Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast

00:50:53

Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/10/07

Belize is often described as a “pristine” ecotourism destination with a landscape that is “naturally” valuable. Yet for much of the twentieth century, British Honduras—as the country was known under colonial rule—was seen as lacking value, an unprofitable backwater.Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize (Columbia UP, 2026) explores how Belize’s precarious coastal environment has become a site for a new kind of capitalist value production, in which

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01:07:39

Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/10/02

Recent years have seen a striking resurgence of anti-imperial and anticolonial rhetoric on the international stage, from Global South to Global North and from the Left to the Right. Why do states deploy these forms of rhetoric in global politics? How do practitioners from the so-called non-Western world differ in their use and performance of rhetoric, and in what ways do they shape international order?In Rhetorical Powers: How Rising States Shape International Order(Columbia UP, 2026)Sasikumar

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01:07:19

Michael R. Fischbach, "I Did It for My Country:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/09/22

In June 1968, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan B. Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy, marking yet another killing in a decade haunted by political violence. As he was being subdued, Sirhan shouted, “I can explain. I did it for my country,” by which he meant Palestine. On trial, he testified that his motives included opposition to Zionism, with particular anger directed toward Kennedy because of the senator’s call for arms sales to Israel. Despite Sirhan’s

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00:57:08

Xiaofei Tian, "Writing Empire and Self: Poetic and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/09/19

China’s early medieval period, from the fifth through the early seventh century, from the Northern and Southern Dynasties through the unified Sui, was a time of political fragmentation, military strife, and ethnic conflict. It also witnessed brilliant artistic creations as well as a full flowering of court culture, with poetry at its heart. How did poetry come to be regarded as the most potent form of cultural capital, a privileged literary genre, and a foundational skill for members of the elite

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00:48:11

Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, "Pierogi: An American...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/09/18

Today, pierogi are the most recognizable Polish food in the United States and a symbol of Polish American identity. How did this humble dish attain such lofty status?In Pierogi: An American Story of Polish Food (Columbia UP, 2026), Professor Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann explores the surprising history of pierogi, tracing how Polish cuisine evolved in the multiethnic landscape of the United States. When Polish immigrants crossed the ocean, they brought with them their traditional cuisine, which came

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00:53:11

Christina E. Firpo, "Beauty and the Nation: Women,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/09/16

During the interwar years, Vietnamese society witnessed a rapid change in the way women looked. Rejecting the model of a sequestered maiden with blackened teeth and long hair, they embraced a vivid palette of colors—and a colorful lifestyle to match. Before the war, Vietnam would have seemed like an unlikely place for a beauty industry to thrive. Virtuous young women were expected to hide their natural beauty, not manipulate it with makeup or flaunt it at a beauty contest. Yet ordinary women began

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32:22

Aarthi Vadde, "We the Platform: How the Internet...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/08/15

We the Platform:How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature(Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and

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66:22

Jarvis C. McInnis, "Afterlives of the Plantation:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/08/12

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded byBooker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy forBlack self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, theCaribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what hadbeen a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alternative futures.Jarvis C. McInnis charts a new account of Black modernity by centering

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46:15

Tsering Döndrup, "The Red Wind Howls" (Columbia UP,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/08/10

The Red Wind Howls(ColumbiaUP, 2025)is an unsettling, gripping, and darkly funny novel by Tsering Döndrup, one of modern Tibet’s most celebrated writers. First self-published in 2006 after no publisher was willing to take the political risk, the novel traces Tibetan experiences under Mao Zedong’s rule, from the 1958 Amdo uprising and the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Through a nonsequential narrative that moves back and forth between characters and events,The Red Wind Howlsweaves

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56:51

Devin Kennedy, "Coding Capitalism: Computers and the...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/07/31

Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated,and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor, manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar economy. Their efforts would shape early computer science and the first applications of computer technology in manufacturing

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45:42

Samantha Iyer, "Agrarian Superpower: Food,...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/07/25

The United States’ superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War

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37:13

Nick Yablon, "From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/07/22

In 1905, when Broadway was already the most famous thoroughfare in New York City, a recreational photographer from Newark, New Jersey named Charles Gilbert Hine set out to document the street’s entire length. Taking pictures from downtown Bowling Green and its skyscrapers to uptown Inwood with its fields and wildflowers, Hine depicted a Broadway animated by the presence of the past and the relentless pressures of change. Through his lens appear shanties, brownstones and country houses;

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44:32

Nora L. Rubel, "Recipes for the Melting Pot: The...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/07/15

In 1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. “I was trying to teach a group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we prepare it in America,” she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher

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56:11

Nicholas Freudenberg, "Fighting for New York:...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/07/07

Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Health at the CUNY School of Public Health. We are discussing his book, Fighting for New York: Activism for Health and Social Justice Since the 1960s (Columbia University Press, 2026). In March 2020, during one of the first major US outbreaks of Covid, New York became an epicenter of the spread. New York's connective tissue, like the walkable city streets, subways, and taxi cabs, became pathways of transmission

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51:37

Natalia Rogach Alexander, "Growing People: The...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/06/10

John Dewey is among history’s most celebrated thinkers on democracy and education, yet he has often been underappreciated and misunderstood as a philosopher. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dewey as not only a reformer of schooling but also a profound theorist of human development, whose vision of the centrality of education to democracy, philosophy, and flourishing can still inspire us today. What can we learn from this great thinker as we face challenges such as widespread drudgery and

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38:14

Thomas Doherty, "How Film Became History: The Rise of...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/05/20

By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from nearly forty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film stitched together from the raw material of older films. At around the same time, the transition to synchronous sound added a transformative new element to the grammar of cinema: the voiceover narration. Together, the film inventory and offscreen commentary gave rise to the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that preserves and rewinds

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55:35

Ayşehan Jülide Etem, "Film Diplomacy: A Media History...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/05/16

Film Diplomacy: A Media History of Turkey-US Relations (Columbia UP, 2026) offers a powerful new account of how film shaped international relations and national identity. Drawing on previously unexamined and recently declassified archives in Turkey and the United States, Ayşehan Jülide Etem demonstrates how both countries used educational films to align institutional agendas and geopolitical interests. By tracing the transnational network of educational cinema, Etem uncovers how film functioned as

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46:37

Shameem Black, "Flexible India: Yoga's Cultural and...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/04/23

Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. Under Modi, it has promoted yoga tourism and staged mass yoga sessions, and Indian officials have proposed yoga as a national solution to a range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer. But as yoga has gone global, its cultural meanings have spiraled far and wide. In Flexible India: Yoga's Cultural and Political Tensions (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Shameem Black

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55:27

Yingyi Ma, "Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/04/15

In Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese College Students Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education (Columbia UP, 2020), sociologist Yingyi Ma offers a multifaceted analysis of a new wave of international Chinese students—mostly self-funded—who have transformed American higher education over the past decade. This privileged yet diverse group of young people, emerging from a rapidly changing China, must navigate the complications and confusions of their formative years while bridging the world’s

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62:02

Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels...

Off the Page: A Columbia University Press Podcast ·

2026/03/29

Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.Ainehi Edoro argues in Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2026) that forests

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