March 15, 2013
Our third post for Women’s History Month looks at Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran by Gohar Homayounpour. The book details Homayounpour’s return to Iran to practice psychoanalysis after a twenty year absence.
March 14, 2013
In honor of Pi day, here is a Q & A with Sanjoy Mahajan author of Street-Fighting Mathematics. Bonus: click this link to view the Creative Commons edition for free.
March 12, 2013
Now that the papal conclave is under way, we decided to take a look at the history of electing popes. Here’s an excerpt from Josep M. Colomer and Iain McLean’s chapter, “Electing Popes: Approval Balloting and Qualified-Majority Rule,” which is part of Robert I. Rotberg’s Politics and Political Change.
March 1, 2013
March is Women’s History Month. To celebrate, we’ll feature a few of our related titles each Friday through the end of the month. First up is an excerpt from Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection by Katharine Park (Zone Books, 2006). Park’s book Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Zone Books, 1998), coauthored with Lorraine Daston, won the Pfizer Prize for the best book in the history of science. Park is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.
February 20, 2013
Happy National Engineers Week (February 17-23)! To celebrate, we interviewed Matthew Wisnioski, author of Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America. Matthew Wisnioski is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech.
February 15, 2013
Continuing with our series on Black History Month, we’ll take a look this week at African-American painter Jacob Lawrence who is featured in our own Exiles, Diasporas And Strangers, the fourth book in Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, a series edited by Kobena Mercer.
February 11, 2013
Our next post for Black History Month focuses on Technology and the African-American Experience, a collection of essays edited by Bruce Sinclair that examine the relationship between race and technology in American history. Below are some more details on the book and an excerpt from an essay by Judith Carney, which demonstrates how essential West African slaves were to South Carolina’s lucrative rice plantation economy due to their knowledge and expertise of rice cultivation.
February 1, 2013
Happy Friday! In honor of Black History Month, we’ll post about related titles every Friday throughout February. Last year, we posted an excerpt from Anca Parvulescu’s Laughter that discussed Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and laughter. We’re kicking off this year’s celebration with another excerpt from Laughter; this time focusing on Louis Armstrong and George W. Johnson.
January 25, 2013
Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf! In honor of Virginia, here’s an excerpt from Rosalind Krauss’ The Optical Unconscious. This passage touches on Virginia’s thoughts on Roger Fry and chess.