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Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

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Interviews with Columbia University Press authors.

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39:51

Madhuri Deshmukh, "The Unraveling Heart: Women's Oral...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/01/15

In this interview we discuss The Unraveling Heart: Women's Oral Poetics and Literary Vernacularization in Marathi (Columbia UP, 2025). Women’s songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia. They have been sung to accompany a daily household labor, making flour using a stone hand mill, for many centuries. Even today, grind mill songs are still well known in Maharashtra, testifying to the endurance of a remarkable genre. Yet these songs have long been understood through

53:58

Q. Edward Wang, "Staple to Superfood: A Global...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/01/14

Sweet potatoes were among the American crops Christopher Columbus brought back to Europe—where they were thought to be an aphrodisiac. In China, this versatile root became a staple that fueled rapid population growth. Introduced to Japan to stave off famine, sweet potatoes later sustained the country’s imperial expansion. Because this hardy plant can thrive in almost any soil, it has long been cultivated as a subsistence crop in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Oceania. In recent years, Western health

52:08

Stuart Klawans, "Crooked, But Never Common: The Films...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/01/10

In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948--The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek among them--all from screenplays he alone had written. Stuart Klawans' Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges (Columbia UP, 2023) pays close attention to Sturges' celebrated dialogue, but also to his films surprisingly intricate

55:25

Megan Bryson and Kevin Buckelew eds., "Buddhist...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/01/02

While early Buddhists hailed their religion's founder for opening a path to enlightenment, they also exalted him as the paragon of masculinity. According to Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha's body boasts thirty-two physical features, including lionlike jaws, thighs like a royal stag, broad shoulders, and a deep, resonant voice, that distinguish him from ordinary men. As Buddhism spread throughout Asia and around the world, the Buddha remained an exemplary man, but Buddhists in other times and places

44:08

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/12/14

The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy (Temple UP, 2025) by Dr. Mirya Holman explicates the purpose, role, and consequences of appointed boards in U.S. cities. Dr. Holman finds cities create strong boards that generate policy, consolidate power, and defend the interests of businesses and wealthy and white residents. In contrast, weak boards pacify agitation from marginalized groups to give the appearance of inclusivity, democratic deliberation, and

65:25

Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen, "The...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/12/04

The Serpent’s Tale: Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience (Columbia UP, 2025) traces the intricate global histories of Kuṇḍalinī, from its Sanskrit origins to its popularity in the West. Ranging from esoteric texts to global gurus, from the cliffs of California to the charnel grounds of Assam, they show that there has never been one single “authentic” model of Kuṇḍalinī but a multiplicity of visions. Bridging the gaps between textual and historical analysis and the complexities of

49:10

John Kieschnick, "Buddhist Historiography in China"...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/12/01

Since the early days of Buddhism in China, monastics and laity alike have expressed a profound concern with the past. In voluminous historical works, they attempted to determine as precisely as possible the dates of events in the Buddha's life, seeking to iron out discrepancies in varying accounts and pinpoint when he delivered which sermons. Buddhist writers chronicled the history of the Dharma in China as well, compiling biographies of eminent monks and nuns and detailing the rise and decline in

41:02

Luke Gibson, "Reading Sanskrit: A Complete...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/11/20

This textbook offers a fresh approach to learning Sanskrit, the ancient language at the heart of South Asia’s vast religious, philosophical, and literary heritage. Designed for independent learners and classrooms alike, it provides a uniquely in-depth and immersive introduction to the language, exploring a rich selection of Sanskrit texts from the Buddhist tradition.Reading Sanskrit: A Complete Step-By-Step Introduction with Texts from the Buddhist Tradition (Columbia UP, 2025)draws from the

60:44

Martin Moore and Thomas Colley, "Dictating Reality:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/11/01

From the United States to China and from Brazil to India, an authoritarian approach to news is spreading across the world. Increasingly, the media is no longer a check on power or a source of objective information but a means by which governments and leaders can propagate their versions of reality, however biased or false.In Dictating Reality: The Global Battle to Control the News (Columbia UP, 2025), Dr. Martin Moore and Dr. Thomas Colley show how states are battling to control and shape the news

62:58

Diane Ravitch, "An Education: How I Changed My Mind...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/28

For many years, Diane Ravitch was among the country’s leading conservative thinkers on education. The cure for what ailed the school system was clear, she believed: high-stakes standardized testing, national standards, accountability, competition, charters, and vouchers. Then Ravitch saw what happened when these ideas were put into practice and recanted her long-held views. The problem was not bad teachers or failing schools, as conservatives claimed, but poverty. She denounced privatization as a

67:34

Jeffrey D. Sharon, "The Great Balancing Act: An...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/21

What's the secret to keeping your balance? The ear does more than hear: it helps us stay stable by perceiving movements and gravity. Elegant sensors deep within the skull detect every twist, turn, and tumble, powering swift reflexes that keep vision and balance steady. This is the vestibular system. It's primordial and ubiquitous: every animal has one, and even plants have a rudimentary version. It works so well that we take it for granted--until it fails. How does this remarkable system function

102:23

Joshua Eisenman and David H. Shinn, "China's...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/08

Since Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2012, nearly every aspect of China’s relations with Africa has grown dramatically. Beijing has increased the share of resources it devotes to African countries, expanding military cooperation, technological investment, and educational and cultural programs as well as extending its political influence.China's Relations with Africa: A New Era of Strategic Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2023) examines the full scope of contemporary political and

71:58

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, "Overdetermined: How...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/08

Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories

69:43

Daniel K. Sodickson, "The Future of Seeing: How...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/10/03

Over the centuries, we have learned to peer into what was once invisible. Imaging devices like cameras, telescopes, microscopes, and MRI machines map the world around, beyond, and within us in ways the naked eye could never see. In so doing, these technologies have transformed our understanding of our place in the universe and our conception of our own bodies--and we may be on the cusp of an even greater revolution.Daniel K. Sodickson--a physicist and biomedical imaging innovator--explores the

53:46

Wendell Marsh, "Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/22

Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both

55:11

Mark Goble, "Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/15

Slow motion is everywhere in contemporary film and media, but it wasn't always so ubiquitous. How did slow motion ascend to the dubious honor of becoming our culture's least "special" effect? And what does slow motion — a trick secured paradoxically through the camera's ever-racing speeds of capture — tell us about the temporalities and trajectories of modernity? Mark Goble, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, takes up these questions in his latest book Downtime: The

51:23

Wu Jianren, "New Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/11

What happens if you took one of the classic characters of Chinese literary fiction and dropped him into early 20th-century China?That’s the premise of Wu Jianren’s novel, New Story of the Stone (Columbia UP, 2025), written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu, from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and takes him first to Qing China and the Boxer Rebellion, and then to the fantastical “Realm of Civilization,” a world that, in Wu’s eyes, reflected what he thought would happen if people embraced

43:30

Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/06

We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of unusual stars appeared on the silver screen, representing groups from which the American mainstream typically sought to avert its eyes. What did it mean for a white entertainment columnist to empathize with an ambiguously gendered Black child star? Or for boys to idolize Lon Chaney, famous for portraying characters with

53:45

Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/09/04

Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but

40:25

Stephan Kieninger, "Securing Peace in Europe: Strobe...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/08/24

This deeply researched book offers new perspective on the NATO-Russia relationship through the eyes of Strobe Talbott, a deputy secretary of state for seven years under President Bill Clinton and the key US diplomatic broker for the former USSR. Stephan Kieninger traces the Clinton administration’s efforts to engage Russia and enlarge NATO at the same time, as elements of a new European security architecture. Drawing on Talbott’s diaries, as well as US and European archives and extensive interviews

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Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

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