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PODCAST

The Academic Life

Christina Gessler

A podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Created and produced by Dr. Christina Gessler, the Academic Life podcast is inspired by today’s knowledge-producers around the world, working inside and outside the academy. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life

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All Episodes

34:42

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th...

The Academic Life ·

2025/09/09

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers: boundary-breaking women like Lavinia Warren, known as the Queen of Beauty; to Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale; to Patty Astley, the mother of the modern circus. These astounding female and gender-nonconforming artists wrestled snakes, performed magic tricks with electricity, and walked across waterfalls on tightropes, shattering

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51:42

Who Needs College Anymore: Imagining A Future Where...

The Academic Life ·

2025/09/04

In this optimistic yet practical assessment of how postsecondary education can evolve to meet the needs of next-generation learners, Kathleen deLaski reimagines what higher education might offer and whom it should serve. In the wake of declining enrollment and declining confidence in the value of a college degree, she urges a mindset shift regarding the learning routes and credentials that best prepare students for post-high-school success. Who Needs College Anymore draws on a decade of research

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58:04

Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time...

The Academic Life ·

2025/08/28

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Dr. Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday

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54:36

Citizenship Stripping: You Are Not American

The Academic Life ·

2025/08/21

Over the last two centuries, the US government has revoked citizenship to cast out its unwanted, suppress dissent, and deny civil rights to all considered “un-American”—whether due to their race, ethnicity, marriage partner, or beliefs. Drawing on the narratives of those who have struggled to be treated as full members of “We the People,” law professor Amanda Frost exposes a hidden history of discrimination and xenophobia that continues to this day.The Supreme Court’s rejection of Black citizenship

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56:38

Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an...

The Academic Life ·

2025/08/14

In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from

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57:38

Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers,...

The Academic Life ·

2025/08/12

We all have the power to change the world through the products we buy. This simple premise has driven the growth of the conscious consumer movement for decades. Indeed, what started with a handful of niche sustainability brands has exploded into the mainstream with labels like Organic, Non-GMO, and Fair Trade Certified now adorning products in major retailers across the country. Yet the true promise of ethical sourcing and conscious consumerism has not been fully realized. Paul Rice has dedicated

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51:08

Teacher by Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives

The Academic Life ·

2025/08/07

Teacher By Teacher traces the journey of the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education and is a deeply personal love letter to all the teachers in our lives. The story of John B. King Jr.’s inspiring path to President Obama’s Cabinet begins the day that his mother died. He insisted on going to school that day, knowing he would find comfort in his classroom. As he navigated living alone with a father dying from undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, it was public school teachers who saved his life, believed in him and saw

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62:11

Rehearsals for Dying

The Academic Life ·

2025/07/31

Deena stepped out of the shower and opened her towel in the steam. “Does my breast look weird?” These words irrevocably change the lives of writer Ariel Gore and her wife. As they descend into a world of doctors and tests, medications and insurance, sickness and treatments and hope and pain and more, they discover just how little they truly knew—despite the awareness campaigns and hyper-visible pink ribbons—about the reality of breast cancer. Over the four years following Deena’s terminal diagnosis,

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70:08

Religion in the Lands That Became America

The Academic Life ·

2025/07/29

Until now, the standard narrative of American religious history has begun with English settlers in Jamestown or Plymouth and remained predominantly Protestant and Atlantic. Driven by his strong sense of the historical and moral shortcomings of the usual story, Thomas A. Tweed offers a very different narrative in this ambitious new history. He begins the story much earlier—11,000 years ago—at a rock shelter in present-day Texas and follows Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, transnational

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63:52

The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for...

The Academic Life ·

2025/07/24

In the increasingly competitive world of academia, simply mastering your discipline is no longer enough to guarantee career success or personal fulfillment. The Entrepreneurial Scholar: A New Mindset for Success in Academia and Beyond (Princeton UP, 2025) challenges scholars at all stages—from doctoral students to tenured professors—to break free from conventional academic pathways by adopting an entrepreneurial mindset. What opportunities can you create based on who you are, what you know, and who

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57:13

Overcoming ABD Pitfalls: Tips for Getting Unstuck

The Academic Life ·

2025/07/17

The ABD [All But Dissertation] phase can either feel liberating—no more coursework or comps!—or like the floor has dropped out. The scaffolding that prepared you for being a graduate assistant, passing comps or conducting your research gives way to a new, wide open space where you are just supposed to write. While some people will flourish in this unstructured writing space, others are left playing detective—how do you know when to approach advisors for feedback? How many times can you ask them to

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55:19

Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea...

The Academic Life ·

2025/07/10

Decolonizing Ukraine, by Dr. Greta Lynn Uehling, illuminates the untold stories of Russia's occupation of Crimea from 2014 to the present, revealing the traumas of colonization, foreign occupation, and population displacement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, including over 90 personal interviews, Dr. Uehling brings her readers into the lives of people who opposed Russia's Crimean operation, many of whom fled for government-controlled Ukraine. Via the narratives of people who traversed

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73:40

Secrets of the Killing State

The Academic Life ·

2025/07/03

In the popular imagination, lethal injection is a slight pinch and a swift nodding off to forever-sleep. It is performed by well-qualified medical professionals. It is regulated and carefully conducted. And it provides a “humane” death. In reality, however, not one of those things is true. Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (NYU Press, 2025) presents the view of lethal injection that states have worked hard to hide. The story told here is bigger than the executions

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57:35

Considering Leaving Academia?

The Academic Life ·

2025/06/30

Today we again explore what it means to leave academia, as Dr. Sophia Basaldua-Sun shares how an informational interview was key to her success in landing a job outside academia, and what her life in the world of publishing is like.Leaving Academia is an ongoing sub-series with the Academic Life, with guests candidly sharing their decisions to stay in or leave academia – and where those decisions took them. We consider what going alt-ac means, whether going into admin keeps the academic spark

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46:17

How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization...

The Academic Life ·

2025/06/26

In How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, (Harvard Education PR, 2024) Laura C. Chávez-Moreno uncovers the process through which schools implicitly and explicitly shape their students’ concept of race and the often unintentional consequences of this on educational equity. Dr. Chávez-Moreno sheds light on how the complex interactions among educational practices, policies, pedagogy, language, and societal ideas interplay to form, reinforce, and blur the boundaries of

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67:27

Trans Technologies

The Academic Life ·

2025/06/19

How can technology creates new possibilities for transgender people? How do trans experiences, in turn, create new possibilities for technology?Trans Technologies, (MIT Press, 2025) by Dr. Oliver L. Haimson, explores how and why mainstream technologies often exclude or marginalize transgender users. Trans Technologies describes what happens when trans people take technology design into their own hands. Dr. Haimson, whose research into gender transition and technology has defined this area of

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65:44

Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic...

The Academic Life ·

2025/06/12

In our fast-changing world, leaders are increasingly confronted by messy, multifaceted challenges that require collaboration to resolve. But the standard methods for tackling these challenges—meetings packed with data-drenched presentations or brainstorming sessions that circle back to nowhere—just don’t deliver. Great strategic conversations generate breakthrough insights by combining the best ideas of people with different backgrounds and perspectives. In Moments of Impact, two experts “crack the

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57:20

The Freedom Academy

The Academic Life ·

2025/06/10

When Professor Asha Rangappa began posting online about the lessons she was teaching in the Yale University course on Russian intelligence and information warfare, the public took notice. Many reached out for a copy of the syllabus, and began lamenting that they couldn’t take her course. This led to the creation of a series of free lessons and presentations for the public through The Freedom Academy – which is Professor Rangappa’s popular Substack.In this episode, we unpack key concepts taught by

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50:52

Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and...

The Academic Life ·

2025/06/05

In Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Dr. Brittany Friedman delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques—including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists—to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of

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56:35

Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio

The Academic Life ·

2025/05/29

Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and their DJs on musical culture since the 1970s was anything but inevitable. As media deregulation and political conflict over obscenity and censorship transformed the business and politics of culture, students and community DJs turned to college radio to defy the mainstream—and they ended up disrupting popular music and commercial radio in the process. In

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305 results

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