Jonas Tinius, "State of the Arts: An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration" (Cambridge UP, 2023)| Listen on Anghami

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

Nov 2023

Post-War Germany

Re-invention and moral struggles are at the heart of the story of post-war Germany traced by Frank Trentmann in his new book Out of the Darkness. Anne McElvoy talks to him, to Thomas Meaney the new editor of Granta who is bringing out an edition called Deutschland, to journalist ... Show More

44m 58s

Feb 2024

S2 Ep8: Jonas Tinius with Iza Kavedžija

Jonas Tinius is a sociocultural anthropologist, and currently scientific coordinator and post-doctoral researcher in cultural anthropology in the ERC project Minor Universality: Narrative World Productions after Western Universalism based at Saarland University. He completed a Ph ... Show More

56m 57s

Oct 1955

The Geography of Art

This year's Reith lecturer is Dr Nikolaus Pevsner, the German-born British scholar of history of art and architecture, and author of the county guide series, The Buildings of England (1951–74). In this series, Dr Pevsner explores the qualities of art which he regards as particula ... Show More

28m 11s

Oct 2025

Joanna Woronkowicz, "Artists at Work: Rethinking Policy for Artistic Careers" (Stanford UP, 2025)

What does it mean to be an artist? In Artists At Work: Rethinking Policy for Artistic Careers (Stanford UP, 2025) Joanna Woronkowicz, the co-founder of the Center for Cultural Affairs and co-director of the Arts, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lab at Indiana University Bloomingt ... Show More

40m 33s

May 2021

Sa’dallah Wannous and the many dimensions of Arab theatre

We examine AUB English Professor Robert Myers and his colleague Sonja Mejcher-Atassi’s new book, The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous – A critical study of the Syrian playwright and public intellectual, which explores the life and work of the late Syrian dramatist and intellectual. M ... Show More

23m 1s

Mar 2022

Uwe Schütte, "Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany" (Penguin, 2021)

Uwe Schütte's Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany (Penguin, 2021) is not your typical rock star biography. Eschewing gossipy interpersonal details, Schütte instead contextualizes Kraftwerk within contemporaneous debates about German cultural identity in the wake of Nazi atrociti ... Show More

54m 29s

Jonas Tinius, "State of the Arts: An Eth...