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Interviews with University of North Carolina Press Authors

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    Marc Masters, "High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape" (UNC Press, 2023)

    The cassette tape was revolutionary. Cheap, portable, and reusable, this small plastic rectangle changed music history. Make your own tapes! Trade them with friends! Tape over the ones you don't like! The cassette tape upended pop culture, creating movements and uniting communities. High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (UNC Press, 2023) charts the journey of the cassette from its invention in the early 1960s to its Walkman-led domination in the 1980s to decline at the birth of compact discs to resurgence among independent music makers. Scorned by the record industry for "killing music," the cassette tape rippled through scenes corporations couldn't control. For so many, tapes meant freedom--to create, to invent, to connect. Marc Masters introduces readers to the tape artists who thrive underground; concert tapers who trade bootlegs; mixtape makers who send messages with cassettes; tape hunters who rescue forgotten sounds; and today's labels, which reject streaming and sell music on cassette. Their stories celebrate the cassette tape as dangerous, vital, and radical. Marc Masters is a music journalist whose work has appeared on NPR and in the Washington Post, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Bandcamp Daily. He is also the author of No Wave. Marc Masters on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

    55 min

  2. 1 DAY AGO

    Cecilia Márquez, "Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation" (UNC Press, 2023)

    The presence of Latinx people in the American South has long confounded the region's persistent racial binaries. In Making the Latino South: A History of Racial Formation (UNC Press, 2023), Cecilia Márquez uses social and cultural history methods to assess the racial logics that have shaped the Latinx experience in the region since the middle of the twentieth century. Structuring her argument around several major themes that frequently signpost the history of the South and of race relations in the United States--the rise of an increasingly mobile middle class, the civil rights movement and fight over school integration, the growth global connection of the region's economy, and political conflict over immigration--Márquez reveals how Latinx people in the South have confronted both whiteness and antiblackness, and how cultural boundaries to exclude Black people from full participation in the life of the region and nation have been essential to the construction of Latinx as a category. Anna E. Lindner (Ph.D., Communication) is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Wayne State University. On Twitter.

    48 min

  3. 11 FEB

    Zaid Adhami, "Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith" (UNC Press, 2025)

    In one of the most important books published in 2025—Dilemmas of Authenticity: The American Muslim Crisis of Faith, published by UNC Press—Zaid Adhami explores questions of religious doubt, authenticity, and crisis of faith. The book examines what many American Muslims describe as a crisis of faith, but Adhami shows that this crisis is less about losing belief and more about the pressures of authenticity. In a cultural moment where people are expected to be true to themselves and to believe sincerely, faith becomes something that must feel emotionally real and personally chosen. Drawing on ethnographic research and intimate conversations with American Muslims, Adhami shows how this demand for authenticity can produce doubt and anxiety, while also becoming a powerful ground for recommitment to tradition. The book challenges familiar narratives of secularization and religious decline, and instead offers a nuanced account of how faith is lived, questioned, and sustained in an age that privileges “authenticity.” The book would be of tremendous benefit to scholars and students of religion, anthropology, sociology, and American studies, as well as to those working on Islam in the United States. It will also resonate with scholars, students, and anyone who has tried to make sense of the complicated relationship between doubt, authenticity, and faith in contemporary American society.

    1h 46m

  4. 27 JAN

    Alaina M. Morgan, "Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora" (UNC Press, 2025)

    Alaina Morgan's Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora (UNC Press, 2025) introduces the conceptual framework of the “Atlantic Crescent” to capture the overlapping encounters between Black, Afro-Caribbean, and South Asian Muslims in the United States and the Caribbean. Using rich archival material, such as the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad Speaks, we learn about 20th century Black Muslim movements such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam as they encounter and engage with South Asian Muslim communities, like the Ahmadiyya movement in the US, as their discourses of global anti-imperial and decolonial struggles shaped or overlapped with each other. The second half of the book takes us to Bermuda to trace the translation of these Black Muslim liberation movements into the Caribbean. By focusing on the flow and encounters of these overlapping diasporas, we learn how anti-imperial and ant-colonial discourses were inhabited by varied South Asian, Black, and Afro-Caribbean diasporic communities, and how organizing, be it around labour and education, framed Islam through Black and Afro-diasporic liberatory registers. Morgan’s sharp analysis of these rich diasporic flows charts new imagined geographies of freedom struggles and resistance. This study will be of interest to scholars who think and write on Islam in the global west and the Caribbean, diaspora studies, anti-colonial and anti-imperial Muslim organizing and much more.

    1h 11m

  5. 21 JAN

    Brian D. Behnken, "Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025" (UNC Press, 2025)

    How police abuse ignited the Chicano movement in the Southwest Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025 (UNC Press, 2025)  offers a sweeping history of Mexican American interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system in the US Southwest. Looking primarily at Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, Brown and Blue tells a complex story: Violent, often racist acts committed by police against Mexican American people sparked protests demanding reform, and criminal justice authorities sometimes responded positively to these protests with measures such as recruiting Mexican Americans into local police forces and altering training procedures at police academies.Brian D. Behnken demonstrates the central role that the struggle for police reform played in the twentieth-century Chicano movement, and the ways its relevance continues to the present. By linking social activism and law enforcement, Behnken illuminates how the policing issues of today developed and what reform remains to be done. Guest: Brian Behnken is a professor of history at Iowa State University. He specializes in African American and Mexican American history, with an emphasis on civil rights activism and comparative race relations. He has published widely within these fields and has also expanded his research focus to explore racial violence, law enforcement, popular culture, and nationalism as they relate to African American and Latino/a/x peoples. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

    1 hr

  6. 12 JAN

    Ryan Emanuel, "On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice" (UNC Press, 2024)

    Despite centuries of colonialism, Indigenous peoples still occupy parts of their ancestral homelands in what is now Eastern North Carolina--a patchwork quilt of forested swamps, sandy plains, and blackwater streams that spreads across the Coastal Plain between the Fall Line and the Atlantic Ocean. In these backwaters, Lumbees and other American Indians have adapted to a radically transformed world while maintaining vibrant cultures and powerful connections to land and water. This reality is paralleled in Indigenous communities worldwide as Indigenous people continue to assert their rights to self-determination by resisting legacies of colonialism and the continued transformation of their homelands through pollution, unsustainable development, and climate change.  In On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2024), environmental scientist Ryan Emanuel, a member of the Lumbee tribe, shares stories from North Carolina about Indigenous survival and resilience in the face of radical environmental changes. Addressing issues from the loss of wetlands to the arrival of gas pipelines, these stories connect the dots between historic patterns of Indigenous oppression and present-day efforts to promote environmental justice and Indigenous rights on the swamp. Emanuel's scientific insight and deeply personal connections to his home blend together in a book that is both a heartfelt and an analytical call to acknowledge and protect sacred places.

    44 min

  7. 27/12/2025

    Aaron G. Fountain Jr., "High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America" (UNC Press, 2025)

    In High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2025), Aaron G. Fountain Jr. highlights the crucial impact of high school activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Mid-twentieth-century student activism is a pivotal chapter in American history. While college activism has been well documented, the equally vital contributions of high school students have often been overlooked. Only recently have scholars begun to recognize the transformative role teenagers played in reshaping American education. Inspired by civil rights and antiwar movements, students across the nation demanded a voice in their education by organizing sit-ins, walkouts, and strikes. From cities such as San Francisco and Chicago to smaller towns such as Jonesboro, Georgia, these young leaders fought for curricula that reflected their evolving worldviews. Drawing on archival research and interviews, Aaron G. Fountain Jr. reveals how teenagers became powerful agents of change, advocating for constitutional rights and influencing school reform. Ironically, the modernization of school security, including police presence, was partly a response to these student-led movements. Through oral histories and FBI records, this fascinating history offers a fresh perspective on high school activism and its lasting impact on American education.

    45 min

  8. 24/12/2025

    Brittany Michelle Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)

    It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Brittany Friedman terms "carceral apartheid." Prisons are a microcosm of how carceral apartheid operates as a larger governing strategy to decimate political targets and foster deceit, disinformation, and division in society. Among many shocking discoveries, Friedman shows that beginning in the 1950s, California prison officials declared war on imprisoned Black people and sought to identify Black militants as a key problem, creating a strategy for the management, segregation, and elimination of these individuals from the prison population that continues into the present day. Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons (UNC Press, 2025), delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques, including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists, to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

    1h 5m
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Interviews with University of North Carolina Press Authors

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  • Creator
    New Books Network
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    232
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    © New Books Network
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    UNC Press Presents Podcast