Best J Duke Podcasts (2025)

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John Mathias, "Uncommon Cause: Living for Environmental Justice in Kerala" (U California Press, 2024) 54:27

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9m ago54:27

54:27

How can activists strike a balance between fighting for a cause and sustaining relationships with family, friends, and neighbors? In this episode John Mathias joins host Elena Sobrino to talk about Uncommon Cause: Living for Environmental Justice in Kerala (2024, University of California Press). Uncommon Cause follows environmental justice activist…

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Banging Demons - Her Soul to Take with Austin Taylor! 1:20:59

3d ago1:20:59

1:20:59

Brea and Mallory talk to Austin Taylor about Her Soul to Take by Harley Laroux! Let’s bang some demons, folks. Email us at [email protected]! Support the Show! Reading Smut Merch Her Soul to Take Losers Next month’s book: Heated Rivalry Secret Histories of Nerd MysteriesBy mallory O'meara, Brea Grant, Austin Taylor

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Jürgen Schaflechner, "Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan" (Oxford UP, 2018) 1:26:58

3d ago1:26:58

1:26:58

About two hundred kilometers west of the city of Karachi, in the desert of Baluchistan, Pakistan, sits the shrine of the Hindu Goddess Hinglaj. Despite the temple's ancient Hindu and Muslim history, an annual festival at Hinglaj has only been established within the last three decades, in part because of the construction of the Makran Coastal Highwa…

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Deepa Das Acevedo, "The War on Tenure" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 1:02:47

8m ago1:02:47

1:02:47

As academia increasingly comes under attack in the United States, The War on Tenure (Cambridge UP, 2025) steps in to demystify what professors do and to explain the importance of tenure for their work. Deepa Das Acevedo takes readers on a backstage tour of tenure-stream academia to reveal hidden dynamics and obstacles. She challenges the common bel…

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Michael Rowe, "Researching Street-Level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions" (Routledge, 2024) 40:09

2d ago40:09

40:09

Researching Street-level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions (Routledge, 2024) is the first among a number of new titles in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods that we’ll be featuring on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science. In it, Mike Rowe discusses the continued relevance of the idea of street level b…

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Georgios Tsourous, "Orthodox Choreographies: Boundaries, Borders and Materiality in Jerusalem's Old City" (Gorgias Press, 2024) 1:04:05

2h ago1:04:05

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Orthodox Choreographies: Boundaries, Borders and Materiality in Jerusalem's Old City (Gorgias Press, 2024) offers a comprehensive anthropological study of lived Christianity in Jerusalem’s Old City, with a special focus on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Anastasis. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, the study explores t…

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Gina Vale, "The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State" (Oxford UP, 2024) 56:55

1d ago56:55

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The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Gina Vale explores the governance of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization through the lives and words of local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women. While the roles and activities of foreign (predominantly Western), pro-IS women have garnered significant attentio…

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Kolby Hanson, "Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2025) 42:26

8d ago42:26

42:26

In Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kolby Hanson argues that these periods of state toleration do not simply change armed groups' behavior, but fundamentally transform the organizations themselves by shaping who takes up arms and which leaders they follow. This book draws on a set of in…

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Todd A. Henry ed., "Queer Korea" (Duke UP, 2025) 49:06

3d ago49:06

49:06

Edited by Todd A. Henry, Queer Korea (Duke UP, 2020) offers a vital and long-overdue examination of this subject. More than an academic text, it is a powerful collection that brings to light the hidden histories of non-normative sexuality and gender expression on the Korean Peninsula. The book challenges the notion that queerness is a recent, Weste…

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Laurian R. Bowles, "Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 1:03:02

10d ago1:03:02

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Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) explores the experiences of women porters, called kayayei, in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, anthropologist Laurian R. Bowles shows how kayayei navigate precarity, bringing into sharp relief how racialization, rooted in histories of colonialis…

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How J&J Is Tackling Alzheimer's Disease With Fiona Elwood, Ph.D. 32:50

6d ago32:50

32:50

In this episode of “Better Biopharma,” host Tyler Menichiello is joined by Fiona Elwood, Ph.D., VP and Neurodegeneration Disease Area Stronghold Leader at Johnson & Johnson. The two talk about J&J’s end-to-end organizational structure and its modality-agnostic approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease. Follow Tyler Menichiello on LinkedIn: https://w…

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Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) 1:39:40

14d ago1:39:40

1:39:40

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with Palgrave Macmillan. Self as Method provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China’s young people t…

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Tim Weiner, "The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century" (Mariner Books, 2025) 51:34

8d ago51:34

51:34

In 2007, Tim Weiner published the book Legacy of Ashes. It was a history of the CIA from its founding to the early 2000s. As a university student in Italy, I bought the book as soon as it came out. The second non-fiction book I ever bought in English. The book was riveting. It kickstarted my interest in the CIA and covert operations. Now, Tim Weine…

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Selling Smut with Amanda Anderson from The Last Chapter! 1:01:18

17d ago1:01:18

1:01:18

Brea and Mallory talk about selling romance and erotica with Amanda Anderson from The Last Chapter bookstore. Email us at [email protected]! Reading Smut Merch The Boss by Abigail Barnette Say You Swear by Meagan Brandy Beautiful Broken Love by Shanora Williams Sweet Strings by Aly Beck Next month’s book is Her Soul to Take by Harley L…

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Hadi Abdullah, "Critical Conditions: My Diary of the Syrian Revolution" (Doppelhouse Press, 2025) 1:02:52

13d ago1:02:52

1:02:52

Hadi Abdullah's Critical Conditions: My Diary of the Syrian Revolution (DoppelHouse Press, 2025), translated by Alessandro Columbu, is no ordinary diary. It’s a testimony written in the heat of events (demonstrations in Daraa and Homs, the bombardments of Aleppo, sieges, and funerals). Through Hadi’s words, we glimpse the Syrian revolution not thro…

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Nidhi Mahajan, "Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean" (U of California Press, 2025) 1:04:03

17d ago1:04:03

1:04:03

Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean (U of California Press, 2025) follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings that are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from…

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Laura Garbes, "Listeners Like Who?: Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry" (Princeton UP, 2025) 42:07

17d ago42:07

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Why is radio so white? In Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry (Princeton UP, 2025) Laura Garbes, a Sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, explores the history of public radio, theorising it as a white institutional space. Alongside the rich history and theoretical fram…

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Susan M. Rigdon, "Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final" (Berghahn Books, 2024) 1:07:48

18d ago1:07:48

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American anthropologist Oscar Lewis secured permission from Fidel Castro to undertake three years of field research on cultural and economic change in Cuba in the decade after the victory of Castro's M-26 Movement. Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final (Berghahn Books, 2024) delves into Lewis' research goals, methods, the training and composition o…

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Chelsi West Ohueri, "Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife" (Cornell UP, 2025) 51:10

23d ago51:10

51:10

Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 2025) is the first book to interrogate race and racial logics in Albania. Chelsi West Ohueri examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. She argues that while race is often …

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Darcie Deangelo et al., "Demilitarizing the Future" (Anthem Press, 2025) 50:25

20d ago50:25

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Demilitarizing the Future (Anthem Press, 2025) draws from art, anthropology, and activism to investigate the entrenchment of militarism in everyday lives and consider novel imaginaries of its dissolution--of peacemaking, community, and shared equitable futures. This book will be published in October of 2025. In this episode, Rebecca Kastleman, Darc…

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Jovana Diković, "The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia" (UCL Press, 2025) 55:05

20d ago55:05

55:05

What if rural progress isn’t about government intervention but about the self-reliance and ingenuity of peasants themselves? The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia (UCL Press, 2025) subverts conventional wisdom on rural development by shifting the focus from state-led planning to the agency of peasants themselves. Rej…

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CDMO Hunger Games And The State Of Biotech With Siren Biotechnology's Nicole Paulk, Ph.D. 1:00:40

21d ago1:00:40

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In this episode of “Better Biopharma,” host Tyler Menichiello is joined by Nicole Paulk, Ph.D., CEO and founder of Siren Biotechnology, a company developing a universal AAV immuno-gene therapy for cancer. They discuss the company’s decision to switch from plasmids to producer cell lines (PCLs) in production, the current funding environment for cell…

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Cold Rush 27:45

25d ago27:45

27:45

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Sari Pietikainen about her new book Cold Rush (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double dev…

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j. Siguru Wahutu, "In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 1:08:59

21d ago1:08:59

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In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa (Cambridge UP, 2025) unpacks the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that organize and circulate journalistic narratives in Africa to show that something complex is unfolding in the postcolonial context of global journalistic landscapes, especially the relationships bet…

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Stephanie K. Kim, "Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul" (MIT Press, 2023) 53:07

22d ago53:07

53:07

Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul (MIT Press, 2023) challenges the popular image of the international student in the American imagination, an image of affluence, access, and privilege. In this provocative book, higher education scholar Stephanie Kim argues that universitie…

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Kevin J. Hayes, "Understanding Hunter S. Thompson" (U South Carolina Press, 2025) 43:55

25d ago43:55

43:55

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), in Understanding Hunter S. Thompson (University of South Carolina Press, 2025), Kevin J. Hayes provides a broad and nuanced analysis of Thompson's multifaceted career and unique …

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Ruth E. Toulson, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore" (U Washington Press, 2024) 58:30

29d ago58:30

58:30

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In Necropolitics of the O…

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Dimly Lit Smut - Gothikana with Sydney Steinberg! 1:01:56

1M ago1:01:56

1:01:56

Grab your maxi skirts, folks. Brea and Mallory talk about Gothikana with actor and comedian Sydney Steinberg! Email us at [email protected]! Forever by Judy Blume Gothikana by RuNyx Reading Smut Merch https://www.instagram.com/sydney_steinberg/ Next month’s book is Her Soul to Take by Harley Laroux!…

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Karen Bartlett, "Escape from Kabul: The Afghan Women Judges Who Fled the Taliban and Those They Left Behind" (New Press, 2025) 1:01:03

1M ago1:01:03

1:01:03

In this episode, New Books Network Host Nina Bo Wagner speaks with Karen Bartlett about The Escape From Kabul: A True Story of Sisterhood and Defiance (The New Press and Duckworth, 2025). The book follows Afghan women judges who fought for justice in the courtroom, then fought to escape with their lives. Across twenty years of U.S.-backed governmen…

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Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, "Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East" (UP of Colorado, 2025) 58:49

26d ago58:49

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Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) by Dr. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, …

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Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020) 50:55

1M ago50:55

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We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of cen…

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BONUS: This Town F*cks - Sweet Berries with Too Stupid To Live! 58:48

1M ago58:48

58:48

Brea and Mallory and Becky from Too Stupid to Live talk about Sweet Berries by C.M. Nacosta, low stakes smut, and how millennials long for health insurance. Email us at [email protected]! Sweet Berries Too Stupid to Live Reading Smut Merch Maneater by Emily Antoinette The Dragon’s Bride by Katee Robert Next month’s book is Her Soul to …

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Maan Barua, "Plantation Worlds" (Duke UP, 2024) 58:49

1M ago58:49

58:49

In Plantation Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the…

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Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football 58:04

1M ago58:04

58:04

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college footba…

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Tom Arnold-Forster, "Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography" (Princeton UP, 2025) 42:50

1M ago42:50

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From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America. His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media are still taught today. Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forste…

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Delivering Biologics To The Brain With Adaptin Bio's Michael Roberts, Ph.D., and Duke University's Mustafa Khasraw, MD 36:11

1M ago36:11

36:11

In this episode of "Better Biopharma," host Tyler Menichiello is joined by Adaptin Bio's CEO, co-founder, and president, Michael Roberts, Ph.D., and Duke University's Mustafa Khasraw, MD. They discuss Adaptin's Brain Bispecific T-cell Engager (BRiTE) platform, its clinical potential to deliver therapeutic T cells across the blood-brain barrier, and…

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Vanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood" (Duke UP, 2020) 50:01

1M ago50:01

50:01

While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work …

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Vanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood" (Duke UP, 2020) 50:01

1M ago50:01

50:01

While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work …

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Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., "Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune" (Ballantine, 2013) 57:03

1M ago57:03

57:03

Bill Dedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and New York Times #1 bestselling author of Empty Mansions, shares the extraordinary story of a reclusive copper heiress, the battle over her fortune, and the HBO series adaptation now in development. As an investigative journalist, Bill Dedman has built his career writing stories that chan…

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Bettina Ng′weno, "No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi" (U of California Press, 2025) 53:28

2M ago53:28

53:28

Bettina Ng’weno is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis Nairobi, known as the Green City in the Sun, has taken shape through anti-urban ideologies that insist that the city cannot be home for most residents. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in a New Ci…