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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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64:48

Daniel Barish, "Learning to Rule: Court Education and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/12/27

The late Qing was a time of great turmoil and upheaval but also a time of great possibility, as scholars, officials, the press, and revolutionaries all sought to find ways to shape China’s future. For many, as explored in Daniel Barish’s new book, Learning to Rule: Court Education and the Remaking of the Qing State, 1861-1912 (Columbia UP, 2022), the solution lay not outside the Qing but within it — with the emperor himself. Learning to Rule explores the education of the final three Qing emperors,

52:08

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

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/12/25

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

51:44

Quentin Bruneau, "States and the Masters of Capital:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/12/18

Today, states' ability to borrow private capital depends on stringent evaluations of their creditworthiness. While many presume that this has long been the case, Quentin Bruneau argues that it is a surprisingly recent phenomenon--the outcome of a pivotal shift in the social composition of financial markets. Investigating the financiers involved in lending capital to sovereigns over the past two centuries, Bruneau identifies profound changes in their identities, goals, and forms of

67:28

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/11/29

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often

87:11

Joseph McBride, "Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge"...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/11/24

The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films―including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment―Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent

61:12

Michael Genovese, "The Modern Presidency: Six Debates...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/11/22

The Modern Presidency: Six Debates That Define the Institution (Columbia University Press, 2022) is a concisely written book that helps makes sense of the most powerful office in America. Michael frames each chapter through a key conundrum about the nature of the presidency. He presents the strongest cases for the sides of every major debate, along with his own view. In addition to providing insight into the modern American presidency, Michael demonstrates how to think about tough issues with

59:54

Howard Chiang, "Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific"...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/11/14

As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical

86:29

Nancy Woloch, "The Insider: A Life of Virginia C....

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/11/09

Virginia C. Gildersleeve was the most influential dean of Barnard College, which she led from 1911 to 1947. An organizer of the Seven College Conference, or “Seven Sisters,” she defended women's intellectual abilities and the value of the liberal arts. She also amassed a strong set of foreign policy credentials and, at the peak of her prominence in 1945, served as the sole woman member of the U.S. delegation to the drafting of the United Nations Charter. But her accomplishments are undercut by other

59:06

Ksenia Chizhova, "Kinship Novels of Early Modern...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/11/01

In the face of a Korean cultural world preoccupied with newness, literary output from the more measured and regulated Choson period (1392-1910) can seem difficult to engage with for readers both inside and outside the country. But as Ksenia Chizhova’s Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday (Columbia UP, 2021) shows, a particular genre of late-Chsoson lineage novels reflect not only the staid norms of Confucian patriarchy and heredity, but also a

126:29

Michael Francis Laffan, "Under Empire: Muslim Lives...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/10/24

Michael Francis Laffan’s Under Empire: Muslim Lives and Loyalties Across the Indian Ocean World, 1775–1945 (Columbia University Press, 2022) traces a tapestry of historical actors, empires, and ideas across the Indian Ocean world. Starting with an imam banished from eastern Indonesia to the Cape of Good Hope in 1780 to build a new Muslim community with a mix of fellow exiles, enslaved people, and even the men tasked with supervising his detention. To nineteenth-century colonial chroniclers who

98:00

Matthew W. King, "In the Forest of the Blind: The...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/10/19

What would an “anti-field history” of Buddhist Studies look like? What does the social history of knowledge look like when it both includes and exceeds the West/Nonwest binary, the ethnonational subject, the secular humanist gaze, and the moral narratives and metaphysical content of modernism? Matt W. King explores these critical questions and models innovative approaches in his second monograph, In the Forest of the Blind (Columbia University Press 2022), which uses Faxian’s Record of Buddhist

84:09

Arthur Bradley, "Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/10/18

In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen's existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned go by

32:40

Sanjay Krishnan, "V. S. Naipaul's Journeys: From...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/10/05

The author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) is one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most controversial. Before settling in England, Naipaul grew up in Trinidad in an Indian immigrant community, and his depiction of colonized peoples has often been harshly judged by critics as unsympathetic, misguided, racist, and sexist. Yet other readers praise his work as

63:32

Michele Moody-Adams, "Making Space for Justice:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/10/03

A standard way of proceeding in political philosophy is to start with some form of conceptual inquiry: we first try to figure out what justice, equality, and freedom are and only then we may eventually begin thinking about how these goods might be pursued and achieved. On this approach, although social activism is perhaps necessary to counteract the worst kinds of social deprivation, it is also premature from the philosophical standpoint: as we still are debating what justice is, present efforts

44:44

Rahul Sagar, "To Raise a Fallen People: The...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/09/29

Most people tend to mark the beginning of Indian international relations thought to Nehru, and his self-proclaimed attempt to build a true non-aligned movement and more enlightened international system. But Indian thought didn’t emerge sui generis after Indian independence, as Rahul Sagar notes in his edited anthology, To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics (Juggernaut / Columbia University Press: 2022). Rahul collects writings from Indian

56:10

Peter Coviello, "Vineland Reread" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/09/28

Vineland is hardly anyone’s favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon’s return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity’s Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the oft-overlooked Vineland opens up new ways of thinking about Pynchon’s writing and about how we read and how we live in the rough currents of history. In Vineland Reread (Columbia UP, 2021), Coviello reads Pynchon’s offbeat novel of sixties insurgents

60:31

Christopher Nichols and David Milne, "Ideology in...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/09/28

Ideology drives American foreign policy in ways seen and unseen. Racialized notions of subjecthood and civilization underlay the political revolution of eighteenth-century white colonizers; neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and unilateralism propelled the post–Cold War United States to unleash catastrophe in the Middle East. Ideologies order and explain the world, project the illusion of controllable outcomes, and often explain success and failure. How does the history of U.S. foreign relations appear

43:20

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, "The Quantified Scholar: How...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/09/26

How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and research

50:10

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

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/09/16

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

84:31

Nicholas Gamso, "Art After Liberalism" (Columbia UP,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/09/12

Art After Liberalism (Columbia UP, 2022) is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging political and social rifts – a moment that could be described as a crisis of liberalism. The apparent failures of liberal thinking are a starting point for an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others. What happens when the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising individual, and the premise of limitless development can no longer be

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Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

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