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Interviews with performing artists and scholars of the performing arts about their new books.
During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studi…
Every year a relatively small number of canonic operas are produced around the world. Many companies shy away from new works, afraid of alienating a p…
What is the future of the film industry? In Mobile Hollywood Labor and the Geography of Production (U California Press, 2024), Kevin Sanson, Professor…
Folk music of the 1960s and 1970s was a genre that was always shifting and expanding, yet somehow never found room for so many. In the sounds of soul-…
In the early 1980s, Walt Disney Productions was struggling, largely bolstered by the success of its theme parks. Within fifteen years, however, it had…
In 2005, Brad Balukjian left his position as a magazine fact-checker to pursue a dream job: partner with his childhood hero, The Iron Sheik (whose rea…
The study of Jewish text, over two millennia, has traditionally taken place in the Bet Midrash (the communal study hall), sitting at a table or desk. …
There She Goes Again: Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises (Rutgers UP, 2023) interrogates the representation o…
A History of Fireworks from Their Origins to the Present Day (Reaktion, 2024) by John Withington illuminates the glittering history of fireworks, from…
In Black Expression and White Generosity: A Theoretical Framework of Race (Emerald Publishing, 2024), Dr. Natalie Wall takes readers on a journey thro…
Serena Laiena joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, The Theater Couple in Early Modern Italy: Self-Fashioning and Mutual Marketing (University …
What is the future of classical music? In The Sound of Difference: Race, Class and the Politics of 'Diversity' in Classical Music (Manchester UP, 2024…
What is it about Times Square that has inspired such attention for well over a century? And how is it that, despite its many changes of character, the…
Konrad Bercovici's The Algonquin Round Table: 25 Years With the Legends Who Lunch (SUNY Press, 2024) is a previously unpublished manuscript exploring …
Growing up in West Texas, Jane Little Botkin didn’t have designs on becoming a beauty queen. But not long after joining a pageant on a whim in college…
Scores sewn into coat linings, instruments hidden in suitcases, sheet music stashed among dirty laundry, concertos written on discarded food wrappers …
During the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system, stars were carefully cultivated and promoted, but at the price of their independence. This familiar na…
Can self-harm be art? In Performance, Masculinity, and Self-Injury (Routledge, 2024), Lucy Weir, a Reader in History of Art at the University of Edinb…
Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. These are iconic elements of film noir visual style. Long after its 1940s heyday, noir hallmar…
Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940–1960 (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers a new history of the partition. Based on previously unex…