Heyman Center For The Humanities At Columbia University Podcasts

In episode nine of the second season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Marie Myung-Ok Lee's The Evening Hero. This sweeping, lyrical novel follows a Korean immigrant pursuing the American dream who must confront the secrets of the past or risk watching the world he’s worked so hard to build come crumbling down.

In episode eight of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Sarah Zukerman Daly's Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections. Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, Violent Victors links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war.

In episode seven of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation by Annie Pfeifer. Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past.

Michele M Moody-Adams's Making Space For Justice In episode six of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope by Michele M Moody-Adams. With this work, Dr. Moody-Adams contends that the insights arising from social movements are critical to bridging the gap between discerning theory and effective practice—and should be transformative for political thought as well as for political activism.

In episode five of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater: Stage Spectacle and Audience Response by Lauren Robertson. This original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular.

In episode four of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Bruce Robbins's Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction. This accessible introduction to cultural theory asks, "What is criticism for?" and presents an answer in the form of an original polemic about the purpose of criticism.

In episode two of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Andreas Huyssen's Memory Art in the Contemporary World: Confronting Violence in the Global South. Andreas Huyssen deals with the ever-expanding field of transnational memory art, which has emerged from a political need to come to terms with traumatic historical pasts, from the Holocaust to apartheid, colonialism, state terror, and civil war.

In episode two of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Nadia Abu El-Haj's Combat Trauma. Nadia Abu El-Haj argues that in the American public’s imagination, the traumatized soldier stands in for destructive wars abroad, with decisive ramifications in the post-9/11 era.

In episode one of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Isabel Huacuja Alonso's Radio For The Millions. This stunning debut examines the history of Hindi-Urdu radio during the height of its popularity from the 1930s to the 1980s

In episode seven of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics by Mae M. Ngai. The Chinese Question chronicles how Chinese migration to the world’s goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race.

In episode six of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-Era China by: Nicholas Bartlett. Drawing on more than 18 months of fieldwork, Nicholas Bartlett explores how individuals’ varying experiences of heroin recovery highlight shared challenges of inhabiting China’s contested present.

In episode five of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights American Comics: A History by Jeremy Dauber. American Comics is a rich chronicle of the last 150 years of American history through the lens of its comic strips, political cartoons, superheroes, graphic novels, and more.

In episode four of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading by Arden Hegele. Romantic Autopsy considers how the poetry and prose of British Romanticism was written in conversation with the field of medicine in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

In episode three of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Roosevelt Montás's Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum and how four authors had a profound impact on Montás’s life.

In episode two of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights David Freedberg's Iconoclasm. Freedberg combines fresh thinking with deep expertise to address the renewed significance of iconoclasm, its ideologies, and its impact.

In episode one of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Susan Bernofsky's Clairvoyant of the Small. In an immaculately researched and beautifully written biography, Susan Bernofsky sets Robert Walser in the context of early twentieth-century European history, establishing him as one of the most important modernist writers.

In the 1960s and 1970s, America experienced a sports revolution. New professional sports franchises and leagues were established, new stadiums were built, football and basketball grew in popularity, and the proliferation of television enabled people across the country to support their favorite teams and athletes from the comfort of their homes. At the same time, the civil rights and feminist movements were reshaping the nation, broadening the boundaries of social and political participation. The Sports Revolution tells how these forces came together in the Lone Star State. Tracing events from the end of Jim Crow to the 1980s, Frank Guridy chronicles the unlikely alliances that integrated professional and collegiate sports and launched women’s tennis. He explores the new forms of inclusion and exclusion that emerged during the era, including the role the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders played in defining womanhood in the age of second-wave feminism. Guridy explains how the sexual revolution, desegregation, and ch

Jazz has always been a genre built on the blending of disparate musical cultures. Latin jazz illustrates this perhaps better than any other style in this rich tradition, yet its cultural heritage has been all but erased from narratives of jazz history. Told from the perspective of a long-time jazz insider, Latin Jazz: The Other Jazz corrects the record, providing a historical account that embraces the genre's international nature and explores the dynamic interplay of economics, race, ethnicity, and nationalism that shaped it.

Hosted by Olivia Branscum and Timothy Lundy, this week's episode features Kaiama L. Glover's A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being. In A Regarded Self Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation. The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood. Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often govern contemporary reading pra

This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice.