I recently had the pleasure of talking with Dave Spafford about his great new book on the production of space (all kinds of space!) in late medieval Japan. It was great fun, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading A Sense of Place: An Interview
I had the pleasure of talking with Andrea Goldman about her wonderful study of opera in late Qing Beijing. It’s a rich book full of nuanced readings of some great historical documents, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Opera and the City: An Interview
Darryl Flaherty and I recently talked about his fascinating new study of nineteenth-century legal culture in Japan, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Public Law, Private Practice: An Interview
Timothy Brook’s beautifully written new book explores the secrets of a map in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. I recently had the pleasure of talking with Tim about it for New Books in History, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading Mr. Selden’s Map of China: An Interview
Sunil Amrith and I recently had the chance to talk about his fascinating new book on the (environmental, political, cultural, social) history of the Bay of Bengal in the maritime world. It’s great work, it was a pleasure to talk about it, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading Crossing the Bay of Bengal: An Interview
David Novak and I recently talked about his awesome new book on noise, Japan, music, and global circulation. It’s a thoughtful study and a pleasure to read, and you can listen to our conversation about it here. Continue reading Japanoise: An Interview
It was a pleasure to talk with Conevery Bolton Valencius about her new book on the making and forgetting of knowledge surrounding a series of earthquakes that rocked the Mississippi Valley in the 19th century. It’s a great story about the history of early American science, with particularly awesome footnotes, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes: An Interview
I recently spoke with Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott about their new edited volume full of great essays that each look at the history and ethnography of addiction from a fresh and interesting perspective. You can find our conversation here. Continue reading Addiction Trajectories: An Interview
Bill Clancey’s great new book explores the nature of exploration itself, in the context of a rich ethnographic study of the scientists and engineers of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions. It was a pleasure to talk with him, and you can find our conversation here. Continue reading Working on Mars: An Interview
Ian Bogost’s wonderful book introduces readers to the field of object-oriented ontology by asking us to consider a fundamental question: why do we ignore “stuff” in scholarship, poetry, science, or business as anything more than a way to continue talking about humans? Is there a way to think and live with stuff in the world that doesn’t reduce it to that which concerns people, but instead … Continue reading Alien Phenomenology: An Interview
Carla Nappi 