The University of Chicago Press Podcast

After decades of criticism about perhaps the most famous director in history, it seems that nothing is left to be said. But maybe critics just haven’t been willing to be surprised by the films they have watched again and again. On this episode of New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews famed literary critic Dr. D.A. Miller (h) about ropes, shoes, desserts, stains, and the other surprising little touches that characterize Hitchcock’s surplus style.In Hidden Hitchcock (University of Chicago Press, 2016), D. A. Miller does what seems impossible: he discovers what has remained unseen in Hitchcock’s movies, a secret style that imbues his films with a radical duplicity. Focusing on three films—Strangers on a Train, Rope, and The Wrong Man—Miller shows how Hitchcock anticipates, even demands a “Too-Close Viewer.” Dwelling within us all and vigilant even when everything appears to be in good order, this Too-Close Viewer attempts to see more than the director points out, to expand the space of the film and the duration of the viewing experience. And, thanks to Hidden Hitchcock, that obsessive attention is rewarded. In Hitchcock’s visual puns, his so-called continuity errors, and his hidden appearances (not to be confused with his cameos), Miller finds wellsprings of enigma. Hidden Hitchcock is a revelatory work that not only shows how little we know this best known of filmmakers, but also how near such too-close viewing comes to cinephilic madness.Works by D.A. Miller mentioned in this interview:“My Lockdown with ‘Death in Venice,’” LA Review of BooksSecond Time Around: From Art House to DVDWe hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (University of Chicago Press, 2020) unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet.Beginning with the Islamic State’s claim that the smashed objects were idols of the “age of ignorance,” Aaron Tugendhaft questions whether there can be any political life without idolatry. He then explores the various roles Mesopotamian sculpture has played in European imperial competition, the development of artistic modernism, and the formation of Iraqi national identity, showing how this history reverberates in the choice of the Mosul Museum as performance stage.Finally, he compares the Islamic State’s production of images to the ways in which images circulated in ancient Assyria and asks how digitization has transformed politics in the age of social media. An elegant and accessibly written introduction to the complexities of such events, The Idols of ISIS is ideal for students and readers seeking a richer cultural perspective than the media usually provides.Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice often with a focus on film and television studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Take a look at a globe. Europe is there in big letters, and, to us, this hardly merits a passing thought. But Europe is a concept, a construct, an idea. So too is modernity. These categories have rich and contested histories. It is to their lineage that Robert Launay looks in Savages, Romans, and Despots: Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder (University of Chicago Press, 2018). In this lucid and discerning volume, Professor Launay explores how a host of European luminaries used others to think about themselves and their worlds. Prior to the nineteenth century, discourses about the New World and China were much less about domination than about understanding their authors’ own social and political milieus. The figure of the Native America, the political life of China, the character of classical antiquity—all these “others” assumed different significances to different thinkers depending on the critique they sought to make about contemporary society. Ranging as it does from Mandeville to Montaigne, Montesquieu, Kant, and many others, this book synthesizes an immense—and immensely complex—body of political thought into an accessible narrative that is doubtless of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike.Jonathan Megerian is a doctoral candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University. He works on late medieval and Renaissance England. His dissertation explores the role of historiography in the formation of imperial ideologies in Renaissance England. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known story.At a time when poison was widely feared, the urgent need for effective cures provoked intense excitement about new drugs. As doctors created, performed, and evaluated poison trials, they devoted careful attention to method, wrote detailed experimental reports, and engaged with the problem of using human subjects for fatal tests. In reconstructing this history, Rankin reveals how the antidote trials generated extensive engagement with “experimental thinking” long before the great experimental boom of the seventeenth century and investigates how competition with lower-class healers spurred on this trend.Alisha Rankin's The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (U Chicago Press, 2021) sheds welcome and timely light on the intertwined nature of medical innovations, professional rivalries, and political power. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Providing a fresh perspective is one of the biggest challenges for historians of New York City. Kara Murphy Schlichting, however, has managed to do just that in her recent book, New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore (University of Chicago Press, 2019). The book shifts our gaze away from Manhattan and towards the coastal periphery—where local planning initiatives, waterfront park building, the natural environment, and a growing leisure economy each had a stake in the regional development of New York City.Schlichting’s regional and environmental approach frames New York’s extensive waterways as points of connection that unite, rather than divide, the urban core and periphery to one another. Residents of the Bronx in the nineteenth century organized groups like the Department of Street Improvements to ensure that their vision of urban expansion was realized, including implementing the grid-system to attract public and private investors from the urban core. Individuals along the East Bronx waterfront in the early-twentieth century similarly redefined the area according to their own wants and needs, converting temporary summer camp colonies into permanent bungalow communities outside, yet within reach, of Manhattan. By the 1930s, Robert Moses’ powerful State Parks Department, bolstered by New Deal and World’s Fair preparation funds, filled the natural marshlands of Flushing Meadows, connected Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx by constructing the Triborough Bridge, and lined area with new ‘modern’ recreational facilities. While differing in size and scope, each aforementioned case contributed to New York City’s conceptual and physical transition into a truly regional city.Garrett Gutierrez is a Ph.D. Candidate of United States History at New York University. His research interests include urban/suburban history, race & ethnicity, informal economy, and youth subcultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tijuana is the largest of Mexico’s northern border cities, and although it has struggled during the United States’ dramatic escalation of border enforcement, it nonetheless remains deeply connected with California by one of the largest, busiest international ports of entry in the world. In Passing: Two Publics in a Mexican Border City (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Rihan Yeh probes the border’s role in shaping Mexican senses of self and collectivity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Yeh examines a range of ethnographic evidence: public demonstrations, internet forums, popular music, dinner table discussions, police encounters, workplace banter, intensely personal interviews, and more. Through these everyday exchanges, she shows how the promise of passage and the threat of prohibition shape Tijuana’s communal sense of “we” and throw into relief long-standing divisions of class and citizenship in Mexico.Out of the nitty-gritty of quotidian talk and interaction in Tijuana, Yeh captures the dynamics of desire and denial that permeate public spheres in our age of transnational crossings and fortified borders. Original and accessible, Passing is a timely work in light of current fierce debates over immigration, Latin American citizenship, and the US-Mexico border. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on New Books in History, Dr. Evan Friss, associate professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the US to talk about The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). This book was originally released in 2015 by the University of Chicago press and we are chatting on the occasion of its paperback release in January.Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation. In the process, debates about the nature of bicycles—where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate them—have played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls. Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old.The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycle’s rise and fall in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world. Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle. When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred. Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for today’s car-centric cities—and ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Mansel, a trustee of the Society for Court Studies and President of the Research Center of the Chateau de Versailles, has written a one-volume biography of the life and times of Louis XIV, King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV (The University of Chicago Press, 2019). One of the longest reigning monarchs in Europe’s history, from 1643 to 1715, Louis XIV left a mark upon France for good and ill. He expanded the country’s borders but left it in horrible financial shape. He was a valuable patron of the arts and architecture, but wreaked havoc on some of his nation’s citizens, especially French Protestants. He reaped the glory associated with imperial policy and dynastic intermarriages throughout Europe, but brought destruction to the lives, fortunes, and cities of his enemies. Mansel brings the court of Louis XIV alive, paying special attention to the daily personal life of the king and his associates. He reviews France’s effects on the politics of Europe and provides a detailed history of the key project of Louis’ life: the palace of Versailles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Terrorism is a cancer, an infection, an epidemic, a plague. For more than a century, this metaphor has figured insurgent violence as contagion in order to contain its political energies. In Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, shows that this trope began in responses to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and tracks its tenacious hold through 9/11 and beyond. Raza Kolb assembles a diverse archive from colonial India, imperial Britain, French and independent Algeria, the postcolonial Islamic diaspora, and the neoimperial United States. Across literary, administrative, medical, and other non-literary sources, she reveals the tendency to imagine anticolonial rebellion, and Muslim insurgency specifically, as a virulent form of social contagion. In our conversation we discuss “imperial disease poetics,” British colonialism in South Asia, the 1857 rebellion, global cholera outbreaks, the Hajj pilgrimage, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the struggle for Algerian independence, Albert Camus’ The Plague, the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, Frantz Fanon, Djamila Boupacha, Salman Rushdie representation of radical Islamism, the 9/11 Commission Report, the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, and the Osama bin Laden mission.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021).Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices