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The Ohio University Press Podcast

The Ohio University Press Podcast

By: New Books Network
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 Interviews with authors of Ohio University Press books.New Books Network Art Literary History & Criticism World
Episodes
  • Uzma Quraishi, "Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2020)

    Uzma Quraishi, "Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War" (UNC Press, 2020)
    Aug 20 2025
    In Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press), Uzma Quraishi (Sam Houston State University) follows the Cold War-era journeys of South Asian international students from U.S. Information Service reading rooms in India and Pakistan, to the halls of the University of Houston, to the suburban subdivisions of Alief and Sugar Land. This student migration between 1960 and 1980 shows how public diplomacy programs overseas catalyzed the arrival of highly educated, middle-class Asians in the U.S. before the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Drawing on archival documents, GIS data, and oral interviews, Quraishi investigates how Indian and Pakistani immigrants forged an “interethnic” identity in Houston and located themselves—both socially and geographically—in the midst of a booming yet segregated Sunbelt city. She conceptualizes their mobility as “brown flight,” a process that simultaneously strengthened ethnic bonds even as it reinforced racial and class barriers. By exploring the links between international and local scales, Redefining the Immigrant South will interest scholars from many fields, including Asian American history; histories of the U.S. South, immigration, and U.S. foreign relations; and sub/urban studies. Ian Shin is assistant professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Jody Benjamin, "The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850" (Ohio UP, 2024)

    Jody Benjamin, "The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850" (Ohio UP, 2024)
    May 17 2025
    The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700 – 1850 (Ohio UP, 2024) examines historical change across a broad region of western Africa—from Saint Louis, Senegal, to Freetown, Sierra Leone—through the development of textile commerce, consumption, and dress. Indigo-dyed and printed cotton, wool, linen, and silk cloths constituted major trade items that linked African producers and consumers to exchange networks that were both regional and global. While much of the historiography of commerce in Africa in the eighteenth century has focused on the Atlantic slave trade and its impact, this study follows the global cloth trade to account for the broad extent and multiple modes of western Africa’s engagement with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Jody Benjamin analyzes a range of archival, visual, oral, and material sources drawn from three continents to illuminate entanglements between local textile industries and global commerce and between the politics of Islamic reform and encroaching European colonial power. The study highlights the roles of a diverse range of historical actors mentioned only glancingly in core-periphery or Atlantic-centered framings: women indigo dyers, maroon cotton farmers, petty traveling merchants, caravan guides, and African Diaspora settlers. It argues that their combined choices within a set of ecological, political, and economic constraints structured networks connecting the Atlantic and Indian Ocean perimeters. Jody Benjamin is a social and cultural historian of western Africa with expertise in the period between 1650 and 1850. His research is informed by a methodological concern to center the diverse experiences and perspectives of Africans in ways that transcend the limitations of the colonial archive. In broad terms, Prof. Benjamin’s scholarship interrogates the multiple connections between west African, African diaspora and global histories through the lens of material culture, technology, labor, gender and race to reshape how historians think about western Africa’s role in the history of global capitalism and its connections to contemporary questions of global inequality. Dr. Benjamin’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the University of California Regents, University of California Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI), the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. From 2022-2023, he was the Principal Investigator for a Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Unarchiving Blackness,” exploring archival practices in African and African Diaspora Studies. Prior to Howard University, Dr. Benjamin taught at the University of California, Riverside. You can learn more about his work here. Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • Bianca Murillo, "Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana" (Ohio UP, 2017)

    Bianca Murillo, "Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana" (Ohio UP, 2017)
    Apr 23 2025
    In Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Ohio UP, 2017), Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible. Fusing economic and business history with social and cultural history, she traces the evolution of consumerism in the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana from the late nineteenth century through to the political turmoil of the 1970s. Murillo brings sales clerks, market women, and everyday consumers in Ghana to the center of a story that is all too often told in sweeping metanarratives about what happens when African businesses are incorporated into global markets. By emphasizing the centrality of human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Murillo introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an Africa-centered perspective. The result is a keen look at colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions, including its entanglement with gender and race. Bianca Murillo is a professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She is a historian of modern Africa, with research and teaching interests in global economies, decolonization, and race and gender studies. While her work focuses on twentieth-century Ghana, her research on international business and capitalism is comparative and transnational. Dr. Murillo has published articles in the journals Gender & History, Enterprise & Society, and Africa. Her current book project, Financing Africa’s Future, is a history of debt, foreign investment, and fraud in Ghana’s post-independence era. Recent writings featuring this research appear in Africa is a Country and History Workshop. Murillo's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute of Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), Fulbright-Hays Program, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program (U.S. Department of Education). She is an elected board member of the Business History Conference (Association) and has served as an elected committee member and committee chair for the American Historical Association. You can learn more about her work here Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter. 150,000,000 million lifetime downloads. Advertise on the New Books Network. Watch our promotional video. Learn how to make the most of our library.
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    1 hr and 12 mins
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