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About Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University. His books include The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move, and Semi-Detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens; he is at work on My Earthsea, a book about Ursula Le Guin. He is editor of the Public Books B-Sides and a collection from Columbia University Press, B-Sides Books: Essays on Forgotten Favorites. He co-founded the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative and co-hosts the podcasts Novel Dialogue and Recall This Book.Free-ranging discussion of books from the past that cast a sideways light on today's world. Recall This Book is hosted by Elizabeth Ferry, Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University and John Plotz, Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative.
NBN Episodes hosted by Elizabeth Ferry:
October 31, 2024
Animals Dream and That Makes Them Morally Considerable (JP)
In his marvelous new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness (Princeton UP, 2023), David Peña-Guzmán (SF State as well as …
October 17, 2024
Self-Help, Dale Carnegie to Today (JP)
Beth Blum, Associate Professor of English at Harvard, is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion (Columbia University Press 2019). In 2020, she spoke w…
October 4, 2024
Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)
You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here. Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard…
October 3, 2024
Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)
Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles …
September 19, 2024
Etherized
Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as…
September 5, 2024
Grief and other Expiring Emotions (Katie Elliott, JP)
Why is that when a loved one dies, grief seems inescapable--and then diminishes? The brilliant Edinburgh philosopher Berislav Marusic's "Do Reasons Ex…
August 15, 2024
Policing and White Power
This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and person…
August 1, 2024
Shaul Magid on the Jewish Radicalism of Meir Kahane
For Kahane, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the black nationalist, the greatest enemy of the Jews was not the Arabs. The greatest enemy of the …
July 4, 2024
Racism as Power Relation
Do we understand racism as the primary driving engine of American inequality? Or do we focus instead on the indirect ways that frequently hard-to-disc…
June 6, 2024
Caribbean Vectors
The largest slave uprising in the 18th century British Caribbean was also a node of the global conflict called the Seven Year’s War, though it isn’t u…
May 9, 2024
Steve McCauley excavates John Cheever's "The Five-Forty-Eight"
We debut a new feature: Recall This Story, in which a contemporary writer picks out a bygone story to read and to analyze. Surely there is no better n…
April 18, 2024
Helena De Bres on Life-Writing (JP, EF)
How does the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things…
April 4, 2024
Hurricanes, Fiction, and Speculative Ethnography (EF)
In this episode, Elizabeth talks with Steven Gonzalez, anthropologist and author of speculative fiction under the pen name E.G. Condé. They discuss th…
March 21, 2024
David Ferry, Roger Reeves, and the Underworld
In Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023) In this Recall This Book conversation from 2021, poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves talk about lyric, epic, and …
March 7, 2024
The Reeducation of Race
NYU professor Sonali Thakkar’s brilliant first book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanf…
February 16, 2024
Sheila Heti Speaks About Awe with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)
In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly va…
February 1, 2024
The Culture Trap
In this episode, Elizabeth and John talk with Derron Wallace, sociologist of education and Brandeis colleague, about his new book The Culture Trap: Et…
January 18, 2024
Ajantha Subramanian on "The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India"
Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down with El…
January 4, 2024
Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism (Episode 3 of 3)
Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen turn from hosts to interlocutors in an episode that ties a bow on our Violent Majorities conversations about Indian…
December 14, 2023
Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism (Episode 2 of 3)
Natasha Roth-Rowland is a writer and researcher at Diaspora Alliance, a former editor at +972 Magazine, and an expert on the Jewish far right. She j…
December 7, 2023
Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethnonationalism (Episode 1 of 3)
"The Slippery Slope to a Multiculturalism of Caste" Professor Balmurli Natrajan has long studied questions of caste, nationalism and fascism in the I…
November 16, 2023
Laurence Ralph Reckons With Police Violence (EF, JP)
In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Letters…
November 2, 2023
"We are all latecomers": Martin Puchner's "Culture"
Recall This Book listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Ant…
October 19, 2023
Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul
John Plotz of Recall This Book spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar about his marvelous new book…