Springtime at The Elizabeths is a time for love stories. The newest history by Elizabeth Sanders (historian of liquid) is now available. You can find it by heading over to The History of Rain. For more on The Elizabeths, an ongoing experiment in conjectural sensual historiography, check out the main project site. Continue reading The History of Rain: A Little Story
The newest story by Elizabeth Woodfall (historian of wind) is now available, and you can find it by heading over to The History of Shivers. For more on The Elizabeths, an ongoing experiment in conjectural sensual historiography, check out the main project site. Continue reading The History of Shivers: A Little Story
A new post in the “Translating Recipes” series just went up on The Recipes Project. This one is a further exploration of the power of between-ness and Manchu medical recipes. It’s part 2 of 3, and you can check it out by heading over here. Continue reading Translating Recipes: Between, Pt. 2
Anna L. Tsing’s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a “riot of short chapters” that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a “third nature,” or “what manages to live despite … Continue reading The Mushroom at the End of the World: An Interview
After reading Natasha Myers’s new book, the world begins to dance in new ways. Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is a sensory ethnography of protein crystallographers that is based on five years of fieldwork conducted between 2003-2008 at a research university on the East Coast of the US. “Protein modelers are the scientists to watch in order to see what forms … Continue reading Rendering Life Molecular: An Interview
The new edited volume by Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black, and Dagmar Schaefer is a wonderfully interdisciplinary global history of rice, rooted in specific local cases, that spans 15 chapters written by specialists in the histories of Africa, the Americas, and several regions of Asia. Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University Press, 2015) creates a conversation among regional and disciplinary modes of studying and narrating rice histories that have often been conducted … Continue reading Rice: An Interview
Christopher Rea’s new book explores five kinds of laughter that emerged from the tumultuous first decades of China’s twentieth century: jokes, play, mockery, farce, and humor. The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (University of California Press, 2015) takes a playful approach to approaching play – it’s not every book of Chinese history and literature that comes with a blurb by Eric Idle … Continue reading The Age of Irreverence: An Interview
Eugene Thacker’s wonderful Horror of Philosophy series includes three books – In the Dust of this Planet (Zero Books, 2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (Zero Books, 2015), and Tentacles Longer than Night (Zero Books, 2015) – that collectively explore the relationship between philosophy (especially as it overlaps with demonology, occultism, and mysticism) and horror (especially of the supernatural sort). Each book takes on a particular problematic using a particular form from the history of philosophy, … Continue reading Horror of Philosophy: An Interview
In late imperial China, how did local elites connect with and influence the central government? How was local information made and managed? How did the state incorporate frontier areas into the empire? How were books produced and read, and by whom? In his new book, Joseph R. Dennis helps answer these questions and more by studying the genre of local gazetteers. Focusing on the Ming period, Writing, Publishing, … Continue reading Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers: An Interview
Dana Simmons’s marvelous and thoughtful new book takes on a question that many of us likely take for granted: “What is a need; what is a want, a desire, a luxury?” Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2015) offers an answer that emerges from and is embedded in the particular historical context of nineteenth century France, but has consequences that range … Continue reading Vital Minimum: An Interview
Carla Nappi 