2073 Micro Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators

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David Livingstone Smith

Making Monsters is about the phenomenon of dehumanization, a phenomenon that is implicated in the most hideous acts that human beings have inflicted upon one another. Perpetrators of mass violence...

Making Monsters - In a nutshell
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church in Los Angeles was suing for the return...

The Missing Pages - In a nutshell
Clare Palmer

I’d like a casual reader to start at the beginning, with the Introduction. That’s because in the Introduction, using recent media stories, I set up the key debate I pursue...

Animal Ethics in Context - A close-up
Frank A. Guridy

Since childhood, I have been passionate about sports. I played baseball in my youth, but I am embarrassed to admit that I was—and still am—a sports geek who could recite...

The Sports Revolution - The wide angle
Thomas J. Schaeper

Edward Bancroft’s story offers new perspectives on a variety of topics: the history of espionage, French involvement in the American Revolution, the operation of the British government, and the character...

Edward Bancroft - The wide angle
Dagmar Herzog

The book arcs from the waning of Victorianism to the collapse of Communism and the rise of European Islam. Throughout, it investigates the shifting fortunes of prostitution and marriage, of...

Sexuality in Europe - The wide angle
Kendall Hoyt

The ability to develop new vaccines quickly is essential to national security and public health. Historically, the U.S. has excelled at responding to national health emergencies. World War II-era programs...

Long Shot - In a nutshell
Kevin Mattson

I want a reader to enter a truly bizarre world: America in 1979. It was a period of disco and disco demolition, cocaine and divorce, an Iranian revolution and oil...

What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? Jimmy Carter, America’s “Malaise,” and the Speech ... - In a nutshell
Philip G. Cerny

My own trajectory has taken a number of twists and turns.In the introduction, I mention only one of the many people who have influenced my own thought—a professor who at...

Rethinking World Politics - The wide angle
Jason Pine

I’m an anthropologist but I’ve struggled with the discipline since I began studying it in the 1980s. That was a time when some anthropologists were focusing on the taken-for-granted medium...

The Alchemy of Meth - The wide angle
Serena R. Zabin

In Dangerous Economies, I explain a shocking moment in eighteenth-century America. 250 years ago, New York was gripped by a terrible fear: that resident slaves were conspiring to torch the...

Dangerous Economies - In a nutshell
Kyle Parry

I love the question about what I’d want a “just-browsing” reader to encounter first, because it’s imagining a reader who hasn’t yet gotten into the book’s “story.” They’re just trying...

A Theory of Assembly - A close-up
Henry A. Giroux

Youth in a Suspect Society takes as its major organizing idea the notion that youth are under assault in ways that are entirely new. My assumption is that young people...

Youth in a Suspect Society - The wide angle
Gary Y. Okihiro

Plucked from tropical America, the pineapple was brought to European tables and hothouses before it was conveyed back to the tropics, where it came to dominate U.S. and world markets....

Pineapple Culture - In a nutshell
Emily Skidmore

True Sex discusses the lives of eighteen individuals who were assigned female at birth but who lived as male in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. By...

True Sex - In a nutshell
Mary Roberts

I hope a reader who stumbles across this book might initially be drawn to the visual richness of this art and then engaged by their cross-cultural narratives. These images are...

Istanbul Exchanges - A close-up
Ho-fung Hung

I hope any browsing reader will spend time with the many figures showing Hong Kong’s financial centrality in the Chinese economy that can be found in the chapter about Hong...

City on the Edge - A close-up
Gary Stuart

The book looks at how people form the different political worlds in which they live. Perhaps we agree, in a broad sense, on what it means to be an “American.”...

Innocent Until Interrogated - The wide angle
Jennifer M. Barker

The full-bodied, mutual suffusion of film and viewer is illustrated graphically and literally by The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1901). The film begins with a medium-long shot of a gentleman...

The Tactile Eye - A close-up
Philip Goodchild

Capital growth begins with borrowing for investment. For all economic activity is limited by the supply of money: there is always so much more that could be done, if only...

Theology of Money - A close-up
Deborah Cohen

The idea that interiors reveal personalities is such a truism of contemporary culture that it is difficult to imagine that it was not always so. While the well-to-do in previous...

Household Gods - A close-up
Warren I. Cohen

A Nation Like All Others is a history of American foreign relations from 1776 to the present; it also a critique of the idea of American exceptionalism; and it laments...

A Nation Like All Others - In a nutshell
William J. Cook

A home of TSP studies is the field of applied mathematics known as operations research. The focus of the field is the creation of methods to improve decision making, in...

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman - The wide angle
Farzana Shaikh

The main idea of my book, Making Sense of Pakistan, is that we need first and foremost to make sense of the country’s identity crisis.This crisis, I argue, is rooted...

Making Sense of Pakistan - In a nutshell
George W. Breslauer

The rise and demise of world communism was one of the great dramas of the 20th century. It was born in wars (World War I, World II), and offered an...

The Rise and Demise of World Communism - In a nutshell
Sylvia Lavin

One of the most compelling themes in contemporary art theory is the controversy surrounding the question of “medium specificity.” That is, whether or not anything but habit and convention determine...

Kissing Architecture - The wide angle
Lydia G. Fash

I risk undercutting my argument that short fiction needs more attention by saying this, but for most readers, the easiest chapter to dive into will be the final chapter about...

The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature - A close-up
Chelsie Yount

Signs from the Future originates from my earlier works—Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017), and Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of...

Selective Solidarity - The wide angle
Alastair Bonnett

In the early 1990s I got involved with one of the more outré forms of geography, known as psychogeography. This involved a lot of unplanned, drifting walks and purposely getting...

Beyond the Map - The wide angle
Bruce Gordon

The biography seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Calvin’s character; to illuminate how heady interaction with influential friends and enemies, unexpected events, and spiritual and intellectual growth shaped the...

Calvin - The wide angle
Stephen DeStefano

The preface provides a perspective for the book, as well as an explanation of the structure of each chapter, so that might be the appropriate place to start browsing.The prologue...

Coyote at the Kitchen Door - A close-up
E. Paul Zehr

Becoming Batman is an examination of a superhero. I was trying to answer a simple question: Is it actually possible for any human to attain the skills and abilities of...

Becoming Batman - In a nutshell
Abraham F. Lowenthal

Global California discusses what Californians can do to identify and promote their own interests in a rapidly changing world. It takes up such thorny issues as globalization, trade, infrastructure, immigration,...

Global California - The wide angle
Anne Dunlop

There wasn’t one moment when the book started to take shape in my mind, but I’ve been thinking about it, off and on, since I was a student. If you...

Painted Palaces - The wide angle
Thomas Wheatland

My book aims to challenge what I consider to be some pervasive views about the Frankfurt School during its period of exile in the United States and to re-evaluate the...

The Frankfurt School in Exile - In a nutshell
Frederick Luis Aldama

The study of mind through cognitive science and the findings of neurobiology have shed very interesting light on the way comic books are produced and read. I find this fascinating...

Your Brain on Latino Comics - In a nutshell
Andrew Scull

Madness is something whose mysteries puzzle us still. The loss of reason, the sense of alienation from the common sense world the rest of us imagine we inhabit, the shattering...

Madness in Civilization - In a nutshell
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly

This book examines the huge number of artistic representations of women warriors that exist in German from the Renaissance to the present—on the stage, in the opera house, on the...

Beauty or Beast? The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present - In a nutshell
Peter Y. Paik

I had not undertaken any scholarly studies of science fiction or popular culture prior to writing this book—my graduate work had focused on the aesthetics of literary modernism. But the...

From Utopia to Apocalypse - The wide angle
Cormac Ó Gráda

I am an economic historian whose academic training was in economics. For over two decades, I have been writing books and articles in the professional academic journals about the Great...

Famine - The wide angle
Louis A. Perez, Jr.

A prospective reader drawn by happenstance would do well to open the book to p. 175 and proceed to look through the chapter “On Gratitude as Moral Currency of Empire.”...

Cuba in the American Imagination - A close-up
Paul Wapner

I would want a casual reader to focus on the last chapter, “Being an Environmentalist: Decisive Uncertainty and the Future of American Environmentalism.”Here I explain that, without nature, environmentalism becomes...

Living through the End of Nature - A close-up
Jeff Allred

When you hear the words “Great Depression,” certain images pop up: a mother hugging her child on a windswept plain, a hand clutching a tin plate, unemployed men standing in...

American Modernism and Depression Documentary - In a nutshell
Eric Gordon

I started writing this book as part of my graduate work in media studies. I was interested in cities and found myself attracted to how cities were represented in films....

The Urban Spectator - The wide angle
Heather Cox Richardson

While the final paragraph of the introduction is perhaps the best synopsis of the book’s argument (page 18), my favorite paragraph in the book is on page 277.This paragraph tells...

Wounded Knee - A close-up
Peter Lamont

If you pick up the book, then you’ll probably begin at the beginning:In the Old Town of Edinburgh, many years ago, there was a shop that sold curiosities.Every day, as people walked by the shop, they looked in the window. They looked at the curious things...

Radical Thinking - A close-up
Susan L. Marquis

Although this effort began in Florida’s tomato fields, the Coalition and the Fair Food Program are providing a model for worker-driven social responsibility that could transform American agriculture, with potential...

I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won - The wide angle
Paul Wapner

I would want a casual reader to focus on the last chapter, “Being an Environmentalist: Decisive Uncertainty and the Future of American Environmentalism.”Here I explain that, without nature, environmentalism becomes...

Living through the End of Nature - A close-up
Garrett L. Brandon

Consider the 1982 “bite mark case” in Newport News, Virginia, that resulted in a murder conviction and death sentence for Keith Allen Harward, who was incarcerated for 33 years before...

Autopsy of a Crime Lab - A close-up
Larry Wolff

A fascinating cast of characters populate the pages of the book—individuals who contributed to shaping the idea of Galicia over the course of two centuries.I write about Habsburg emperors like...

The Idea of Galicia - A close-up

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