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  • Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, "The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    2025/01/17
    Every year, the chilly mistral wind blows through the Rhône valley of southern France, across the Camargue wetlands, and into the Mediterranean Sea. Most forceful when winter turns to spring, the wind knocks over trees, sweeps trains off their tracks, and destroys crops. Yet the mistral turns the sky clear and blue, as it often appears in depictions of Provence. The legendary wind is central to the area’s regional identity and has inspired artists and writers near and far for centuries. This force of nature is the focus of Dr. Catherine Dunlop’s The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024), a wonderfully written examination of the power of the mistral wind, and in particular, the ways it challenged central tenets of nineteenth-century European society: order, mastery, and predictability. As Dunlop shows, while the modernizing state sought liberation from environmental realities through scientific advances, land modification, and other technological solutions, the wind blew on, literally crushing attempts at control, and becoming increasingly integral to regional feelings of place and community. 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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    51 分
  • Melissa B. Reynolds, "Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Melissa B. Reynolds, "Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    2025/01/17
    What do you do when you feel an itchy throat coming on? You probably head online, first to search for your symptoms and then to evaluate the information you found — just as ordinary 15th and 16th century English people would have sifted through information in their almanacs, medical recipe collections, and astrological tracts. As Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (U Chicago Press, 2024) shows, ordinary English readers learned to assess and evaluate information through ordinary, everyday interactions with inexpensive and practical books. By tracing the creation, proliferation, and reading of such 'practical books,' Melissa Reynolds explores changing attitudes towards medicine and science as well as how readers navigated uncertainty and the unknowable. Through its focus on the production of practical books, Reading Practice also charts changing attitudes towards books, first as manuscripts became less expensive and then as print became imbued with authority. Vivid and precise, Reading Practice should be read by those interested in the history of the book, the history of science, and anyone who has ever consulted Dr. Google (which, let's be honest, is probably everyone). In addition to centering the reading practices of ordinary people, Reading Practice also does a fabulous job explaining exactly what it looks like and takes to work with medieval manuscripts and early printed texts, making it perfect reading for graduate students and those heading into library research. Listeners should also check out the companion website, which contains bibliographic information about the manuscripts and prints used in the project, network analysis of the relationship between printers and book, and data visualizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 10 分
  • Steven Shapin, "Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Steven Shapin, "Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    2025/01/08
    What we eat, who we are, and the relationship between the two. Eating and Being: A History of Ideas about Our Food and Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of Western thinking about food, eating, knowledge, and ourselves. In modern thought, eating is about what is good for you, not about what is good. Eating is about health, not about virtue. Yet this has not always been the case. For a great span of the past—from antiquity through about the middle of the eighteenth century—one of the most pervasive branches of medicine was known as dietetics, prescribing not only what people should eat but also how they should order many aspects of their lives, including sleep, exercise, and emotional management. Dietetics did not distinguish between the medical and the moral, nor did it acknowledge the difference between what was good for you and what was good. Dietetics counseled moderation in all things, where moderation was counted as a virtue as well as the way to health. But during the nineteenth century, nutrition science began to replace the language of traditional dietetics with the vocabulary of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and calories, and the medical and the moral went their separate ways. Steven Shapin shows how much depended upon that shift, and he also explores the extent to which the sensibilities of dietetics have been lost. Throughout this rich history, he evokes what it felt like to eat during another historical period and invites us to reflect on what it means to feel about food as we now do. Shapin shows how the change from dietetics to nutrition science fundamentally altered how we think about our food and its powers, our bodies, and our minds. Steven Shapin is professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    45 分
  • Fernando Domínguez Rubio, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

    Fernando Domínguez Rubio, "Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
    2025/01/03
    How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters. Still Life offers a fascinating and detailed ethnographic account of what it takes to prevent these disasters from happening. Going behind the scenes at MoMA, Domínguez Rubio provides a rare view of the vast technological apparatus—from climatic infrastructures and storage facilities, to conservation labs and machine rooms—and teams of workers—from conservators and engineers to guards and couriers—who fight to hold artworks still. As MoMA reopens after a massive expansion and rearranging of its space and collections, Still Life not only offers a much-needed account of the spaces, actors, and forms of labor traditionally left out of the main narratives of art, but it also offers a timely meditation on how far we, as a society, are willing to go to keep the things we value from disappearing into oblivion. This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.” Fernando Domínguez Rubio is an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California-San Diego. Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Nushelle de Silva is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work examines museums and exhibitions, and how the dissemination of visual culture is politically mediated by international organizations in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 4 分
  • Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

    Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
    2025/01/02
    On this episode, J.J. Mull interviews scholar and historian Camille Robcis. In her most recent book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, psychiatric and psychoanalytic meaning of institutional psychotherapy as articulated at Saint-Alban Hospital in France by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism. J.J. Mull is a poet, training clinician, and graduate student at Smith College School for Social Work currently living in Northampton, MA. He can be reached at jmull@smith.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 5 分
  • Rachel Louise Moran, "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Rachel Louise Moran, "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
    2025/01/02
    New motherhood is often seen as a joyful moment in a woman’s life; for some women, it is also their lowest moment. For much of the twentieth century, popular and medical voices blamed women who had emotional and mental distress after childbirth for their own suffering. By the end of the century, though, women with postpartum mental illnesses sought to take charge of this narrative. In Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Rachel Louise Moran explores the history of the naming and mainstreaming of postpartum depression. Coalitions of maverick psychiatrists, psychologists, and women who themselves had survived substantial postpartum distress fought to legitimize and normalize women’s experiences. They argued that postpartum depression is an objective and real illness and fought to avoid it being politicized alongside other fraught medical and political battles over women’s health. Based on insightful oral histories and in-depth archival research, Blue reveals a secret history of American motherhood, women’s political activism, and the rise of postpartum depression advocacy amid an often-censorious conservative culture. By breaking new ground with the first book-length history of postpartum mental illness in the twentieth century, Moran brings mothers’ battles with postpartum depression out of the shadows and into the light. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 分
  • Nick Yablon, "Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule" (U Chicago Press, 2019)

    Nick Yablon, "Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
    2024/12/31
    In Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule (University of Chicago Press, 2019), Nick Yablon traces the birth of the time capsule in the United States. Starting with the Gilded Age, Yablon explores the way Americans from diverse backgrounds constructed memories of their present through the creation of time capsules. Examining the ephemera included in the time capsules, including writing texts, photographs, phonographic records, films, and other artifacts, Yablon details the way these capsules not only created records of their time periods, but also how they show the ways in which their creators and contributors imagined the future. Remembrance of Things Present not only allows readers a glimpse into the history of time capsules, but also the ways in which politics, social justice, and American values were all represented in these buried treasures. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間 3 分