How should we understand our new golden age of television? In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Martin Shuster, Director of Judaic Studies and Assistant Professor at Goucher College,

The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of a new type of humor, based on sarcasm, improvisation and drugs. From The National Lampoon to Saturday Night Live, many new stars appeared, both as performers and writers. In his book,

As part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation, the nascent Israeli state tried to limit Jewish religiosity. However, with the steady growth of the ultraorthodox community and the expansion of the settler community,

Follow-up interviews are always fun. Listen to my follow-up interview with Dahlia Schweitzer, author of Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (Rutgers University Press, 2018). I talk with her and Rob Thomas,

What do Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Canadian popular culture have in common? This is the question that Mark A. McCutcheon seeks to answer in his new book, The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenst...

While documentaries have been an accepted part of filmmaking for a long time, they are more popular than ever now, partly because of the many ways of distribution, as well as the less expensive methods of making them. Jacob Bricca,

What does it mean to say that a city can “die”? As Brian Tochterman shows in this compelling intellectual and cultural history, motifs of imminent death—of a “Necropolis” haunting the country’s great “Cosmopolis”—have been a persistent feature of disco...

In her new book, Heroes, Villains and the Muslim Exception: Muslim and Arab Men in Australian Crime Drama (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Mehal Krayem, a sociologist and researcher at the University of Technology Sydney,

Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory as we prep for the zombie apocalypse. In her new book Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Dahlia Schweitzer brings them together as she explores the outbreak ...

What did it mean to be perceived as Jewish or non-Jewish in Weimar Germany? How, in an age of growing antisemitism, was Jewishness revealed, or made invisible? Kerry Wallach of Gettysburg College, explores these questions in her new book,

When you hear “Twentieth Century Fox,” I doubt you know where the source of “Fox” in the name. In her book, The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox (Harper, 2017), Vanda Krefft presents a detailed biography of one ...

As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of second-order systems theory to the analysis of literat...

While Stanley Kramer is considered a successful producer and director of many films as Hollywood moved out of the studio era, he also was criticized for his lesser skills as a director, as well as his liberal beliefs that permeated many of his movies.

In Impossible Conversations: Imaginary Interviews with World-Famous Artists (Black Scat Books, 2015), Carla M. Wilson imagined discussions with (you guessed it) world-famous artists. In this book—Curious Impossibilities: Ten Cinematic Riffs (Black Scat...

Thelma and Louise is rightly considered a great film that went through an incredible journey to the screen. It is also an illustration of how dedicated women still had to fight hard to get it made. Becky Aikman‘s book Off the Cliff: How the Making of T...

Kevin Bartig’s new book Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores multiple facets of one of the most famous film scores of the twentieth century, as well as the cantata Prokofiev adapted from the original music.

On this episode Diana DePasquale talks to Zach Sands, author of Film Comedy and the American Dream (Routledge, 2017). Some of the films Zach writes about are Harvey, The Graduate, Blazing Saddles, The Jerk, Trading Place, and Office Space.

Connections between France and North Africa have long been shaped by colonialism, nationalism, and economics. This intercultural relationship has also been mediated through the arts. In Muslim Women in French Cinema: Voices of Maghrebi Migrants in Fran...

As an award-winning documentarian and writer, Stephen Most has a great deal of experience in the art of storytelling with non-fiction films. In Stories Make the World: Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary (Berghahn Books, 2017),

Though not a figure in the public imagination today, William Fox is a man whose legacy is visible in the numerous media enterprises that bear his name. Vanda Krefft‘s biography The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William F...

In her new book, Beyond the Silver Screen: A History of Women, Filmmaking and Film Culture in Australia, 1920-1990 (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Mary Tomsic, an ARC Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Melbourne,

Material success and prosperity are the aspirational goal for many Americans. The myth of meritocracy embedded in this national ethos has made this dream a civil religion. In Profane Parables: Film and the American Dream (Baylor University Press,

In his new book, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Cultural Studies scholar Joel Dinerstein explores the cultural history of cool and the codes that defined the style and attitude of this relatively new concept...

In Stephen Pimpare‘s new book, Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017), the reader is encouraged to think about how we portray poverty and people in poverty in movies. Overall,

Noel Brown is a film and television scholar at Liverpool Hope University. His research has focused on Hollywood and British cinema (classical and contemporary), family entertainment, children’s culture and animation.