May 13
Rina Bliss, "What's Real About Race: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
Professor Rina Bliss teaches in the sociology department at Rutgers University, and has written on the social significance of genetic studies on intelligence, race, and social factors. In What's Real About Race: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society (W.W. Norton, 2025) Bliss ... Show More
53m 20s
May 11
Angus Burgin on the Rise of the Internet
We were joined by Angus Burgin, Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and talked about how the arrival of the Internet remade life and politics in the 90s. Angus shared his thoughts on the motivations behind his upcoming book, which offers an intellectual hi ... Show More
3m 45s
May 10
Peter S. Soppelsa, "Paris After Haussmann: Living with Infrastructure in the City of Light, 1870–1914" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2026)
Modern Paris is often hailed as a capital of urban infrastructure. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in 1853–1870, branded “Haussmannization,” helped define urban modernity for cities worldwide. But even as infrastructures expanded and modernized, some Parisian ... Show More
51m 34s
Jul 2012
John Burnham, “After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the ... Show More
56m 43s
Jul 2020
RU97: RENDERING DR KEVIN VOLKAN UNCONSCIOUS, PSYCHOANALYSIS, EDUCATION, MUSIC, WRITING, CLINIC WORK
Dr. Kevin Volkan is a founding faculty member and Professor of Psychology at California State University Channel Islands, where he researches and teaches courses in psychopathology and atypical behaviors, personality theory, as well as Nazi Germany, and Eastern philosophy. He als ... Show More
1h 14m
Jun 2019
Eleonor Gilburd, "To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture" (Harvard UP, 2018)
Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West. A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus on peaceful cooperation with foreign powers. A year after Stalin’s death, author ... Show More
1h 27m
Nov 2021
The Devils: Dostoevsky’s novel of political evil
The Devils, The Possessed, or Demons, as it’s also known in translation, is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s most political novel but it’s also his bleakest and funniest. It’s a hundred and fifty years since its publication and two hundred years since its author’s birth. The novel tells the s ... Show More
40m 4s
In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narratives to counter state-sanctioned psychiatric diagnoses of insanity. Reich discusses the interesting literary preoccupations of Soviet psychiatrists and psychiatri ... Show More
