New Books in Science, Technology, and...
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com
Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/
Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork
2701
Kristina Kleutghen, “Imperial Illusions: Crossi...
Kristina Kleutghen‘s beautiful new book offers a fascinating window into the culture of illusion in China in the eighteenth century and beyond. Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in the Qing Palaces (University of Washington Press,
71 min
2702
Ann C. Pizzorusso, “Tweeting Da Vinci” (Da Vinc...
Ann C. Pizzorusso‘s new book is a wonderfully creative and gorgeously illustrated meeting of geology, art history, and Renaissance studies. Arguing that understanding Italy’s geological history can significantly inform how we see its art, literature,
67 min
2703
Matthew Stanley, “Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s...
“Show me how it doos.” Such were the words of a young James Clerk “Dafty” Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experi...
66 min
2704
Nicolas Rasmussen, “Gene Jockeys: Life Science ...
Nicolas Rasmussen‘s new book maps the intersection of biotechnology and the business world in the last decades of the twentieth century. Gene Jockeys: Life Science and the Rise of Biotech Enterprise (Johns Hopkins University Press,
63 min
2705
Karen A. Rader and Victoria E. M. Cain, “Life o...
In lucid prose that’s a real pleasure to read, Karen Rader and Victoria Cain‘s new book chronicles a revolution in modern American science education and culture. Life on Display: Revolutionizing U. S. Museums of Science & Natural History in the Twentie...
69 min
2706
Frank Pasquale, “The Black Box Society: The Sec...
Hidden algorithms make many of the decisions that affect significant areas of society: the economy, personal and organizational reputation, the promotion of information, etc. These complex formulas, or processes,
50 min
2707
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, “Transient Work...
Words have meaning. More specifically, the definitions attached to words shape our perspective on, and how we categorize, the things that we encounter. The words of “technology” and “innovation” are exemplars of how definitions impact perspectives.
37 min
2708
Johanna Drucker, “Graphesis: Visual Forms of Kn...
Johanna Drucker‘s marvelous new book gives us a language with which to talk about visual epistemology.Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014) simultaneously introduces the nature and function of information grap...
64 min
2709
Daniel Margocsy, “Commercial Visions: Science, ...
Daniel Margocsy‘s beautiful new book opens with a trip to Amsterdam by Baron Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, and closes with a shopping spree by Peter the Great. These two trips bookend a series of fascinating forays into the changing world of entrepre...
68 min
2710
Carolyn L. Kane, “Chromatic Algorithms: Synthet...
Carolyn L. Kane’s new book traces the modern history of digital color, focusing on the role of electronic color in computer art and media aesthetics since 1960. Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art,
63 min
2711
Janet K. Shim, “Heart-Sick: The Politics of Ris...
Janet K. Shim‘s new book juxtaposes the accounts of epidemiologists and lay people to consider the roles of race, class, and gender (among other things) in health and illness. Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality,
74 min
2712
William J. Turkel, “Spark from the Deep” (Johns...
“In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning.” William J. Turkel‘s new book traces the emergence and inhabiting of an electric world through the span of human history...
67 min
2713
Alon Peled, “Traversing Digital Babel: Informat...
Failure by government agencies to share information has had disastrous results globally. From the inability to prevent terrorist attacks, like the 9-11 attacks in New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania,
42 min
2714
Ethan Zuckerman, “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans...
In the early days of the Internet, optimists saw the future as highly connected, where voices from across the globe would mingle and learn from one another as never before. However, as Ethan Zuckerman argues in Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age ...
46 min
2715
Lawrence Lipking, “What Galileo Saw: Imagining ...
Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Rev...
67 min
2716
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Sci...
After the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a “destruction of reason.” It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged st...
71 min
2717
Kara W. Swanson, “Banking on the Body: The Mark...
How did we come to think of spaces for the storage and circulation of body parts as “banks,” and what are the consequences of that history for the way we think about human bodies as property today? Kara W. Swanson‘s wonderful new book traces the histor...
65 min
2718
Hugh F. Cline, “Information Communication Techn...
There is no doubt that innovations in technology have had, and are having, a significant impact on society, changing the way we live, work, and play. But the changes that we are seeing are far from novel. In fact,
40 min
2719
Robert Stolz, “Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, an...
Robert Stolz‘s new book explores the emergence of an environmental turn in modern Japan. Bad Water: Nature, Pollution; Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Duke University Press, 2014) guides readers through the unfolding of successive eco-historical periods ...
73 min
2720
Susan Haack, “Evidence Matters: Science, Proof,...
Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, then, that the law is in large part an epistemological ent...
83 min
2721
Michael Osborne, “The Emergence of Tropical Med...
In The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Michael Osborne offers a new way to think about and practice the history of colonial medicine. Eschewing pan-European or Anglo-centric models of the history of colonia...
60 min
2722
John Tresch, “The Romantic Machine: Utopian Sci...
John Tresch‘s beautiful new book charts a series of transformations that collectively ushered in a new cosmology in the Paris of the early-mid nineteenth century. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicag...
71 min
2723
John Protevi, “Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and th...
Right now, humanists across very different disciplinary fields are trying to create the kinds of cross-disciplinary conversations that might open up new ways to conceptualize and ask questions of our objects of study.
66 min
2724
Daryn Lehoux, “What Did the Romans Know?: An In...
Daryn Lehoux‘s new book will forever change the way you think about garlic and magnets. What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking (University of Chicago Press, 2012) is a fascinating account of the co-production of facts and wo...
69 min
2725
Gregory Smits, “Seismic Japan” (University of H...
In two recent books, Gregory Smits offers a history of earthquakes and seismology in Japan that creates a wonderful dialogue between history and the sciences. Seismic Japan: The Long History and Continuing Legacy of the Ansei Edo Earthquake (University...
69 min