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Book bans and book challenges are both on the rise. And they are increasing at unprecedented rates. But why is this happening? Dr. Christine Emeran of the National Coalition Against Censorship joins us to explore what’s driving censorship movements nationwide. In today’s episode, she takes us through politically organized efforts to ban books, and shares the statistics of book challenges and bans. She explores the new strategies used by groups to challenge books (strategies which differ from the past), and talks about groups fighting back to keep books on shelves.
Our guest is: Dr. Christine Emeran, who is the Youth Free Expression Program Director at the NCAC (National Coalition Against Censorship). In previous roles, she served as a research consultant at UNESCO and UNESCO-International Institute for Education Planning in Paris, France, including initiatives on knowledge societies, primary education decentralization policies, youth program on climate change, and lifelong learning. Dr. Emeran is the author of the book New Generation Political Activism in Ukraine 2000–2014 and contributed the book chapter “The March for Our Lives Movement in the USA: Generational Change and the Personalization of Protest,” to When Students Protest: Secondary and High Schools. In her academic career, Dr. Emeran taught sociology and political science courses, both in the US and abroad. Dr. Emeran is glad to be contributing her knowledge to support students’ rights to free expression.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes.
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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 novelist to begin with than RTB' shouse sage, Steve McCauley.
And not just because he's got the pipes to power through a whole fantabulous John Cheever story. "The Five-Forty-Eight" (published in The New Yorker 70 years ago) is about sordidness uncovered, a train, and a face in the dirt. It ticks almost every Cheever box, evoking an infinitude of lives unled elsewhere while ostensibly documenting nothing more than the time to takes to down a couple of drinks, scuttle feverishly through some midtown streets, and take a lumbering commuter train out of the city.
Steve feels that in our own century, things have changed for the American short story and there's no going back to Cheever's mode. After Raymond Carver, it would be hard to embrace the proliferation (sometimes dizzying, sometimes delightful) of solid details that Cheever deploys. The two try out a final comparison to E M Forster who also quasi-fit into this society, but, Steve opines, could project himself into his female characters in a way that Cheever cannot or will not.
John Cheever works mentioned:

"The Swimmer" (also a Gregory Peck movie)

"The Jewels of the Cabots"

"Oh Youth and Beauty" and other stories that nest multiple lives within a single frame, like "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well"

Works by others:

Sloane Wilson's 1955 novel, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (and the 1956 film)

Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" ("she would have been a good woman if there had been someone there to shoot her every day of her life.")

Anton Chekov, "Lady with the Lapdog"

Richard Yates and mid-century office nihilism (eg his 1961 Revolutionary Road)

Jean Stafford's novels (The Mountain Lion, Boston Adventure) do get reprinted and re-read, Steve points out.

Raymond Carver, only partially minimalist, but reduced still further by Gordon Lish in e.g. the story "Mr Copy and Mr fix-it"

Listen to and read the episode here.
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Newspaper (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Maggie Messitt is about more than news printed on paper. It brings us inside our best and worst selves, from censorship and the intentional destruction of historic record, to partisan and white supremacist campaigns, to the story of an instrument that has been central to democracy and to holding the powerful to account.
This is a 400-year history of a nearly-endangered object as seen by journalist Maggie Messitt in the two democratic nations she calls home – the United States and South Africa.
The “first draft of history,” newspapers figure prominently through each movement and period of unrest in both nations-from the first colonial papers published by slave traders and an advocate for press freedom to those published on ID cards, wallpaper, and folio sheets during civil wars. Offices were set on fire. Presses were pushed into bodies of water. Editors were run out of town. And journalists were arrested.
Newspaper reflects on a tool that has been used to push down and to rise up, and a journey alongside the hidden lives that have harnessed its power.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State University Press, 2022) by Dr. Julia Havas is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Dr. Havas’ central argument is that postmillennial "feminist quality television" springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded "quality television" culture on the one hand and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other.
Postmillennial quality television culture promotes the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. Its development has facilitated evaluative academic analyses of television texts based on aesthetic merit, producing a corpus of scholarship devoted to pinpointing where value resides in shows considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of television scholarship have criticised this approach for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonization informing the phenomenon. Woman Up intervenes in this debate by reevaluating such approaches and insisting that rather than further fostering or critiquing already prominent processes of canonization, there is a need to interrogate the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four TV programs emerging in the early period of the "feminist quality TV" trend—30 Rock (2006–13), Parks and Recreation (2009–15), The Good Wife (2009–16), and Orange Is the New Black (2013–19)—Woman Up demonstrates that such series mediate their cultural significance by combining formal aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicised rhetoric around a "problematic" postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Laying the foundation for an understanding of US-Israeli relations, this lively and accessible book provides critical background on the origins and development of the 'special' relations between Israel and the United States.
Questioning the usual neo-realist approach to understanding this relationship, David Tal instead suggests that the relations between the two nations were constructed on idealism, political culture, and strategic ties.
Based on a diverse range of primary sources collected in archives in both Israel and the United States, The Making of an Alliance: The Origins and Development of the US-Israel Relationship (Cambridge UP, 2022) discusses the development of relations built through constant contact between people and ideas, showing how presidents and Prime Ministers, state officials, and ordinary people from both countries, impacted one another. It was this constancy of religion, values, and history, serving the bedrock of the relations between the two countries and peoples, over which the ephemeral was negotiated.
The author, David Tal, is Professor and Yossi Harel Chair in Modern Israel Studies in the Department of History at the University of Sussex. A historian of diplomatic and military history, he has published extensively on Israeli diplomatic and military history, and U.S. diplomatic history and disarmament policies.
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Veteran and entrepreneur Tim Sheehy has led an action-packed life: a 2008 graduate of the Naval Academy, as a Navy SEAL he completed deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, South America, and the Pacific region, where he earned him multiple combat decorations, including the Bronze Star with Valor for Heroism in Combat and the Purple Heart Medal. After being wounded in combat, he moved to Montana where he founded Bridger Aerospace, an aerial firefighting and aerospace services company based in Belgrade, Montana, which specializes in applying military tools and training to fight wildfires. He recounts the story of his foray into aerial firefighting in his recent book Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting (Permuted Press, 2023). In January 2023, Bridger Aerospace went public at a valuation of $869 million. Now, Tim is running for Senate in Montana, one of the most competitive Senate races of the 2024 election. In this conversation, Tim discusses entrepreneurship, the state of our military, education, and the importance of the Constitution.
Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any event does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented.
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