The SOF/Heyman Bookshelf

Host highlights Rob King's Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger. Rob King uses Metzger’s work to explore what taste means and how it works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing frontiers of cultural acceptability.

In the final episode of the 2025 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials by Julie Stone Peters. This book shows that judges and accusers turned to performance, staging to create doctrines of proof: catching the criminal “in the acte”; establishing “notoriety of the fact”; and producing “violent presumptions” of guilt.

Host highlights Hannah Weaver's Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past. In this volume, Weaver examines the medieval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorized as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy.

Host highlights Joseph Albernaz's Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community. With sharp close readings, new historical constellations, and innovative theoretical paradigms, Common Measures recasts the relationship of the Romantic period to the basic terms of modernity.

In our first episode of the 2025 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Ying Qian's Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China. This work studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements.

In the final episode of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights The Persian Prince: The Rise and Resurrection of an Imperial Archetype by Hamid Dabashi. This book articulates a bold new idea of the Persian Prince—a metaphor of political authority, a figurative ideal deeply rooted in the collective memories of multiple nations, and a literary construct that connected Muslim empires across time and space.

In episode six of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400–1600 by Alessandra Russo. Original and convincing, A New Antiquity is a pathbreaking study that disrupts existing conceptions of Renaissance art and early modern humanity.

In episode five of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967) by Ana Fernández-Cebrián. This book examines cultural fictions and social life at the time when Spain turned from autarchy to the project of industrial and tourist development.

In episode four of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives.

In episode three of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt by Ellen Morris. This work covers the creation and curation of social memory in pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt. Ancient, Classical, Medieval, and Ottoman sources attest to the horror that characterized catastrophic famines.