Episodes

  • Nicholas P. Roberts, "A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace" (U California Press, 2025)

    Nicholas P. Roberts, "A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace" (U California Press, 2025)
    Aug 16 2025
    A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace (U California Press, 2025) is a sweeping retelling of the Omani position in the Indian Ocean. Here the reign of Oman’s longest-serving ruler, Saʿid bin Sultan, offers a keyhole through which we can peer to see the entangled histories of Arabia and the Gulf, South Asia, and East Africa in the Omani Empire. In centering this empire, Nicholas P. Roberts shows how Arabs, Africans, and Asians actively shaped the conditions of commercial engagement in the Western Indian Ocean, uniting the empire’s domains into a single oceanic marketplace in which Europeans and Americans had to accede if they wished to succeed. Drawing upon sources in three languages from four continents, A Sea of Wealth is a vivid narrative full of colorful characters that upturns many conventional understandings of our modern world. Nicholas P. Roberts was formerly Assistant Professor of History at Norwich University and the Howell Fellow for Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is currently earning a JD at Case Western Reserve University. Ahmed Yaqouob AlMaazmi is an Assistant Professor of History at the United Arab Emirates University, with interests in the intersections of empire, science, slavery, law, environmental infrastructures, and material culture in the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Indian Ocean world.
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    53 mins
  • Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)

    Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018)
    Aug 8 2025
    From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national ‘sperm crisis’ (jingzi weiji). Ayo Wahlberg book Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (U California Press, 2018) explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it. Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • Kit W. Myers, "The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States"(U California Press, 2025)

    Kit W. Myers, "The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States"(U California Press, 2025)
    Aug 7 2025
    This episode features Dr. Kit W. Myers, associate professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced, discussing his book The Violence of Love: Race, Family and Adoption in the United States, which was published by the University of California Press in January 2025. The Violence of Love challenges the narrative that adoption is a solely loving act that benefits birth parents, adopted individuals, and adoptive parents—a narrative that is especially pervasive with transracial and transnational adoptions. Using interdisciplinary methods of archival, legal, and discursive analysis, Myers comparatively examines the adoption of Asian, Black, and Native American children by White families in the United States. He shows how race has been constructed relationally to mark certain homes, families, and nations as spaces of love, freedom, and better futures—in contrast to others that are not—and argues that violence is attached to adoption in complex ways. Propelled by different types of love, such adoptions attempt to transgress biological, racial, cultural, and national borders established by traditional family ideals. Yet they are also linked to structural, symbolic, and traumatic forms of violence. The Violence of Love confronts this discomforting reality and rethinks theories of family to offer more capacious understandings of love, kinship, and care. Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a research assistant professor in the department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Nadya Bair, "The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market" (U California Press, 2020)

    Nadya Bair, "The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market" (U California Press, 2020)
    Jul 26 2025
    The legendary Magnum photo agency has long been associated with heroic lone wolf male photographers such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, roaming the world in search of the “decisive moment” – the perfect shot that captured the essence of a major news story. Nadya Bair’s highly original book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press 2020) argues that this idealized portrayal of Magnum occludes the larger networks within which these photographers operated, including the crucial roles performed by often female office staff, by picture editors and corporate clients. She sets out to show that right from the outset, Magnum was also a business operation, one that pioneered modern ideas of branding borrowed from advertising agencies and commercial partners. Drawing on extensive archival work and including numerous images of photo page spreads, The Decisive Network presents Magnum in a novel and distinctive light, as the framer of new global imaginaries that reflected the evolution of post-war capitalism. Nadya Bair is an assistant professor of art history at Hamilton College For digital explorations of the Magnum network, see Nadya’s fascinating website. Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here.
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    38 mins
  • Brian Fauteux, "Music in Orbit: Satellite Radio in the Streaming Space Age" (Univ of California Press, 2025)

    Brian Fauteux, "Music in Orbit: Satellite Radio in the Streaming Space Age" (Univ of California Press, 2025)
    Jul 23 2025
    Years before the advent of music streaming, Sirius and XM established satellite radio services that attracted paying subscribers through their ever-expanding lineup of niche music channels and exclusive celebrity-hosted programming. Brian Fauteux's Music in Orbit: Satellite Radio in the Streaming Space Age (University of California Press, 2025) is the first book to explore how satellite radio bridges legacy broadcast music radio and streaming platforms, serving as both precursor and integral player in today's streaming media environment. Arguing for the ongoing significance of radio in the digital age and the pernicious effects of monopoly power on the vibrancy of contemporary music industries, Music in Orbit offers essential context for the serious problems now facing working musicians, music consumers, and music communities.
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    1 hr and 15 mins
  • Robert N. Spengler, "Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity" (Univ of California Press, 2025)

    Robert N. Spengler, "Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity" (Univ of California Press, 2025)
    Jul 22 2025
    The 15,000-year story of how grass seduced humanity into being its unwitting labor force--and the science behind it. Domesticated crops were not human creations, and agriculture was not simply invented. As Robert N. Spengler shows, domestication was the result of an evolutionary process in which people played a role only unwittingly and as actors in a numberless cast that spanned the plant and animal kingdoms. Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants Evolved to Exploit Humanity (Univ of California Press, 2025) is the first book to bring together recent scientific discoveries and fascinating ongoing research to provide a systematic account of not only how agriculture really developed but why. Through fifteen chapters, this book dives deep into the complex processes that drove domestication and the various roles that plants and animals, including humans, played in bringing about those changes. At the intersection of popular history, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, Nature's Greatest Success offers a revolutionary account of humanity not at the apex of nature but deeply embedded in the natural world and the evolutionary processes that continue to guide it even today.
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    36 mins
  • Karen Redrobe, "Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War" (Univ of California Press, 2025)

    Karen Redrobe, "Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War" (Univ of California Press, 2025)
    Jul 16 2025
    Karen Redrobe's latest book Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War (Univ of California Press, 2025) is a fascinating account of the role of animation in the visual cultures of war. It analyzes works by artists including Yael Bartana, Nancy Davenport, Kelly Dolak and Wazhmah Osman, Gesiye, David Hartt, Helen Hill, Onyeka Igwe, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Mary Reid Kelley, and Patrick Kelley, in which relational and intermedial practices of “(inter)(in)animation” generate aesthetic tactics for reframing war. Like all of Karen's work, Undead is theoretically rich, thoroughly interdisciplinary, and written with clarity as well as urgency. Its mixture of clear-sighted criticality and dogged hopefulness is especially powerful in the times of conflict, cruelty, and destructiveness through which we’re living. In this wide-ranging conversation, Karen speaks with refreshing honesty and vulnerability about how to reimagine scholarly research and writing in line with anti-war feminist politics, what it means to confront the complicity of the university—and of university workers—in cultures of war, and why scholars should embrace being wrong and taking risks. Undead was published in April 2025 by the University of California Press. A free ebook version is available through Luminos.
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Laurie Denyer Willis, "Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil" (U California Press, 2023)

    Laurie Denyer Willis, "Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil" (U California Press, 2023)
    Jul 11 2025
    Through deep attention to sense and feeling, Go with God grapples with the centrality of Evangelical faith in Rio de Janeiro's subúrbios, the city's expansive and sprawling peripheral communities. Based on sensory ethnographic fieldwork and attuned to religious desire and manipulation, this book shows how Evangelical belief has changed the way people understand their lives in relation to Brazil's history of violent racial differentiation and inequality. From expressions of otherworldly hope to political exhaustion, Go with God depicts Evangelical life as it is lived and explores where people turn to find grace, possibility, and a future. Mentioned in this episode: Denyer Willis, Laurie. 2018. “‘It smells like a thousand angels marching’: The Salvific Sensorium in Rio de Janeiro’s Western Subúrbios.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 2: 324–348. Laurie Denyer Willis is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Liliana Gil is Assistant Professor of Comparative Studies (STS) at The Ohio State University.
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    47 mins