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Rutgers University Press Podcast

Rutgers University Press Podcast

By: New Books Network
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 Interviews with authors of Rutgers University Press books.New Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism World
Episodes
  • Barbara Jane Brickman, "Suffering Sappho! Lesbian Camp in American Popular Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

    Barbara Jane Brickman, "Suffering Sappho! Lesbian Camp in American Popular Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
    Jan 8 2026
    An ever-expanding and panicked Wonder Woman lurches through a city skyline begging Steve to stop her. A twisted queen of sorority row crashes her convertible trying to escape her queer shame. A suave butch emcee introduces the sequined and feathered stars of the era’s most celebrated drag revue. For an unsettled and retrenching postwar America, these startling figures betrayed the failure of promised consensus and appeasing conformity. They could also be cruel, painful, and disciplinary jokes. It turns out that an obsession with managing gender and female sexuality after the war would hardly contain them. On the contrary, it spread their campy manifestations throughout mainstream culture. Offering the first major consideration of lesbian camp in American popular culture, Suffering Sappho! traces a larger-than-life lesbian menace across midcentury media forms to propose five prototypical queer icons—the sicko, the monster, the spinster, the Amazon, and the rebel. On the pages of comics and sensational pulp fiction and the dramas of television and drive-in movies, Barbara Jane Brickman discovers evidence not just of campy sexual deviants but of troubling female performers, whose failures could be epic but whose subversive potential could inspire. In this episode Dr. Barbara Jane Brickman (University of Alabama) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal of Women’s History) discuss Suffering Sappho! First, Brickman introduces the listeners to lesbian camp and then we discuss the many storied characters in the monograph. We share the zingers and one liners of actress Tallulah Bankhead and giggle about the camp antics of Superwoman’s sidekick, Etta Candy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • Andrea Gevurtz Arai ed., "Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia" (Rutgers UP, 2025)

    Andrea Gevurtz Arai ed., "Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
    Dec 27 2025
    An exciting collection of stories of change that most people don’t usually hear from the bottom up, from the grassroots, about what’s happening in East Asia. Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia (Rutgers UP, 2025) brings together an exciting cross-regional interdisciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists, and others for a collection that addresses the last two decades' hollowing out of social connections, socioeconomic income gaps, and general precarity of life in East Asian societies. Written by authors from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, each chapter is focused on people making a difference together in socially sustainable ways, particularly in the areas of gender, labor, and environments - both built and natural. These projects all constitute acts of creative resistance to neoliberal development, and each act of creative resistance demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making new worlds and lifeways in the small and everyday. Taking on larger political and economic forces that affect their lives and communities, each project and group of individuals featured here is focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures. Andrea Gevurtz Arai is a cultural anthropologist and Acting Assistant Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (2016), co-editor of Spaces of Possibility: Korea and Japan (2016) and Global Futures in East Asia (2013). Arai is completing a second book, The 3.11 Generation: Changing the Subjects of Gender, Labor and Environment in Trans-Local Japan and co-editing Ultra low birth societies in East Asia: Crisis Discourse and Collaborative Responses. Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, critical development studies, and the anthropology of time. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 23 mins
  • Jeffrey Kroessler, "Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens" (Rutgers UP, 2025) This

    Jeffrey Kroessler, "Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens" (Rutgers UP, 2025) This
    Dec 19 2025
    The borough of Queens is the largest of New York City’s five boroughs. It holds more people than Chicago or Los Angeles. And thanks to immigration, it is today home to a population of extraordinary ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity. Queens is also the subject of a new book by Jeffrey Kroessler, Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens, published by Rutgers University Press. Kroessler, an expert on the history and preservation of Queens, was working on the final edits for Rural County, Urban Borough when he died in 2023. His wife, the architect Laura Heim, took up the work of moving the book through the publication process. She selected and placed the images in the book and wrote its Preface and Acknowledgements. Rural County, Urban Borough is a history with a strong sense of place. Covering the the history of Queens from European settlement to the present, Kroessler charts centuries of change in the landscape. He shows how politics, industry, transportation, government and real estate interests all shaped the borough. Linking Queens to New York City and the wider world, Kroessler illuminates important elements of American metropolitan history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    18 mins
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