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Interviews with performing artists and scholars of the performing arts about their new books.
Since the release of Jordan Peele's Academy Award-winning horror hit Get Out (2017), interest in Black horror films has erupted. This renewed intrigue…
Sh. An-ski (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863-1920) was a writer in Russian and Yiddish, a revolutionary, a wartime relief worker, and an ethnographer who…
It is a compulsion of the human race to find a way to memorialize those we have lost and why we have lost them, from a gravestone of a loved one to wa…
Reverberations of Culture: Racialized Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Musical Variety by Just a Buncha Clowns (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Shane Br…
For over a century, Alfred Hitchcock has remained one of cinema's most influential directors. Known as the Master of Suspense, this visionary filmmake…
Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Ki…
Starting in the 1880s, Black performers, and those invested in telling stories centering Black people, attempted to counter the dehumanizing and harmf…
In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson famously argued that Shakespeare is enduringly popular because he “is above all writers, at least above all …
The unbelievable insider stories of how they “got the shot,” Cinematic Immunity tells the story of New York City's movie industry from the crew member…
Jes Battis' new book, It's Only Forever. Labyrinth (ECW Press, 2026) is a wild, intimate, and political deep dive into Jim Henson’s 1986 classic starr…
Since the 1990s, a largely underground upwelling of trans creativity has helped new trans identities, communities, and political movements come togeth…
S. An-ski’s play The Dybbuk, a story of possession set in a shtetl (think The Exorcist meets Fiddler on the Roof), is the foundation of modern Jewish …
How can an entirely foreign cast perform the American “The Shawshank Redemption” in the Chinese language across China? In this episode of the Nordic A…
Over the last seven decades, some of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theater of the Third Reich. From Ke…
Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive (NYU Press, 2026) is a bold and incisive reconsideration of the relationship …
Caryn Rose's Three Chords and Blessed Noise (2026) is an ode to the lost art of the tour diary. In November of 2025, Patti Smith and her band embarked…
Today’s guest, John Kuhn, is the author of Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Press, …
With his fake beard, putty nose, and thick Yiddish accent, the “stage Jew” was once a common character in vaudeville, part of a genre that mocked immi…
"Roman theatre" is a term often used to describe the theatre of ancient Italy during the second and third century BCE. Plautus and Terence are referre…
Movies open a window into our collective soul. In Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency (Lever Press, 2026), Stephen Lee Naish guides us throu…