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Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888-1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, this biography recovers Szalit's life and presents a stunning collection of her art.
Szalit was a sought-after artist. Highly regarded by art historians and critics of her day, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists' and queer circles in Weimar Berlin and in 1930s Paris. Szalit's fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres.
This engaging and deeply moving biography explores the life, work, and cultural contexts of an exceptional Jewish woman artist. Complementing studies such as Michael Brenner's The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (Penn State UP, 2024) brings Rahel Szalit into the larger conversation about Jewish artists, Expressionism, and modern art.
Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner.
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In Greg Sarris' book The Forgetters (Heyday Books, 2024), Answer Woman, a crow, cannot come up with a story until she is asked by Question Woman, her sister. But they both want to remember those who forgot the stories – because only by retelling the stories can they learn lessons of the past. From the time before creation to the near future, Answer Woman knows stories about clouds and sky, people who might be animals, storytelling contests of the past, and lessons learned from mistakes. Greg Sarris’s creation stories represent age old Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Native American storytelling traditions, whose goals are to comfort and inspire while understand human frailty and striving.
Greg Sarris is an accomplished author, university professor, and tribal leader serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. He is the current board chair of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. In 1992, he co-authored the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act which restored federal recognition and associated rights to the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Native Americans of California, including the right to reestablish tribal lands.
Sarris graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford. He has taught American and American Indian Literature, and Creative Writing at UCLA, Stanford, Loyola Marymount University, and Sonoma State University. Currently, he serves as a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He is also a producer, playwright, and the author of several books, including the award-winning How a Mountain Was Made (2017), starred Kirkus review Becoming Story (2022), and Grand Avenue (1995), which he adapted for an HBO film, and co-produced with Robert Redford. He is co-executive producer of Joan Baez: I Am A Noise (2023) and a recent short story, Citizen (2023), was adapted by San Francisco’s Word for Word theater. He is passionate about riding his horse and remembering to connect with the landscape around him.
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Through an original framework of literary sensory studies, Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Cambria, 2022) provides a comparative analysis of how six contemporary works of Sinophone fiction reimagine the links between the self and the city, the past and the present, as well as the physical and the imaginary. It explores the connection between elusive memories and material cityscapes through the matrix of the senses. Joining recent efforts to imagine world literature beyond the international, this monograph engages in a triangular comparison of fiction from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei – three Sinophone cities, each with its own strong urban identity that comes with unique cultural and linguistic hybridities.
Sensing the Sinophone combines narratological tools for studying time in fiction with critical concepts of spatiality in order to establish an analytical focus on narrative voice and reliability (including the inaccuracy of memory), structural non-linearity (such as mental time travel), and the construction of fictional parallel cities as loci for plot development. In this study, the conventional sensorium and its role in recollection is explored and amplified to include whole-body sensations, habitual synesthesia, and the emotional aspects of sensations that produce a sense of place or self.
Astrid Møller-Olsen is an international research fellow with Lund University (Sweden), University of Stavanger (Norway), and University of Oxford (United Kingdom); her position is funded by the Swedish Research Council. Dr. Møller-Olsen holds an MA in comparative literature and a PhD in Chinese studies. Her research has been published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, SFRA Review, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, and International Journal of Heritage Studies. She hosts the podcast Sinophone Unrealities and the literary blog xiaoshuo.blog.
Tong He is a Lecturer in English at Central China Normal University.
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Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (Michigan State UP, 2022) reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence.
Avery Weinman earned her Bachelor’s in History from UCSC and her Master’s in History from UCLA. Her work has been published in American Jewish History and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. She is a naturalist, an environmentalist, and a birder.
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For every lover of food culture, A History of the World in 10 Dinners: 2,000 Years, 100 Recipes (Rizzoli, 2023) by Victoria Flexner and Jay Reifel presents scrupulously researched and accessible cookbook presents one-of-a-kind dinner parties inspired by seminal moments in culinary history.
In ten chapters—each an important moment in food history, from Ancient Rome to Al-Andalus in Spain, from the Ethiopian Empire to nineteenth-century New York City—the authors pair menus with immersive retellings of historic culinary breakthroughs, and present the ingredients and modern techniques adapted for today’s kitchens to allow cooks of all abilities to entertain with dishes that were created and enjoyed hundreds of years ago but remain relevant to today’s food tastes and values.
Readers learn to orchestrate feasts from Apicus, blend spices from the Silk Road, feature indigenous ingredients of the Americas, revisit the “classics” from the Court of the Sun King, and savor the complex delicacies from the birth of the American restaurant scene. The home cook can prepare an entire seven-course Tudor feast, for example, or pick and choose dishes from around the world throughout time. Rich illustrations, hand-drawn maps, and contemporary photography create an immersive experience.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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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Over three years have passed since a military coup of February 2021 in Myanmar precipitated a popular uprising that has since transformed into a revolutionary situation. While researchers and writers have cobbled together edited books trying to come to terms with all that has happened and how we might interpret it in relation to Myanmar’s recent past, Elliott Prasse Freeman’s Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar (Stanford University Press, 2023) is the first authoritative monographic study of the transitional 2010s and early revolutionary 2020s. Freeman spent the decade prior to the coup living and working with activists in Myanmar, and after it he did further digital ethnographic research and interviews. He combines a trove of data generated over these years with a sharp appreciation of social scientific theory to produce an account of the state in Myanmar as bluntly biopolitical.
Mark Goodale writes in the book's foreword that Rights Refused is noteworthy for its stunning ambition, both intellectual and political; its synthesis of debates, theories and methodology from across a range of disciplines; and, its movements across multiple registers, scales and temporalities. That makes it both a demanding and rewarding book — and so too is this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies!
Elliott manages the Burma Studies Group online, which features weekly updates of new publications on Burma aka Myanmar, like those forthcoming books he mentions at the end of this episode.
Looking for things to read? Elliott recommends Elsa Dorlin's Self Defense, and Neferti Tadiar's Remaindered Life.
Like this interview? You might also be interested in Gerard McCarthy’s Outsourcing the Polity; and, The Politics of Love in Myanmar by Lynette Chua.
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