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New Books Network

About Carla Nappi

NBN Episodes hosted by Carla:

Science, Technology, and Society May 21, 2021

The Earthquake Observers

Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter

Deborah R. Coen

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Earthquakes have taught us much about our planet's hidden structure and the forces that have shaped it. This knowledge rests not only on the recordings of seismographs but also on …
Science, Technology, and Society May 21, 2021

Articulating the World

Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image

Joseph Rouse

Hosted by Carla Nappi
In the words of Joseph Rouse’s new book, “The most pressing challenge for naturalism today is to show how to account for our own capacities for scientific understanding as a …
Science, Technology, and Society December 17, 2018

After Eunuchs

Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China

Howard Chiang

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia …
NBN Seminar December 6, 2018

General Intellects

Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century

McKenzie Wark

Hosted by Carla Nappi
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for …
NBN Seminar November 20, 2018

Discognition

Steven Shaviro

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it like to …
Science, Technology, and Society October 17, 2018

Making Time

Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan

Yulia Frumer

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Yulia Frumer’s new book follows roughly three hundred years of transformations in how time was conceptualized, measured, and materialized in Japan. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan (University …
Science, Technology, and Society October 11, 2018

The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius

A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions

Dániel Margócsy, Mark Somos, and Stephen N. Joffe

Hosted by Carla Nappi
The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Brill, 2018) is a masterful new book that will long be on …
East Asian Studies September 25, 2018

Forgotten Disease

Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine

Hilary A. Smith

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century to the present day. However …
East Asian Studies September 13, 2018

The Art of Being Governed

Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China

Michael Szonyi

Hosted by Carla Nappi
At the heart of Michael Szonyi’s new book are two questions: 1) How did ordinary people in the Ming deal with their obligations to provide manpower to the army?, and …
East Asian Studies August 31, 2018

The End of Concern

Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies

Fabio Lanza

Hosted by Carla Nappi
If you work in Asian studies as a scholarly field, you should read Fabio Lanza’s new book. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press …
East Asian Studies August 27, 2018

Curating Revolution

Politics on Display in Mao's China

Denise Y. Ho

Hosted by Carla Nappi
“In Mao’s China, to curate revolution was to make it material.” Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period …
NBN Seminar August 13, 2018

The Ecology of Attention

Yves Citton

Hosted by Carla Nappi
We are arguably living in the midst of a form of economy where attention has become a key resource and value, labor, class, and currency are being reconfigured as a …
East Asian Studies August 10, 2018

The Pidgin Warrior

Zhang Tianyi (tr. David Hull)

Hosted by Carla Nappi
“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful …
East Asian Studies August 2, 2018

Textures of Mourning

Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls

Reginald Jackson

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Reginald Jackson’s inspiring new book takes a transdisciplinary approach to rethinking how we read, how we pay attention, and why that matters deeply in shaping how we understand the past …
Science, Technology, and Society May 18, 2017

Face/On

Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other

Sharrona Pearl

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Sharrona Pearl's new book is an absolute pleasure to read. Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (The University of Chicago Press, 2017) looks closely at facial allotransplantations …
East Asian Studies May 18, 2017

The Social Life of Inkstones

Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China

Dorothy Ko

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Dorothy Ko's new book is a must-read. Troubling the hierarchy of head over hands and the propensity to denigrate craftsmen in Chinese history, The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and …
Science, Technology, and Society May 13, 2017

Synthetic

How Life Got Made

Sophia Roosth

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Sophia Roosth's wonderful new book follows researchers clustered around MIT beginning in 2003 who named themselves synthetic biologists. A historically informed anthropological analysis based on many years of ethnographic work …
East Asian Studies May 13, 2017

A World Trimmed with Fur

Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule

Jonathan Schlesinger

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Jonathan Schlesinger's new book makes a compelling case for the significance of Manchu and Mongolian sources and archival sources in particular in telling the story of the Qing empire and …
East Asian Studies May 4, 2017

The Edge of Knowing

Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature

Roy Bing Chan

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Roy Bing Chan's new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period …
Science, Technology, and Society May 4, 2017

Placing Outer Space

An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds

Lisa Messeri

Hosted by Carla Nappi
What kind of object is a planet? Lisa Messeri's new book asks and addressed this question in a fascinating ethnography that explores how scientific practices transform planets into places and …
East Asian Studies May 2, 2017

The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History

Timothy Cheek

Hosted by Carla Nappi
In the preface to his new book, Timothy Cheek calls out a widespread tendency to focus on dissidents when engaging with Chinese intellectuals. (This is a problem insofar as we …
East Asian Studies April 25, 2017

The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan

Marcia Yonemoto

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Were women a problem in early modern Japan? If they were, what was the nature of the problem they posed? For whom, and why? Marcia Yonemoto's new book explores these …
NBN Seminar April 25, 2017

What Love Is

And What It Could Be

Carrie Jenkins

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Carrie Jenkins' new book is a model for what public philosophy can be. Beautifully written, thoughtful, and compellingly and carefully argued, What Love Is: And What it Could Be (Basic …
Science, Technology, and Society April 25, 2017

The Dancing Bees

Karl von Frisch and the Discovery of the Honeybee Language

Tania Munz

Hosted by Carla Nappi
Tania Munz's new book is a dual biography: both of Austrian-born experimental physiologist Karl von Frisch, and of the honeybees he worked with as experimental, communicating creatures. The Dancing Bees …