Born in Amsterdam in 1946, Professor Shulamit Reinharz grew up amid the lingering shadows of wartime trauma, an experience that shaped her later academic path and her role in the creation of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. With Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir (Amsterdam Publishers, 2024), she has crafted a unique form of Holocaust memoir, describing it as a “piano duet” between her father’s extensive writings and her own historical commentary. The result is a careful interplay between memory and historical verification.

The interview also explored Reinhart’s research in Gunzenhausen, the Bavarian town where her father’s story began before he was forced into exile. Today, with no Jewish residents since 1939, Gunzenhausen has become a setting for remembrance projects that Reinhart has actively supported. She spoke of Emmy Hetzner, a retired teacher who initiated a project with her ninth-grade students to research the town’s Jewish history, resulting in a comprehensive online archive. Reinhart’s own involvement with a German-Jewish Dialogue Group has led to symbolic but important acts of reconciliation, such as proposals to mark Jewish names on war memorials with Magen Davids, recovering neglected synagogue stones, and supporting a tree-planting initiative where one tree is dedicated to each Jewish family whose descendants have returned.

Central to Hiding are the interwoven themes of love, education, and hiding. Reinharz recounted how her father’s independence on a Dutch farm enabled him to master the language and build trust with locals. Later, in Amsterdam, he honed useful skills as an auto mechanic, participated in resistance activities, and nurtured enduring bonds. His relationship with Reinharz’s mother, which began in a Zionist youth group in Munich, sustained them despite being separated during periods of hiding. Their commitment to one another was paralleled by friendships with individuals like Laura Dorlacher and the Schroden couple, recognized as Righteous Gentiles, who risked everything to protect him.

Reinharz also reflected on the role of education during the Nazi era, describing how teachers indoctrinated students into antisemitic ideology, extending propaganda beyond the classroom into public rituals and community life. In this way, education became an instrument of hatred, embedding prejudice in young generations.

As the conversation concluded, Reinharz turned to her next project, which will tell her mother’s story as a two-time refugee. Unlike Hiding in Holland, which is built on her father’s testimony, the new work will examine her mother’s displacements across Germany, Holland, and the United States, offering a gendered perspective within Holocaust studies.

The exchange illuminated how Reinharz’s scholarship bridges her roles as academic, daughter, and custodian of memory. Hiding in Holland, already a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Holocaust memoirs, stands as both a historical document and a meditation on love, friendship, resilience, and the responsibility to preserve stories across generations.

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“My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery,” declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation‑state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758–1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony. Then he became a general in the colonial army of the new French Republic. When it was discovered that France once again supported slavery, Dessalines declared war on his former allies. Fighting under the slogan “Liberty or Death,” his army forced the French to evacuate in late 1803. At the start of the new year, Dessalines declared independence from France and became the leader of a free Haiti.
A hero to Haitians for centuries, Dessalines is portrayed abroad as barbarous and violent. Yet this caricature derives not from facts—as Dr. Julia Gaffield demonstrates with extensive new research—but from the fears of contemporary enslavers. Showcasing the man behind the myths, Dr. Gaffield reveals Dessalines’s deep suffering, warm friendships, and unwavering commitment to destroying slavery, racism, and colonialism, and his bold insistence on his people’s right to liberty and equality.

Our guest is: Dr. Julia Gaffield, who is associate professor of history at William & Mary. She is the author of Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution; and of I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom (Yale UP, 2025). She lives in Williamsburg, VA.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and a developmental editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show’s newsletter here 

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Revolution: Prince, the Band, the Era (Backbeat Books, 2025) is a detailed exploration into the era of Prince's most prolific and groundbreaking music made with considerable inspiration and performed by a unique cadre of musicians he gathered and relentlessly drove to be the sonic, visual, and ideological reflection of his evolving vision. Although being the most self-contained, versatile, and prolific artist of his era, Prince reveled in the band, a multi-racial, intergender unit that acted as both family and loyal acolytes that embodied his ethos, expressed his pathos, and lifted him to rarified heights of pop dominance. This is the story of the genre-shifting, multi-media, trailblazing Prince & the Revolution from their humble inception to their precipitous rise in celebrated hit singles, albums, films, and tours to their controversial and shocking demise.

James Campion is a columnist, essayist, and associate editor for the pop culture magazine The Aquarian Weekly, where he's reported on and interviewed rock stars and reviewed concerts and albums for thirty years. He has also authored three previous books on music: Shout It Out Loud: The Story of KISS's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon (2015), Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon (2018), and Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude (2022).

James Campion’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021) and Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming book is U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, October 2025).

Bradley Morgan on Facebook and Bluesky.

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Hadi Abdullah's Critical Conditions: My Diary of the Syrian Revolution (DoppelHouse Press, 2025), translated by Alessandro Columbu, is no ordinary diary. It’s a testimony written in the heat of events (demonstrations in Daraa and Homs, the bombardments of Aleppo, sieges, and funerals). Through Hadi’s words, we glimpse the Syrian revolution not through statistics, but through the eyes of someone who was there, who risked his life to record what others tried to silence.

Alessandro’s translation conveys not only the urgency of testimony but also the rhythms of protest chants, the tenderness of Syrian idioms, and the weight of memory. 
In this episode, we sit down with translator Alessandro Columbu to discuss the challenges of translating a voice born of crisis, the role of grassroots media in preserving truth, and what it means to convey such words into English at a moment when Syria’s story is still unfolding.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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In his literary biography, Philip Roth: Stung by Life (Yale UP, 2025), Steven J. Zipperstein captures the complex life and astonishing work of Philip Roth (1933–2018), one of America’s most celebrated writers. Born in Newark, New Jersey—where his short stories and books were often set—Roth wrote with ambition and awareness of what was required to produce great literature. No writer was more dedicated to his craft, even as he was rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances. And yet, as much as Roth wrote about sex and self, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an “unchaste monk” (his words).

Zipperstein explores the unprecedented range of Roth’s work—from “Goodbye, Columbus” and Portnoy’s Complaint to the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. Drawing on extensive archival materials and over one hundred interviews, including conversations with Roth about his life and work, Zipperstein provides an intimate and insightful look at one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers, placing his work in the context of his obsessions, as well as American Jewishness, freedom, and sexuality.

Interviewee: Steven J. Zipperstein is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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In 388 BCE, Plato, at the age of about forty and in the midst of writing The Republic, visited for the first time the then-Greek city state of Syracuse, on the eastern shores of Sicily. Syracuse was ruled by a tyrant, Dionysius, who on death was followed by his son, also a tyrant. Over the course of his three separate visits to Syracuse over the years, encountering both father and son, Plato arrived at the model for tyranny laid out in The Republic. That’s the argument of James Romm’s splendid book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece (W.W. Norton, 2025). In our conversation, Romm renders, not the familiar “marble Plato” of his God-like dialogues, but an altogether human figure grappling with his own personal vulnerabilities. We discuss, too, the parallels to today’s times, in which tyrants and would-be tyrants continue to plague the world. The tyrant, as Romm ably shows, is an archetype for all time.

James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College and editor of the Ancient Lives biography series from Yale University Press.

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Cecil John Rhodes became one of the most influential people in the history of the British Empire. He made a fortune in South Africa by leading the world's most important diamond mining company, De Beers, as well as a gold-mining concern called Consolidated Gold Fields. While he was a busy entrepreneur, he was also a member of the Cape Colony's legislature and served as prime minister from 1890 to 1896, a key period for the development of racial discrimination. His British South Africa Company was given a charter to govern what is today Zambia and Zimbabwe. His most famous legacy is the Rhodes Trust, which funds the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University.

A complex figure, admired and detested in his own time, Rhodes dreamt to unite Southern Africa's colonies and republics into one state, dominated by white settlers, with labor provided by Black people who were constrained and pressured by discriminatory laws. He built his wealth on the backs of African migrant laborers, for whom he had little regard. His British South Africa Company was accused of fraud. And in 1895 and 1896, he famously encouraged a failed plot to overthrow the independent Boer republic in the Transvaal. Rhodes' coup helped to precipitate the South African War, which started in 1899 and ended in 1902, the year of Rhodes' death.

This authoritative biography focuses on the relationship between Rhodes' well-known activities in business and politics and the development of Southern Africa's infrastructure, most famously his plan for a Cape-to-Cairo railway. Rhodes envisioned a region where racism became embedded in the mining, farming, communication, and transportation industries. He pursued this vision in the face of opposition from many quarters. Understanding the extent of Rhodes' activities helps us to understand the challenges of modern Africa and the recent Rhodes Must Fall movement. A critical analysis of this contested figure, The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes (Oxford University Press, 2025) offers an original portrait of a crucial figure of his era.

William Kelleher Storey is Professor of History and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Millsaps College.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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A North American Tour Journal 1824-1825: The Making of a Prime Minister (Sutton Publishing, 2025) follows Edward Stanley's 1824-25 journey through North America, a formative tour that profoundly shaped his political ideals.
In July 1824, Edward Geoffrey Smith Stanley arrived in New York City at the end of a month-long voyage from Liverpool. The young MP and future 14th earl of Derby had left England under a cloud. His political career was off to a rough start, and he was in love with a woman he was forbidden to marry. The lengthy tour of America that he was about to embark on--a 'banishment' as he called it--had been imposed upon him.
From July 1824 into March 1825, Stanley travelled extensively throughout the eastern half of North America. He crossed mountains and lakes, journeyed up and down rivers, and trekked through pine barrens, swamps, and marshes. He travelled by stagecoach, steamboat, canoe, horseback, and sometimes on foot, studying every aspect of the towns and countryside he passed through. He was sometimes surprised, and sometimes shocked, by what he saw: the complex interactions between the Catholic French and their Protestant British neighbours in Canada; the horrifying lives of black slaves in the Southern states; the poverty of Irish immigrants in the North; the degradation of Native Americans everywhere. It left a deep impression on Stanley, shaping his future career as a political reformer and distinguished statesman.

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Claire McCardell forever changed fashion—and most importantly, the lives of women. She shattered cultural norms around women’s clothes, and today much of what we wear traces back to her ingenious, rebellious mind. McCardell invented ballet flats and mix-and-match separates, and she introduced wrap dresses, hoodies, leggings, denim, and more into womenswear. She tossed out corsets in favor of a comfortably elegant look and insisted on pockets, even as male designers didn’t see a need for them. She made zippers easy to reach because a woman “may live alone and like it,” McCardell once wrote, “but you may regret it if you wrench your arm trying to zip a back zipper into place.”

After World War II, McCardell fought the severe, hyper-feminized silhouette championed by male designers, like Christian Dior. Dior claimed that he wanted to “save women from nature.” McCardell, by contrast, wanted to set women free. Claire McCardell became, as the young journalist Betty Friedan called her in 1955, “The Gal Who Defied Dior.”

Filled with personal drama and industry secrets, Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson reveals how Claire McCardell built an empire at a time when women rarely made the upper echelons of business. At its core, hers is a story about our right to choose how we dress—and our right to choose how we live.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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A magnificent cultural biography, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler (Amistad, 2025) charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion.

In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories.

Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”

Susana M. Morris is the Associate Professor of Literature, Media & Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. You can find Susana at her website, at Instagram; on Threads; and on Substack.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Susana went after the show to explore the question What Would Octavia Do? in our present moment.

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