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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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49:26

Yingyao Wang, "Markets with Bureaucratic...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/03/18

China’s breathtaking economic development has been driven by bureaucrats. Even as the country transitioned away from socialist planning toward a market economy, the economic bureaucracy retained a striking degree of influence and control over crafting and implementing policy. Yet bureaucrats are often dismissed as faceless and inconsequential, their role neglected in favor of party leaders’ top-down rule or bottom-up initiatives.

77:09

Lea David, "A Victim's Shoe, a Broken Watch, and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/03/11

Everyday items found at the sites of atrocities possess a striking emotional force. Victims’ garments, broken glasses, wallets, shoes, and other such personal property that are recovered from places of death including concentration camps, mass graves, and prisons have become staples of memorial museums, exhibited to the public as material testimony in order to evoke sympathy and promote human rights. How do these objects take on such power, and what are the benefits and pitfalls of deploying them

54:58

Sunila S. Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke, "The Yoga...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/02/13

In Indian languages from Sanskrit to Marathi, yoga has an enormous range of meanings, though most often it refers to philosophy or methods to control the mind and body. The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India (Columbia UP, 2025) argues for a wider understanding, demonstrating that yoga has long expressed political thought and practice. The political idea of yoga names the tools of kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes stratagems for going into battle and for the

69:33

Seungsook Moon, "Civic Activism in South Korea: The...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/02/12

Dr. Seungsook Moon’s Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism was published by Columbia University Press in July 2024. She provides in-depth qualitative studies of three different types of organizations to show how civic organizations that emerged from the democratization movement with a conscious emphasis on social change have sought to address socioeconomic and political problems caused or aggravated by South Korea’s neoliberal transformation. Examining how

34:12

Peter Hill, "River Profiles: The People Restoring Our...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/01/29

Peter Hill has been working as a resource manager with a specialty in stream restoration for over two decades, first for Washington DC and then as a consultant for Great Lakes Watershed Opportunities. Currently, he is Senior Policy Advisor for Green Infrastructure at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center in Milwaukee, WI.His many years of experience in managing major, multi-agency stream and river restoration projects which necessarily needed to include building partnerships to support such

50:17

Dario Fazzi, "Smoke on the Water: Incineration at Sea...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/01/26

The U.S. government, military, and industry once saw ocean incineration as the safest and most efficient way to dispose of hazardous chemical waste. Beginning in the late 1960s, toxic chemicals such as PCBs and other harmful industrial byproducts were taken out to sea to be destroyed in specially designed ships equipped with high-temperature combustion chambers and smokestacks. But public outcry arose after the environmental and health risks of ocean incineration were exposed, and the practice was

54:01

Pierre Sokolsky, "The Clock in the Sun: How We Came...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/01/21

On the surface of the Sun, spots appear and fade in a predictable cycle, like a great clock in the sky. In medieval Russia, China, and Korea, monks and court astronomers recorded the appearance of these dark shapes, interpreting them as omens of things to come. In Western Europe, by contrast, where a cosmology originating with Aristotle prevailed, the Sun was regarded as part of the unchanging celestial realm, and it took observations through telescopes by Galileo and others to establish the reality

40:54

Bruce Lieberman and Niles Eldredge,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/01/19

One of the twentieth century's great paleontologists and science writers, Stephen Jay Gould was, for Bruce S. Lieberman and Niles Eldredge, also a close colleague and friend. In Macroevolutionaries: Reflections on Natural History, Paleontology, and Stephen Jay Gould (Columbia UP, 2024), they take up the tradition of Gould's acclaimed essays on natural history, offering a series of wry and insightful reflections on the fields to which they have devoted their careers.Lieberman and Eldredge explore

59:05

Robin Visser, "Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/01/18

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023) explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and

57:33

Arthur Bradley, "Staging Sovereignty: Theory,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/01/15

Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy (Columbia University Press, 2024) explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance. Author Arthur Bradley considers the theatricality of power—its forms, dramas, and iconography—and examines sovereignty’s modes of appearance: thrones, insignia, regalia, ritual, ceremony, spectacle, marvels, fictions, and phantasmagoria. He weaves together political theory and literature, reading figures

76:06

Sixiang Wang, "Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/01/09

The Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with Ming China, a relationship that was carefully cultivated and achieved only through the strategic deployment of cultural practices, values, and narratives by Chosŏn political actors. Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China (Columbia UP 2023) explores this history, rethinking how we understand Sino-Korean relations. Boundless Winds of Empire is detailed, rich, and filled

65:25

Todd McGowan, "Universality and Identity Politics"...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/01/04

The great political ideas and movements of the modern world were founded on a promise of universal emancipation. But in recent decades, much of the Left has grown suspicious of such aspirations. Critics see the invocation of universality as a form of domination or a way of speaking for others, and have come to favor a politics of particularism—often derided as “identity politics.” Others, both centrists and conservatives, associate universalism with twentieth-century totalitarianism and hold that it

84:12

Jessica Namakkal, "Unsettling Utopia: The Making and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2025/01/01

After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists

116:31

Joseph McBride, "George Cukor's People: Acting for a...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2024/12/21

The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely admired but often misunderstood. Reductively stereotyped in his time as a "woman's director"-a thinly veiled, disparaging code for "gay"-he brilliantly directed a wide range of iconic actors and actresses, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith. As Katharine Hepburn, the star of ten

72:22

Nergis Ertürk, "Writing in Red: Literature and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2024/12/18

Writing in Red: Literature and Revolution Across Turkey and the Soviet Union (Columbia UP, 2024) examines political relations and literary translations between Turkey and the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s through to the 1960s. By drawing on a wide range of texts – from erotic comedy, historical fiction and film, to socialist realist novels and theatre – Ertürk argues that these works belong simultaneously to modern Turkish literature, a transnational Soviet republic of letters, and the global

41:15

Donald R. Prothero, "The Story of Earth's Climate in...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2024/12/14

Over 4.5 billion years, Earth's climate has transformed tremendously. Before our more temperate recent past, the planet swung from one extreme to another--from a greenhouse world of sweltering temperatures and high sea levels to a "snowball earth" in which glaciers reached the equator. During this history, we now know, living things and the climate have always influenced and even shaped each other. But the climate has never changed as rapidly or as drastically as it has since the Industrial

57:07

Jonathan Conlin, "The Met: A History of a Museum and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2024/12/07

New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions. Its holdings encompass a vast range—including paintings, sculptures, costumes, instruments, and arms and armor—and span millennia, from ancient Egypt and Greece to Islamic art to European Old Masters and modern artists. How did the Met amass this trove, and what do the experiences of the people who bought, restored, catalogued, visited, and watched over these works tell us about the museum?The Met: A

53:10

Lauren D. Olsen, "Curricular Injustice: How U.S....

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2024/11/23

Medical schools have increasingly incorporated the humanities and social sciences into their teaching, seeking to make future physicians more empathetic and more concerned with equity. In practice, however, these good intentions have not translated into critical consciousness. Humanities and social sciences education has often not only failed to deliver on its promise but even entrenched the inequalities that the medical profession set out to address. In Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical

44:32

Tyler W. Williams, "If All the World Were Paper: A...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2024/11/14

In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizing and writing Hindi literary history. He responds to recent developments in quantitative and qualitative

49:50

Rajbir Singh Judge, "Prophetic Maharaja: Loss,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2024/10/30

How do traditions and peoples grapple with loss, particularly when it is of such magnitude that it defies the possibility of recovery or restoration? Rajbir Singh Judge offers new ways to understand loss and the limits of history by considering Maharaja Duleep Singh and his struggle during the 1880s to reestablish Sikh rule, the lost Khalsa Raj, in Punjab.Sikh sovereignty in what is today northern India and northeastern Pakistan came to an end in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the

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Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

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