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.
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2401
Adam Tanner, “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Compani...
Personal health information often seems locked-down: protected by patient privacy laws, encased in electronic record systems (EHRs) and difficult to share or transport by and between physicians and hospitals.
54 min
2402
Joy Rohde, “Armed with Expertise: The Militariz...
In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions.
47 min
2403
Londa Schiebinger, “Secret Cures of Slaves: Peo...
Londa Schiebinger‘s new book Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines the contexts, programs, and ethics of medical experimentation in the British and Frenc...
40 min
2404
Peter Sahlins, “1668: The Year of the Animal in...
Peter Sahlins’s 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (Zone Books, 2017) is a captivating look at the role of animals in court and salon culture in the first decades of Louis XIV’s reign in France. Focusing on the years in and around 1668,
51 min
2405
Laura Kalba, “Color in the Age of Impressionism...
When you imagine the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, what colors do you see? Whatever comes to mind, Laura Kalba’s, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art (Penn State University Press,
58 min
2406
Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Scie...
As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the context of the social and political issues of her time.
48 min
2407
Jacob N. Shapiro, “Small Wars, Big Data: The In...
Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro, takes a data-based approach to examine how actions can affect violence in asymmetric conflicts.
53 min
2408
Larry Cuban, “The Flight of a Butterfly or the ...
In The Flight of a Butterfly or the Path of a Bullet? Using Technology to Transform Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2018), Larry Cuban looks at the uses and effects of digital technologies in K–12 classrooms,
32 min
2409
Hala Auji, “Printing Arab Modernity: Book Cultu...
In Middle Eastern history, the printing press has been both over- and under-assigned significance as an agent of social change. Hala Auji’s Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill,
49 min
2410
Kyla Schuller, “The Biopolitics of Feeling: Rac...
Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. However, by contrasting Black lives with White feelings, Kyla Schuller sets up the central conflict of he...
56 min
2411
Eden Medina, “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Techn...
It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics. In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist president, Salvador Allende,
63 min
2412
Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: Th...
French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. While not diminishing the epistemological and aesthetic...
54 min
2413
Martha Few, “For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and...
Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in late eighteenth-century Guatemala and the diverse ways t...
63 min
2414
Jörg Matthias Determann, “Space Science and the...
Space Science and the Arab World, Astronauts, Observatories and Nationalism in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2018) a recently published history of Arab exploration of space, offers a fascinating insight into fundamental issues shaping the contemporary...
58 min
2415
Laura Spinney, “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of ...
The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth–from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson.
42 min
2416
Mark A. McCutcheon, “The Medium Is the Monster:...
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...
77 min
2417
B.J. Mendelson, “Privacy: And How to Get It Bac...
The use of our data and the privacy, or lack thereof, that we have when we go online has become a topic of increasing importance as technology becomes ubiquitous and more sophisticated. Governments, advocacy groups and individual citizens are demanding...
45 min
2418
Sam Kean, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeon...
Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim coped. In many cases survival was miraculous,
56 min
2419
Aimi Hamraie, “Building Access: Universal Desig...
The Americans with Disability Act passed in 1990, but it was just one moment in ongoing efforts to craft the meaning and practice of “good design” that put people with disabilities at the center. In their new book,
42 min
2420
David J. Silverman, “Thundersticks: Firearms an...
In Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), David J. Silverman argues that Indian societies adopted firearm technology not because they were visually impressive or c...
44 min
2421
Sigrid Schmalzer, et. al., “Science for the Peo...
“What is needed now is not liberal reform or withdrawal, but a radical attack, a strategy of opposition. Scientific workers must develop ways to put their skills at the service of the people and against the oppressors.” (Zimmerman, et al. 1972).
57 min
2422
Jenny Reardon, “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethi...
How do we create meaning after the genome? Such a profound question is at the center of the recently published book by Jenny Reardon, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Knowledge and Justice after the Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
66 min
2423
George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, “Understa...
Understanding Cyber Conflict: 14 Analogies (Georgetown University Press, 2017), edited by George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite, uses analogies to conventional warfare and previous technological innovations to explain the complexities of cyber capabilit...
52 min
2424
Susan M. Squier, “Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawin...
Susan M. Squier’s book, Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke University Press, 2017) is about development— biological and ecological. It explores how the media (paintings, films, graphics) that experts have created to understand developme...
44 min
2425
Thomas Morris, “The Matter of the Heart: A Hist...
For thousands of years the human heart remained the deepest of mysteries; both home to the soul and an organ too complex to touch, let alone operate on. Then, in the late nineteenth century, medics began going where no one had dared go before.
61 min