New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020)

Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced.

John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at [email protected] and @johnwphd.

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Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.

The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.

Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).

Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

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Chelsea McCracken talks about her new book A Grammar of Belep (Walter de Gruyter, 2019). McCracken is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at Dixie State University and Senior Research Analyst of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. She became involved in the homeschool reform movement as a result of the abuse and educational neglect experienced by her homeschooled family members.

A Grammar of Belep is a reference grammar that provides a full grammatical description of the previously-undocumented Austronesian language variety known as Belep. Belep is spoken by approximately 1600 people in New Caledonia, primarily in the Belep Isles. This is the first full-length grammar of the language, describing the sounds, morphology and syntax of Belep.

A Grammar of Belep also describes the importance of culture for Belep speakers, including la coutume (from the French) or ‘the custom.’ Interestingly, there is no Belep word for this, as la coutume is a cover term for many interrelated Belep cultural practices. This book is an important addition to our knowledge of Austronesian languages and languages as a whole.

Carrie Gillon is a linguist, editor and writing coach, working in the academic and healthcare sectors. She’s the author of The Semantics of Determiners (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2103) and the co-author of Nominal Contact in Michif (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is also the co-host of the podcast The Vocal Fries, a biweekly podcast about linguistic discrimination (or why judging language is not OK).

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After the Second World War, an Australian diplomat was one of eight people to draft the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. And in the years that followed, Australians of many different stripes—including activists fighting for Aboriginal rights and women’s rights, communists, and even anticommunists—invoked human rights in their respective political struggles. Yet, despite these Australians’ embrace of human rights, the Australian government didn’t sign the Declaration of Human Rights until 1972, and then it took even longer to ratify it.

Australia’s ambiguous relationship with human rights is precisely what Jon Piccini untangles in his fascinating, deeply researched book, Human Rights in Twentieth-Century Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2019). By exploring these many different groups’ invocation of human rights, Piccini, a faculty member at the Australian Catholic University, is able to show how ideas and language can circulate even across ideological divisions. This book should be read by those interested in the global history of ideas and human rights, Australian political and social historians, along with those like me, who know little about Australia but would like to learn a lot more.

Dexter Fergie is a PhD student of US and global history at Northwestern University. He is currently researching the 20th century geopolitical history of information and communications networks. He can be reached by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @DexterFergie.

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Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.

The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more.

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How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike.

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If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years working on a PhD, or if you’re a faculty member whose career has basically consisted of higher ed, switching isn’t so easy. PhD holders are mostly trained to work as professors, and making easy connections to other careers is no mean feat. Because the people you know were generally trained to do the same sorts of things, an easy source of advice might not be there for you.

Thankfully, for anybody who wishes there was a guidebook that would just break all of this down, that book has now been written. Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers (Stylus Publishing, 2020) by Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas J. Tobin offers practical advice and step-by-step instructions on how to decide if you want to leave behind academia and how to start searching for a new career. If a lot of career advice is too vague or too ambiguous, this book corrects that by outlining not just how to figure out what you might want to do, but critically, how you might go about accomplishing that.

Zeb Larson is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University with a PhD in History. His research deals with the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

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We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous―and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter―if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways―displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty―or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information (W. W. Norton, 2019), data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories. Public conversations are increasingly propelled by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie demystifies an essential new literacy, one that will make us better equipped to navigate our data-driven world.

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Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved with the changing economic, political, and military expediencies of the Pacific War. Though ideas about the Sphere as a regional order of hierarchical solidarity with Japan at its apex, a “grand strategy of opportunism” rooted in the “sphere-of-influence diplomacy” and “cooperative imperialism” of Japan’s bombastic and enigmatic foreign minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, Yellen shows that plans for the Sphere only became specific and concrete when Japan’s war situation descended into increasing desperation from 1942 on. The second half of the book shifts gears to examine responses to the Sphere in the Philippines and Burma. Yellen shows that for local nationalist elites like Burma’s first prime minister Ba Maw, whether Japanese rhetoric about the creation of more-or-less liberal international order within the Sphere for the top-echelon nations like Burma and the Philippines was genuine or self-serving, “even sham independence brought opportunity.” By focusing on these pragmatic nationalists (“patriotic collaborators”) Yellen contributes to a growing body of literature on empire that refuses to be pigeonholed by binaries of virtuous resistance and traitorous collaboration.

This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University.

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Today we are joined by Trevor Thompson, a journalist who has reported on association football in Australia and around the world since the 1980s. He is also the author of Playing for Australia: The First Socceroos, Asia, and World Football (Fair Play Publishing, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the limitation of Australia’s connection with British football in the interwar period, Australia’s Asian football connections, and the future for Australian football in the Asia-Pacific.

In Playing for Australia, Thompson investigates the Asian context of some of Australia’s earliest international soccer matches. He notes that Australia’s engagement with Asian football did not start in with their adherence to the Asian Football Confederation in 2006. Instead, Thompson illustrates the long durée history of Australian connections in Asia-Pacific football. In 1922, Australia competed in their first internationals against New Zealand. The next year, a side from China visited Australia touring Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Over the next decade, Australian teams mostly competed against teams from Asia and South Asia and representative teams from Australia also travelled multiple times to the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, and Malaya.

Thompson’s revision of Socceroos early years raises tantalizing possibilities for what Australian football might have looked like had its early organizers been more ambitious, cosmopolitan, aware, united, and even more Asian. He argues that Aussie cultural fealty to Great Britain slowed the growth of Aussie football during the crucial decades of its international expansion. The ignorance of early organizers, the disunity of state soccer federations, and the arrogance of the FA caused Australia to miss their chance to compete in the first two World Cups. This book will appeal to readers interested in Australian, Asian, and sports history.

Keith Rathbone is a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France’s Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at [email protected].

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