Episodios

  • Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)

    Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
    Nov 17 2025
    Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg as a Barnumesque purveyor of spectacle, Lester D. Friedman presents the filmmaker as a major artist who pairs an ongoing willingness to challenge himself with a widely recognized technical mastery. This new edition of Citizen Spielberg (University of Illinois Press, 2022) expands Friedman’s original analysis to include films of the 2010s like Lincoln and Ready Player One. Breaking down the works by genre, Friedman looks at essential aspects of Spielberg’s art, from his storytelling concerns and worldview to the uncanny connection with audiences that has powered his longtime influence as a cultural force. Friedman's examination reveals a sustained artistic vision--a vision that shows no sign of exhausting itself or audiences after Spielberg's nearly fifty years as a high-profile filmmaker. Incisive and discerning, Citizen Spielberg, Second Edition, offers a career-spanning appraisal of a moviemaking icon. Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales [https://research.bangor.ac.uk/...(b8c6d91f-14c5-4862-8745-0f5d0e938a28).html]. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick [https://oxford.universitypress...]. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
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    49 m
  • Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)

    Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)
    Nov 16 2025
    “We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor in RTE’s Upwardly Mobile. Though the first queer characters in Irish entertainment television were tropes and stereotypes, they represented an important shift in LGBTQ visibility in Irish media. The road to early representations in entertainment media was a hard road paved by gay rights activists, AIDS stigma, and production teams looking for sensationalism. In LGBTQ Visibility, Media, and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan explores the dynamics of queer visibility and sexuality in Ireland through televised media between 1974 and 2008. Tune in for our chat about Gay Byrne and the Late Late Show, queer soap stars, the AIDS crisis and globalization of Ireland, and the LGBTQ rights tug-of-war that played out in turn-of-the-century television. Avrill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
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    1 h y 14 m
  • Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)

    Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)
    Nov 16 2025
    A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of a rotund British gentleman…. This may sound like a catalog of images from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but it is just as much an encapsulation of the works of Joan Harrison, a studio-era producer, a prolific cinematic storyteller, and a pioneer of female-centered suspense media at mid-century. Harrison remains best known as Alfred Hitchcock’s right-hand woman—that is, to the extent that she is known at all. Christina Lane has written the first-ever book dedicated to the life and art of Joan Harrison, entitled Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, The Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock (Chicago Review Press, February 2020). Born into a middle-class family in Surrey, Harrison took a secretarial job with Alfred Hitchcock as an aimless twenty-something, only to become a producer on films including Foreign Correspondent (1940), Rebecca (1940), and Suspicion (1941). In the 1940s, Harrison branched out, building a solo career producing movies for RKO and Universal Studios, only to return to the Hitchcock fold to run TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962). In this discussion, Lane shares how she uncovered this obscure history, placing this “phantom lady” at the center of her own story. She also discusses the trajectory of Harrison’s career and how she adapted her research for a broader readership. Christina Lane is Professor in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami and Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, and on NPR and Turner Classic Movies. Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
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    1 h y 2 m
  • Lucy Caplan, "Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera" (Harvard UP, 2025)

    Lucy Caplan, "Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera" (Harvard UP, 2025)
    Nov 15 2025
    Recently, musicologists and others have started writing about Black participation in opera. Lucy Caplan’s Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera (Harvard UP, 2025) is a major new publication on this topic. Caplan examines what she calls a Black operatic counterculture in the US dating from the performance of H. Lawrence Freeman’s first opera, The Martyr, in 1893 until the 1950s. Rather than centering her analysis on opera as a symbol of uplift or on the ways that the operatic establishment excluded Black participation, Caplan thinks about how opera was part of a project of self-fashioning in Black communities. She argues that opera could be one way to answer the question, in the words of Black librettist Karen Chilton, “How do we become ourselves?” Focusing on institutions and networks, while also not ignoring influential figures, Caplan delves into the rich history of Black opera through numerous points of entry. This is not a strictly chronological retelling of a few, already well-known operatic “firsts.” Instead, Caplan writes about everything from critics to short-lived opera companies, from celebrities to supernumeraries, and recreates this previously untold complex and multifaceted operatic legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
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    1 h
  • Strings of Identity: The Horse-Head Fiddle and Mongolian Identity in China (with Ying Song)

    Strings of Identity: The Horse-Head Fiddle and Mongolian Identity in China (with Ying Song)
    Nov 5 2025
    In this episode, we trace how the horse-head fiddle has evolved in the People’s Republic of China — from a traditional steppe instrument to a cultural symbol reshaped through state representation and modern performance. We discuss how it is made, taught, and performed in China, how it is portrayed in Chinese institutions, and how young Mongols today engage with the instrument as a way to express identity, creativity, and belonging in contemporary China. Our guest, Ying Song from Zhejiang University, is a PhD candidate in sociology whose research focuses on the horse-head fiddle and its role in shaping Mongolian identity. Beyond academia, she has also curated cultural exhibitions and organized numerous Mongolian music-sharing events, which you can find in the link below. Ning Ao is a PhD student at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies (ACE) at Lund University. Her research looks at generational differences among Chinese Mongols. Episode producer: Ning Ao Ying Song’s Rednote Page Ying Song’s Email: songying182@163.com Swedish physician and missionary Joel Eriksson in Inner Mongolia The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia) Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland) Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania) Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) Norwegian Network for Asian Studies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
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    37 m
  • Jessica Doyle and Jordan Ferguson, "Dance Dance Revolution" (Boss Fight Books, 2025)

    Jessica Doyle and Jordan Ferguson, "Dance Dance Revolution" (Boss Fight Books, 2025)
    Nov 3 2025
    On September 26, 1998, a video game made its debut in Japanese arcades. It was over seven feet tall and weighed just over 900 pounds. It had no characters, no story, no quests to fulfill or bosses to beat. What it had was a metal platform on which you were supposed to stand, put your feet into the right place at the right time, and dance. Join two music critics, long-ago players, and Sota Fujimori fans as they take you on the astonishing journey through the artists, influences, and innovators of Dance Dance Revolution, a game two and a half decades in the making and still going -- in homes, arcades, and expos. From its unexpected appearance to its social heyday to its reappearance in the American market, DDR has taken many forms -- not all of them sanctioned by Konami. It has spawned community, creativity, competition, lawsuits, 1,000+ songs that range from wacky to tacky to beautiful, and yes, a lot of dancing. While we were all leaning on the back bar, working up a sweat, DDR managed to change the world. Jessica Doyle has a Ph.D. in city planning and a love for writing about the connections between pop music, globalization, and the built environment. She cares for her family in the Atlanta suburbs. Jordan Ferguson is the author of J Dilla’s Donuts, #93 in the 33 1/3 series of record guides, and co-host of the Geekdown, a podcast about fandoms. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Find him online @jordan_ferguson. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
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    36 m
  • Janice Ross "The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    Janice Ross "The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design" (Oxford UP, 2025)
    Oct 28 2025
    The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design (Oxford UP, 2025) explores how objects and the domestic spaces seep into the aesthetic consciousness of movement-based artists, like dancers and urban designers, significantly shaping their approach to movement invention and choreography. If these objects and spaces happen to have been designed by a leading modernist architect and landscape designer working with the dancer, then the aesthetic imprint is amplified. Dance innovation becomes pressed into dialogue with spatial, environmental, and urban agendas. The Choreography of Environments builds on this premise to consider the use of ordinary objects from a private residence as lenses into viewing dance innovation. Author Janice Ross posits the Halprins' 1950s iconic mid-century modern home and expansive outdoor dance deck as a hidden archive. She explores four objects from their house and gardens -- staircase, deck, chair, and window -- to trace how, despite the conservative postwar climate, this intimate domestic space became a radical template reshaping postmodern dance invention and its expansion into civic, social, and environmental engagement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The work that happened in this white, middle class, Jewish-American home in a San Francisco suburb paved the way for changes that continue to resonate today across contemporary dance, performance, and urban design. These include: defamiliarizing urban landscape and gardens as cloistered theaters where civic identities are rehearsed, orchestrating collective problem solving and invention, normalizing the nude body, privileging a utilitarian and responsive rather than sentimental approach to dance in the environment, and re-positioning choreography as a vital medium for urban problem solving. These four representative objects in the Halprin home are also used to trace the burgeoning of dance as a forceful medium for civic engagement, and its valorization of the ordinary in movement. As a whole, this book shows how dance, architecture, and landscape design would have a profound confluence through these shared domestic spaces and objects of the Halprins' lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
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    57 m
  • A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia

    A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia
    Oct 27 2025
    As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. In this episode, K. G. joins me to discuss his research on the morin khuur, or “horse fiddle,” in Mongolia, and how Mongolians use the traditional instrument to express and envision human and more-than-human futures against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
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    1 h y 4 m