Behind the Cover with Indiana University Press

Jan 17 2025 157 ep. 58 mins 33
Behind the Cover with Indiana University Press Podcast artwork

Interviews with authors of Indiana University Press books.

  Arts  History
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Lily E. Hirsch, "Taking Funny Music Seriously" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Jan 17 2025 60 mins  
Take funny music seriously! Though often dismissed as silly or derivative, funny music, Lily E. Hirsch argues, is incredibly creative and dynamic, serving multiple aims from the celebratory to the rebellious, the entertaining to the mentally uplifting. Music can be a rich site for humor, with so many opportunities that are ripe for a comedic left turn. Taking Funny Music Seriously

Larisa Jasarević, "Beekeeping in the End Times" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Oct 26 2024 63 mins  
Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing unease, as their honeybees weather t

Larry E. Holmes, "Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921–1985" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Oct 25 2024 40 mins  
In Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921-1985 (Indiana University Press, 2024), Larry E. Holmes shows us how Soviet football culture regularly disregarded official ideological and political imperatives and skirted the boundaries between socialism and capitalism. In the early 1920s, the Soviet press denounced football as a bourgeois sport that was injurious to both

Aviad Moreno, "Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Sep 14 2024 61 mins  
Dr. Aviad Moreno is himself an incarnation of entwined homelands. He is an Israeli whose grandfather moved from Morocco to Venezuela, sent his son back to Morocco to study. The family hailed from Spain before the Exile in 1492 only to maintain much of the Spanish language and character. These migrations create a unique diaspora for the Jews of northern Morocco, one that is Hispanop

Jeremy Black, "Rethinking Geopolitics" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Aug 17 2024 41 mins  
Amid the bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 and the escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the geopolitical balance of power has changed significantly in a very short period. If current trends continue, we may be witnessing a tectonic realignment unseen in more than a century. In 1904, Halford Mackinder delivered a seminal lecture entitled "The Geographical Pivot of

Rosemary Pennington, "Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media" (Indiana UP, 2024)

Jul 26 2024 76 mins  
As Muslim American representation becomes more prominent in popular culture, how are they continued to be portrayed? Rosemary Pennington's new book Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media (Indiana University Press, 2024) explores the “trap of hypervisibility” faced by Muslims in popular media and the burden of representation that follows them. More representation m

Slava Greenberg, "Animated Film and Disability: Cripping Spectatorship" (Indiana UP, 2023)

Jun 21 2024 60 mins  
While many live-action films portray disability as a spectacle, "crip animation" (a genre of animated films that celebrates disabled people's lived experiences) uses a variety of techniques like clay animation, puppets, pixilation, and computer-generated animation to represent the inner worlds of people with disabilities. Crip animation has the potential to challenge the ableist ga

Jennifer Hart on African Mobility and Infrastructure

Jun 03 2024 69 mins  
Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks to Jennifer Hart, Professor and Chair of the History Department at Virginia Tech, about her work on the history and ethnography of mobility and infrastructure in Ghana. Hart’s newest book, Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra (Indiana University Press, 2024), examines how technocrat

Nicholas Underwood, "Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France" (Indiana UP, 2022)

May 21 2024 64 mins  
Nick Underwood's Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar Paris (Indiana University Press, 2022) is a captivating study of the culture and politics of the vibrant community of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Making their way to the French capital from various sites in Eastern Europe, members of this Jewish community developed their own cu

Sarah A. Cramsey, "Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946" (Indiana UP, 2023)

Mar 09 2024 55 mins  
In Uprooting the Diaspora: Jewish Belonging and the Ethnic Revolution in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1936-1946 (Indiana UP, 2023), Sarah Cramsey explores how the Jewish citizens rooted in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia became the ideal citizenry for a post–World War II Jewish state in the Middle East. She asks, how did new interpretations of Jewish belonging emerge and gain su