University of Minnesota Press

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.

Jordan S. Carroll, an expert on speculative whiteness and author of "Reading the Obscene," teams up with David M. Higgins, a senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of "Reverse Colonization." They explore how science fiction has been entwined with white nationalism, revealing the historical ties of neo-Nazi movements to sci-fi fandom. The guests discuss the impact of speculative narratives on identity, the intersection of masculinity in these tales, and the need for diverse voices to counteract the reactionary trends in modern fandom.

Policy expert and climate scientist Anna Farro Henderson explores how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined in her new book, Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood. Grounded in her experience as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton, Henderson brings readers behind the closed doors of discovery and debate—and illuminates the messy, contradictory humanity of our scientific and political institutions. Here, Henderson is joined in conversation with Tenzin Dolkar and Roberta Downing on getting your voice heard in politics.Anna Farro Henderson is an award-winning writer, PhD scientist, and environmental policy expert. She is a fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, teaches at the Loft Literary Center, and works in climate advocacy. She lives with her family in St. Paul, where she makes daily visits to the Mississippi River.Tenzin Dolkar has more than 15 years of experience in policy development, advocacy, community organizing, and management with state and local governments. Dolkar is a council member on the Metropolitan Council, and has previously served as the State of Minnesota’s Rail Director and as a policy advisor on transportation, agriculture, and rural issues for Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton.Roberta Downing is a public policy professional with more than 20 years of experience. Downing held a congressional fellowship administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and served on the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions under Senator Edward M. Kennedy; has held several academic and policy-focused positions, including for the offices of US Senator Sherrod Brown and DC Mayor Muriel E. Bowser; and is principal and co-founder of Harper Downing LLC, a Minnesota-based government affairs consulting firm.Praise for the book:“Honest and immersive, this book offers a behind-the-scenes look at how culture (and who crafts it) shapes everything from the sediment the narrator studies to the policies that define climate action today.”—Elizabeth Rush, author of The Quickening“Anna Farro Henderson’s deep encounters with Big Science and Big Bureaucracy will help you understand why progress on matters of life and death can be so maddeningly slow; her encounters with herself may help you figure out how to live your own life.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature“With fierce intelligence and wild exuberance, Anna Farro Henderson throws herself headlong into the biggest challenges of our time: how to love fully, create abundantly, and stop the ruin of the precious ecosystems that sustain us.”—Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers“Some books are so good I want to shout about them to the rooftops. Core Samples is one of those.”—Vick Mickunas, Dayton Daily NewsCore Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood by Anna Farro Henderson is available from University of Minnesota Press.

In a timely challenge to the potent political role of digital technology, Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology argues that right-wing ideology was built into both the technical and social construction of the digital world from the start. Leveraging more than a decade of research, David Golumbia, who passed away in 2023, traced how digital evangelism has driven a worldwide shift toward the political right, concealing inequality, xenophobia, dishonesty, and massive corporate concentrations of wealth and power beneath the idealistic presumption of digital technology as an inherent social good. George Justice wrote the foreword to Cyberlibertarianism, and is joined in conversation with Frank Pasquale.George Justice is professor of English literature and provost at the University of Tulsa.Frank Pasquale is professor of law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School.David Golumbia (1963–2023) was associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology; The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism; and The Cultural Logic of Computation.EPISODE REFERENCES:Tim WuLawrence LessigWikileaksDavid E. Pozen: Transparency’s Ideological Drift https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/20.500.13051/10354Stefanos Geroulanos / Transparency in Postwar France#CreateDontScrapeDavid Golumbia / ChatGPT Should Not Exist (article)M. T. Anderson / FeedJonathan Crary / Scorched Earth"If you want to understand the origins of our information hellscape with its vast new inequalities, corrupt information, algorithmic control, population-scale behavioral manipulation, and wholesale destruction of privacy, then begin here."—Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"Cyberlibertarianism is essential for understanding the contemporary moment and the recent past that got us here. It stands as a monumental magnum opus from a meticulous thinker and sharp social critic who is sorely missed."—Sarah T. Roberts, director, Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, UCLACyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology is available from University of Minnesota Press.

Energy transition is crucial to the struggle against climate change. Imre Szman is concerned with who is trying to lay claim to the narratives guiding our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, how they are doing it, and why and to what ends. Mark Simpson joins Szeman in conversation about Szeman’s new book, Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life. Imre Szeman is director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and professor of human geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is cofounder of the Petrocultures Research group.Mark Simpson is professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta, one of the founding collaborators on the research collective After Oil, and a core member of the Petrocultures Research Group.REFERENCES:-Imre Szeman, essay, System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster, South Atlantic Quarterly-Timothy Mitchell / Carbon Democracy-Seth Klein / A Good War-Jennifer Wenzel, essay, Forms of Life: Thinking Fossil Infrastructure and Its Narrative Grammar, Social Text-Extinction Rebellion / Common Sense for the 21st Century-After Oil Collective / Solarities-University of Toronto’s Institute for Inclusive Economies and Sustainable Livelihoods, director, Sergio Montero-Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland ReportFutures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life 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.“The content of this book is extraordinary. Imre Szeman is an exceptional expert, well-versed in analysing the complex intersections between energy, society, and politics. The book is a real opportunity to deepen our understanding of contemporary energy and political issues.”—International Journal of Environmental Studies

"We aren't done with Pee-wee's Playhouse because there's much to learn from sticking with it." So opens Cait McKinney's I Know You Are, but What Am I?, a book that thinks across the ways we remember and misremember Pee-wee. McKinney explores the expansive, mediated landscape of the television show; engages a reparative retelling of the actor Paul Reubens's 1991 arrest in a suburban adult film theater; and gets into the collecting of the iconic Talking Pee-wee dolls and their afterlives on eBay and YouTube. Here, McKinney is joined in conversation with John Stadler.Cait McKinney is associate professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.John Stadler is assistant professor of film studies at North Carolina State University.I Know You Are, but What Am I?: On Pee-wee Herman is available from University of Minnesota Press as part of its Forerunners series. An open-access edition is available to read free online at manifold.umn.edu.