All Episodes
Comics, visual culture, and feminism in the 1980s
In Visible Archives is a book that explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones of the 1980s and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal mom...
Care is more than human—it's creaturely.
Benjamin Meiches explores the role of animals laboring alongside humans (mine-clearance dogs, milk-producing cows and goats, disease-identifying rats) in humanitarian ...
Cactus hunters and the illicit succulent trade.
What inspires desire for plants? In The Cactus Hunters, Jared Margulies takes readers through the intriguing world of succulent collecting, where collectors and conser...
Imagining a new—human and nonhuman—grammar of urban life.
“There is always some moment when other-than-human life bursts into presence amid the clamor of urban routine.” —Maan Barua, Lively CitiesOne of the fundamental dimens...
Political violence and abolitionist futures.
Terrorism on Trial examines the contemporary role U.S. domestic courts play in the global war on terror. Author Nicole Nguyen advocates for a rethinking of popular und...
Redefining extinction through thawing permafrost.
In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost—and its disappearance—redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity that affects both life and...
Emergency response and its significant toll.
From his first days as a rookie firefighter and emergency medical technician to his command of a company as a twenty-year veteran, Jeremy Norton has made regular, dire...
The New American War Film
Unfolding amid an atmosphere of profound anxiety and disillusionment, the new American war film demonstrates a breakdown of the prevailing cultural narratives that had...
Gramsci at Sea
In Gramsci at Sea, author Sharad Chari asks how the environmental crisis of the oceans is linked to legacies of capitalism and imperialism across and within the oceans...
On Nietzsche and posthumanist philosophy
Focusing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception of the life sciences of his day (including concerns with insects and the emergent social properties they exhibit) and his r...
Ark thinking: Climate change and the Great Flood
In Noah’s Arkive, Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate change catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of c...
Have we ever been civilian? On war’s expansion beyond the battlefield.
As military and other forms of political violence become the planetary norm, On Posthuman War traces the expansion of war as manifest within humanity’s individual, soc...
The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities
In the 2010s cities and counties across the US witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades...
The Lichen Museum with A. Laurie Palmer (Art after Nature 4)
Lichens are composite organisms made of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex ...
Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson
The first biography of Robert Smithson, Inside the Spiral deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his succes...
Making breathable worlds through citizen engagement
Modern environments are awash with pollutants. The book Citizens of Worlds is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to mo...
Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: On filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang
A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema, Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. A new book by Nicholas de Villiers, CRUISY,...
Hear, hear! Talking English idioms that really take the cake with Anatoly Liberman.
Are you feeling merry as a grig? Or merry as a pismire? Pert as a pearmonger? Fit as a fiddle? Where do these idioms come from? Do they make life more fun? If you’ve e...
Queer Silence with J. Logan Smilges, Travis Chi Wing Lau, and Margaret Price
In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empower...
Arte Programmata: An important antecedent to the digital age.
In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies to experiment with art and technology and subvert conceptions of freedom and control...
Pooches. Planes. Pandemic. Margret Grebowicz and Christopher Schaberg on mass phenomena transformed by Covid.
A lot of societal structures have been permanently upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. We’re here to talk about two: air travel and dog ownership. Margret Grebowicz, aut...
How feelings about race are normalized by media culture
Amid fervent conversations about antiracism and police violence, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery delivers vital new ideas, analyzing how media culture instruct...
Allotment Stories: Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Joseph M. Pierce
“White people passed laws specifically in order to take away this land from our people. And then we did these other things in order to try to survive.” ALLOTMENT STORI...
Dorion Sagan and Joshua DiCaglio on the cosmic challenge of scale.
How is it possible that you are—simultaneously—cells, atoms, a body, quarks, a component in an ecological network, a moment in the thermodynamic dispersal of the sun, ...
Christopher Isherwood’s California lectures: with James J. Berg, Chris Freeman, and Claude Summers
In the 1960s, Christopher Isherwood gave an unprecedented series of lectures at California universities about his life and work. During this time, Isherwood spoke open...
What would an education beyond learning look like?
In a time when online classrooms and meetings have become both indispensable and mundane features of the university, STUDIOUS DRIFT asks: What kind of university becom...
Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature
The new book ‘Cacaphonies’ takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view 20th- and 21st-century French literat...
Sylvain Tesson's wandering journey of solitude through the countryside of France
ON THE WANDERING PATHS is Sylvain Tesson’s literary adventure and philosophical reflection during a three-month journey of solitude and personal contemplation while wa...