New Books in Popular Culture

Jan 28 2025 1313 ep. 55 mins 1.4k
New Books in Popular Culture Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Popular Culture about their New Books

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A.I. is Spielberg & Kubrick’s Dark Twisted Fantasy

Jan 28 2025 84 mins  
It’s the UConn Popcast, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, is a strange and profound text on human-AI relations. Centering on David, an artificial child who is embraced and then abandoned by his adoptive human mother, the movie has the structure of a fairy tale and the sensibility of a horror film. We found the text to have significant things to sa

Catherine Butler, "British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Jan 20 2025 73 mins  
Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children's books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurants in Tokyo, the Japanese have a close and multifaceted relationship with British children's literature. In British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses (Bloomsbury, 2023), Catherine But

Marco Arnaudo, "The Tabletop Revolution: Gaming Reimagined in the 21st Century" (McFarland, 2023)

Jan 19 2025 27 mins  
The Tabletop Revolution: Gaming Reimagined in the 21st Century (McFarland, 2023) is an overview of the ongoing revolution in tabletop gaming design and culture, which exploded to unprecedented levels of vitality in the 21st century, leading to new ways of creating, marketing, and experiencing a game. Designers have become superstars, publishers have improved quality control, and th

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

Javaria Farooqui, "Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Jan 16 2025 53 mins  
Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts. Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance nov

Beretta E. Smith-Shomade, "Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Jan 15 2025 51 mins  
In Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture (Rutgers UP, 2024), Beretta E. Smith-Shomade contends that Black spirituality and Black church religiosity are the critical crux of Black popular culture. She argues that cultural, community, and social support live within the Black church and that spirit, art, and progress are deeply entwined and se

Jesper Juul, "Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer" (MIT Press, 2024)

Jan 14 2025 36 mins  
The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be fun. The Commodore 64 (C64) is officially the best-selling desktop computer model of all time, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. It was also, from 1985 to 1993, the platform for which most video games were made. But alth

Patrick Dixon, "Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

Jan 13 2025 66 mins  
For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item that quickly evolved into a meal, spawned a legion of imitators, and gained a large share of the global poultry market. Yet, almost as soon as the McNugget made its North American debut, it quickly became the subject of opprobrium an

Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)

Jan 09 2025 47 mins  
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls. Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751 (Bucknell University Press, 2024) by Dr

Andrew S. Latham, "Hey! Listen!: Hypertext Rhetoric and The Legend of Zelda" (McFarland, 2024)

Jan 05 2025 39 mins  
How does analyzing video games as hypertexts expand the landscape of research for video game rhetoricians and games studies scholars? This is the first book to focus on how hypertext rhetoric impacts the five canons of rhetoric, and to apply that hypertext rhetoric to the study of video games. It also explores how ludonarrative agency is seized by players seeking to express themsel