MSU Press Podcast

The first and most prolific professional architect to live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, D. Fred Charlton used Lake Superior sandstone to craft distinctive buildings throughout the UP. Born in England and trained as a civil engineer, Charlton arrived in Detroit in the late 1870s. There he sought work as a draftsman. Like many of his peers, Charlton had no formal training as an architect, and he learned his trade at several prominent firms. In 1887, Scott & Company sent him to Marquette to open a branch office. Three years later, Charlton opened his own firm, and over the next twenty-eight years, he designed more than four hundred buildings, including residences, commercial structures, schools, courthouses, and churches throughout the region. These buildings offer valuable insights both into the tastes of Americans before the World War I and into the evolution of the architectural profession. Deftly adapting national trends, Charlton provided Upper Peninsula communities with modern structures worthy of any place in the nation. Many of his buildings remain to this day, monuments to the skill of this English-born architect who made a place for himself upon the shores of Lake Superior. Architectural Missionary is a fascinating and informative history of Charlton’s work and of architecture in the upper Midwest.

Steven C. Brisson to discuss the life and work of D. Fred Charlton. Brisson is the director of Mackinac State Historic Parks, vice chair of the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History, and a former board member of the Michigan Humanities Council.

Architectural Missionary is available at msupress.org  and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg—Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

During the German Occupation from 1940 to 1944, Resistance fighters, Parisian youth, and French prisoners of war mined a vast repertoire from a long national musical tradition and a burgeoning international entertainment industry, embracing music as a rhetorical resource with which to destabilize Nazi ideology and contest collaborationist Vichy propaganda. After the Liberation of 1944, popular music continued to mediate French political life, helping citizens to challenge American hegemony and recuperate their nation’s lost international standing.

Ultimately, through song, French dissidents rejected Nazi subordination, the politics of collaboration, and American intervention and insisted upon a return to that trinity of traditional French values, liberté, egalité, fraternité. Strains of Dissent recovers the significance of music as a rhetorical means of survival, subversion, and national identity construction and illuminates the creative and cunning ways that individual citizens defied the Occupation outside of formal resistance networks and movements.  

Kelly Jakes is Assistant Professor in the department of communication at the College of Charleston. Her research focuses on rhetoric and culture, with special attention to social movements, resistance, and music. In her work, she examines how marginalized or dissident citizens use verbal and nonverbal discourse to build solidarity, reassign political authority, and contest norms of national identity, gender, race, and class.

Dr. Jake’s book Strain’s of Dissent: Popular Music and Everyday Resistance in WWII France, 1940-1945 is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Nothing is off-limits in Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security. This ultimately American text positions big ideas in public spaces, often discovering the absurdity and humor in such connections. Johnson makes poetry of the dizzying influences affecting the post-postmodern American, skipping whimsically from the Pixies to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” from the Confederate flag to unisex public toilets, from eggplant emojis to Vladimir Putin stealing Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring. Rich in voice and character, Smuggling Elephants through Airport Security collects observations that provide a succinct feel for the twenty-first-century American zeitgeist. 

Brad Johnson’s first full-length poetry collection, The Happiness Theory, was published in 2013, and his work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, J Journal, and whole host of other publications.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa is an original and provocative study of contemporary African film and literature. In the book, Vlad Dima investigates how football and cinema express individual and collective fantasies. Shedding new light on both well-known and less familiar films, The Beautiful Skin asks just whose fantasy is articulated in football and African cinema. Answering this question leads Dima to explore body and identity issues through the metaphor of skin: fantasy as a skin; the football jersey as a skin; and ultimately film itself as a skin that has visual, aural, and haptic qualities. In the neocolonial context, the body is often depicted as suffering through processes of being flattened or emptied out. So frequently do African cinema and literature reproduce this image of the hollowed body, the body of all skin, as it were, that it comes to define neocolonialism. Throughout this book, Dima seeks to answer whether the body of film—the depth of both characters and story within the cinematic skin—could carry us into the post-neocolonial era, an era defined by “full” bodies and personal affirmation. 

Vlad Dima is Professor of African Cultural Studies and French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Sonic Space in Diop Mambety’s Films and numerous articles, mainly on French and francophone cinemas, but also on francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television. His third book, “Meaning-Less-Ness in Postcolonial Cinema” is also forthcoming from MSU Press.

The Beautiful Skin: Football, Fantasy, and Cinematic Bodies in Africa is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

In China today, the party-state increasingly penetrates commercial social media while aspiring to turn its own media agencies into platforms. Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, Engaging Social Media in China, edited by my guest Guobin Yang and Wei WAng, shows the complexity behind the central role the party-state plays in shaping social media platforms. State-sponsored platformization, however, does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party’s desired outcomes. Citizens continue to appropriate social media for creative public engagement at the same time as more people are managing their online settings to reduce or refuse connection, inducing new forms of crafted resistance to hyper-social media connectivity. 

The wide-ranging essays presented in this volume explore the mobile radio service Ximalaya.FM, Alibaba’s evolution into a multi-platform ecosystem, livestreaming platforms, the role of Twitter in Trump’s North Korea diplomacy, user-generated content in the news media, social media art projects, and the reluctance to engage with WeChat, among other concerns. Ultimately, readers will find that the ten chapters in this volume contribute significant new research and insights to the fast-growing scholarship on social media in China at a time when online communication is increasingly constrained by international struggles over political control and privacy issues. 

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. There he directs the Center on Digital Culture and Society and serves as deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016) and the award-winning book The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009). He is also the editor or coeditor of four other books, including Media Activism in the Digital Age (2017) and China's Contested Internet (2015).

Engaging Social Media in China: Platforms, Publics, and Production is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Goubin is on Twitter @yangguobin. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Ending a war, as Fred Charles Iklé wrote, poses a much greater challenge than beginning one. In addition to issues related to battle tactics, prisoners of war, diplomatic relations, and cease-fire negotiations, ending war involves domestic political calculations as well. Balancing tides of public opinion against policy needs poses a deep and enduring problem for presidents.

In this first-of-its-kind study, Resowing the Seeds of War explains how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Obama managed the political, policy, and bureaucratic challenges that arise at the end of war via a series of rhetorical choices that reframe, modify, or unravel depictions of national enemies, the cause of the conflict, and the stakes for the nation and world. This end-of-war rhetoric justifies ending hostilities, rationalizes postwar national policy, argues for the construction of postwar security arrangements, and often sustains public support for massive financial investment in reconstruction.

By tracking presidential manipulations of savage imagery from World War II to the War on Terror, Resowing the Seeds of War concludes that even as metaphoric reframing facilitates exit from conflict, the same rhetorical gestures incur unexpected consequences that make national involvement in the next conflict more likely. 

Stephen J. Heidt has taught at Florida Atlantic University, California Lutheran University, and California State University, Northridge, focusing on the form and function of presidential rhetoric in policy deliberation. He has published in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, the Southern Communication Journal, and a number of edited volumes.

Resowing the Seeds of War: Presidential Peace Rhetoric since 1945 is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Stephen is @sjhrhetoric on Twitter. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

The Resistance Network is the history of an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria who helped save the lives of thousands during the Armenian Genocide. The book challenges depictions of Armenians as passive victims of violence and subjects of humanitarianism, demonstrating the key role they played in organizing a humanitarian resistance against the destruction of their people. Piecing together hundreds of accounts, official documents, and missionary records, Mouradian presents a social history of genocide and resistance in wartime Aleppo and a network of transit and concentration camps stretching from Bab to Ras ul-Ain and Der Zor. He ultimately argues that, despite the violent and systematic mechanisms of control and destruction in the cities, concentration camps, and massacre sites in this region, the genocide of the Armenians did not progress unhindered—unarmed resistance proved an important factor in saving countless lives.

Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University, and the editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Armenian Review. In 2020, Dr. Mouradian was awarded a Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant from Columbia University.

The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918 is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. Khatchig is on Twitter @khatcho and he’s also available on Facebook and Instagram. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

A landmark in our understanding of international community-engaged learning programs, Community Engagement Abroad invites educators to rethink everything from disciplinary assumptions to the role of higher education in a globalizing world. Tapping the many such programs developed at Michigan State University during the last half-century, the volume develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing study-abroad programs with a community-engagement focus. More than a how-to guide, it also offers seven theoretically framed case studies showing how these experiences can change students, faculty, and communities alike. The book’s authors take readers on a fascinating journey through how they changed as a result of designing and delivering programs in full collaboration with community partners, and as a whole the delivers powerful, persuasive arguments for developing truly reciprocal, mutually beneficial partnerships beyond the academy.

Pat Crawford is the director of the School of Design at South Dakota State University and former Associate Director of Planning, Design, and Construction at Michigan State University. Brett Berquist leads international strategy and operations as director international at the University of Auckland.

Community Engagement Abroad: Perspectives and Practices on Service, Engagement, and Learning Overseas is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with Brett on Twitter @bberquist. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Writing That Breaks Stones: African Child Soldier Narratives is a critical examination of six memoirs and six novels written by and about young adults from Africa who were once child soldiers. It analyzes both how such narratives document human rights violations and how they connect and disconnect from their readers in the global public sphere. It draws on literary scholarship about novels and memoirs, as well as on fieldwork conducted by social scientists about African children in combat situations. The six memoirs analyzed in Writing That Breaks Stones focus on a lone individual’s struggles in a hostile environment, and they use repetition, logical contradictions, narrative breaks, and reversals of binaries in order to tell their stories. By contrast, the novels use narrative ambiguity, circularity, fragmentation, and notions of dystopia in ways that call attention to the child soldiers’ communities and environments. All twelve narratives depict the child soldier’s agency and culpability somewhat ambiguously, effectively reflecting the ethical dilemmas of African children in combat.

JOYA URAIZEE is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of English at Saint Louis University in Missouri. She is the author of This Is No Place for a Woman: Nadine Gordimer, Nayantara Saghal, Buchi Emecheta and the Politics of Gender (2000) and In the Jaws of the Leviathan: Genocide Fiction and Film (2010).

Writing That Breaks Stones: African Child Soldier Narratives is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.

Thank you all so much for listening, and never give up books.

Selected by Mark Doty for the 2019 Wheelbarrow Books prize, Derek Sheffield’s Not for Luck ushers us into the beauty and grace that comes from giving attention to the interconnections that make up our lives. Through encounters with a herd of deer, a circle of salmon in a mountain creek, and a shiny-eyed wood rat, these poems offer moments of wonder that celebrate our place as one species among many on our only earth. Sheffield is also the author of Through the Second Skin, and he is coeditor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, poetry editor of Terrain.org, and a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College.

A stunning and visceral debut, Noah Davis’s Of this River ushers in a new era of poems from the Allegheny region of Appalachia. In striking stories and scenes, Davis portrays the spiritual cost of deep poverty, the necessity to ask for forgiveness, and the joy in praising the beauty still found in the steep hollows. These poems will cling to you like water on the soles of your boots. Noah Davis grew up in Tipton, Pennsylvania, and writes about the Allegheny Front. His poems and prose have appeared in Best New Poets, Orion Magazine, North American Review, River Teeth Journal, Sou'wester, and Chautauqua, among others.

Of this River and Not for Luck are both available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Derrek on Facebook and at dereksheffield.com. Noah is on Instagram @n.davis21. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on Twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to the team at MSU Press for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi people. The University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.