The SOF/Heyman Bookshelf

Bölümler

• Rob King's Man of Taste 05.01.2026 34dk

  Host highlights Rob King's Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger. Rob King uses Metzger’s work to explore what taste means and how it works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing frontiers of cultural acceptability.
• Julie Stone Peters's Staging Witchcraft Before the Law 04.01.2026 32dk

  In the final episode of the 2025 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials by Julie Stone Peters. This book shows that judges and accusers turned to performance, staging to create doctrines of proof: catching the criminal “in the acte”; establishing “notoriety of the fact”; and producing “violent presumptions” of guilt.
• Hannah Weaver's Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past 11.12.2025 37dk

  Host highlights Hannah Weaver's Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past. In this volume, Weaver examines the medieval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorized as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy.
• Joseph Albernaz's Common Measures 02.12.2025 34dk

  Host highlights Joseph Albernaz's Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community. With sharp close readings, new historical constellations, and innovative theoretical paradigms, Common Measures recasts the relationship of the Romantic period to the basic terms of modernity.
• Ying Qian's Revolutionary Becomings 24.11.2025 33dk

  In our first episode of the 2025 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Ying Qian's Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China. This work studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements.
• Hamid Dabashi's The Persian Prince 23.09.2024 31dk

  In the final episode of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights The Persian Prince: The Rise and Resurrection of an Imperial Archetype by Hamid Dabashi. This book articulates a bold new idea of the Persian Prince—a metaphor of political authority, a figurative ideal deeply rooted in the collective memories of multiple nations, and a literary construct that connected Muslim empires across time and space.
• Alessandra Russo's A New Antiquity 16.09.2024 29dk

  In episode six of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400–1600 by Alessandra Russo. Original and convincing, A New Antiquity is a pathbreaking study that disrupts existing conceptions of Renaissance art and early modern humanity.
• Ana Fernández-Cebrián's Fables of Development 09.09.2024 28dk

  In episode five of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967) by Ana Fernández-Cebrián. This book examines cultural fictions and social life at the time when Spain turned from autarchy to the project of industrial and tourist development.
• Anoordha Iyer Siddiqi's Architecture of Migration 26.08.2024 33dk

  In episode four of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives.
• Ellen Morris's Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt 19.08.2024 29dk

  In episode three of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt by Ellen Morris. This work covers the creation and curation of social memory in pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt. Ancient, Classical, Medieval, and Ottoman sources attest to the horror that characterized catastrophic famines.
• Ryan Carr's Samson Occom 12.08.2024 30dk

  In episode two of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast by Ryan Carr. In this groundbreaking book, Ryan Carr argues that Occom’s writings were deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions of hospitality, diplomacy, and openness to strangers
• Eleanor Johnson's Waste and the Wasters 05.08.2024 31dk

  In episode one of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Eleanor Johnson's Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England. The latest from the new SOF/Heyman board member is a groundbreaking examination of ecological thought in medieval England.
• Marie Myung-Ok Lee's The Evening Hero 11.09.2023 32dk

  In episode nine of the second season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Marie Myung-Ok Lee's The Evening Hero. This sweeping, lyrical novel follows a Korean immigrant pursuing the American dream who must confront the secrets of the past or risk watching the world he’s worked so hard to build come crumbling down.
• Sarah Zukerman Daly's Violent Victors 05.09.2023 30dk

  In episode eight of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Sarah Zukerman Daly's Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections. Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, Violent Victors links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war.
• Annie Pfeifer's To The Collector Belong The Spoils 28.08.2023 32dk

  In episode seven of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation by Annie Pfeifer. Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past.
• Michele M Moody-Adams's Making Space For Justice 21.08.2023 29dk

  Michele M Moody-Adams's Making Space For Justice In episode six of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope by Michele M Moody-Adams. With this work, Dr. Moody-Adams contends that the insights arising from social movements are critical to bridging the gap between discerning theory and effective practice—and should be transformative for political thought as well as for political activism.
• Lauren Robertson's Entertaining Uncertainty In The Early Modern Theatre 14.08.2023 29dk

  In episode five of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater: Stage Spectacle and Audience Response by Lauren Robertson. This original study shows that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries responded to the crises of knowledge that roiled through early modern England by rendering them spectacular.
• Bruce Robbins's Criticism and Politics 07.08.2023 31dk

  In episode four of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Bruce Robbins's Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction. This accessible introduction to cultural theory asks, "What is criticism for?" and presents an answer in the form of an original polemic about the purpose of criticism.
• Andreas Huyssen's Memory Art in the Contemporary World 31.07.2023 30dk

  In episode three of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Andreas Huyssen's Memory Art in the Contemporary World: Confronting Violence in the Global South. Andreas Huyssen deals with the ever-expanding field of transnational memory art, which has emerged from a political need to come to terms with traumatic historical pasts, from the Holocaust to apartheid, colonialism, state terror, and civil war.
• Nadia Abu El-Haj's Combat Trauma 24.07.2023 29dk

  In episode two of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Nadia Abu El-Haj's Combat Trauma. Nadia Abu El-Haj argues that in the American public’s imagination, the traumatized soldier stands in for destructive wars abroad, with decisive ramifications in the post-9/11 era.