Episodes

  • Andrew Herscher, "Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

    Andrew Herscher, "Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
    Jul 12 2025
    In the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, Anishinaabe leaders granted land to a college where their children could be educated. At the time, the colonial settlement of Anishinaabe homelands hardly extended beyond Detroit in what settlers called the “Michigan Territory.” Four days after the Treaty of Fort Meigs was signed, the First College of Michigania was founded to claim the land that the Anishinaabeg had just granted. Four years later, the newly-chartered University of Michigan would claim this land. By the time that the university’s successor moved to Ann Arbor twenty years later, Anishinaabe people had been forced to cede almost all their land in what had become the state of Michigan, now inhabited by almost 200,000 settlers. Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Andrew Herscher narrates the University of Michigan’s place in both Anishinaabe and settler history, tracing the university’s participation in the colonization of Anishinaabe homelands, Anishinaabe efforts to claim their right to an education, and the university’s history of disavowing, marginalizing, and minimizing its responsibilities and obligations to Anishinaabe people. Continuing the public conversations of the same name on U-M’s campus in 2023, Under the Campus, the Land provides a new perspective on the relationship between universities and settler colonialism in the US. Members of the U-M community, scholars of Midwest history, and those interested in Indigenous studies will find this book compelling. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    41 mins
  • Jacob F. H. Smith, "Waves of Discontent: Electoral Volatility, Public Policymaking, and the Health of American Democracy" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

    Jacob F. H. Smith, "Waves of Discontent: Electoral Volatility, Public Policymaking, and the Health of American Democracy" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
    Aug 11 2025
    After a period of relative calm in congressional elections prior to 2006, America has experienced a series of highly competitive, volatile national elections. Since then, at least one of the US House, US Senate, and presidency has flipped party control--often with a large House or Senate seat swing--with the exception of the 2012 election. In Waves of Discontent, Jacob F. H. Smith argues that a pervasive feeling of displeasure in the American public has caused this increase in electoral volatility. Examining the consequences of volatility in congressional elections reveals that political amateurs are more likely to win in wave years than in normal years. Based on this data, Smith presents a new theory about the policy process--the policy doom loop--in which frustration among voters at both the inability of Congress to pass policy and anger at policies that actually do pass results in even more churn in congressional elections. Waves of Discontent offers some suggestions to promote constructive policymaking efforts in Washington to reduce frustration in the electorate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    22 mins
  • Katarina Kušic, "Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia" (University of Michigan Press, 2025)

    Katarina Kušic, "Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia" (University of Michigan Press, 2025)
    Jun 1 2025
    Studies of statebuilding and peacebuilding have been criticized for their disregard of people living the consequences of intervention projects. Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Katarina Kušic takes on the task of engaging with spaces and peoples not usually present in IR scholarship to rethink the very concept of “intervention” by paying close attention to how people actually experience and make sense of those efforts. In particular, the book offers a detailed engagement with ethnographic fieldwork in two policy areas in Serbia—agricultural policy and non-formal youth education. By engaging with subjects, the book not only enhances our understanding of intervention, but also uncovers the limitations of the concept. Dr. Kušić argues that the concept limits what we can observe and theorize, and it prevents researchers from engaging with the people living in spaces of intervention as coeval political subjects. As an alternative, she proposes to foreground improvement over “intervention.” This reorientation enables researchers to trace hierarchies beyond the local/international dichotomy, expands fields of visibility beyond those prescribed by interventions themselves, and seriously considers the contradictions at the heart of liberalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr
  • M. Myrta Leslie Santana, Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

    M. Myrta Leslie Santana, Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
    May 20 2025
    In Transformismo, M. Myrta Leslie Santana draws on years of embedded research within Cuban trans/queer communities to analyze how transformistas, or drag performers, understand their roles in the social transformation of the island. Once banned and censored in Cuba, transformismo, or drag performance, is now state-sponsored events. Transformismo suggests that these performances are making critical interventions in Cuban trans/queer life and politics and in doing so, the volume offers critical insight into how Cuba's postsocialist reform has exacerbated racial, sexual, and economic inequalities. Leslie Santana argues that mainstream trans/queer nightlife in Cuba is entangled with the island's tourism economy, which has shaped the aesthetics and social makeup of transformismo in coastal Havana, which largely caters to foreigners. Leslie Santana considers how Black lesbian and transgender transformistas are expanding understandings of sexual selfhood and politics on the island, particularly questioning the ways that Black women's creativity is prominently featured in the aesthetics of tourism and trans/queer nightlife, while Black women themselves are denied social and material capital. M. Myrta Leslie Santana is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California San Diego. Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 mins
  • Ariel Nereson, "Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past" (U Michigan Press, 2022)

    Ariel Nereson, "Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
    May 11 2025
    On the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, renowned choreographer and director Bill T. Jones developed three tributes: Serenade/The Proposition, 100 Migrations, and Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray. These widely acclaimed dance works incorporated video and audio text from Lincoln's writings as they examined key moments in his life and his enduring legacy. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (U Michigan Press, 2022) explores how these works provided both an occasion and a method by which democracy and history might be reconceived through movement, positioning dance as a form of both history and historiography. The project addresses how different communities choose to commemorate historical figures, events, and places through art--whether performance, oratory, song, statuary, or portraiture--and in particular, Black US American counter-memorial practices that address histories of slavery. Advancing the theory of oscillation as Black aesthetic praxis, author Ariel Nereson celebrates Bill T. Jones as a public intellectual whose practice has contributed to the project of understanding America's relationship to its troubled past. The book features materials from Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company's largely unexplored archive, interviews with artists, and photos that document this critical stage of Jones's career as it explores how aesthetics, as ideas in action, can imagine more just and equitable social formations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    31 mins
  • Brendan Haug, "Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

    Brendan Haug, "Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
    May 6 2025
    Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm (University of Michigan Press, 2024) is the first environmental history of Egypt’s Fayyūm depression. The book examines human relationships with flowing water from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE. Until the arrival of modern perennial irrigation in the nineteenth century, the Fayyūm was the only region of premodern Egypt to be irrigated by a network of artificial canals. By linking large numbers of rural communities together in a shared dependence on this public irrigation infrastructure, canalization introduced a radically new way of interacting with both the water of the Nile and fellow farmers in Egypt. Drawing on ancient Greek papyri, medieval Arabic literature, and modern comparative evidence, Garden of Egypt explores how the Nile’s water, local farmers, and state power continually reshaped this irrigated landscape over more than 13 centuries. Following human/water relationships through both space and time further helps to erode disciplinary boundaries and bring multiple periods of Egyptian history into contact with one another. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy chats with Brendan Haug about the relationship between people, water, and the environment in Egypt’s Fayyūm. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    57 mins
  • Nothingism

    Nothingism
    May 5 2025
    In this episode of High Theory, Jason Schneiderman talks about Nothingism. A term of his own coinage, a tongue-in-cheek manifesto, nothingism is an invitation to refuse the values of digital culture in favor of the values of print. You can read more about poetry at the end of print culture in Jason’s new book, entitled Nothingism (Michigan UP, 2025). In the episode Jaason refers to M.B. Parkes’s book Pause and Effect An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West and the poetry of his teacher Agha Shahid Ali. Jason Schneiderman is a poet and teacher. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He also edited an anthology of queer theory for first year writing courses called Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford, 2016). He works as a Professor of English at CUNY’s BMCC and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu. It shows a blue blur on a pink floral print background. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    20 mins
  • Alan Chong, "The International Politics of Communication: Representing Community in a Globalizing World" (U Michigan Press, 2025)

    Alan Chong, "The International Politics of Communication: Representing Community in a Globalizing World" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
    May 4 2025
    In an era of globalization, international communication constantly takes place across borders, defying sovereign control as it influences opinion. While diplomacy between states is the visible face of international relations, this “informal diplomacy” is usually less visible but no less powerful. Information politics can be found in propaganda, Internet politics, educational exchanges, tourism, and even popular film. In The International Politics of Communication: Representing Community in a Globalizing World (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Alan Chong examines this informational dimension of international politics, investigating how information is generated, conveyed through channels, and directed specifically at audiences. While citizens are often portrayed as faithfully loyal supporters and beneficiaries of the modern nation-state—a fiction supported by passports, identification papers, and other notarized credentials—they are subject to the pulls of loyalty from transnational tribal affiliations, mythological and historical narratives of ethnicity, as well as the transcendental claims of religion and philosophy. Increasingly, social media also enchants non-state individuals, providing new virtual communities as the center of loyalties rather than national affiliations. By reinterpreting taken-for-granted concepts in journalism, media, political economy, nationalism, development, and propaganda as information politics, this book prepares serious-minded scholars, citizens, politicians, and social activists everywhere to understand the power plays in international communication and use alternatives to begin transforming power relations.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 14 mins