New Books in Popular Culture

Oct 27 2024 1258 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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  Society & Culture  History
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Andrew deWaard, "Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture" (U California Press, 2024)

Oct 27 2024 81 mins  
Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but Wall Street. In this book, Andrew deWaard shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributi

Landon Palmer, "Rock Star/Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom" (Oxford UP, 2020)

Oct 26 2024 64 mins  
During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries incr

Margarette Lincoln, "Perfection: 400 Years of Women's Quest for Beauty" (Yale UP, 2024)

Oct 26 2024 28 mins  
A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends. Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women of the eighteenth century applied blood from a black cat's tail to problem skin, while doctors in t

Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

Oct 23 2024 29 mins  
It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?" In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were t

Thinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75

Oct 23 2024 29 mins  
It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?" In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were t

Peter C. Kunze, "Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

Oct 19 2024 68 mins  
In the early 1980s, Walt Disney Productions was struggling, largely bolstered by the success of its theme parks. Within fifteen years, however, it had become one of the most powerful entertainment conglomerates in the world. Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Peter Kunze argues that far from an executive feat,

Ashawnta Jackson, "Soul-Folk" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Oct 19 2024 70 mins  
Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-folk, Black artists like Terry Callier and Linda Lewis began to reclaim their space in the genre, and use it to bring their own traditions to light- the jazz, the blues, the field hollers, the spirituals- and creating something wholly

Anne Higonnet, "Liberty Equality Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution" (Norton, 2024)

Oct 18 2024 47 mins  
Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Térézia shed the underwear cage

Brad Balukjian, "The Six Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Wrestlemania" (Hachette, 2024)

Oct 18 2024 61 mins  
In 2005, Brad Balukjian left his position as a magazine fact-checker to pursue a dream job: partner with his childhood hero, The Iron Sheik (whose real name was Khosrow Vaziri), to write his biography. Things quickly went south, culminating in the Sheik threatening Balukjian’s life. Now seventeen years later, Balukjian returns to the road in search of not only a reunion with the

Beth Blum on Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)

Oct 17 2024 29 mins  
Beth Blum, Assistant Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke with John about how self-help went from its Victorian roots (worship greatness!) to the ingratiating unctuous style prescribed by the other-directed Dale Carnegie (everyone loves the sound of their own name) before arriving at the “n