Dr. Victoria Phillips adeptly tells the story of Martha Graham's role as diplomat, arts innovator, and dancer. Her book Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy (Oxford UP, 2019) is a look at the years that her company toured the world as an example of American democracy and freedom. Martha Graham's Cold War frames the story of Martha Graham and her particular brand of dance modernism as pro-Western Cold War propaganda used by the United States government to promote American democracy. Representing every seated president from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan, Graham performed politics in the global field for over thirty years. This fascinating story takes you through the world of Martha Graham and her famous dancer as they circle the globe promoting American values and artistic ingenuity.
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Victoria Phillips, "Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy" (Oxford UP, 2019)

Interviews with Authors about their New Books
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Although Katie Kitamura feels free when she writes—free from the “soup of everyday life,” from the political realities that weigh upon her, and even at times from the limits of her own thinking—she is keenly aware of the unfreedoms her novels explore. Katie, author of the award-winning Intimacies (2021), talks with critic Alexander Manshel about the darker corners of the human psyche and the inescapable contours of history that shape her fiction. Alexander and Katie explore how she brings these tensions to “the space of interpretation, where the book exists” and places trust in her readers to dwell there thoughtfully. They also discuss the influence of absent men (including Henry James), love triangles, love stories, long books, and titles (hint: someone close to Katie says all her novels could be called Complicity). Stay tuned for Katie’s answer to the signature question, which takes listeners from to the farmlands of Avonlea to the mean streets of Chicago.
Mentioned in this episode
By Katie Kitamura:

Intimacies

A Separation

Gone to the Forest

Japanese for Travelers

The Longshot

Also mentioned:

Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation”

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy


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You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)

Alexander Statman's book A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a revisionist history of the idea of progress reveals an unknown story about European engagement with Chinese science.
The Enlightenment gave rise not only to new ideas of progress but consequential debates about them. Did distant times and places have anything to teach the here and now? Voltaire could believe that they did; Hegel was convinced that they did not. Early philosophes praised Chinese philosophy as an enduring model of reason. Later philosophes rejected it as stuck in the past. Seeking to vindicate ancient knowledge, a group of French statesmen and savants began a conversation with the last great scholar of the Jesuit mission to China. Together, they drew from Chinese learning to challenge the emerging concept of Western advancement.
A Global Enlightenment traces this overlooked exchange between China and the West to make compelling claims about the history of progress, notions of European exceptionalism, and European engagement with Chinese science. To tell this story, Alexander Statman focuses on a group of thinkers he terms “orphans of the Enlightenment,” intellectuals who embraced many of their contemporaries’ ideals but valued ancient wisdom. They studied astronomical records, gas balloons, electrical machines, yin-yang cosmology, animal magnetism, and Daoist medicine. And their inquiries helped establish a new approach to the global history of science.
Rich with new archival research and fascinating anecdotes, A Global Enlightenment deconstructs two common assumptions about the early to late modern period. Though historians have held that the idea of a mysterious and inscrutable East was inherent in Enlightenment progress theory, Statman argues that it was the orphans of the Enlightenment who put it there: by identifying China as a source of ancient wisdom, they turned it into a foil for scientific development. But while historical consensus supposes that non-Western ideas were banished from European thought over the course of the Enlightenment, Statman finds that Europeans became more interested in Chinese science—as a precursor, then as an antithesis, and finally as an alternative to modernity.
Alexander Statman is a Distinguished Scholar and JD candidate at the UCLA School of Law and a former A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
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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Alexander Statman, "A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

Anthony Valerio's novel Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer (Grailing Press, 2024) tells the story of Walter Michael Gregory. Call him Wally. 
Walter Michael Gregory is a literary rogue peddling his prose and amours around 1970s Manhattan. He talks like Frank Sinatra sings, he writes truly, he is a lover par excellence, and he will charm you with his bawdy confessions.
Raised in Brooklyn by mobsters and his doting mother, Wally recounts his idyllic childhood and how he came to be such an amorous soul. Now stepping into life as a young man about town, he establishes himself in the Greenwich Village literary scene and sets out to find work, any work, in the publishing industry. What he finds is the heady rush of hobknobbing with the greats and the tough truths of working for a living. Forced to live off his literary wits, Wally finds interesting work as a copy editor, encyclopedia writer, and literary pornographer. If he can dodge lovers, hunger, meteors, and a lurking bengal tiger of his own imagining, he might realize his dream, cashing in with his prose and feeling like a writer.
From his boyhood in Brooklyn to the pastimes and pitfalls of a bachelor's life, join Wally on this jaunt through his consciousness and a bygone big city, big book era.
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Anthony Valerio, "Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer" (Grailing Press, 2024)

Contemplative Studies and Jainism: Meditation, Prayer, and Veneration (Routledge, 2023) is one of the first wide-ranging academic surveys of the major types and categories of Jain praxis. It covers a breadth of scholarly viewpoints that reflect both the variegation in terms of spiritual practices within the Jain traditions as well as the Jain hermeneutical perspectives, which are employed in understanding its rich diversity.
The volume illustrates a complex and nuanced understanding of the multifaceted category of Jain religious thought and practice. It offers a rare intrareligious dialogue within Jain traditions and at the same time, significantly broadens and enriches the field of Contemplative Studies to include an ancient, ascetic, non-theistic tradition. Meditation, yoga, ritual, prayer are common to all Indic spiritual traditions. By investigating these diverse, yet overlapping, categories one might obtain a sophisticated understanding of religious traditions that originally emerged in South Asia. Essays in this book demonstrate how these forms of praxis in Jainism, and the philosophies that anchor those practices, are interrelated, and when brought into dialogue, help to foster new tools for understanding a complex and variegated tradition such as Jain Dharma.
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Purushottama Bilimoria et al., "Contemplative Studies and Jainism: Meditation, Prayer, and Veneration" (Routledge, 2023)

Today’s book is: Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration (Common Threads Press, 2024), by Dr. Isabella Rosner, which considers how for centuries, people have stitched in good times and in bad, finding strength in the needle moving in and out of fabric. Stitching Freedom explores the embroidery made in prisons and mental health hospitals — those who have embroidered to distract, to reflect or to calm. From Mary, Queen of Scots to Lorina Bulwer to “Unfortunate Annie” Parker, embroidery historian and curator Isabella Rosner unpicks embroidered histories to discover what can be created when freedom is out of reach.
Our guest is: Dr. Isabella Rosner, who is curator of the Royal School of Needlework and a research consultant at Witney Antiques. She hosts the “Sew What?” podcast about historic needlework and those who stitched it. She is a 2023 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, and the author of the History Today article “With Her Own Hair: A Victorian Prisoner’s Art,” and the new book Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Listeners may also be interested in:

The Royal School of Needlework

Rozsika Parker's The Subversive Stitch.

Betty Ring's Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework 1650-1850.

Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin's Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950.

A conversation with the director of the Emerson Prison Initiative

A conversation about The Journal of Higher Education in Prison

Education Behind the Wall


Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes.
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Victoria Phillips, "Martha Graham's Cold War: The Dance of American Diplomacy" (Oxford UP, 2019)

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