Saundra Weddle, "The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice" (Penn State UP, 2026)
Saundra Weddle joins fellow Venetianist Jana Byars to talk about her pathbreaking new release, The Brothel and Beyond: An Urban History of the Sex Trade in Early Modern Venice (Penn State UP, 2026). T...
28 Jan 56min
Olivia Weisser, "The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, venereal disease, or the 'pox,' was a dreaded diagnosis throughout Europe. Its ghastly marks, along with their inexorable link to sex, were so stigmatizing...
28 Jan 51min
Kong Pheng Pha, "Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality" (U Washington Press, 2025)
This episode features Dr. Kong Pheng Pha discussing his recently published book, Queering the Hmong Diaspora: Racial Subjectivity and the Myth of Hyperheterosexuality (U Washington Press, 2025).Queer...
25 Jan 55min
Lauren D. Sawyer, "Growing Up Pure: White Girls, Queer Teens, and the Racial Foundations of Purity Culture" (NYU Press, 2025)
Gaining mass popularity in the mid-1990s with the True Love Waits rally on the Washington Mall, purity culture began as an urge from evangelical conservatives for Christian adolescents to publicly com...
22 Jan 44min
Juliane Maxwald, "Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality" (Taylor & Francis, 2025)
Today I spoke with Juliane Maxwald abut her new book Psychoanalytic Sex Therapy: Exploring the Unconscious Life of Sexuality (Taylor & Francis, 2025). Maxwald bridges psychoanalytic theory with cont...
21 Jan 50min
Elwin Hofman et al. eds., "The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe" (Leuven UP, 2022)
Elwin Hofman joins Jana Byars to talk about the volume he edited with Magaly Rodríguez García & Pieter Vanhees, The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe (Leuven UP, 2022)...
17 Jan 50min
Everything Is Fine, I'll Just Work Harder: Confessions of a Former Badass
In Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of A Former Badass (Street Noise Books, 2025), Professor Cara Gormally draws us into the familiar academic world of chronic busyness. In pan...
16 Jan 39min
Zoë McGee, "Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel" (Manchester UP, 2025)
What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think. Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reve...
15 Jan 1h 3min
