logo
episode-header-image
Jan 2024
57m 15s

Tulasi Srinivas, "Wonder in South Asia: ...

NEW BOOKS NETWORK
About this episode
Tulasi Srinivas' edited volume Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics (SUNY Press, 2023) brings together historians and ethnographers of South Asia, including leading and emerging scholars, to consider the place and meaning of wonder in such varied joyful, tense, and creative sites and moments as Sufi music performances in Gujarat, Tamil graveya ... Show More
Up next
Sep 15
Tom Hulme, "Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life Before Gay Liberation" (Cornell UP, 2026)
Professor Tom Hulme's second book reconstructs the erotic and romantic lives of queer men in Belfast across roughly seventy years, from the recriminalisation of sex between men in the 1880s to the emergence of a mainstream public debate about homosexuality in the 1950s. It follow ... Show More
48m 1s
Sep 12
John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian, "Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026)
In John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian’s Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the authors put forward a comprehensive new theoretical approach to understanding laughter and the humour we use to inspire it. ... Show More
1h 7m
Sep 7
Francesca Sbardella, "Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister" (Berghahn Books, 2025)
Monasteries are typically characterized by physical and symbolic limitations on access as they are usually known through written texts and accounts by nuns who live in that world but do not allow others to have access. This has often resulted in research based on indirect sources ... Show More
38m 23s
Recommended Episodes
Feb 2022
Renny Thomas, "Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment" (Routledge, 2021)
Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biograp ... Show More
52m 38s
Oct 2021
Wendy Doniger, "Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History" (U Virginia Press, 2021)
Raj Balkaran speaks with Wendy Doniger about her new book Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History (University of Virginia Press, 2021), along with her translation of the final four books of the Mahābhārata's Critical Edition translation project, the p ... Show More
1h 3m
Dec 2020
Narrating Africa in South Asia
Narrating Africa in South Asia (Special Journal Issue: South Asian History and Culture, Volume 11, Issue 4, 2020) explores the multifaceted and longue durée history of the African diaspora in South Asia. The themes of the articles cover many grounds, such as race, religion, socia ... Show More
1h 38m
Aug 2017
Pop science and Punjabi epics
With Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas – Alexander van Tulleken on what makes popular science books – including Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry – so popular, and is there a hidden danger in making science the subject of water-cooler conversations?; Clair Wi ... Show More
44m 40s
Oct 2025
Hindutva and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India
Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and leader of the Centre for South Asian Democracy. M. Sudhir Selvaraj is Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace Studies and International Development at the University of Bradford. ... Show More
19m 53s
Jan 2024
East West religious connections
The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East is the new book from New Generation Thinker and historian Christopher Harding. In Passions of the Soul, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams looks at the classics of Eastern Christian writing. At Comp ... Show More
45m 2s