Hildegard of Bingen was many things: a religious leader, a prolific letter-writer, a visionary prophet, possibly a compiler of medical lore, and certainly one of the most important composers of the 12th century. In recent years,

Joan Judge‘s wonderful new book takes readers into the pages of the Funu shibao (the Women’s Eastern Times), a “Shanghai-based, nationally distributed, protocommercial, gendered journal that was closely attuned to the concerns of its readers,

Is hip hop defined by its artists or by its audience? In Home With Hip Hop Feminism, Aisha Durham returns hip hop scholarship to its roots by engaging in an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach to studying hip hop.

Alice J. Kang has written Bargaining for Women’s Rights: Activism in an Aspiring Muslim Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Kang is assistant professor of political science and ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In her new book, Identity, Youth, and Gender in the Korean American Church (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Christine Hong explores the lives of female Korean American Mainline Christian adolescents. Hong’s work,

Nanxiu Qian, professor at Rice University, discusses her new book Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform (Stanford University Press, 2015). Qian argues that the role women played in the late Qing reform move...

How does gender make war, and how does war make gender? In Gender, War, and Conflict (Polity Press, 2014), Laura Sjoberg (University of Florida) analyzes war and conflict through a gendered lens, arguing for the need for “gender mainstreaming” in the s...

We live in a world awash with pornography, in the face of which anti-porn feminist philosophizing has not had much impact. In How to Do Things With Pornography (Harvard University Press, 2015), Nancy Bauer takes academic philosophy to task for being ir...

Richard H. King is Emeritus Professor of American and Canadian Studies at The University of Nottingham. His book Arendt and America (University of Chicago, 2015) is an intellectual biography and transnational synthesis of ideas and explores how the Ger...

Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor in writing, literature and publishing. Her book Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Mariner Books, 2013) won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

As slavery came to an end in the Caribbean’s British colonies, officials and local reformers began to worry about how and whether they would convince their newly freed workforce to continue working. More specifically,

In her wonderful new book Polygyny: What it Means When African American Muslim Women Share Their Husbands (University Press of Florida, 2015), Debra Majeed, Professor of Religious Studies at Beloit College,

Sarah H. Jacoby‘s recent monograph, Love and Liberation: Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro (Columbia University Press, 2014), focuses on the extraordinary life and times of the Tibetan laywoman Sera Khandro and us...

Waiting several hours in line for a hug is well worth it for thousands of people, the devotees of the Guru, Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi. In Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (University of California Press, 2014), Amanda Lucia,

Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Germany,

What are some of the key features and characteristics of the Muslim feminist Qur’an exegetical tradition and what are some of the tensions and ambiguities found in that tradition? Those are the central questions addressed by Aysha Hidayatullah,

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Later,

Mia Bay is a professor of history at Rutgers University, and Director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina, 2015).

As I imagine most any biographer will tell you, one of the great joys and privileges of biographical research is using archives. This is where one encounters tangible pieces of the subject’s life- letters, diaries, receipts,

Megan Threlkeld is an associate professor of history at Denison University. Her book Pan-American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) provides a rich transnational examination of the years fol...

Jonathan Eig is a New York Times best-selling author of four books and former journalist for the Wall Street Journal. His book The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (W.W. Norton,

Sally G. McMillen is the Mary Reynolds Babcock professor of history at Davidson College. In her book Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (Oxford University Press, 2015) McMillen has given us a rich biography of the life and times of the abolitionist and w...

Kabul Carnival: Gender Politics in Postwar Afghanistan (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) by Julie Billaud is a fascinating account of women and the state and ongoing ‘reconstruction’ projects in post-war Afghanistan.

As Meryle Secrest notes in the introduction to her new book, Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography (Knopf, 2014),”The most extraordinary fashion designer of the twentieth century is now just a name on a perfume bottle.” Were it not a book about Schiaparelli,