Staging Sovereignty: Theory, Theater, Thaumaturgy (Columbia University Press, 2024) explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance. Author Arthur Bradley considers the theatricality of power—its forms, dramas, and iconography—and examines sovereignty’s modes of appearance: thrones, insignia, regalia, ritual, ceremony, spectacle, marvels, fictions, and phantasmagoria. He weaves together political theory and literature, reading figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben alongside writers including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Melville, Valéry, Kafka, Ionesco, and Genet.

Arthur Bradley is professor of comparative literature at Lancaster University. His most recent book is Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure (Columbia, 2019).

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On today’s show, we address a performer’s nightmare—the nightmare of not being able to hear yourself onstage. My guest is ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday, who takes us behind the scenes of the famed Cirque du Soleil to learn how even Cirque’s world-class musicians struggle with technology when they want to hear themselves. 

Building on his international career as a touring sound technician, ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday researches the working communities and hidden labor of live sound technicians on large-scale touring productions. He is a recent graduate of the PhD program in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Today Jake takes us behind the scenes of Cirque du Soleil, sharing his dissertation research on how sound engineers and musicians negotiate the power to hear oneself. 

Stage monitoring, the technology that allows musicians to hear the performance as they play, is a topic we rarely hear about, but it’s absolutely essential to performers. Faraday suggests that, while new in-ear monitors are marketed as a godsend for performers, they are more of a mixed blessing, “homogenizing listening” and creating new kinds of issues and anxieties for musicians.  

Today’s show was edited and mixed by Jacob Danson Faraday, with additional editing by Mack Hagood. 

The song “Sail Away” by Colton Benjamin (2017) was obtained from the Free Multitrack Download Library on the Cambridge Music Technology website by Mike Senior, author of the excellent book Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio. 

Read the dissertation: Buried in the mix: touring sound technicians, sonic control, and emotional labour on Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo by Jacob Danson Faraday (2021). 

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Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity (Oxford UP, 2024) dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked opportunities for understanding and shared community in words and ideas that might in the past have been considered too silly to matter much for serious scholarship. Each chapter pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called 'stupidity' in work by Shakespeare and other authors. Each centers significant, often comic situations that emerge -- on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period -- when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language, characters, or plotlines that exceed, and at times entirely undermine, the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. Each suggests that a framing of putative 'stupidity' pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends. Words such as 'baffle' in Twelfth Night or 'twangling' and 'jingling' in The Tempest, and characters such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Holofernes the pedant, might in the past have been considered unworthy of critical attention -- too light or obvious to matter much for our understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Adam Zucker's meditation on the limits of learnedness and the opportunities presented by a philology of stupidity argues otherwise.

Adam Zucker is a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare and other 16th and 17th Century authors. In addition to Shakespeare Unlearned (Oxford University Press, 2024), he is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the co-editor of essay collections Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (Routledge, 2015); and Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Adam lives in Northampton, MA with his family, where he plays loud twangling instruments in the bands Outro, Bring It to Bear, The Young Old, and The Father Figures.

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Winging It: Improv’s Power & Peril in the Time of AI & Trump (Spring, 2024) is Randy Fertel’s third book, his second on improvisation. Creating something impromptu and without effort challenges our assumption that everything of value depends upon long study, tradition, and hard work. Improvisation comes to disrupt all that. The gesture all improvisations share—I will create this on the fly, or as Donald Trump has it, my gut knows more than many brains—defies rationality and elevates embodied emotions, instinct, and intuition. Claiming to be free of serious purpose, improvisation only pursues pleasure. Or, so it says. Through the lens of neuroscience, bioevolution, and well-known cultural texts, Winging It explores the links among the many disciplines improv informs—from Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” to the hip-hop masterpiece Hamilton. It defines what connects Kerouac’s On the Road, rock and roll, improv comedy, Fred Astaire’s tap, detective fiction, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, psychedelics, hookup culture, AI, even politics—in particular, the reign of the Improviser-in-Chief

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The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely admired but often misunderstood. Reductively stereotyped in his time as a "woman's director"-a thinly veiled, disparaging code for "gay"-he brilliantly directed a wide range of iconic actors and actresses, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith. As Katharine Hepburn, the star of ten Cukor films, told the director, "All the people in your pictures are as goddamned good as they can possibly be, and that's your stamp."

In this groundbreaking, lavishly illustrated critical study, Joseph McBride provides insightful and revealing essayistic portraits of Cukor's actors in their most memorable roles. The queer filmmaker gravitated to socially adventurous, subversively rule-breaking, audacious dreamers who are often sexually transgressive and gender fluid in ways that seem strikingly modern today. McBride shows that Cukor's seemingly self-effacing body of work is characterized by a discreet way of channeling his feelings through his actors. He expertly cajoled actors, usually gently but sometimes with bracing harshness, to delve deeply into emotional areas they tended to keep safely hidden. Cukor's wry wit, his keen sense of psychological and social observation, his charm and irony, and his toughness and resilience kept him active for more than five decades in Hollywood. George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director (Columbia UP, 2024) gives him the in-depth, multifaceted examination his rich achievement deserves.

Joseph McBride is a film historian and a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg; three books on Orson Welles; and critical studies of Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and the Coen Brothers. He acted for Welles in The Other Side of the Wind and has won a Writers Guild of America award.

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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From rock & roll to contemporary pop, Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music (Repeater, 2024) is a timely and original exploration of popular music’s role in shaping our society. Told through a Marxist lens, Toby Manning traces the last seventy years of political and social upheavals through its most iconic US and UK-based music.

Mixing Pop and Politics examines the connections between popular music and political ideology and explores themes like the liberation of rock ’n’ roll, containment of girl groups, defiance of glam, resignation of soft rock, the communal spirit of disco, and the individualism of 1980s pop. Spanning the early 1950s to today, the book reveals how music—from doo-wop to hip-hop, punk to crunk, and grunge to grime—has both reflected and resisted the political forces of its time.

Toby Manning is the author of The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd (2006) and John le Carré and the Cold War (2018).

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Born of an Anglican mother and a Jewish father who disdained religion, Kaplan knew little of her Judaic roots and less about her famed great-grandfather until beginning her research, more than twenty years ago. 

In Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin (Syracuse UP, 2007), Kaplan describes the commune he founded and led in Russia, his meteoric rise among Jewish New York's literati, the birth of such masterworks as Mirele Efros and The Jewish King Lear, and his seething feud with Abraham Cahan, powerful editor of the Daily Forward. Writing in a graceful and engaging style, she recaptures the Golden Age and colorful actors of Yiddish Theater from 1891-1910. Most significantly she discovers the emotional truth about the man himself, a tireless reformer who left a vital legacy to the theater and Jewish life worldwide.

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Hounds Of Love invites you to not only listen, but to cross the boundaries of sensory experience into realms of imagination and possibility. Side A spawned four Top 40 hit singles in the UK, 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)', 'Cloudbusting', 'Hounds of Love' and 'The Big Sky', some of the best-loved and most enduring compositions in Bush's catalogue. On side B, a hallucinatory seven-part song cycle called The Ninth Wave broke away from the pop conventions of the era by using strange and vivid production techniques that plunge the listener into the psychological centre of a near-death experience. Poised and accessible, yet still experimental and complex, with Hounds Of Love Bush mastered the art of her studio-based songcraft, finally achieving full control of her creative process. When it came out in 1985, she was only 27 years old.

Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (Bloomsbury, 2024) charts the emergence of Kate Bush in the early-to-mid-1980s as a courageous experimentalist, a singularly expressive recording artist and a visionary music producer. Track-by-track commentaries focus on the experience of the album from the listener's point of view, drawing attention to the art and craft of Bush's songwriting, production and sound design. It considers the vast impact and influence that Hounds Of Love has had on music cultures and creative practices through the years, underlining the artist's importance as a barrier-smashing, template-defying, business-smart, record-breaking, never-compromising role model for artists everywhere.

Leah Kardos is a senior lecturer in music at Kingston University London, UK. She is the author of Blackstar Theory: The Last Works of David Bowie (Bloomsbury, 2022), which was included as one of The Wire's 'Best Books of 2022'.

Leah on Twitter.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025).

Bradley on Twitter.

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Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2024)  provides a much-needed study of the political economy of music streaming, drawing from Western Marxism, social reproduction theory, eco-socialist thought and more to approach the complex and highly contested relationship between music and capital. By attending to the perverse ways in which recorded music has been ultimately decommodified under the current regime of music production, circulation and consumption, Eric Drott explores issues that far exceed music - consumer surveillance, Silicon Valley monopolism, the crisis of care, capitalist extractivism and the climate emergency - while showing us how the streaming economy is thoroughly imbricated, and implicated, in these processes. Drott's rigorous and wide-ranging analysis thus offers novel ways of understanding music, culture, digitalisation and capitalism in present and future tenses .

Eric Drott is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin.

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In this episode of High Theory, Laura Stamm talks about the biopic. One of the oldest forms of narrative cinema, biographical pictures are a mainstay of the medium today. Early biopics played an important role in public health discourse, representing the discoveries of science and the lives of scientists, which in turn led queer artists to adopt the genre in response to the AIDS crisis.

Laura’s book, The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era (Oxford UP, 2022), asks why queer filmmakers repeatedly produced biographical films of queer individuals living and dead throughout the years surrounding the AIDS crisis. These films evoke the genre's history building up lives worthy of admiration and emulation and the parallel history of representing lives damaged. By portraying lives damaged by inconceivable loss, queer filmmakers challenge the illusion of a coherent self presumably reinforced by the biopic genre and in doing so, their films open the potential for new means of connection and relationality.

In the episode Laura references many films, including the Greta Garbo film Queen Christina (1933); Freud: The Secret Passion (1962); The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936); Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940); John Greyson’s musical Zero Patience (1993); and the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black (2024). Her research extends beyond the 1980s moment of crisis, and in the episode she gives a good explainer pre-code Hollywood and (briefly) the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. If you were interested in this episode and want to learn more about queer representation in US popular culture, check out Margaret Galvan’s episode on Visibility.

Laura Stamm is Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics and Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Department of Medicine at University of Rochester. She completed her PhD in Film and Media Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Stamm's research interests broadly focuses on LGBTQ+ health, transgender studies, and medicine in visual culture. Beyond the book discussed here, her work has recently appeared in the edited collection New Queer Television: From Marginalization to Mainstream (Intellect Press, 2024) and Synapsis on “From the Clinic to the Talk Show: Narratives of Trans History in Framing Agnes.”

The image for this episode shows photographs by Rob Corder of photographs by Peter Hujar of two queer artists, the sculptor Louise Nevelson and the writer, photographer, film maker, etc., David Wojnarowicz. Left: Peter Hujar, "Louise Nevelson (II), 1969". Gelatin silver print (1934-1987) Morgan Library. BAM Right: Peter Hujar, "David Wojnarowicz", 1981. Gelatin silver print (1934-1987) Menschel Collection. BAM Photos by Rob Corder. We do not own these images, but we do like them.

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