• Anna Calori, "Engineering Global Socialism: Ownership, Non-Alignment, and Corporate Culture in a Bosnian Company" (Indiana UP, 2026)
    2026/06/19
    Engineering Global Socialism: Ownership, Non-Alignment, and Corporate Culture in a Bosnian Company (Indiana UP, 2026) chronicles the journey of the Bosnian global corporation Energoinvest and its workers from its Yugoslav socialist ideals through decades of dissolution, reconstruction, and post-socialist transformation. Author Anna Calori provides a company-centric window into the business history of socialist globalization during periods of national development, destruction, and rebuilding. Contrary to popular perceptions of "centralized" socialist states, Energoinvest actively shaped trade relations with the Global South, driven by a socialist corporate culture that encouraged competition as well as collective decision-making. Even after Yugoslavia's disintegration in 1992 ended its dreams of a socialist path to globalization, these core characteristics shaped Energoinvest's adaptation to capitalist transformations and made it a key player in the struggle for Bosnia's post-war economic reconstruction. Through oral histories and archival research, Calori reveals how Energoinvest's workers paired the promise of a new model of global integration with their own visions of a working world in which they set the rules of engagement—and how, upon its sale to mostly foreign owners, the marginalization and ethnic homogenization of employee shareholders mirrored changes around citizenship in Bosnia. Now, in the twenty-first century, Energoinvest offers new promises of a post-industrial future, but its often hazy parameters leave workers to rely on the memory of "what could have been" to make sense of change. Tracing the long trajectory of a Yugoslav enterprise through decades of large-scale social change, Engineering Global Socialism presents a historical and sociological moment in which workers' ideas about social and corporate enterprise offered the possibility of a more democratic path to globalization. Anna Calori is Lecturer in Contemporary Economic History at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Filippo De Chirico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Energy History at Roma Tre University. His research focuses on the history of the Italian natural gas sector.
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    49 分
  • Rachel Deblinger, "Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust" (Indiana UP, 2025)
    2026/05/20
    How did American Jews come to learn about the Holocaust in the immediate aftermath of the war? What kinds of images and representations of Holocaust survivors first circulated in America, when most Jewish survivors were still stuck in European displaced persons camps? Drawing on communal records and previously unexamined cultural materials, Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust (Indiana UP, 2025) details the kinds of narratives that inspired American Jewish action in the wake of the Holocaust and argues that American Jewish communal life became a significant site of knowledge formation and dissemination about the Holocaust. Through organizational campaign materials, public speeches, appeal letters, brochures, posters, radio broadcasts, and short films, American Jews were compelled to act as heroes, saving Jewish lives and a Jewish future.Bringing postwar communal narratives into the longer history of Holocaust memory in America challenges our understanding of what Holocaust narratives look and sound like and invites us to consider the relationship between humanitarian aid and the narratives they employ to inspire action. By expanding our understanding of how stories about the Holocaust became part of an American discourse and considering multiple forms of Holocaust survivor accounts, Saving Our Survivors highlights the messy, diffuse, and contested nature of memory construction in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, as well as each new tragedy we confront.
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    59 分
  • Pavel Brunssen, "The Making of 'Jew Clubs': Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures" (Indiana UP, 2025)
    2026/04/09
    Today we are joined by Pavel Brunssen, a Research Associate and Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Research Center on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University and author of The Making of “Jew Clubs”: Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures (Indiana UP, 2025). In our conversation, we discussed the difference between Jewish clubs and “Jew Clubs,” the overlapping of antisemitism and philosemitism in football fan cultures, the language politics of clubs and supporter’s organizations, and the inability to completely master the unmastered past. In The Making of “Jew Clubs,” Brunssen looks at four “Jew Clubs” – clubs that have been identified by either the organization, their supporters, or their opponents as having a Jewish identity. He focuses on Bayern Munich FC, FK Austria Vienna, Ajax Amsterdam, and Tottenham Hotspur. Each provides an angle into his deeply researched and theoretical discussion of how a club can become identified with Jewish identity, without necessarily having a significant number of Jewish members or supporters or even having identified as Jewish. His investigation into this phenomenon provides him a space to understand how postwar Europeans have attempted to come to terms with the unmasterable past of antisemitism and the Holocaust. In his chapter on Bayern Munich FC, Brunssen examines a club that has self-consciously adopted a “Jew Club” identity as a way of working through the club’s complicated wartime history. Bayern Munich’s administration and fans each promote the club’s Jewish heritage, particularly expressed through the former president Kurt Landauer, as a way of creating a space between their association and German football’s Nazi past. For the club, their celebration of Landauer demonstrates their cosmopolitan values, but for fans Landauer’s legacy offers a space to critique the club’s current engagement with organizations such as the Qatari government. FK Austria Vienna has long been associated with Jewishness because of the club’s location in Vienna, its association with café culture, and its “modern” style of play. Today the club mobilizes its “Jew Club” identity to differentiate itself from its rival Rapid Vienna and to repudiate the actions of a radical right segment of its own supporters. Ajax Amsterdam became a “Jew Club” in response to the taunts of their rivals from Rotterdam – Feyenoord. Ajax supporters became “Super Jews” in response and the club’s carnivalesque stadium atmosphere creates a “virtual Jewish space.” The fandom’s philosemitism both opens the door for Jewish agency, including of fans from Israel, and normalizes antisemitic chants from rival fans. Tottenham Hotspur might be the most infamous “Jew Club” in the world. Its identity emerged in the 1930s and by the 1970s, the club’s supporters adopted the Y-word as a form of linguistic reclamation. In becoming the Y-army, they take back the powerful taboo of the slur from their opponents, but Brunssen questions whether such linguistic triangulation works and points to the club’s ongoing efforts to police against the Y-word in public forums. Brunssen’s work is fascinating, well researched, and theoretically rigorous. It will be of interest to scholars interested in antisemitism, football, and memory culture.
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    1 時間 16 分
  • Yiddish in Israel: A History
    2026/03/27
    The new book Yiddish in Israel: A History (Indiana UP, 2020) challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Following the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture, author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Join us for a discussion of this book with Rachel Rojanski in conversation with Rachel Brenner, Shachar Pinsker, and Sunny Yudkoff. This book talk originally took place on May 27, 2020.
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    1 時間 11 分
  • Lauren M. MacLean, "Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana: Electricity and Citizenship as Reciprocity (Indiana UP, 2026)
    2026/03/15
    In Ghana, much as in other parts of the Global South, postcolonial leaders aimed for industrial growth through the establishment of affordable hydroelectric power. However, in the current rapidly changing climate, many nations face recurring droughts, which hinder electricity production just when demand is on the rise. This situation has led to challenges like load shedding and unplanned power outages, which have strained the bond between citizens and the government. Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana: Electricity and Citizenship as Reciprocity (Indiana UP, 2026) aims to unravel the puzzling reality that, despite enduring increasing difficulties from these electricity shortages, the Ghanaian citizens who suffer most harshly are also the least likely to demand political accountability from the state. Drawing on archival evidence, focus groups, qualitative interviews, survey data, and contemporary art and music, author Lauren M. MacLean explains how this disparity in experience—fueled by differences in income and geographical location—has led lower- and higher-income Ghanaians to form contrasting perspectives on their social rights regarding public services and to adopt varying approaches to political involvement. Rather than relying on a predetermined social contract, citizens in Ghana develop a more fluid relationship with the state, shaped by their histories, identities, and personal experiences. This reciprocity highlights their awareness of how climate change and the global shift toward green energy can significantly impact their lives while also underscoring the necessity for the government to take the lead and engage with Ghanaians to promote climate justice. Lauren M. MacLean is the Thomas P. O’Neill Chair of Public Life and Department Chair of Political Science at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on the politics of electricity access and the everyday practice of citizenship in Africa. She conducts fieldwork in Ghana and Kenya, collecting survey data from individuals, conducting focus group discussions, doing archival work, and carrying out qualitative interviews with politicians, policymakers, practitioners, and ordinary people. MacLean has published award-winning books and articles, including: Informal Institutions and Citizenship in Rural Africa (Cambridge, 2010), The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (Cornell, 2014), co-edited with Cammett, and Field Research in Political Science (Cambridge, 2015), coauthored with Kapiszewski and Read. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals and supported by grants, including NSF, SSRC, RWJ, Fulbright-Hays, and Carnegie. She was the recipient of the APSA QMMR 2016 David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award. You can learn more about her work here. Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana.
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    1 時間 21 分
  • Sandra E. Greene, “Slave Owners of West Africa: Decision Making in the Age of Abolition” (Indiana UP, 2017)
    2026/02/28
    In today’s podcast we talked to Dr. Sandra Greene about her book Slave Owners of West Africa. Decision Making in the Age of Abolition published in 2017 by Indiana University Press. In this book Dr. Greene presents us with the biographies of three individuals who lived in the southeastern corner of what is today the Republic of Ghana between the mid-nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. These men became wealthy and prominent in their own communities largely through their trading activities. They had multiple wives and dependents many of whom were slaves. By documenting the lives of these three men—Amegashie Afeku of Keta, Nyaho Tamakloe of Anlo, and Noah Yawo of Ho Kpenoe—Dr. Greene examines the different ways in which they confronted the processes of European colonization and the abolition of slavery. As slaveholders, all three had much to lose from these transitions and yet, they all adopted different positions and strategies. What personal, political and economic factors informed these decisions are the central questions examined in Greene’s book. Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia is Associate Professor of History at Montclair State University. She specializes in modern intellectual history of Africa, historiography, World history and Philosophy of History. She is the co-author of African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts (Pearson, 2011).
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    42 分
  • The Shtetl: Myth and Reality with Samuel Kassow
    2026/02/27
    Even those who do not know much Yiddish have probably heard the word “shtetl,” but what does that word mean exactly? Can we just say that it was a small town in Eastern Europe with a lot of Jews—and leave it at that? Or was the shtetl that nostalgic world of “tradition” so lovingly celebrated in Fiddler on the Roof? How are we to understand imaginary shtetls like Sholom Aleichem’s Kasrilevke, where the “little people” ran around, talked non stop, and tried to make sense of a world they could no longer understand or control? Indeed the “shtetl” meant many things to many people. For many Zionists and Jewish leftists, the shtetl was a pathetic symbol of Jewish backwardness. Others cherished it as a place of real Jewishness, that fixed point that gave Jews in the diaspora the feeling of being home. The destruction of the Holocaust encouraged this nostalgia for the lost shtetl, especially as many Jews in the post-war world, newly comfortable and secure in their new homes, showed a new interest in their ethnic roots. In this lecture, YIVO Visiting Research Historian Samuel Kassow will explore the “real shtetl” and the “imagined shtetl,” which both formed an integral part of Eastern European Jewish peoplehood. Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director and CEO of YIVO.
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    1 時間 9 分
  • Jovana Babović, "The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory" (Indiana UP, 2025)
    2026/01/29
    The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory (Indiana UP, 2025) gathers interviews with members of the last generation to experience a unified Yugoslavia as children. Born between 1971 and 1991, this cohort spent a relatively short period of their childhood in Yugoslavia – yet the Yugoslav experience had a profound and lasting impact on their lives. The eight individuals selected for this collection share memories of their childhood during the final decades of socialism, offering unique insights into what it means to lose a country, and how they continue to find meaning in the Yugoslav past. Jovana Babović is an Associate Professor of modern European history at SUNY Geneseo. Her research focuses on urban culture and society in Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. Profile page: here Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.
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    46 分