A wordsmith, an extempore poet and a satirist, Kāḷamēkam (also known as Kāḷamēka Pulavar; fifteenth century) is widely known for his taṉippāṭals or 'self-contained verses', on a panoply of topics. These splendid but notoriously provocative verses were composed during a transitional phase of Tamil literature, by now in deep conversation with Sanskrit poetics and poetic language, thereby yielding an incredibly rich and innovative poetry. Kāḷamēkam sings of courtesans, fellow humans, of gods, of animals, praises them, derides them, and insults them, using sarcasm, dry wit, and criticism, combined with śleṣas and yamakas, samasyās and nindāstutis. 

The Monsoon Cloud: Poet Kāḷamēkam and His Irreverent Poetry (Primus, 2024) seeks to introduce this brilliant poet and his timeless and influential poetry, while analysing his humour, worldview, personal values, and devotion.

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The first in-depth study of the collaborative intellectual exchange between the European and the Arabic Republics of Letters. 

Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad Ibn Qasim Al-Hajari Between Europe and North Africa (U California Press, 2023) reformulates our understanding of the early modern Mediterranean through the remarkable life and career of Moroccan polymath Ahmad Ibn Qâsim al-Hajarî (ca. 1570-1641). By showing Hajarî’s active engagement with some of the most prominent European Orientalists of his time, Oumelbanine Zhiri makes the case for the existence of an Arabic Republic of Letters that operated in parallel to its European counterpart.

A major corrective to the long-held view of Orientalism that accords agency only to Europeans, Beyond Orientalism emphasizes the active role played by Hajarî and other “Orientals” inside and outside of Europe in some of the most significant intellectual movements of the age. Zhiri explores the multiple interactions between these two networks of intellectuals, decentering Europe to reveal how Hajarî worked collaboratively to circulate knowledge among Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East

Oumelbanine Zhiri is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She has published books and articles on Leo Africanus and François Rabelais and on the cultural history of the connection between Europe and North Africa in the early modern period.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the critical essay collection Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); and the chapbooks The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming (2018) and Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (2016). Her research is on racial capitalism, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police.

Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (Semiotext(e), 2023) features the early writings of Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang’s trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an “odd girl” from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot’s Fool, with a leap of faith.

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Today I talked to Aliza Arzt about Turning the Pages: Conversations Through Time with Rabbi Isador Signer (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024)

In 1924, Rabbi Isidor Signer was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. He had been born in Romania and raised in Montreal. He would go on to lead congregations in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Somerville, Massachusetts; and Manhattan Beach, New York, until his death at age 53.

A century later, his granddaughter has selected and annotated two dozen of Rabbi Signer's sermons, delivered between the years 1923 and 1949. She has also solicited a contemporary response to each sermon, reflecting on Rabbi Signer's words from the perspective of a century's hindsight. Respondents include rabbis, professors, writers, and other deeply engaged Jews.

Rabbi Signer's career and sermons span the period from the aftermath of the first World War (one from 1924 eulogizes President Woodrow Wilson) to the aftermath of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Taken together, the sermons and responses in this volume provide an illuminating window on American Judaism in both the early 20th and early 21st centuries.

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Few history books sell better than biographies of Nazi leaders. They attract anyone even tangentially interested in World War Two or Nazi Germany. It’s not surprising, then, that there are dozens of biographies of Himmler, Goering, and Hitler himself.

Oddly, though, Reinhard Heydrich is relatively understudied.  Robert Gerwarth’s wonderful new biography of Heydrich, titled Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (Yale UP, 2012), fills this gap admirably. Gerwarth’s book is part of a new wave of serious biographies that have appeared in the last years. All are characterized by a thoughtful engagement with recent research on the Holocaust. All devote considerable attention to their subjects’ lives in the period before the Nazi takeover. All emphasize the choices made by their subjects and the way these choices were not predetermined. Hitler’s Hangman is an outstanding example of this new scholarship.

Gerwarth’s work, in particular, is distinguished by its particularly effective writing. He synthesizes a great deal of information gracefully, a demanding task in a biography this concise. At the same time, he preserves space for anecdotes and details that illuminate his topic and add color to his narrative.

Hitler’s Hangman has been widely praised by reviewers across the spectrum. It is praise that is richly deserved.

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Today I talked to Christopher Paul Clohessy about Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî (Gorgias Press, 2020).

As Abû ʿAbd Allâh al-Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlî and Fâṭima and grandson of Muḥammad, moved inexorably towards death on the field of Karbalâʾ, his sister Zaynab was drawn ever closer to the centre of the family of Muḥammad, the 'people of the house' (ahl al-bayt). There she would remain for a few historic days, challenging the wickedness of the Islamic leadership, defending the actions of her brother, initiating the commemorative rituals, protecting and nurturing the new Imâm, al-Ḥusayn's son ʿAlî b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlî b. Abî Ṭâlib, until he could take his rightful place. This is her story.

Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”.

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In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024), renowned biographer Dr. Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora Babb.

Dunkle follows Babb from her impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado to California. There, she befriended the era's literati, including Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison; entered into an illegal marriage; and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was Babb's field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that Steinbeck relied on to write his novel. But this is not merely a saga of literary usurping; on her own merits, Babb's impact was profound. Her life and work feature heavily in Ken Burns's award-winning documentary The Dust Bowl and inspired Kristin Hannah in her bestseller The Four Winds. Riding Like the Wind reminds us with fresh awareness that the stories we know—and who tells them—can change the way we remember history.

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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Today’s book is: Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024) by Dr. Donna J. Nicol, which examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Black Woman on Board tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974–94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Dr. Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates. Black Woman on Board explores how Hampton methodically "played the game of boardsmanship," using the soft power she cultivated amongst her peers to remove barriers that might have impeded the implementation and expansion of affirmative action policies and programs. In illuminating the ways that Hampton transformed the CSU as the "affirmative action trustee," this remarkable book makes an important contribution to the history of higher education and to the historiography of Black women's educational leadership in the post-Civil Rights era.

Our guest is: Dr. Donna J. Nicol, who is the Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach, CA.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav’s book Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood (Penguin Random House India, 2024) undertakes a systematic intellectual study of Lala Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought through four decades of his active political life, lived between 1888 and 1928. It contests the dominant scholarly interpretation of Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought as the nascent stage of Savarkarite Hindutva, and highlights the internally differentiated nature of ‘Hindu Nationalism’. Showing that, by 1915, Lajpat Rai moved towards ‘Indian’ nationalist narratives, it challenges the assumption that all ideas of Hindu nationhood necessarily culminate in Hindutva. An examination of Lajpat Rai’s final nationalist narrative as a Hindu Mahasabha leader in the 1920s confirms the revisionist historiographical rejection of the oppositional binary that was long drawn between Hindu communal politics, on one hand, and secular Indian nationalism and secularism, on the other. Lajpat Rai organized a Hindu politics in service of a secular Indian nation-state. Nevertheless, the book pushes back against revisionist assumptions that Hindu communal politics and secularism can be championed together comfortably, and that the articulation of a Hindu politics alongside a vision for secularism reduces that secularism to little more than Hindu majoritarianism. Being Hindu, Being Indian argues for the need to take the analytical tension and contrast between ‘Hindu politics’ and ‘secularism’ seriously. Methodologically, the book constitutes an argument to resist reductionism and respect the nuances, complexities, fluidity, and internal tensions in an individual thinker’s thought.

Dr. Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav is an intellectual historian of modern South Asia, with interests in nationalism, secularism, and religious and political thought more broadly. After receiving a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the “Multiple Secularities” Research Group at the University of Leipzig in Germany, and at ICAS: M.P. in New Delhi, India. She is now an incoming Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, India.

Anamitra Ghosh is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of History, South Asia Institute, Universität Heidelberg, Germany. He can be reached at [email protected]

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Growing up in West Texas, Jane Little Botkin didn’t have designs on becoming a beauty queen. But not long after joining a pageant on a whim in college, she became the first protégé of El Paso’s Richard Guy and Rex Holt, known as the “Kings of Beauty”—just as the 1970’s counterculture movement began to take off.

A pink, rose-covered gown—a Guyrex creation—symbolizes the fairy tale life that young women in Jane’s time imagined beauty queens had. Its near destruction exposes reality: the author’s failed relationship with her mother, and her parents’ failed relationship with one another. Weaving these narrative threads together is the Wild West notion that anything is possible, especially do-overs.

The Pink Dress: A Memoir of a Reluctant Beauty Queen (She Writes Press, 2024) awakens nostalgia for the 1960s and 1970s, the era’s conflicts and growth pains. A common expectation that women went to college to get “MRS” degrees—to find a husband and become a stay-at-home wife and mother—often prevailed. How does one swim upstream against this notion among feminist voices that protest “If You Want Meat, Go to a Butcher!” at beauty pageants, two flamboyant showmen, and a developing awareness of self? Torn between women’s traditional roles and what women could be, Guyrex Girls evolved, as did the author.

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