University of Minnesota Press

Scholars have long challenged the common assumption of midwestern isolationism. In Global Heartland, historian Peter Simons reorients the way we look at the critical period in US history from the 1930s through 1950s, showing how farmers across the Midwest understood their work as contributing to an era of international upheaval, geographical reimagination, and global ecological thinking. Here, Simons is joined in conversation with Michael Lansing about the rural heartland, US foreign policy, and the changing and multidisciplinary ways that scholars approach history.Peter Simons is a historian in upstate New York and author of Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm.Michael Lansing is a professor of history at Augsburg University and author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics. EPISODE REFERENCES:Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century / Hendrik MeijerThe Heartland: An American History / Kristin HogansonGrasslands Grown: Creating Place on the US Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies / Molly P. RozumBack East: How Westerners Invented a Region / Flannery BurkeSupermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race / Shane HamiltonNuclear Country: The Origins of the Rural New Right / Catherine McNicol StockLester E. Helland Papers, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, MadisonPraise for the book:“From Lend-Lease to Food for Peace, Global Heartland reveals how rural Midwesterners came to see their farms as being at the heart of the world.”—Kristin Hoganson“This rich and revealing book transforms the way we think about the rural heartland.”—Michael LansingGlobal Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm by Peter Simons is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Join Talia Mae Bettcher, a philosophy professor and author of "Beyond Personhood", in conversation with Judith Butler, a leading voice in feminist and gender studies. They delve into the complexities of trans identity, discussing the damaging political narratives surrounding trans rights and the need for an evolved understanding of personhood. Bettcher introduces groundbreaking ideas like interpersonal spatiality and critiques traditional identity constructs. Their dialogue highlights philosophy as a form of resistance and offers profound insights into navigating contemporary challenges faced by trans individuals.

​"Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks." How do we visualize something that cannot be physically seen? What limitations do existing knowledge structures impose that reverberate through planetary problem-solving processes, including public health and environmental crises? This episode brings together two scholars who think elementally: Lisa Yin Han, who operates in the blue humanities or ocean humanities, who studies mediation and the deep seafloor; and Gloria Chan-Sook Kim, who focuses on scientific problems of knowledge and visualization and more specifically, microbes. Their astounding conversation goes from emerging microbes to the seabed to places where their research intersects, including catastrophic deferral, scalar mediation, the figure of the plume, and the concept of resolution.Lisa Yin Han is assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College and author of Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor.Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is a scholar of visual culture, media studies, and science and technology studies, assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and the Security in the War on Microbes. Episode references:Melody JueCelina Osuna, desert humanitiesNicole StarosielskiChristopher P. Heuer / Into the WhiteAndrea BallesteroAdriana Petryna / Life ExposedCelia LoweStefan Helmreich / Alien OceanJames Hamilton-Paterson / Seven-TenthsDeepwater Alchemy and Microbial Resolution are available from University of Minnesota Press.

There's living coral, and then there's Coral—the iconicity and imaginary of living coral. As Melody Jue writes in Coralations, coral alternates between signifying an organism and signifying an environment, all too often imagined as a tourist destination. In rethinking the limitations of Coral, Jue opens up possibilities for a more expansive sense of environmental media, more inclusive goals for multispecies justice, and more nuanced forms of oceanic care work. Here, Jue is joined in conversation with Ann Elias. Melody Jue is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jue is author of Coralations and Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater and coeditor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics with Rafico Ruiz.Ann Elias is professor emerita of visual culture at the University of Sydney. Elias is author of many books including Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity.REFERENCES:Coral Whisperers (Irus Braverman)Situated Knowledges (Donna Haraway, in the journal Feminist Studies)Her Seal Skin Coat (Lauren Beukes, short story)Sylvia EarleJacques CousteauCalifornia Against the Sea (Rosanna Xia)Jean PainlevéZoological Surrealism (James Leo Cahill)Alien Ocean (Stefan Helmreich)Chasing Coral documentaryCoralations by Melody Jue is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book is part of the Forerunners series, and an open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.

University of Minnesota Press, est. 1925, turns 100 this year. Yes, we are twice as old as Saturday Night Live. And just as old as The New Yorker and The Great Gatsby. The Press has had only five directors in its history, and many current staff have been on for more than a few decades.How about another serendipitous milestone: this podcast, est. 2020, is releasing its 100th episode right here, right now. The past 99 episodes have focused on our authors. Between authorship and publication, a book passes through more than a few hands, and today we are getting into it with people who have dedicated their days, years, and decades in service of books and research. About half of our staff are represented here. Without further adieu, come meet (half of) the Press!People appearing in this episode include:Douglas Armato, director of University of Minnesota PressSusan Doerr, associate directorEmily Hamilton, associate director for book publishingLaura Westlund, managing editor and development officerJason Weidemann, editorial directorPieter Martin, senior editorMichael Stoffel, managing editor–scholarly booksHeather Skinner, publicity director and assistant marketing managerRachel Moeller, assistant production manager and art directorErik Anderson, senior acquisitions editorMaggie Sattler, digital marketing managerEric Lundgren, development and outreach managerEliza Edwards, production assistantEmma Saks, editorial assistantCarina Bolaños Lewen, exhibits and marketing assistantAnthony Silvestri, journals managerZack Stewart, journals production specialistAlena Rivas, publicity associateKeep up with our centennial at z.umn.edu/ump100.Thank you for listening.

Between the 1850s and 1930s, before playhouses for children reached the mainstream, they were often fully functional cottages designed by well-known architects for British royalty, American industrialists, and Hollywood stars. Recognizing the playhouse in this era as a stage for the purposeful performance of upper-class identity, Abigail A. Van Slyck illuminates their role as carefully planned architectural manifestations of adult concerns, from Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s Swiss Cottage (1853) to the children’s cottage on the grounds of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport mansion (1886) to the glass-block playhouse given to Shirley Temple in 1936, and many more in between. Here, Van Slyck is joined in conversation with Annmarie Adams, Marta Gutman, and Kate Solomonson.Abigail A. Van Slyck is the Dayton Professor Emeritus of Art History at Connecticut College and author of Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood; A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960; and Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890-1920.Annmarie Adams is an architectural historian at McGill University in Montreal. Adams is author of Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital, 1893-1943; Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900; and coauthor of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession.Marta Gutman is dean and professor in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Gutman is author of A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950.Kate Solomonson is architectural historian and professor emeritus in the Department of Architecture at the University of Minnesota. Solomonson is coeditor, with Van Slyck, of the Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture series with University of Minnesota Press.EPISODE REFERENCES:-Hanover estate: Osborne (Swiss Cottage), Isle of Wight, UK. For Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.-Vanderbilt estate: The Breakers, Newport, Rhode Island. For Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt.-Dow estate: Foxhollow Farm (Fallsburgh), Rhinebeck, New York. For Tracy Dows and Alice Olin Dows.-Whitney estate: Greentree, Manhasset, Long Island. For Payne Whitney and Helen Hay Whitney.-Dodge estate: Meadow Brook Hall (since 1929, Knole Cottage; before 1929, Hilltop Lodge), Rochester, Michigan. For Alfred Wilson and Matilda Dodge Wilson.-Ford estate: Gaukler Pointe, Grosse Pointe, Michigan. For Edsel Ford and Eleanor Clay Ford.Designing the Creative Child / Amy F. OgataPastoral Capitalism / Louise MozingoThe research of Barbara Penner (Bartlett School of Architecture, London)Praise for the book:"Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and profusely illustrated, Playhouses and Privilege is a must-read for anyone interested in the study of children, architecture, privilege, and play."—Marta Gutman, dean, Spitzer School of Architecture, CUNY"Small spaces can host big stories. In charting the spatial components of social prestige, Abigail A. Van Slyck delineates shifting conceptions of childhood, modulating gender politics, charged interactions between parents and children, and popular representations of youthful celebrity. This is a riveting read—focused and yet expansive, innovative, and insightful at every turn."—Simon Sleight, coeditor of A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern AgePlayhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood by Abigail A. Van Slyck is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“If the public can predict you, it starts to like you. But the Marchesa didn’t want to be liked.” For the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Marchesa Luisa Casati astounded Europe. Artists such as Man Ray painted, sculpted, and photographed her; writers such as Ezra Pound and Jack Kerouac praised her strange beauty. An Italian woman of means who questioned the traditional gender codes of her time, she dismissed fixed identities as mere constructions. Gathering on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the first publication of Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati (the first full-length biography of Luisa Casati, now offered in an updated, ultimate edition), Michael Orlando Yaccarino joins Valerie Steele, Joan Rosasco, and Francesca Granata in conversation about the enigma that is the Marchesa Casati.Michael Orlando Yaccarino is a writer specializing in international genre film, fashion, music, and unconventional historic figures. Scot D. Ryersson (1960–2024) was an award-winning writer, illustrator, and graphic designer. Michael and Scot collaborated on many projects, are coauthors of Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, The Ultimate Edition, and are founders of the Casati Archives. www.marchesacasati.comValerie Steele is a fashion historian and director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Steele is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including Paris Fashion, Fetish, and Fashion Designers A-Z.Joan Rosasco taught at Smith College, Columbia University, and New York University, with focus on European art and culture, French literature, and the Belle Époque period. She is author of numerous publications including The Septet.Francesca Granata is associate professor of fashion studies at Parsons School of Design. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary visual culture, fashion history and theory, and gender and performance studies. Granata is editor of Fashion Criticism and author of Experimental Fashion, and wrote the afterword to Infinite Variety.Praise for the book:"Ryersson and Yaccarino are judicious historians of frivolity who capture the tone of a life that was obscenely profligate yet strangely pure."—The New Yorker"A meticulously researched biography, Infinite Variety is as much art history as chronicle of personal obsession."—The New York Times"Fascinating . . . with or without her cheetahs, the Marchesa Casati’s circus of the self makes her a natural for the new millennium."—Vanity FairInfinite Variety: The Life and Legend of Marchesa Casati, The Ultimate Edition is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Microbes: We can’t see them, but we have no choice but to live with them. Microbes have significant, enduring impacts on human health and remind us to resist the abstraction of crucial forces in our everyday lives. Welcome to a multidisciplinary conversation about microbes, featuring Amber Benezra (Gut Anthro), Gloria Chan-Sook Kim (Microbial Resolution), and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer (American Disgust) in a wide-ranging conversation that opens up possibilities for imagining more equitable approaches to science, visualizing and embodying the microbe, and conceptualizing health at individual, societal, and planetary levels.Amber Benezra is assistant professor of science and technology studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and is author of Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes, a finalist for the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science.Gloria Chan-Sook Kim is assistant professor of media and culture at the University of California, Riverside, and is author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the War against Emerging Microbes.Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer is professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic University, and is author of American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within; The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life; Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology; and Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age. Praise for the books:“We learn from microbes—and the messy, fragile, tenacious humans that study them—how much the minute details of mundane life matter. Alternately hopeful and unsettling, Gut Anthro is a book that expertly does what microbes have always done: change how we see, how we collaborate, and who we are.”—Emily Yates-Doerr, author of The Weight of Obesity“Gloria Chan-Sook Kim’s visual methodology proposes a clear optic for understanding how global health responses to microbial threats will fail unless we wrestle with the systems that perpetuate the conditions for the next mutant microbe on the horizon.” —Stefanie R. Fishel, author of The Microbial State“American Disgust pushes readers to think beyond individual taste to consider how whiteness shapes what is acceptable or profane and how to grow our capacity for the unfamiliar. It is a refreshing take on a long-debated concept.”—Ashanté M. Reese, coeditor of Black Food MattersBooks by Amber Benezra, Gloria Chan-Sook Kim, and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer are available from University of Minnesota Press.

Humans are one species on a planet of millions of species. The literary collection Creature Needs is a project that grew out of a need to do something with grievous, anxious energy—an attempt to nourish the soul in a meaningful way, and an attempt to start somewhere specific in the face of big, earthly challenges and changes, to create a polyvocal call to arms about animal extinction and habitat loss and the ways our needs are interconnected. The book’s editors, Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman, and Susan Tacent, are joined here in conversation.More about the book: Creature Needs is published in collaboration with the nonprofit organization Creature Conserve. The following writers contributed new literary works inspired by scientific articles: Kazim Ali, Mary-Kim Arnold, Ramona Ausubel, David Baker, Charles Baxter, Aimee Bender, Kimberly Blaeser, Oni Buchanan, Tina Cane, Ching-In Chen, Mónica de la Torre, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Thalia Field, Ben Goldfarb, Annie Hartnett, Sean Hill, Hester Kaplan, Donika Kelly, Robin McLean, Miranda Mellis, Rajiv Mohabir, Kyoko Mori, David Naimon, Craig Santos Perez, Beth Piatote, Rena Priest, Alberto Ríos, Eléna Rivera, Sofia Samatar, Sharma Shields, Eleni Sikelianos, Maggie Smith, Juliana Spahr, Tim Sutton, Jodie Noel Vinson, Asiya Wadud, Claire Wahmanholm, Marco Wilkinson, Jane Wong.About the editors:Christopher Kondrich, poet in residence at Creature Conserve, is author of Valuing, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Contrapuntal. His writing has been published in The Believer, The Kenyon Review, and The Paris Review.Lucy Spelman is founder of Creature Conserve, a nonprofit dedicated to combining art with science to cultivate new pathways for wildlife conservation. A zoological medicine veterinarian, she teaches biology at the Rhode Island School of Design and is author of National Geographic Kids Animal Encyclopedia and coeditor of The Rhino with Glue-On Shoes.Susan Tacent, writer in residence at Creature Conserve, is a writer, scholar, and educator whose fiction has been published in Blackbird, DIAGRAM, and Tin House Online.Episode references:The Lord God Bird by Chelsea Steubayer-Scudder in Emergence MagazineThinking Like a Mountain by Jedediah Purdy in n+1Praise for the book:A thought-provoking and emotionally resonant read that stands out for its lyrical prowess and formal innovation, making it a significant contribution to contemporary literature as well as a key volume bridging the gap between the worlds of science and art.”—Library JournalCreature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Public schools are one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—and are also some of our most unequal institutions. In Unsettling Choice, Ujju Aggarwal explores how the expansion of choice-based programs led to greater inequality and segregation in a gentrifying New York City neighborhood during the years following the Great Recession, mobilizing mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side while solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private. Here, Aggarwal is joined in conversation with Sabina Vaught.Ujju Aggarwal is assistant professor of anthropology and experiential learning at The New School. She is author of Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education and coeditor of What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Policy Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality.Sabina Vaught is professor at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Kinloch Commons for Critical Pedagogy and Leadership. Vaught is coauthor of The School-Prison Trust and author of Compulsory: Education and the Dispossession of Youth in a Prison School.  Episode references:Ruth Wilson GilmoreChristina HeathertonCindy KatzSelma JamesJoão Costa VargasMorgan Talty / Fire ExitPraise for the book:“A must-read to understand the racialized violence inherent within one of the most fundamental aspects of education in the United States: the logic of choice.”—Damien Sojoyner“Read this book, and be moved and transformed.”—Sabina VaughtUnsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education by Ujju Aggarwal is available from University of Minnesota Press.