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Posts published in “News”

Read an Excerpt from “Metropolitan Latinidad,” Edited by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz

Latino urban history has been underappreciated not only in its own right but for the centrality of its narratives to urban history as a field. A scholarly discipline that has long scrutinized economics, politics, and the built environment has too often framed race as literally Black and white. This has

Read an Interview with Poet and Translator Kristin Dykstra

As we get ready to celebrate Poetry Month 2025, we also continue to celebrate the amazing writers, editors, and translators in our Phoenix Poets series. Here, we spoke with poet and translator Kristin Dykstra, whose new book of original poems, Dissonance, considers life at the US’s northern border in the

A Jazz Age Lesson in Activism, with Stunning Parallels to Politics Today

Guest Post from Gioia Diliberto, author of Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition  A radical social/political movement has taken over the government. Privately, many legislators and officials acknowledge that the movement is deeply flawed, even mad in some respects. They know the country is

A Guest Post from Margaret Gullette, author of “American Eldercide”

“The Room Next Door” is Stylish and Even Watchable . . . But Not Brave Enoughby Margaret Morganroth Gullette Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” enacts a rare life event that most of us don’t want to contemplate even vicariously. By now everyone knows the donnée: A war correspondent (Tilda Swinton),

Chicago Perspectives on Current Events: A Reading List of Books to Think With

In today’s never-ending news cycle, it can be hard to stay grounded and make sense of the flood of information. So, we offer here a list of books to help us think through these times. Informed by the University of Chicago’s trademark openness to the free exchange of ideas, the

Read an Excerpt from “Mastery and Drift: Professional-Class Liberals since the 1960s”

Since the 1960s, American liberalism and the Democratic Party have been remade along professional class lines, widening liberalism’s impact but narrowing its social and political vision. In Mastery and Drift, historians Brent Cebul and Lily Geismer have assembled a group of scholars to address the formation of “professional-class liberalism” and its

Five Questions with Jill Pruetz, author of “Apes on the Edge”

Fongoli chimpanzees are unique for many reasons. Their female hunters are the only apes that regularly hunt with tools, seeking out tiny bush babies with wooden spears. Unlike most other chimps, these apes fear neither water nor fire, using shallow pools to cool off in the Senegalese heat. Up to

Speculum Celebrates 100 years of the Medieval Academy of America

In 1925, the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) was founded as a learned society dedicated to pursuing scholarly research on the Middle Ages in North America. A century later, the MAA occupies a central position in the landscape of medieval studies, and Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, the flagship journal of the

A Reading List for When You’re Longing for the Tropics

One grey day after another. February may be the shortest month but the cold and damp make it drag on forever. We’re all looking to escape the dreary weather, aren’t we? Here is a list of books that will help you dream of warmth, the sun, and maybe a tropical

Read an excerpt from “On Close Reading” by John Guillory

What exactly is “close reading,” and where did the term come from? In On Close Reading, John Guillory takes up two puzzles. First, why did the New Critics—who supposedly made close reading central to literary study—so seldom use the term? And second, why have scholars not been better able to

Five Questions with Alexander Wood, author of “Building the Metropolis”

Between the 1880s and the 1930s, New York City experienced explosive growth as nearly a million buildings, dozens of bridges and tunnels, hundreds of miles of subway lines, and thousands of miles of streets were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling population. In his book Building the Metropolis, Alexander Wood

Read an Interview with Poet and Translator Aaron Coleman

To celebrate new Phoenix Poets books, we’re introducing Phoenix editors, poets, and translators through a series of short interviews. Here, we spoke with poet and translator Aaron Coleman, whose new translated bilingual edition of Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo has recently published. In this interview, he discusses his

Read an Excerpt from “Yet Another Costume Party Debacle” by Ingrid A. Nelson

Drawing on interviews and archival research, Yet Another Costume Party Debacle shows how colleges both contest and reproduce racialized systems of power. Sociologist Ingrid A. Nelson juxtaposes how students and administrators discuss race with how they behave in the aftermath of racially charged campus controversies. Nelson shows how the underlying campus structures

Read an Excerpt from “The Politics of Utopia” by Arnaud Orain

Published this summer, The Politics of Utopia is a fascinating retelling of the first banking and financial collapse in eighteenth-century France. This week, we’re sharing a short excerpt from the book’s introduction. Since the end of the seventeenth century, utopians, theologians, travelers, economists, and what Daniel Defoe called projectors—individuals who