New Books in Critical Theory

Interviews with Scholars of Critical Theory about their New Books

Science
Social Sciences
1726
Julie L. Rose, "Free Time" (Princeton UP, 2018)
55 min
1727
Michelle Fine, “Just Research in Contentious Ti...
What can a researcher do to promote social justice? A conventional image of a researcher describes her staying in the ivory tower for most of the time, producing papers filled with academic jargons periodically,
78 min
1728
Chris Horrocks, “The Joy of Sets: A Short Histo...
Television started as a dream of nineteenth-century science fiction. It took its place in the twentieth-century home, and became a fixture of family life and a transformative cultural force. Today, televisions are both less visible and more present tha...
37 min
1729
Raymond Boyle, “The Talent Industry: Television...
What are the hidden structures of the television industry? In The Talent Industry: Television, Cultural Intermediaries and New Digital Pathways (Palgrave, 2018), Raymond Boyle, a professor of communications at the University of Glasgow‘s Centre for Cul...
38 min
1730
Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “The New Immigrant Whit...
From Dancing with the Stars to the high-profile airport abandonment of seven-year-old Artyom Savelyev by his American adoptive parents in April 2010, popular representations of post-Soviet immigrants in America span the gamut of romantic anti-Communist...
51 min
1731
Melissa Terras, “Picture-Book Professors: Acade...
How have academics been represented in children’s books? In Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh,
30 min
1732
Jennifer Yusin, “The Future Life of Trauma: Par...
How does postcolonial theory and the work of Freud help us understand trauma? In The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition (Fordham University Press, 2017), Dr. Jennifer Yusin, Associate Professor of English and Philosophy at Drexel Un...
32 min
1733
Tim Jelfs, “The Argument about Things in the 19...
In The Argument about Things in the 1980s: Goods and Garbage in an Age of Neoliberalism (West Virginia University Press, 2018), Tim Jelfs argues that debates about the nature of stuff—its moral valence, its spiritual value,
62 min
1734
Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers, “Violence’s F...
Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers are anthropologists who have an interest in studying film for its value in a way to view the world. In Violence’s Fabled Experiment (August Verlag, 2018), they examine three filmmakers: Werner Herzog,
51 min
1735
Jacqueline Rose ,”Mothers: An Essay on Love and...
I left the kitchen radio on while reading Jacqueline Rose‘s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) in preparation for this interview. It was June. Putting the book down for a minute to get a glass of water,
52 min
1736
Joel R. Pruce, “The Mass Appeal of Human Rights...
How can human rights campaigns function in consumer and celebrity society? In The Mass Appeal of Human Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Joel Pruce, assistant professor in political science at the University of Dayton,
36 min
1737
Irfan Ahmad, “Religion as Critique: Islamic Cri...
In the last few decades, questions relating to Islam’s compatibility with liberal secular democracy, or the question of why Islam remains incompatible with Western liberal norms of thought and politics have generated considerable commentary in both sch...
53 min
1738
Nick Hubble, “The Proletarian Answer to the Mod...
Nick Hubble’s The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) is a thrilling, and timely challenge to the orthodoxy that proletarian and high-modernist literatures ought to be understood in opposition to one another....
85 min
1739
Michael Levien, “Dispossession Without Developm...
Historically ubiquitous at least since the 15th century and integral to the rise and consolidation of capitalism, land dispossession has re-emerged as a hot button issue for governments, industries, social movements and researchers.
54 min
1740
Steven Stoll, “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appal...
As you’ll hear in this interview with Steven Stoll, his latest book Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 2017) is “really a book about capitalism.” Specifically, it’s about how the people of the southern mountains––meaning,
44 min
1741
Kurt Dopfer, “Modern Evolutionary Economics: An...
This week we met Prof. Kurt Dopfer (Universität St Gallen, Switzerland) to talk about Modern Evolutionary Economics: An Overview (Cambridge University Press, 2018), a book he co-authored with eight other economists.
43 min
1742
Shelley Tremain, “Foucault and Feminist Philoso...
How should we understand disability? In Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Dr. Shelley Tremain explores this complex question from the perspective of feminist philosophy,
32 min
1743
Dagmar Herzog, “Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis ...
‘Create two, three—many Freuds!’ That, Dagmar Herzog shows, was the forgotten slogan of the Cold War. With Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Prof. Herzog carries forward the groundbreaking rese...
43 min
1744
Charles Umney, “Class Matters: Inequality and E...
What is class? In Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain (Pluto Press, 2018), Charles Umney, an Associate Professor in Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leeds, offers a new marxist analysis of the meaning an...
41 min
1745
Sean Molloy, “Kant’s International Relations: T...
What does Kant have to tell us about International Relations? In Kant’s International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace (University of Michigan Press, 2017), Sean Molloy, a Reader in International Relations at the University of Kent,...
46 min
1746
Larisa Jašarević, “Health and Wealth on the Bos...
In her new book, Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt (Indiana University Press, 2017), Larisa Jašarević traces the odd entanglements between the body and the economy in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the new post-war, post-socialist market,
56 min
1747
Yves Citton, “The Ecology of Attention” (Polity...
We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being reconfigured as a result. But how is this happening, what are the consequences,
68 min
1748
The Invisible Committee, “Now” (Semiotext(e), 2...
What could the communism of the future be? In Now  (Semiotext(e), 2017), The Invisible Committee explores our current crisis by thinking through key critical theory questions, along with specific interventions on French and global politics.
55 min
1749
Simone Wesner, “Artists’ Voices in Cultural Pol...
Why is the artist’s voice missing from cultural policy? In Artists’ Voices in Cultural Policy: Careers, Myths and the Creative Profession after German Unification (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Dr. Simone Wesner,
43 min
1750
Martin Shuster, “New Television: The Aesthetics...
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,
52 min