Dr. David Graves is a philosopher, artist, musician and author. He helped found the Academic College of Tel Aviv, where he is Senior Lecturer in Art and Philosophy. In this exciting interview, he talks about his recent book New Realism in Contemporary Israeli Painting (Austin Macauley, 2023), and shares insight on what is true and real about the world we live in, the stories we tell, and the worlds we create.

About the book: Art today can be whatever one wants it to be: a rotting cadaver, a photograph of someone else's photograph, a banana... In this post-modern age of post-truth, of social media and the selfie, when everyone has a high-resolution digital camera at their fingertips, one wonders what would possess a talented artist to sit for days, weeks, often months, to paint a portrait of a friend or a landscape of home. Today, a group of 20 or so remarkable painters have revived a fascinating style of realistic painting, and in Israel of all places, where realistic art has never played any significant role. Their brand of realism is not mundane photographic realism, but rather it is an intensified sort of realism, a kind of hyper-realism. This book offers an initial explanation as to what these artists are doing, and how they are doing it.

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In recent years, manga and anime have attracted increasing scholarly interest beyond the realm of Japanese studies. This Companion takes a unique approach, committed to exploring both the similarities and differences between these two distinct but interrelated media forms. Firmly based in Japanese sources, The Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime (Cambridge UP, 2024) offers a lively and accessible introduction, exploring the local contexts of manga and anime production, distribution, and reception in Japan, as well as the global influence and impact of these versatile media. Chapters explore common characteristics such as visuals, voice, serial narrative and characters, whilst also highlighting distinct challenges and histories. The volume provides both a basis for further research in this burgeoning field and a source of inspiration for those new to the topic.

Listeners are also invited to observe an author roundtable on Feb.19, 2025. Please RSVP here.

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Building on the field of modern archival practice, Transmediation and the Archive: Decoding Objects in the Digital Age (ARC Humanities Press, 2024) explores the possibilities of archival objects. Investigating material as diverse as early modern printed books, death masks, a spirit photograph, and a manuscript choir book, Astrid J. Smith interrogates not only what the objects are now, but also asks what they were before taking material form, and what they can become as their format is transferred to other media. Blending insights from museum, library, archives, and media studies with experiential research, Smith examines the activities that shape the making of heritage objects and asks how an awareness of digitization practices can inform our knowledge of both their digital and physical form. She proposes a new methodological framework for evaluating the way materiality and media can affect our relationship with historical artefacts and book culture and demonstrates its fascinating application.

Astrid J. Smith is Rare Book and Special Collections Digitization Specialist and a Production Coordinator at Stanford Libraries, focusing on medieval objects and fragile archival materials. A life-long creative, she is especially interested in book arts and the philosophy of digitization.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

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Today we speak to Hildegard Westerkamp, the pioneering composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. The centerpiece of all of her work is a close attention to the sonic environment and its relation to culture. We will listen to excerpts of six soundscape compositions made between 1975 and 2005, all of which reward the close listener–conceptually and aesthetically–with a deeper relationship to the sonic environment. 

Mack Hagood interviewed Westerkamp shortly after the death of R. Murray Schafer in late 2021. Westerkamp worked closely with Schafer in the early 1970s and she graciously agreed to talk about him despite the grief being fresh. They also discussed her own amazing career and that’s the part of the tape we are sharing in this episode. They talk about her formative years as a 20-something working with Schafer and his World Soundscape Project and then we jump into a number of her compositions, ending with the piece “Breaking News” from 2012. 

Incredibly, she said Mack was the first person to ever ask her about that piece, even though it is one of her favorites. And sure enough, not long after this interview she released a retrospective album on Earsay Music called Breaking News, which features that piece and a number of others created between 1988 and 2012. 

For our Patreon members we have the full, unedited interview for those who want to hear all her thoughts on R. Murray Schafer and her career. Join at Patreon.com/phantompower. 

And a quick correction: Hildegard wanted me to clarify that the sentence “When there is no sound, hearing is most alert,” which she uses in “Whisper Study,” is a quote from the Indian mystic Kirphal Singh in his book Naam (or Word).

Pieces featured in this episode: 

“Gently Penetrating beneath the Sounding Surfaces of Another Place” (1997)

“Whisper Study” (1975)

“Fantasie for Horns” (1978)

“A Walk through the City” (1981)

“Für Dich – For You” (2005)

“Breaking News” (2002)

Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.

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Weaving Europe, Crafting the Museum: Textiles, history and ethnography at the Museum of European Cultures, Berlin (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Magdalena Buchczyk delves into the history and the changing material culture in Europe through the stories of a basket, a carpet, a waistcoat, a uniform, and a dress. The focus on the objects from the collection of the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin offers an innovative and challenging way of understanding textile culture and museums. The book shows that textiles can be simultaneously used as the material object of research, and as a lens through which we can view museums. In doing so, the book fills a major gap by placing textile knowledge back into the museum.

Each chapter focuses on one object story and can be read individually. Swooping from 19th-century wax figure cabinets, Nazi-era collections, Cold War exhibitions in East and West Berlin, and institutional reshuffling after German unification, it reveals the dramatically changing story of the museum and its collection. Based on research with museum curators, makers and users of the textiles in Italy and Germany, Poland and Romania, the book provides intimate insights into how objects are mobilised to very different social and political effects. It sheds new light on movements across borders, political uses of textiles by fascist and communist regimes, the objects' fall into oblivion, as well as their heritage and tourist afterlives. Addressing this complex museum legacy, the book suggests new pathways to prefigure the future.

Featuring new archival and ethnographic research, evocative examples and images, it is an essential read for students of textile and material culture, museum and curatorial studies as well as anyone interested in history, heritage and craft.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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A companion piece to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, Seven Sins and Seven Virtues (Abrams, 2024) by Dr. Ed Simon completes this moral trilogy and finally considers God’s most enigmatic of creations: None of the conundrums of metaphysics are as baroque as the motivations of the human soul. Unlike the devils condemned to perdition and the angels compelled to paradise, humans are divine creatures that house within them warring impulses.

The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues: A Visual History (Cernunnos, 2024) examines the literary, philosophical, theological, and most of all artistic expressions of the seven deadly sins and their respective seven cardinal virtues, drawing upon millennia of history to gather a compendium of humanity at its best and its worst. As a volume, the book explores the Manichean nature of the human animal in all of its grandeur and canker, motivated by the faith that tales of damnation and salvation are the only stories that are ultimately worth telling.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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William Gallois joins the podcast to discuss his latest book, Qayrawān: The Amuletic City, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in 2024.

Qayrawān: The Amuletic City investigates the fascinating history of the Tunisian city of Qayrawān, which in the last years of the nineteenth century found itself covered in murals. Concentrated on and around the city’s Great Mosque, these monumental artworks were only visible for about fifty years, from the 1880s through the 1930s. This book investigates the fascinating history of who created these outdoor paintings and why.

Using visual archaeological methods, Qayrawān highlights the ‘unknown artist’ as an actor of ‘unnoticed agency’ and a practitioner of living traditional arts. Locating pictorial records of the murals from the backdrops of photographs, postcards, and other forms of European ephemera, Gallois identifies a form of religious painting that transposed traditional aesthetic forms such as house decoration, embroidery, and tattooing―which lay exclusively within the domains of women―onto the body of a conquered city. Gallois argues that these works were created by women as a form of “emergency art,” intended to offer amuletic protection for the community, and demonstrates how they differ markedly from “classical” Islamic antecedents and modern modes of Arab cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa.

The book challenges tacit assumptions of foreign categories and standards of aesthetics imposed upon Islamic and African art. It contributes to further explorations of the exploration of the ways in which Islam was interwoven with preexisting cultures and forms of expression, particularly in calling for a continued reimagining of the study of “Islamic art.” The book makes welcome contributions to Islamic, African, and Middle Eastern studies, particularly in relation to colonial and art histories. It will be welcomed by scholars of Islamic Studies, African Studies, and Art History.

William Gallois is Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, in England. In addition to Qayrawān: The Amuletic City, Prof Gallois is the author of A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (2013) and The Administration of Sickness (2008), among other works.

Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa focusing on issues in Sufism, theology, renewal, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast.

He can be reached by email at: [email protected]

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At the height of his career, Sargent painted twelve portraits of the Wertheimer family, commissioned by Asher Wertheimer, a German-Jewish London art dealer who became his greatest private patron and close friend. Their portraits, later gifted to the National Gallery, stirred both admiration and controversy, challenging societal norms. In Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers (FSG, 2024), Jean Strouse's historical narrative explores the decline of the British aristocracy and the evolving art market across London, Vienna, and Italy.

Christina Obolenskaya researches twentieth-century women’s political history based out of Columbia University and LSE. In the past, her work has been featured in the Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review and more.

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Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that of Gustav Klimt's luminous painting featured in the film Woman in Gold, illustrate the legacy of Nazi looting in the art world today. But what happened to looted art that was never returned to its rightful owners?

In France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, postwar governments appropriated the most coveted unclaimed works for display in museums, embassies, ministries, and other public buildings. Following cultural property norms of the time, the governments created custodianships over the unclaimed pieces, without using archives in their possession to carry out thorough provenance (ownership) research. This policy extended the dispossession of Jewish owners wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators well into the twenty-first century.

The custodianships included more than six hundred works in Belgium, five thousand works in the Netherlands, and some two thousand in France. They included paintings by traditional and modern masters, such as Rembrandt, Cranach, Rubens, Van der Weyden, Tiepolo, Picasso, and Matisse. This appropriation of plundered assets endured without controversy until the mid-1990s, when activists and journalists began challenging the governments' right to hold these items, ushering in a period of cultural property litigation that endures to this day. Including interviews that have never before been published, Museum Worthy: Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Elizabeth Campbell deftly examines the appropriation of Nazi art plunder by postwar governments and highlights the increasingly successful postwar art recovery and restitution process.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Across Iron Age Central Eurasia, non-sedentary people created, viewed, and considered animal-style imagery, creating designs replete with feline bodies with horse hooves, deer-birds, animals in combat, and other fantastic creatures. Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) focuses on this animal-style imagery, examining the dissemination of this image system. 

Filled with fascinating images carefully chosen from an enormous geographical scope, Petya Andreeva's vivid book explores how communities used animal-style design to create and define status, to bond alliances together, and to showcase steppe know-how and worldliness in sedentary communities. Fantastic Fauna should appeal to those in Eurasian history, East Asian history, art and archeology, and those interested in thinking about steppe art. 

Interested listeners should also check out Petya's chapter on the Golden Hoard (available here), part of an Open-Access UNESCO volume on the Silk Roads.   

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