The University of Chicago Press Podcast

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 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...

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...

In my conversation with Professor Pablo F. Gómez about his new book,  Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality , published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026...

Panel painters in both the middle ages and the fifteenth century created works that evoke the luster of precious stones, the sheen of polished gold and silver, and the colorful radiance of stained glass. Yet their...

Standardizing Sex: A History of Trans Medicine (U Chicago Press, 2025) traces the emergence of trans medicine in Scandinavia in the twentieth century, exploring the construction and negotiation of medical...

Elisa Tamarkin, an English prof of high repute (Anglophilia and Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance) at UC Berkeley, joins RTB to discuss Done in a Day: Telex from the...

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of...

A surprising look at the big business of owning small businesses and what America's franchise economy means for its workers. Walk into a McDonald's anywhere in the United States, and it will be identical to every other...

The Mahabharata, Volume 8 (U Chicago Press, 2026) is a translation of the twelfth book of The Mahābhārata, an epic tale of history and kingship, reinforced with legends, romances, and metaphysical...

Money is everywhere in our daily lives. It lurks in the swipe of a card at the grocery store, in looming student-loan debts, in the prices of things we want, and in our subconscious navigation of the modern world. In...

Deserts, the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, spurred by the diverse and unfamiliar regions the US...

Ella Jenkins (1924–2024) was one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, although many people have never heard of her. A pioneer in children’s music and an innovative educator, Jenkins recorded forty...

Most people only know one of the Ryukyu Islands: the island of Okinawa, home to sandy beaches and one of the U.S.’s most important bases in Asia. There are lots of myths about this island chain, which stretch from...

With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life, an...