The University of Chicago Press Podcast

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Interviews with authors of University of Chicago Press books.

  1. 5d ago

    Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census with danah boyd (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    In this episode, danah discusses proposed changes to the census that could lead to population undercounts, distort congressional apportionment, and have other far-reaching consequences. The public comment period closes November 2, 2026. You can submit a comment here. Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census (U Chicago Press, 2026) is an eye-opening story of the people who make the census, the United States’ largest and most consequential dataset, and the growing threats to their crucial work. By many measures, the US census is the government’s largest non-wartime operation, and one of the world’s oldest and biggest data-making endeavors. The 2020 census required more than a decade of planning and technical work—not to mention managing nearly a quarter of a million temporary workers simultaneously—to collect data about the American public. That data was then processed to count each of 331,449,281 residents once—and only once—and in the right place. The operation is also one of the country’s most consequential. Census data determine how political power and federal funding are allocated. Census data make politics, and consequently, politics make census data. In this urgent book, danah boyd explores what it took for the Census Bureau to make the 2020 census, amidst a global pandemic and natural disasters, and while navigating political forces that constrained the budget, micro-managed the schedule, and attacked statisticians’ methods. With rare insider access to the Census Bureau, boyd observed and interviewed hundreds of government civil servants who made the 2020 census. By documenting the perspectives of government workers, Data Are Made, Not Found provides a rare glimpse into what it takes to make democracy’s data. Each chapter reveals a different challenge—ranging from the last-minute fights about a citizenship question to the not-so-helpful help of well-intended stakeholders to avoid undercounts—and shows how civil servants responded to each problem, controversy, and hurdle. Boyd shows how many of the challenges that the Census Bureau faced in 2020 resulted from decades of political operatives, data users, and various stakeholders playing what boyd calls “Jenga politics,” weakening the administrative state for short-term political gains by removing support and adding more requirements. Civil servants saved the 2020 census, but future censuses—and other data-making efforts related to elections, health, and the economy—are precarious. Boyd’s message is clear and compelling: protecting democracy means protecting the people and institutions that produce this data. danah's website here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  2. 6d ago

    The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable with Justin de Benedictis-Kessner (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    In the United States, hundreds of thousands of elected and appointed officials serve more than 50,000 subnational governments, making important decisions about services ranging from education to infrastructure to policing. The provision of critical city services shapes citizens’ everyday lives. Supposedly, local politicians are the elected representatives closest to the people they serve, but are they actually accountable to their constituents? Justin de Benedictis-Kessner shows that they are not: local elections routinely fail to punish bad politicians or reward strong performers. The Fog of Accountability: How Institutions Keep Voters from Holding Their Local Governments Accountable  argues that this is because urban politics is defined by minimally effective competition, complex institutions that confuse voters, and a lack of effective media coverage. These institutional features combine to stymie even well-intentioned voters and make accountability difficult. Fixing these problems is challenging, but, as de Benedictis-Kessner shows, change is possible if we can enable citizens to reclaim and assert their political power. Justin de Benedictis-Kessner is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His work has received the Clarence Stone Emerging Scholar Award and the Norton Long Young Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association, and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science Advances. Host Ursula Hackett is the Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. Her award-winning book, America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State is published with Cambridge University Press. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  3. Oct 24

    On the Street of the Hidden Shops: One City Block, Two Thousand Years, and a Walk Through the Layered Lives of Rome with Elizabeth Rodini (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    Elizabeth Rodini joins Jana Byars to talk about her new forthcoming book, On the Street of Hidden Shops: One City Block, Two Thousand Years, and a Walk Through the Layered Lives of Rome (U Chicago Press, 2026). Delve into Rome's lost history through the stories of a single city block. Cutting through the heart of Rome is Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a time-worn street named for the mysterious "shops" said to run beneath it. History lies thick here, a museum atop a convent atop ancient ruins; layered in are the traces of artisans and poets, pilgrims and saints, a Fascist deportation, a communist coffee bar, a political assassination, and shopkeepers, too. These stories all rest upon a single city block, the same place where, in 13 BCE, the triumphal Roman general Lucius Cornelius Balbus built a monumental theater complex in his own honor. Elizabeth Rodini's On the Street of the Hidden Shops digs deep into this corner of the city, uncovering a set of surprising, often poignant narratives that range across two thousand years. For as the walls of Balbus's compound decayed and the neighborhood was rebuilt, this block would come to shelter Romans from all walks of life: the daughters of local prostitutes, an earnest young man in search of a bride, an entrepreneur determined to preserve the city's colorful dialect, a Jewish family recently liberated from the nearby Ghetto, a band of idealistic archaeologists unearthing a long-forgotten past, as well as a gifted baker, a medieval donkey, and a Renaissance ghost. Their stories survive in archives and artifacts, but also in the enduring power of rumor and legend. On the Street of the Hidden Shops invites us on a captivating journey to one place across many centuries. Its tight urban focus reveals a Rome most visitors miss, while uncovering some of the many Romes that have been largely lost to history. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  4. Oct 23

    Outed: LBJ’s Confidant and the Arrest that Transformed a Presidency with Timothy Stewart-Winter (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    Timothy Stewart-Winter joins Michael Stauch to discuss the arrest that transformed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s longest-serving and most trusted advisor, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for soliciting sex in a YMCA bathroom near the White House. The scandal blasted across the front pages of major US newspapers, was dissected and analyzed by the FBI, and became a watershed in making straight America aware of queer life. Drawing on Jenkins’s previously unexamined personal papers, including hundreds of letters he received in the aftermath of his arrest from ordinary Americans and government officials alike, in Outed: LBJ's Confidant and the Arrest That Transformed a Presidency (U Chicago Press, 2026) Stewart-Winter shows how antigay policies and the revelations around them continue to reverberate today. Highlights include:  - A discussion of Jenkins’s career as LBJ’s closest aide at the intersection of the Lavender Scare, the urbanization of Washington DC, and the growth of the federal government after World War II;- How letters Jenkins received after his arrest reveal Americans’ changing views on sexuality and family life;- The effect that Jenkins’s public exile had on gay visibility just before the rise of gay liberation;- A tantalizing speculative reading of the effect that Jenkins’s exile from Washington, DC, had on the LBJ presidency and its most significant failure, the war in Vietnam;- How a bouquet of flowers from none other than J. Edgar Hoover helped rehabilitate Jenkins’s image after his arrest. Guest: Timothy Stewart-Winter is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. He is also the author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics, which won the John Boswell Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  5. Oct 20

    Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives with Kathleen Bawn and Knox Brown (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    Parties on the Ground: A Study of Nominations for the House of Representatives (U Chicago Press, 2026) is a study of political parties and party nominations for the House of Representatives in 55 winnable open-seat nominations in the 2013-14 electoral cycle. Based on a combination of field interviews, fundraising and spending data from the Federal Election Commission, content analysis of newspaper coverage, and exit polls of voters in four contests, it argues that the most important actors in most nominations are those who supply campaign resources to some candidates and deny them to others. These "policy demanders," as the study calls them, consist mainly of standard interest group actors - business, labor, agriculture, professionals - but include faith-based activists and Tea Partiers as leading actors in some nominations. Among the study's main arguments are that policy demanders care more about their particular interests and values than general ideology, put serious effort into vetting candidates before supporting them, and often either work through local parties or coordinate among themselves. The study analyzes the competition between establishment and insurgent candidates in the Republican Party in terms of its general arguments. Progressive reformers sought the adoption of primary elections to empower voters to control the direction of their parties, but this study finds that most primary electorates pay too little attention to make use of the opportunity. Professor Kathleen Bawn is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published her work in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science. Professor John Zaller is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His other books include The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion and The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform. Host Dr Ursula Hackett is Churchill Associate Professor of U.S. Politics at the University of Oxford. She is the author of America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State and a forthcoming book on redistricting.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  6. Oct 17

    Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture with Matthew Warner Osborn (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title “The Night-Hawk, No. 1” with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: “I’ll be a candleholder and look on.” Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Dr. Matthew Warner Osborn reveals in Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), this was the sobriquet of a mysterious columnist for the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press, the first radical socialist newspaper in America. Dressed in a mysterious cloak, the Night Hawk soared over Philadelphia, revealing the evil crimes of prominent gentlemen, fighting murderous criminals, and calling out fraudulent moral authorities.  The Night Hawk was the ingenious invention of an impoverished actor, Cornelius A. Logan, who created the character as a public champion of Philadelphia’s Working Men’s movement, the first successful American labor party. The Night Hawk’s nocturnal adventures transformed their socialist ideology into an entertaining fantasy that dramatized the struggle against industrial exploitation and the degradation of working people. The success of the character made Logan into a celebrity, and he went on to become a popular and innovative comedian on the antebellum stage. A harbinger of the superheroes we know today, the Night Hawk promises to illuminate dark secrets from the past, but he can also shed light on our present. He ignites our need to see corrupt elites unmasked and held accountable for their actions, all while protecting the innocent and oppressed. Americans have always loved to fantasize about powerful superheroes who hide behind masks while chasing bad guys, and Dr. Osborn shows in this entertaining history how the Night Hawk was perhaps the first standard bearer for that enduring mystique.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  7. Oct 12

    Realism After the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel with Rafael Walker (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    The realist novel, so the story goes, isn’t really an American genre but a European and British one. And what the realist novel does—again, according to conventional wisdom—is entrench a liberal model of the individual: the self as autonomous and perfectible. Pushing back against these and other received ideas, Rafael Walker offers a self-professed “heretical” view of the history of the American novel in Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel (U Chicago Press, 2025).  A specialist in American and African American literature as well as gender and sexuality studies, Walker is Associate Professor of English and Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College and the editor of new editions of two essential American novels: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929).  In Realism after the Individual, his first book-length study, Walker shows how realist novels written by US authors from the 1890s to the 1920s transform our understanding of what the novel is and does in the American context. These novels are populated, Walker argues, with “post-individualist” individuals, particularly women, who want new things endlessly and who especially want what other people want—because they've adapted to America's brave new world of capitalist consumption and mass culture. In this conversation with Alix Beeston, Walker ranges widely and expertly across literary and intellectual history as he shares about women with insatiable desires, men who are killed off for not desiring enough, and the resonances between early twentieth-century literature and the present political moment. He also offers some recommendations for the important but now all-but-forgotten realist novels we should all be reading. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  8. Sep 28

    Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891-1931 with Edward Baring (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Offers a transformative reading of the Marxist tradition by uncovering its connections to the institutions and practices of worker education. For the past hundred years, “vulgar Marxism” has been the go-to insult among socialist and communist intellectuals, a shorthand for the ways Marxist theory could go wrong. But why would thinkers advocating for working-class emancipation use “vulgarity” as an epithet? In Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931 (U Chicago Press, 2025), Edward Baring seeks an answer by delving into debates over Marxism in the first decades of the twentieth century. He shows that this common phrase wasn’t aimed primarily at popular understandings of Marx. Rather, it was used to attack intellectuals for failing to teach Marx’s theory to the working masses correctly. His history of “vulgar Marxism” homes in on the project of mass worker education at a time when the project was both widely pursued and fiercely contested. Worker education offered a mechanism through which Marxist theory was meant to promote large-scale social and political change, and it drew on a massive infrastructure of schools, publishing houses, and educational bureaus that stretched across Europe and reached millions. By centering this project, Baring radically recasts the history of Marxism from the Second International to World War II. He challenges classic oppositions between “economistic” and “cultural” versions of Marxism; rereads many of the most significant Marxist theorists of the time, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci; and offers new resources for understanding how Marxist ideas transformed as they traveled around Europe and then spread throughout the world. Edward Baring is associate professor of history and human values at Princeton University. He is the author of Converts to the Real and The Young Derrida. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Interviews with authors of University of Chicago Press books.

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