Author: Carla Nappi

Podcasts

The Edge of Knowing: An Interview

Roy Bing Chan’s new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period through the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. Informed by theoretical engagements with Russian Formalism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, affect studies, and more, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese … Continue reading The Edge of Knowing: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

Placing Outer Space: An Interview

What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri’s new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and helps us understand why that matters not just for how we understand outer space, but also for how we understand the Earth and ourselves. Based on 15 months of participant observation in 2009 and 2010 … Continue reading Placing Outer Space: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History: An Interview

In The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Timothy Cheek offers a magisterial intellectual history of modern China that maps the changing terrain of intellectual life over a century so that the reader can place a particular figure, idea, or debate sensibly, helping the reader track different times, social worlds, and key concepts. It’s a wonderful book for readers of all sorts, and you … Continue reading The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
News

Metagestures

Dominic Pettman and I have spent the last year and a half (or so) conducting an experiment born out of a series of related questions: As a writer, what can it look like to meaningfully engage theory? As we respond to a work of cultural theory, what might fiction writing help us understand, see, and make that straight-up academic theory writing might not offer? Thus was … Continue reading Metagestures

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan: An Interview

Were women a problem in early modern Japan? If they were, what was the nature of the problem they posed? For whom, and why? Marcia Yonemoto‘s new book explores these questions in a compelling study that brings together the public discourse on women in the Tokugawa period (including prescriptive literature, instruction manuals for women, representations of women in fiction and drama, woodblock prints, and book illustrations) … Continue reading The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
Podcasts

The Dancing Bees: An Interview

Tania Munz‘s new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as experimental, communicating creatures. The Dancing Bees: Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language (University of Chicago Press, 2016) alternates between chapters that take us into the work and life of a fascinating scientist amid the Nazi rise to … Continue reading The Dancing Bees: An Interview

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi
News

Long time no post! Plus, What History Could Have Been 3…

Happy it’s-almost-summer, everyone! This is mostly a post to wave hello-again-nice-to-see-you-again as the website and I emerge from the fog of the academic year. I’ll be back to updating the site regularly from here on out, posting from Berlin as I finish a book manuscript and start a new project this summer. In the meantime, here’s a thing: I’ll be part of a small group … Continue reading Long time no post! Plus, What History Could Have Been 3…

Unknown's avatarCarla Nappi