Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge UP, 2019) by Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a summa of his lifetime study of Russian culture. In doing so, Brooks provides a needed corrective to the prior standard work, now over 50 years old. Firebird and the Fox chronicles a century of Russian ... Show More
Nov 24
Sebastian Truskolaski, "Adorno and the Ban on Images" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Adorno and the Ban on Images (Bloomsbury, 2022) upends some of the myths that have come to surround the work of the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno – not least amongst them, his supposed fatalism.
Sebastian Truskolaski argues that Adorno's writings allow us to address what is argua ... Show More
58m 5s
Nov 23
Ilan Kelman, "Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries" (UCL Press, 2022)
Antarcticness: Inspirations and Imaginaries (UCL Press, 2022)
edited by Ilan Kelman
Antarcticness joins disciplines, communication approaches, and ideas to explore meanings and depictions of Antarctica. Personal and professional words in poetry and prose, plus images, present and ... Show More
42m 16s
Nov 20
Ana Patricia Rodríguez, "Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area" (University of Arizona Press, 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. ... Show More
33m 3s
Jun 2020
Episode #67: The Coolest Artists You Don't Know: Romaine Brooks (Season 7, Episode 7)
For most Americans, there’s a list of arts that they might be able to rattle off if pressed to name them off the top of their heads. Picasso. Michelangelo. Leonardo da Vinci. Name recognition does go a long way, but such lists also highlight what many of us don’t know-- a huge tr ... Show More
30m 17s
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
May 2023
Andrew Epstein on John Ashbery ("Street Musicians")
An episode I've been waiting for from the beginning: Andrew Epstein joins the podcast to talk about John Ashbery, one of the most important poets of the last hundred years, and his beautiful and haunting poem of mid-career, "Street Musicians."Andrew is Professor of English at Flo ... Show More
1h 28m