Moving between shower drains, aqueducts, rain gardens, and even kitchen sinks, Replumbing the City: Water Management as Climate Adaptation in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2025) traces the enormous urban waterscape of Los Angeles in a state of flux. For more than a century, the city of Los Angeles has relied on faraway water for the …

How are David Lynch's films as much in dialogue with literary and musical traditions as they are cinematic ones? By interrogating this question, David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2025) broadens the interpretive horizons of Lynch's filmography, calling for a new approach to Lynch's films that goes beyond cinem…

In Nazi Billionnaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (Mariner Books, 2022), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it. In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch…

Spies In My Blood: A Polish Family’s Secret Fight Against Nazis & Communists (Polestar-Media, 2025) is the true story of two brothers raised in New York by WWII exiles and their journey to Poland. Each takes a different path to infiltrate the Communist secret police on a mission to uncover the truth about their family of soldiers, spies, and assass…

One small town, two "thousand-year floods" in the span of two years: how does a community become resilient in the face of the ever-increasing risks of climate change? Small towns across America and around the world face mounting challenges with flood risk, a result of not only climate change but also poorly adapted landscapes, sprawl, overdevelopme…

Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration (Purdue UP, 2025) discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre. Babyn Yar is one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union and modern Ukraine, where the Nazis and their collaborators killed virtually all the Jews who remained…

On the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, renowned choreographer and director Bill T. Jones developed three tributes: Serenade/The Proposition, 100 Migrations, and Fondly Do We Hope . . . Fervently Do We Pray. These widely acclaimed dance works incorporated video and audio text from Lincoln's writings as they examined key moments in his …

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 7-9. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the question of when in a rebellion must you break cover and insist - publicly - on the truth. We see a second major theme of this arc as discipline. The rebellion is moving from a para-military to a mi…

What would a rodeo open to anyone and everyone look like? In their new book, Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo (U Washington, 2023), history professors Elyssa Ford (Northwest Missouri State) and Rebecca Scofield (University of Idaho) argue that the International Gay Rodeo Associaton (IGRA) provides a template. Founded in the 1970s as…

In this episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Kern Carter about his acclaimed YA novel, Boys and Girls Screaming (Dancing Cat Books, 2022). About the book: When Ever's father passes away suddenly, she is devastated. Not long after that, her mom has a stroke and Ever's anguish becomes almost too much for her to handle. That's when she gets th…

As they compete in leagues around the world, elite women’s basketball players continually adjust to new cultures, rules, and contracts. Courtney M. Cox follows athletes, coaches, journalists, and advocates of women’s basketball as they pursue careers within the sport. Despite all attempts to contain them or prevent forward momentum, they circumvent…

About 100 years ago, prominent psychologists Stanley Smith Stevens, Edward Tolman and Clark Hull spearheaded the idea of linking psychological concepts, such as “memory”, to specific experimental designs. In Operationism in Psychology: An Epistemology of Exploration (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Uljana Feest offers a rich analysis of this li…

How can urban housing, and the land underneath, now account for half of all global wealth? According to Patrick Condon, the simple answer is that land has become an asset rather than a utility. If the rich only indulged themselves with gold, jewels, and art, we wouldn’t have a global housing crisis. But once global capital markets realized land was…

In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, Tarin Ahmed, the host, is joined by guest, William Jennings, a senior lecturer in French at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, and author of Dibia's World.: Life on an Early Sugar Plantation (Liverpool UP, 2023). William discusses the importance of names, voice and the community life of a hundred …

Learn how to take an apolitical, unbiased stance to support students as they pursue research, literature connections, maker activities, and civic engagement projects in their communities, nationally, and globally. In Youth Social Action in the Library: Cultivating Change Makers (Bloombury, 2025), Gina Seymour outlines school and public library prog…

Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon (2024) is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Situated in the state of Acre, which continuously had to grapple with a complex positionality between frontier and periphery, Maron E. Greenleaf explor…

Join me for a fascinating conversation with one of today’s leading voices in environmental studies, Daniel Macfarlane, as we explore his new book The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Please see the description of the book below, then tune in to hear Dr. Macfarlane share the insights, research,…

The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway marked a foundational moment in the history of automotive racing. Events at the famed track and others like it also helped launch America's love affair with cars and an embrace of road systems that transformed cities and shrank perceptions of space. Brian Ingrassia tells the story of the legendary…

There is much that ordinary Ukrainians do not know about Jews and that ordinary Jews do not know about Ukrainians. As a result, those Jews and Ukrainians who may care about their respective ancestral heritages usually view each other through distorted stereotypes, misperceptions, and biases. This book sheds new light on highly controversial moments…

This week on International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey interviews historian Tara Zahra, author of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (W.W. Norton, 2023). Zahra reflects on the historical parallels between the current backlash against globalization and the anti-globalist movements of the interwar period…

In My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America (Princeton University Press, 2025), Ruth Braunstein maps the contested moral landscape in which Americans experience and make sense of the tax system. Braunstein tells the stories of Americans who view taxpaying as more than a mundane chore: antigovernment tax defiers who challenge the legitim…

In their fourth edition of Watching TV: American Television Season by Season (Syracuse University Press, 2025), Harry Castleman and Walter Podrazik present a season-by-season narrative that encompasses the eras of American television from the beginning in broadcast, through cable, and now streaming. They deftly navigate the dizzying array of contem…

Join me for a conversation with Dr. Seulghee Lee (Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, University of South Carolina) about his recently published book, Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (Ohio State UP, 2025). Some topics of our discussion include Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings (2007), Gayl Jones…

A tech insider explains how capitalism and software development make for such a dangerous mix. Software was supposed to radically improve society. Outdated mechanical systems would be easily replaced; programs like PowerPoint would make information flow more freely; social media platforms like Facebook would bring people together; and generative AI…

In Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights (Duke University Press 2024), Lara Montesinos Coleman blends ethnography, political philosophy, and critical theory to reorient debates on human rights through attention to understandings of legality, ethics, and humanity in anticapitalist and decolonial struggle. Drawing on he…

Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in 20th and 21st Century East Asia (Brill, 2024) explores the visual culture of national recollection in modern and contemporary East Asia by emphasizing memories that are under the continuous process of construction, reinforcement, alteration, resistance, and contestation. Expanding the disc…

Dr. Catherine Hartmann is Assistant Professor of Asian Religions in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at University of Wyoming. She received her B.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia in 2011, M.A. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago in 2013, and a Ph.D. from the Committee on the Study of R…

How players evoke personal and subjective meanings through a new theory of player response. In The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully (MIT Press, 2025), Tracy Fullerton and Matthew Farber explore the experiences we have when we play games: not the outcomes of play or the aesthetics of formal game structures but the ephemeral and emotional expe…