The University of Chicago Press Podcast

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone.Hannah Wohl speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged (U Chicago Press, 2021), her ethnographic study of the New York contemporary art scene that reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions and how aesthetic judgment evolves between artist studios, galleries, art fairs, and collectors’ houses.We mention Paula Cooper Gallery and the work of artists Lucky DeBellevue and Gina Beavers. The Armory Show takes place in NY in early September 2021.Hannah Wohl is an assistant professor in sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are maps of the Earth’s landmasses, the universe, the ocean floors, human migration, the human brain: maps are so integral to how we interact with the world that we sometimes forget that they are not the world. In When Maps Become the World (University of Chicago Press), Rasmus Grunfeldt Winther considers how maps get made, used, and abused, and how processes and problems from cartography can be found in the ways we create and use scientific theories. Winther, who is professor of humanities at the University of California – Santa Cruz, shows how “pernicious reification” – taking the map or model for what it represents -- can arise in science, and he argues for a form of pluralism about our understanding of the world, called contextual objectivity, that lies between realism and constructivism. The maps and drawings filling the book highlight Winther’s discussion and illustrate the power that maps and theories have to shape the way we think about the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union conducted an ambitious yet clandestine programme to map the world - from big cities like New York and Tokyo, to seemingly-obscure towns like Gainsborough (Lincolnshire) and Pontiac (Missouri). The programme was unlike any other of its time, encompassing a wide variety of topographic maps and city plans in incredible detail. The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is not only a compilation of some 350 extracts of this collection, but also a deep dive into the provenance, nature and applications of these Cold War era Soviet maps. Join us as we talk to co-authors John Davies and Alex Kent about the joys of working with maps, the difficulties they encountered researching the Soviet mapping programme, and their visions for the future. Listeners interested in contributing to John and Alex's research may contact them at author@redatlasbook.com. Prints of Soviet City Plans are also available on their website.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helen Sword, writing champion, brings us into the word gym. Or maybe kitchen. Either way, The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (U Chicago Press, 2016) is a short, sharp introduction to great writing based around 5 principles:--use active verbs whenever possible;--favour concrete language over vague abstractions;--avoid long strings of prepositional phrases;--employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence; --reduce your dependence on four pernicious “waste words”: it, this, that, and there.There are examples of the good - William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John McPhee, A. S. Byatt, Richard Dawkins, Alison Gopnik, and well, the bad. But you can fix the bad - really Dr Sword's point. Dr Helen Sword received her doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University and has lived since 2001 in New Zealand, where she is a Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland and runs a private writing consultancy, WriteSpace Limited.Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Alex Csiszar, professor in the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University and author of The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (U Chicago Press, 2018). We talk about the British, the French, and the Germans. No joke.Alex Csiszar : "There's this myth out there about what makes a scientist a scientist. It's that they're highly skeptical of everything. They don't believe a claim until they see it with their own eyes. But anybody who spends any kind of time in the scientific process knows this is ridiculous. Most everything that everybody believes in the sciences is stuff that they've been given to believe through reading papers, through education, through being told by their colleagues, through textbooks–––almost everything anybody in the sciences believes has come to them through trust. And the formats and genres through which a lot of that stuff comes to one's eyes matter a lot for generating that trust. Though, maybe one of the lessons of the book is that the formats and genres might matter a little less than you might at first think because there are other means, perhaps more important means, through which individuals come to trust a particular claim––and personal contacts matter a lot here. But clearly what is being discussed in a lot of the debates that I follow in this book are the means through which such trust can be established, guaranteed."Daniel heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As projects like Manhattan's High Line, Chicago's 606, China's eco-cities, and Ethiopia's tree-planting efforts show, cities around the world are devoting serious resources to urban greening. Formerly neglected urban spaces and new high-end developments draw huge crowds thanks to the considerable efforts of city governments. But why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens (U Chicago Press, 2021), Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of the enduring appeal of urban green space, showing that city planners have long thought that creating green spaces would lead to social improvement. Turning to Germany's Ruhr Valley (a region that, despite its ample open space, was "greened" with the addition of official parks and gardens), Angelo shows that greening is as much a social process as a physical one. She examines three moments in the Ruhr Valley's urban history that inspired the creation of new green spaces: industrialization in the late nineteenth century, postwar democratic ideals of the 1960s, and industrial decline and economic renewal in the early 1990s. Across these distinct historical moments, Angelo shows that the impulse to bring nature into urban life has persistently arisen as a response to a host of social changes, and reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities. Ultimately, however, she finds that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeffrey Jenkins and Justin Peck’s new book Congress and the First Civil Rights Era, 1861-1918 (U Chicago Press, 2021) explores how Congressional Republicans enacted laws aimed at establishing an inclusive, multiracial democracy. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Congress crafted a civil rights agenda -- including laws, strict enforcement mechanisms, and Constitutional amendments that (for a brief time) enabled Black Americans to vote, sit on juries, and exercise other civil rights. Using a rich collection of data, the book documents how the Republican coalitions that passed and enforced civil rights weakened because of GOP political weakness in the South, shifts in the political preferences of Northern voters, and lack of GOP unity over core assumptions. Jenkins and Peck offer a Congress-centered American political development perspective to understand how Republicans built civil rights yet subsequently undermined the nascent multiracial democracy that their civil rights agenda helped make possible. The book focuses on the conflict within the Republican Party and electoral trends to argue that “policy enactments are a consequence of, and a window into, evolving attitudes about civil rights.” The book’s granular political history demonstrates how legal institutions -- created by majoritarian bodies like Congress -- liberated and protected an oppressed class of citizens but also reasserted the power of the white majority.Dr. Jeffery A. Jenkins is Provost Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Law, Judith & John Bedrosian Chair of Governance and the Public Enterprise, Director of the Bedrosian Center, and Director of the Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.Dr. Justin Peck is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University. In addition to his work on Congress and Civil Rights, he is engaged in a project that seeks to understand how the United States’ role in international affairs leads to the production of new political ideas and to the reform of domestic political institutions.Daniella Campos assisted with this podcast.Susan Liebell is professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “BLM versus #BLM:The Dangers of the New Armed Rebellion Narrative” was recently published as part of the Brennan Center for Justice’s series on Protest, Insurrection, and the Second Amendment and “Sensitive Places: Originalism, Gender, and the Myth Self-Defense in District of Columbia v. Heller” appeared in July 2021’s Polity. Email her comments at sliebell@sju.edu or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marching across occupied France in 1944, American GI Leroy Stewart had neither death nor glory on his mind: he was worried about his underwear. "I ran into a new problem when we walked," Stewart wrote, "the shorts and I didn't get along. They would crawl up on me all the time." Crawling underwear may have been a small price to pay for the liberation of millions of people, but in the utter wretchedness of the moment, it was quite natural for soldiers like Stewart to lose sight of that end. In Sheer Misery: Soldiers in Battle in WWII (U Chicago Press, 2021), Mary Louise Roberts focuses on the corporeal experiences of the soldiers who fought in Belgium, France, and Italy during the last two years of the Second World War. In the horrendously unhygienic and often lethal conditions of the front line, their bodies broke down, stubbornly declaring their needs for warmth, rest, and good nutrition. Turning away from the accounts of high-level military strategy that dominate many WWII histories, Roberts instead relies on diaries and letters to bring to life visceral sense memories like the moans of the "screaming meemies," the acrid smell of cordite, and the shockingly mundane sight of rotting corpses.Told in inimitable style by one of our most distinctive historians of the Second World War, Sheer Misery, published by the University of Chicago Press, gives readers both an unprecedented look at the ground-level world of the common soldier and a deeply felt rendering of the experience of being a body in war.Douglas Bell is a historian who focuses on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s hard to imagine a place more central to American mythology today than Silicon Valley. To outsiders, the region glitters with the promise of extraordinary wealth and innovation. But behind this image lies another Silicon Valley, one segregated by race, class, and nationality in complex and contradictory ways. Its beautiful landscape lies atop underground streams of pollutants left behind by decades of technological innovation, and while its billionaires live in compounds, surrounded by redwood trees and security fences, its service workers live in their cars.With arresting photography and intimate stories, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (U Chicago Press, 2021) makes this hidden world visible. Instead of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses, we see portraits of struggle—families displaced by an impossible real estate market, workers striving for a living wage, and communities harmed by environmental degradation. If the fate of Silicon Valley is the fate of America—as so many of its boosters claim—then this book gives us an unvarnished look into the future. Matthew Jordan is a university instructor, funk musician, and clear writing enthusiast. He studies the history of science and technology, driven by the belief that we must understand the past in order to improve the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Terry McGlynn, author of The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching (U Chicago Press, 2020). McGlynn is also a professor of biology at California State University Dominguez Hills and research associate in the Department of Entomology in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We talk about learning, actually.Terry McGlynn : “If you’re giving students a writing assignment, like an experimental protocol, and they’re supposed to write about what they did in the lab or in the field, and it’s a cookbook project, you know, where the students don’t design the methods themselves and they're just doing what they were told to do and they're writing that down–––well, then the students are just jumping through a hoop and there's no ownership. That just gets you following through the prescribed steps, and in each of those steps, you just need to know, 'Oh, I just need to write a sentence where I've said This is where I did this,' and you write that sentence. And so, I think you can get through the whole assignment without thinking about the grand reason why you're doing it, right? Because the grand reason why you're doing it is because you need to turn it in and get your grade. And so all the little decisions you're making when you're doing the writing assignment–––all those decisions are all based on a micro level of, 'Okay, this next sentence, and that next sentence,' rather than if you had more control over what you're writing or if you had a bigger set of questions–––basically, if you knew why you're doing this assignment, you know like, what is the purpose of the assignment other than to turn it in and to get a grade–––because then that would be the purpose which is behind all those other small decisions, the purpose that guides you toward some destination."McGlynn's blog is here. Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices