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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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55:20

Poulomi Saha, "An Empire of Touch: Women's Political...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/03/11

Can subalterns speak? Now an iconic question from a prominent postcolonial studies scholar Gayatri Spivak, the question interrogates the in-built assumption about the locatable agency in an individual. Postcolonial studies have grappled with the question of legibility and limitations of archives. In her pathbreaking work, An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia UP, 2019), Poulomi Saha disrupts the binaries of nation/individual and agency/silence by

46:09

Joseph L. Graves and Alan H. Goodman, "Racism, Not...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/03/10

The science on race is clear. Common categories like “Black,” “white,” and “Asian” do not represent genetic differences among groups. But if race is a pernicious fiction according to natural science, it is all too significant in the day-to-day lives of racialized people across the globe. Inequities in health, wealth, and an array of other life outcomes cannot be explained without referring to “race”—but their true source is racism. What do we need to know about the pseudoscience of race in order to

82:32

Edward Tyerman, "Internationalist Aesthetics: China...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/03/08

I am joined for my interview with Edward Tyerman by Ed Pulford, another host on our channel. Together, we discuss Edward’s new book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021). Internationalist Aesthetics examines how knowledge of China is produced in the early Soviet period through the aesthetic idiom of internationalism. Tyerman shows how artist intellectuals, especially Sergei Tretyakov, the book’s protagonist, make China affectively sensible for

69:22

Aubrey Clayton, "Bernoulli's Fallacy: Statistical...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/02/10

There is a logical flaw in the statistical methods used across experimental science. This fault is not a minor academic quibble: it underlies a reproducibility crisis now threatening entire disciplines. In an increasingly statistics-reliant society, this same deeply rooted error shapes decisions in medicine, law, and public policy with profound consequences. The foundation of the problem is a misunderstanding of probability and its role in making inferences from observations. Aubrey Clayton traces

95:33

Michele Alacevich, "Albert O. Hirschman: An...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/02/09

Despite the virtually unanimous agreement about his importance, describing Hirschman’s legacy and influence on others is not an easy task— arguably because he was indeed in a league of his own. His search for fresh perspectives was so eclectic that, as many have noted, no recognizable school has ever developed in his footsteps … – Michele Alacevich, Albert O. Hirschman – An Intellectual Biography (2021) These thoughts from the concluding chapter of Michele Alacevich’s latest book Albert O

53:47

Sunny Xiang, "Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/01/31

In Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (Columbia University Press, 2020), Sunny Xiang reads the archives of US intelligence agencies alongside Asian American literature to develop a method of reading for tone rather than content, and shows us how doing so allows us to rethink both the nature of war itself and the construction of race during the long cold war. On this episode of New Books in Asian American Studies, Sunny Xiang chats about militarization

60:25

Peter Krause and Ora Szekely, "Stories from the...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/01/24

How do researchers navigate the complexities of the field? In Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Columbia UP, 2020), political scientists from a diverse range of biographical and academic backgrounds describe their research experiences in North and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, ranging from archival work to interviews with combatants. In sharing their stories, the book's forty-four contributors provide accessible illustrations of

83:38

Dominique Townsend, "A Buddhist Sensibility:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2022/01/03

Founded in 1676 during a cosmopolitan early modern period, Mindröling monastery became a key site for Buddhist education and a Tibetan civilizational center. Its founders sought to systematize and institutionalize a worldview rooted in Buddhist philosophy, engaging with contemporaries from across Tibetan Buddhist schools while crystallizing what it meant to be part of their own Nyingma school. At the monastery, ritual performance, meditation, renunciation, and training in the skills of a bureaucrat

76:19

David Sulzer, "Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/12/30

Why does a clarinet play at lower pitches than a flute? What does it mean for sounds to be in or out of tune? How are emotions carried by music? Do other animals perceive sound like we do? How might a musician use math to come up with new ideas? This book offers a lively exploration of the mathematics, physics, and neuroscience that underlie music in a way that readers without scientific background can follow. David Sulzer, also known in the musical world as Dave Soldier, explains why the perception

50:10

Álvaro Santana-Acuña, "Ascent to Glory: How One...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/12/03

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a revered classic today fifty five years after it was first published in 1967. Today I talked to Alvaro Santana Acuña a sociologist and historian who describes the ingredients that went into manufacturing the success of this book. In Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (Columbia UP, 2020), Alvaro Santana-Acuña first deconstructs the “fake news” surrounding García Márquez and then describes the cultural brokers,

81:08

Eric Hayot, "Humanist Reason: A History, an Argument,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/12/03

In Humanist Reason: A History, an Argument, a Plan (Columbia UP, 2021), Eric Hayot develops the concept of “humanist reason” to understand the nature and purpose of humanist intellectual work and lays out a serious of principles that undergird this core idea. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision that moves beyond traditional disciplines to demonstrate what the humanities can tell us about our

62:44

Amy Fried and Douglas B. Harris, "At War with...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/12/02

Political Scientists Amy Fried (University of Maine) and Douglas B. Harris (Loyola University Maryland) have a new book, At War with Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (Columbia UP, 2021), that looks at the question of distrust within American politics and how that distrust has moved from healthy skepticism to a weapon to be used to divide citizens and undermine the entire governmental system in the United States. Part of this is an historical examination,

64:55

Eva von Redecker, "Praxis and Revolution: A Theory of...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/11/29

The concept of revolution marks the ultimate horizon of modern politics. It is instantiated by sites of both hope and horror. Within progressive thought, “revolution” often perpetuates entrenched philosophical problems: a teleological philosophy of history, economic reductionism, and normative paternalism. At a time of resurgent uprisings, how can revolution be re-conceptualized to grasp the dynamics of social transformation and disentangle revolutionary practice from authoritarian usurpation? Eva

70:11

Nicole Willock, "Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/11/17

What happened to the Buddhist scholars who stayed behind in Tibet and China after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans fled from the People’s Liberation Army in 1959? In Lineages of the Literary: Tibetan Buddhist Polymaths of Socialist China (Columbia University Press 2021), Nicole Willock discovers through the stories and writings of the “Three Polymaths” (Tib. mkhas pa mi gsum) of socialist China that contrary to common assumptions, Tibetan Buddhist leaders active in the People’s

63:51

Robert Brooks, "Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/11/15

What happens when the human brain, which evolved over eons, collides with twenty-first-century technology? Machines can now push psychological buttons, stimulating and sometimes exploiting the ways people make friends, gossip with neighbors, and grow intimate with lovers. Sex robots present the humanoid face of this technological revolution―yet although it is easy to gawk at their uncanniness, more familiar technologies based in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are insinuating themselves

33:49

Machiko Ōgimachi, "In the Shelter of the Pine: A...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/11/04

In the early eighteenth century, the noblewoman Ōgimachi Machiko composed a memoir of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, the powerful samurai for whom she had served as a concubine for twenty years. Machiko assisted Yoshiyasu in his ascent to the rank of chief adjutant to the Tokugawa shogun. She kept him in good graces with the imperial court, enabled him to study poetry with aristocratic teachers and have his compositions read by the retired emperor, and gave birth to two of his sons. Writing after Yoshiyasu’s

46:25

Robert Hellyer, "Green with Milk and Sugar: When...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/10/15

Robert Hellyer’s Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America's Tea Cups (Columbia UP, 2021) is a tale of American and Japanese teaways, skillfully weaving together stories of Midwesterners drinking green tea (with milk and sugar, to be sure), the recent and complex origins of Japan's love of now-ubiquitous sencha, Ceylon tea merchants exploiting American racism, Chinese tea production expertise, and the author’s own family history in the Japan-America tea trade going back to the nineteenth

39:09

Elizabeth Lacouture, "Dwelling in the World: Family,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/10/14

To call the hundred years that straddle the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries as a radical period of change for China is an understatement, moving from the Imperial period, through the Republican era, and ending in the rise of the PRC. Dr. Elizabeth LaCouture’s Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960, published by Columbia University Pres explores this history by looking at Tianjin: a city divided into nine foreign concessions, and perhaps, at the time, the

63:52

Michael Yudell, "Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/10/08

Race, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, an identifiable present, and an uncertain future. The concept of race has been at the center of both triumphs and tragedies in American history and has had a profound effect on the human experience. Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (Columbia UP, 2018)revisits the origins of commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences, examines the roots of the modern idea

47:16

Paul Milgrom, "Discovering Prices: Auction Design in...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2021/10/06

Neoclassical economic theory shows that under the right conditions, prices alone can guide markets to efficient outcomes. But what if it it’s hard to find the right price? In many important markets, a buyer’s willingness to pay for one good (say, the right to use a certain part of the radio spectrum range in San Francisco) will depend on the price of another complementary good (the right to use that same spectrum in Los Angeles). The number of possible combinations can rapidly become incalculably

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Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

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