Our book is: Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (UP of Colorado, 2024) which presents a new look at how the big box retail store has dramatically reshaped the US economy and its ecosystems in the last half century. From the rural South to the frigid North, from inside stores to ecologies far beyond, this book examines the relationships that make up one of the most visible features of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century American life. The rise of big box retail since the 1960s has transformed environments on both local and global scales. Almost everyone has explored the aisles of big box stores. The allure of “everyday low prices” and brightly colored products of every kind connect shoppers with a global marketplace. Contributors join a growing conversation between business and environmental history, addressing the ways American retail institutions have affected physical and cultural ecologies around the world. Essays on Walmart, Target, Cabela’s, REI, and Bass Pro Shops assess the “bigness” of these superstores from “smokestacks to coat racks” and contend that their ecological impacts are not limited to the footprints of parking lots and manufacturing but also play a didactic role in educating consumers about their relationships with the environment. A model for historians seeking to bring business and environmental histories together in their analyses of merchant capital’s role in the landscapes of everyday life and how it has remade human relationships with nature, Big Box USA is a must-read for students and scholars of the environment, business, sustainability, retail professionals, and a general audience.

Our guest is: Dr. Rachel Gross, who is assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver, where she teaches US environmental, business, and public history. She works with university and community partners to bring history into the public realm. She is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America, and the co-editor of Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She uses her PhD in history to explore what stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Audun Kjus joins Jana Byars to talk about Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum (Utah State Press, 2025), eds. Audun Kjus, Jakob Löfgren, Cliona O’Carroll, Simon Poole & Ida Tolgensbakk. Utah State Press, 2025).

The junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious respect for rules. Rituals involve nearly endless varieties of social arrangements and can truly transform people, but they also include improvisation, testing, and pretending. Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum explores the connectivity between the playful and the ritualized through a fresh theoretical perspective, highlighting the creative messiness and the cultural paradoxes such intersections allow. The chapters span topics such as hen parties, marriage proposals, ash scatterings, extreme sports races, football fans, computer game festivals, celebrations of fandom, migration heritages, and antiracist protests. While the case studies are selected to show a range of diversity with various mergings of play, game, ritual, ceremony, rite, and ritualizing, the introductory and concluding discussions offer sharpened perspectives on common aspects. Following these excursions through the play-ritual continuum will be enjoyable for readers interested in how people make sense of their own existence and profitable for scholars in folklore, anthropology, religion, pedagogy, cultural studies, and social sciences and humanities more generally.

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More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker.

In this first episode, he interviews Mark Nelson - author of Jumping the Abyss: Marriner S. Eccles and the New Deal, 1933-1940 (University of Utah Press, 2017). Eccles chaired the Fed from 1934 to 1948, turned it into a Washington power centre, and centralised policymaking with the Board of Governors.

The US might have been better served if Eccles and his nemesis Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary from 1934-1945, had swapped roles, says Nelson. "That's true except for the fact that Eccles did do something very important at the Fed and that is the Banking Act of 1935, which really changed the Fed in an enormously important way and Morgenthau would not have done that ... I think it would have happened at some point. You could make the argument, though, that it may not have happened in 1935 if Eccles hadn't been there because Eccles took the job at the Fed on the understanding that these changes would be made”.

An actor-turned-historian, Mark Nelson was educated at Pepperdine University and Claremont Graduate University and today teaches at Greenville Technical College, South Carolina. His next book will be Race and Recovery: James F. Byrnes and the New Deal.

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Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907 (Utah State University Press, 2023) recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of active rhetorical practices of assimilation resistance in colonized spaces.

Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty.

By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially to those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

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Claiming Space: Performing the Personal through Decorated Mortarboards (Utah State University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sheila Bock examines the growing tradition of decorating mortarboards at college graduations, offering a performance-centred approach to these material sites of display. Taking mortarboard displays seriously as public performances of the personal, this book highlights the creative, playful, and powerful ways graduates use their caps to fashion their personal engagement with notions of self, community, education, and the unknown future.

The forms and meanings of these material displays take shape in relation to broader, ongoing conversations about higher education in the United States, conversations grounded in discourses of belonging, citizenship, and the promises of the American Dream. Integrating observational fieldwork with extensive interviews and surveys, Dr. Bock highlights the interpretations of individuals participating in this tradition. She also attends to the public framings of this tradition, including how images of mortarboards have grounded online enactments of community through hashtags such as #LatinxGradCaps and #LetTheFeathersFly, as well as what rhetorical framings are employed in news coverage and legal documents in cases where the value of the practice is both called into question and justified.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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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An ethnographic study based on decades of field research, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Nahua Sacred Journeys in Mexico's Huasteca Veracruzana (UP of Colorado, 2023) explores five sacred journeys to the peaks of venerated mountains undertaken by Nahua people living in northern Veracruz, Mexico. Punctuated with elaborate ritual offerings dedicated to the forces responsible for rain, seeds, crop fertility, and the well-being of all people, these pilgrimages are the highest and most elaborate form of Nahua devotion and reveal a sophisticated religious philosophy that places human beings in intimate contact with what Westerners call the forces of nature. Alan and Pamela Sandstrom document them for the younger Nahua generation, who live in a world where many are lured away from their communities by wage labor in urban Mexico and the United States.

Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain contains richly detailed descriptions and analyses of ritual procedures as well as translations from the Nahuatl of core myths, chants performed before decorated altars, and statements from participants. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing the role of sacred paper figures that are produced by the thousands for each pilgrimage. The work contains drawings of these cuttings of spirit entities along with hundreds of color photographs illustrating how they are used throughout the pilgrimages. The analysis reveals the monist philosophy that underlies Nahua religious practice in which altars, dancing, chanting, and the paper figures themselves provide direct access to the sacred.

In the context of their pilgrimage traditions, the ritual practices of Nahua religion show one way that people interact effectively with the forces responsible for not only their own prosperity but also the very survival of humanity. A magnum opus with respect to Nahua religion and religious practice, Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain is a significant contribution to several fields, including but not limited to Indigenous literatures of Mesoamerica, Nahuatl studies, Latinx and Chicanx studies, and religious studies.

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Childfree and Happy: Transforming the Rhetoric of Womens' Reproductive Choices (Utah State University Press, 2023) examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and how they circulate through women’s lives by paying attention not just to spoken or written beliefs but also to affectual circulations of reproductive doxa.

Through interviews with thirty-four childfree women and analysis of childfree rhetorics circulating in historical and contemporary texts and events, this book demonstrates how childfree women individually and collectively try to speak back to common beliefs about their reproductive experiences, even as they struggle to make their identities legible in a sociocultural context that centers motherhood. Childfree and Happy theorizes how affect and rhetoric work together to circulate reproductive doxa by using Sara Ahmed’s theories of gendered happiness scripts to analyze what reproductive doxa is embedded in those scripts and how they influence rhetoric by, about, and around childfree women.

Delving into how childfree women position their decision not to have children and the different types of interactions they have with others about this choice, including family members, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals, Childfree and Happy also explores how communities that make space for alternative happiness scripts form between childfree women and those who support them. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of the rhetoric of motherhood/mothering, as well as feminist rhetorical studies.

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Drilled to Write: Becoming a Cadet Writer at a Senior Military College (Utah State UP, 2022) offers a rich account of US Army cadets navigating the unique demands of Army writing at a senior military college. In this longitudinal case study, J. Michael Rifenburg follows one cadet, Logan Blackwell, for four years and traces how he conceptualizes Army writing and Army genres through immersion in military science classes, tactical exercises in the Appalachian Mountains, and specialized programs like Airborne School.

Drawing from research on rhetorical genre studies, writing transfer, and materiality, Drilled to Write speaks to scholars in writing studies committed to capturing how students understand their own writing development. Collectively, these chapters articulate four ways Blackwell leveraged resources through ROTC to become a cadet writer at this military college. Each chapter is dedicated to one year of his undergraduate experience with focus on curricular writing for his business management major and military science classes as well as his extracurricular writing, like his Ballroom Dance Club bylaws and a three-thousand-word short story.

In Drilled to Write, Rifenburg invites readers to see how cadets are positioned between civilian and military life--a curiously liminal space where they develop as writers. Using Army ROTC as an entry into genre theory and larger conversations about the role higher education plays in developing Army officers, he shows how writing students develop genre awareness and flexibility while forging a personal identity.

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In Becoming Colorado: The Centennial State in 100 Objects (UP of Colorado, 2021), historian William Wei paints a vivid portrait of Colorado history using 100 of the most compelling artifacts from Colorado’s history. These objects reveal how Colorado has evolved over time, allowing readers to draw multiple connections among periods, places, and people. Collectively, the essays offer a treasure trove of historical insight and unforgettable detail.

Beginning with Indigenous people and ending in the early years of the twenty-first century, Wei traces Colorado’s story by taking a close look at unique artifacts that bring to life the cultures and experiences of its people. For each object, a short essay accompanies a full-color photograph. These accessible accounts tell the human stories behind the artifacts, illuminating each object’s importance to the people who used it and its role in forming Colorado’s culture. Together, they show how Colorado was shaped and how Coloradans became the people they are. Theirs is a story of survival, perseverance, enterprise, and luck.

Providing a fresh lens through which to view Colorado’s past, Becoming Colorado tells an inclusive story of the Indigenous and the immigrant, the famous and the unknown, the vocal and the voiceless—for they are all Coloradans.

William Wei is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. His major works include Counterrevolution in China: The Nationalists in Jiangxi during the Soviet Period, The Asian American Movement, and Asians in Colorado. Wei has held a Rockefeller Fellowship, Mellon Fellowship, and Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and was the 2019–2020 Colorado State Historian.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics, here on the New Books Network.

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A provocative theoretical synthesis by renowned folklorist and anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge (Utah State UP, 2021) questions intellectual foundations and charts new paths forward. Briggs argues, through an expansive look back at his own influential works as well as critical readings of the field, that scholars can disrupt existing social and discourse theories across disciplines when they collaborate with theorists whose insights are not constrained by the bounds of scholarship.

Eschewing narrow Eurocentric modes of explanation and research foci, Briggs brings together colonialism, health, media, and psychoanalysis to rethink classic work on poetics and performance that revolutionized linguistic anthropology, folkloristics, media studies, communication, and other fields. Beginning with a candid memoir that credits the mentors whose disconcerting insights prompted him to upend existing scholarly approaches, Briggs combines his childhood experiences in New Mexico with his work in graduate school, his ethnography in Venezuela working with Indigenous peoples, and his contemporary work—which is heavily weighted in medical folklore.

Unlearning offers students, emerging scholars, and veteran researchers alike a guide for turning ethnographic objects into provocations for transforming time-worn theories and objects of analysis into sources of scholarly creativity, deep personal engagement, and efforts to confront unconscionable racial inequities. It will be of significant interest to folklorists, anthropologists, and social theorists and will stimulate conversations across these disciplines.

Dr. Charles Briggs is co-director of the Medical Anthropology Program, co-director of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor of Folklore in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including Learning How to Ask, Voices of Modernity, Stories in the Time of Cholera, Making Health Public, and Tell Me Why My Children Died. He has received such honors as the James Mooney Award, the Chicago Folklore Prize, the Edward Sapir Book Prize, the J. I. Staley Prize, the Américo Paredes Prize, the New Millennium Book Award, and the Cultural Horizons Prize.

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