Episodios

  • Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)

    Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, "Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago" (MIT Press, 2024)
    Nov 26 2025
    An important critic of modern culture, American economist Thorstein Veblen is best known for the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” the ostentatious display of goods in the service of social status. In the field of architectural history, scholars have employed Veblen in support of a wide range of arguments about modern architecture, but never has he attracted a comprehensive and critical treatment from the viewpoint of architectural history. In Barbarian Architecture: Thorstein Veblen’s Chicago (MIT Press, 2024), Joanna Merwood-Salisbury corrects this omission by reexamining Veblen's famous book as an original theory of modernity and situating it in a particular place and time—Chicago in the 1890s. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, she explores Veblen's position in relation to debates about industrial reform and aesthetics in Chicago during the period 1890–1906. Bolstered by a strong visual narrative made possible by several of Chicago's historic photographic collections, Barbarian Architecture makes a compelling and original argument for the influence of Veblen's home city on his work and ideas. This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century architecture, focusing on cultural techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    40 m
  • Lauren E. M. Everett, "Fortunate People in a Fortunate Land: At Home in Santa Monica's Rent-Controlled Housing" (Temple UP, 2025)

    Lauren E. M. Everett, "Fortunate People in a Fortunate Land: At Home in Santa Monica's Rent-Controlled Housing" (Temple UP, 2025)
    Nov 26 2025
    Rent control and other tenant protections have profound and positive impacts on individuals’ and communities’ lives. Dr. Lauren Everett’s Fortunate People in a Fortunate Land: At Home in Santa Monica’s Rent-Controlled Housing (Temple UP, 2025) shows how rent control impacts the lives of the renters themselves. Dr. Everett interviews residents about their experiences in low- and middle-income households in rent-controlled private market housing in Santa Monica, CA, a city where Everett was born and raised but can no longer afford to live. Dr. Everett seeks to understand the extent to which individuals feel at home or not at home and what factors contribute to those experiences. She also explores the nexus of Santa Monica’s tenant protection policies, infrastructure, and resources and the extent to which they inform stability—both perceived and actual—and life decisions. The first scholarly book to take a tenant-centered approach to examining the benefits and problems of rent control, Fortunate People in a Fortunate Land examines the residential experience in this specific local context and explains how it relates to policy and other externalities in cities where homeownership is not financially viable for most renters. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    50 m
  • Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)

    Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)
    Nov 24 2025
    Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations are selective. They are never the whole story. These old towns and their turbulent histories have been key sites in Europe’s ongoing theater of politics and war. Exploring seven old towns, from Frankfurt and Prague to Vilnius in Lithuania, the acclaimed writer Marek Kohn examines how they have been used since the Second World War to conceal political tensions and reinforce certain versions of history. Uncovering hidden stories behind these old and old-seeming façades in The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe (Yale University Press, 2023), Dr. Kohn offers us a new understanding of the politics of European history-making—showing how our visits to old towns could promote belonging over exclusion, and empathy over indifference. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h
  • Tom White, "Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster" (Repeater, 2025)

    Tom White, "Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster" (Repeater, 2025)
    Nov 23 2025
    Once used extensively in schools, hospitals, and housing, asbestos has taken the lives of millions. Bad Dust: A History of the Asbestos Disaster (Repeater, 2025) by Tom White traces the international history of the asbestos disaster — from mining operations in apartheid South Africa to the factories and shipyards of the UK – and tells the story of the activists and workers who took on a once indomitable industry. Illegal for the past quarter century, much asbestos still remains in place today, slowly degrading and placing us all at risk. Bad Dust reveals that the asbestos disaster has in fact only just begun, and that far from being a problem solved, the fight urgently needs to be taken up once again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    40 m
  • Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area" (University of Arizona Press, 2025)

    Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area" (University of Arizona Press, 2025)
    Nov 20 2025
    For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community. In this episode, we sit down with Ana Patricia Rodríguez, author of Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area (U Arizona Press, 2025). In In Avocado Dreams, Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region.This timely and relevant work not only enriches our understanding of Salvadoran diasporic experiences but also contributes significantly to broader discussions on migration, identity, and cultural production in the United States. This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for the University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert (forthcoming in 2026) investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    33 m
  • Henry H. Sapoznik, "The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City" (SUNY Press, 2025)

    Henry H. Sapoznik, "The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City" (SUNY Press, 2025)
    Nov 18 2025
    The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) by Henry H. Sapoznik explores a century of Yiddish popular culture in New York City. Sapoznik--the author of Klezmer! Jewish Music fro0m Old World to Our World and a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project--tells his story through chapters on eating, architecture, music and theater. Within each chapter are shorter entries on topics as varied as knishes, cafeterias, prominent buildings, Jews and jazz, Black cantors, women cantors, and Yiddish theater. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles, the book offers fresh insights into the profound influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. The guide also contains fifty images, many of which have never before been published. The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City is vivid, deeply researched, and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    48 m
  • Carolyn T. Adams et. al, "Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century" (Penn Press, 2025)

    Carolyn T. Adams et. al, "Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century" (Penn Press, 2025)
    Nov 14 2025
    Informed by current scholarship and richly illustrated with full-color photographs and maps, Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century (Penn Press, 2025) brings to the public an up-to-date, diverse history of Philadelphia across its many dimensions. Volume 1 adopts "Greater Philadelphia" to indicate a regional scope, but not one limited by a fixed geographical boundary. Instead, "Greater Philadelphia" refers to the interdependence between the city and its periphery across parts of three states: southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware. The Greater Philadelphia Region represents a collection of stories fundamental to the Philadelphia area's history and evolution based on the belief that regions work best when residents, divided in space but linked in multiple ways through social and economic connections, possess shared knowledge about the people and the places that surround them. Volume 2 begins with Philadelphia's role during the American Revolution, as the nation's first capital until 1800, and as home to one of the North's largest free African American communities in the antebellum period. From the Civil War to woman suffrage, from the Lenape people to the Gray Panthers, from Black Power to Occupy Philadelphia, the book chronicles the ongoing dynamics of citizenship and nationhood as they unfolded in the Philadelphia region from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Greater Philadelphia and the Nation demonstrates how Philadelphia, and its periphery across southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware, create, challenge, and sustain the nation. Volume 3 reveals the influence of empires and nations on Greater Philadelphia while also emphasizing the dynamic role the region and its people have played in shaping the modern world. Exploring the immigrants who peopled the Delaware Valley, the faiths they practiced, the environment they shaped, the wars they waged, and the global connections they forged, Greater Philadelphia and the World reveals a city and its surroundings that has been continually molded by its links to the Atlantic, the Americas, and the Pacific. Omari Averette-Phillips is a PhD Candidate in History & African American Studies at UC-Davis. He can be reached at okaverettephillips@ucdavis.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    37 m
  • Ihnji Jon, "Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics" (Pluto Press, 2021)

    Ihnji Jon, "Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics" (Pluto Press, 2021)
    Nov 8 2025
    Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action 'for the environment' is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city. Based on the author's site visits and interviews in Darwin (Australia), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Cleveland (Ohio), and Cape Town (South Africa), Ihnji Jon's Cities in the Anthropocene: New Ecology and Urban Politics (Pluto Press, 2021) tells the story of how cities can lead a transformative pro-environment politics. National governments often fail to make binding agreements that bring about radical actions for the environment. This book shows how cities, as local sites of mobilizing a collective, political agenda, can be frontiers for activating the kind of environmental politics that appreciates the role of 'nature' in the everyday functioning of our urban life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 m