recent past. Over vast stretches of time, Madagascar's forests have expanded and contracted in response to shifting climates, and the hand of people is clear in changes during the last thousand years or so. Today, Madagascar is a microcosm of global trends. What happens there in the decades ahead can, perhaps, suggest ways to help turn the tide on the environmental crisis now sweeping the world.Sloth Lemur's Song: Madagascar from the Deep Past to the Uncertain Present (U Chicago Press, 2022) is a far-reaching account of Madagascar's past and present, led by an expert guide who has immersed herself in research and conservation activities with village communities on the island for nearly fifty years. Alison Richard accompanies the reader on a journey through space and time--from Madagascar's ancient origins as a landlocked region of Gondwana and its emergence as an island to the modern-day developments that make the survival of its array of plants and animals increasingly uncertain. Weaving together scientific evidence with Richard's own experiences and exploring the power of stories to shape our understanding of events, this book captures the magic as well as the tensions that swirl around this island nation.For more information visit this website.Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is a mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favela in Rio, where residents articulate their own politics of freedom against the backdrop of multiple forms of oppression. Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights--usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois--at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ folks, and slum dwellers. In this visceral ethnography of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Moisés Lino e Silva explores what happens when liberalism is inflected by people whose lives are impaired by normative understandings of liberty. He calls these marginalized visions of freedom "minoritarian liberalism," a concept that stands in for overlapping, alternative modes of freedom--be they queer, favela, or peasant. Lino e Silva introduces readers to a broad collective of favela residents, most intimately accompanying Natasha Kellem, a charismatic self-declared travesti (a term used in Latin America to indicate a specific form of female gender construction opposite to the sex assigned at birth). Many of those the author meets consider themselves "queer," while some are treated as "abnormal" simply because they live in favelas. Through these interconnected experiences, Lino e Silva not only pushes at the boundaries of anthropological inquiry, but also offers ethnographic evidence of non-normative routes to freedom for those seeking liberties against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation, transphobia, racism, and other patterns of domination.Moisés Lino e Silva is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Brazil.  Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (U Chicago Press, 2021) maps a new territory for inquiry at the intersection of music, philosophy, affect theory, and sound studies. The essays in this volume consider objects and experiences marked by the correlation of sound and affect, in music and beyond: the voice, as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or machine-made; and our sonic environments, whether natural or artificial, and how they provoke responses in us. Far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced and even determined by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars, including both established and new voices. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersections with affect and the emotions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is a mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favela in Rio, where residents articulate their own politics of freedom against the backdrop of multiple forms of oppression. Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights--usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois--at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children, LGBTQ folks, and slum dwellers. In this visceral ethnography of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Moisés Lino e Silva explores what happens when liberalism is inflected by people whose lives are impaired by normative understandings of liberty. He calls these marginalized visions of freedom "minoritarian liberalism," a concept that stands in for overlapping, alternative modes of freedom--be they queer, favela, or peasant. Lino e Silva introduces readers to a broad collective of favela residents, most intimately accompanying Natasha Kellem, a charismatic self-declared travesti (a term used in Latin America to indicate a specific form of female gender construction opposite to the sex assigned at birth). Many of those the author meets consider themselves "queer," while some are treated as "abnormal" simply because they live in favelas. Through these interconnected experiences, Lino e Silva not only pushes at the boundaries of anthropological inquiry, but also offers ethnographic evidence of non-normative routes to freedom for those seeking liberties against the backdrop of capitalist exploitation, transphobia, racism, and other patterns of domination.Moisés Lino e Silva is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) in Brazil.  Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This striking contribution to Black literary studies examines the practices of Black writers in the mid-twentieth century to revise our understanding of the institutionalization of literary studies in America. In Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (U Chicago Press, 2022), Andy Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left. These include well-known figures such as Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry as well as still underappreciated writers like Melvin B. Tolson and Doxey Wilkerson. In their critical practice, these and other Black writers levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals. From these vantages, Black writers not only called out the racist assumptions of the New Criticism, but also defined Black literary and interpretive practices to support communist and other radical world-making efforts in the mid-twentieth century. Hines’s book thus offers a number of urgent contributions to literary studies: it spotlights a canon of Black literary texts that belong to an important era of anti-racist struggle, and it fills in the pre-history of the rise of Black studies and of ongoing Black dissent against the neoliberal university.Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is the first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge.In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Mario Daniels and Dr. John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state.They argue that every single day beginning in the 1940s, US export controls have intervened in the global sharing of scientific-technological knowledge. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only—and not even the most important—regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (U Chicago Press, 2022), finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America's unequal system of higher education.Charlie Eaton is an economic sociologist and Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Merced. He studies the role of social ties, organizations, and politics in the interplay between financiers, other elites, and subordinate social groups. His work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Politics & Society, The Review of Financial Studies, Socius, Sociology Compass, and PS: Political Science and Politics.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the 1970s, health professionals, researchers, governments, advocacy groups, and commercial interests have invested in the pursuit of something called “sexual health.” Under this expansive banner, a wide array of programs have been launched, organizations founded, initiatives funded, products sold—and yet, no book before this one asks: What does it mean to be sexually healthy? When did people conceive of a form of health called sexual health? And how did it become the gateway to addressing a host of social harms and the reimagining of private desires and public dreams?Conjoining “sexual” with “health” changes both terms: it alters how we conceive of sexuality and transforms what it means to be healthy, prompting new expectations of what medicine can provide. Yet the ideal of achieving sexual health remains elusive and open-ended, and the benefits and costs of promoting it are unevenly distributed across genders, races, and sexual identities. Rather than a thing apart, sexual health is intertwined with nearly every conceivable topical debate—from sexual dysfunction to sexual violence, from reproductive freedom to the practicalities of sexual contact in a pandemic. In The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life (U Chicago Press, 2022), Steven Epstein analyzes the rise, proliferation, uptake, and sprawling consequences of sexual health activities, offering critical tools to assess those consequences, expand capacities for collective decision making, and identify pathways that promote social justice.Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England. Her book, Acupuncture as Revolution: Suffering, Liberation, and Love (Brevis Press) was published in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices