Shatema Threadcraft, "Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Western democracies are haunted. Michael Hanchard suggests that the specter of race is what haunts our democracies, but it may be more accurate to suggest that they are haunted by their own racialized...
22 Nov 202558min
Janice M. McCabe, "Making, Keeping, and Losing Friends: How Campuses Shape College Students’ Networks" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
We’re all familiar with the sentiment that “college is the best time of your life.” Along with a newfound sense of freedom, students have a unique opportunity to forge lifelong friendships at a point ...
21 Nov 202551min
Thomas Piketty, "A Brief History of Equality" (Harvard UP, 2022)
It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Pik...
17 Nov 202528min
Nayma Qayum, "Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
Across the global South, poor women’s lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions – rules that exist on paper – but by informal norms and practices. V...
16 Nov 20251h 2min
Jason A. Higgins, "Prisoners After War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (U Massachusetts Press, 2024)
In Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Mass. Press, 2024), Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections between the military and carceral system through the sto...
10 Nov 20251h 2min
Michelle Christine Smith, "Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age" (Southern Illinois UP, 2021)
Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society...
9 Nov 202559min
Christopher Ali, "Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity" (MIT, 2021)
As much of daily life migrates online, broadband—high-speed internet connectivity—has become a necessity. The widespread lack of broadband in rural America has created a stark urban–rural digital divi...
9 Nov 202552min
Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr, "Atmospheric Knowledge: Environmentality, Latency, and Sonic Multimodality" (U California Press, 2025)
How do we know through atmospheres? How can being affected by an atmosphere give rise to knowledge? What role does somatic, nonverbal knowledge play in how we belong to places? Atmospheric Knowledge t...
7 Nov 202546min
