New Books in Literary Studies

Apr 12 2025 2407 ep. 53 mins 894
New Books in Literary Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books

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Jina B. Kim, "Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing" (Duke UP, 2025)

Apr 12 2025 53 mins  
In Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-Of-Color Writing (Duke UP, 2025), Jina B. Kim develops what she calls crip-of-color critique, bringing a disability lens to bear on feminist- and queer-of-color literature in the aftermath of 1996 US welfare reform and the subsequent evisceration of social safety nets. She examines literature by contemporary femini

The Great Gatsby is an American Dystopia

Apr 11 2025 107 mins  
It’s the UConn Popcast, and on the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, we explore what The Great Gatsby means in America today. In this deep-dive we ask: What did Gatsby mean in 1925, and how have those meanings changed in 2025? What mythologies of America does Gatsby circulate, and challenge? How does Gatsby read to a Brit who never read it in high sch

9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper

Apr 10 2025 49 mins  
What work can genre do today? And can the genre system become more than a method of reductive containment and market segmentation—can it be a generative source of imaginative chaos? Few are as qualified to address these questions as Lauren Beukes, whose simultaneous embrace of genres from science fiction to crime to horror and refusal to abide within their borders—what she call

Christian Sheppard, "The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball: Lessons for Life from Homer's Odyssey to the World Series" (Greenleaf, 2025)

Apr 10 2025 61 mins  
Who are you, how are you supposed to live, and what about happiness? Answers to age-old questions are offered in classic myths about heroes, gods, and monsters, and at the ballgame. In The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball (Greenleaf, 2025), author Christian Sheppard interweaves Homer’s epics with glorious stories from the green fields of America’s pastime, celebrating Achilles’ cou

Roland Mayer, "The Ruins of Rome: A Cultural History" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Apr 08 2025 76 mins  
The beguiling ruins of Rome have a long history of allure. They first engaged the attention of later mediaeval tourists, just as they do today. The interest of travellers was captured in the Renaissance by artists, architects, topographers, antiquarians, archaeologists and writers. Once the ruins were seen to appeal to visitors, and to matter for their aesthetic quality, their prot

Elana Wolff, "Faithfully Seeking Franz" (Guernica Editions, 2023)

Apr 07 2025 62 mins  
The itinerary of Faithfully Seeking Franz comprises an irregular quest for dead mentor, modernist author Franz Kafka--in places he lived, worked, vacationed and convalesced, and in the body of work he left: fiction, diaries, notebooks, and correspondence. The search for the man inside the writer is both a personal journey and a joint venture of two in the field: E. and M. in pursui

Joseph J. Diorio, "A Few Words about Words" (Beaufort Books, 2021)

Apr 06 2025 30 mins  
Written by a self-taught grammarian, A Few Words About Words (Beaufort Books, 2021) offers an accessible and engaging guide to mastering the English language. A simple mistake, like writing your instead of you’re or there instead of they’re, can make the difference between winning or losing an opportunity. A missing comma can spark a PR disaster, while a well-crafted sentence c

Xiaolu Ma, "Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930)" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Apr 05 2025 64 mins  
Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia Via Japan (1880-1930) (Harvard Asia Center, 2024) offers the first detailed account of the complex cultural, literary and intellectual relationships between Russia, Japan and China in the modern era. In this wide-ranging interview, author Xiaolu Ma reflects on the remarkable process of Russian culture reaching China thr

Katherine Hallemeier, "African Literature and US Empire: Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)

Apr 04 2025 41 mins  
African Literature and US Empire Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing (Edinburgh UP, 2024) demonstrates how African literature grapples with the enforced optimism of US empire that circulates in postcolonial nations: Unsettles chronologies that chart a growing disillusionment with the postcolonial nation and national development across the twentieth and twen

Miriam Haughton, "The Theatre of Louise Lowe" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Apr 02 2025 58 mins  
Louise Lowe is a theatre and performance director, writer, choreographer, dramaturge, and, more recently, a television director and short film writer/director, working in Ireland and internationally. She is the Co-Artistic Director of ANU Productions, established with Owen Boss in Dublin in 2009. Lowe is known for facilitating and creating moments of interior reckoning for audience