Advertise on podcast: The SOF/Heyman Bookshelf

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Podcasts from Columbia University's The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, where we feature talks with professors about their recent work, publications, novels, and more. Constantine Lignos hosts. Previous seasons were hosted by Olivia Branscum and Timothy Lundy. We also feature The Trilling Tapes. In this podcast series, we mine the recorded Trilling archives to uncover and contextualize more than forty years of exceptional critical thought.

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Rob King's Man of Taste

2026/01/05

Host highlights Rob King's Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger. Rob King uses Metzger’s work to explore what taste means and how it works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing frontiers of cultural acceptability.

Julie Stone Peters's Staging Witchcraft Before the Law

2026/01/04

In the final episode of the 2025 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials by Julie Stone Peters. This book shows that judges and accusers turned to performance, staging to create doctrines of proof: catching the criminal “in the acte”; establishing “notoriety of the fact”; and producing “violent presumptions” of guilt.

Hannah Weaver's Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past

2025/12/11

Host highlights Hannah Weaver's Experimental Histories: Interpolation and the Medieval British Past. In this volume, Weaver examines the medieval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorized as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy.

Joseph Albernaz's Common Measures

2025/12/02

Host highlights Joseph Albernaz's Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community. With sharp close readings, new historical constellations, and innovative theoretical paradigms, Common Measures recasts the relationship of the Romantic period to the basic terms of modernity.

Ying Qian's Revolutionary Becomings

2025/11/24

In our first episode of the 2025 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Ying Qian's Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China. This work studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements.

Hamid Dabashi's The Persian Prince

2024/09/23

In the final episode of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights The Persian Prince: The Rise and Resurrection of an Imperial Archetype by Hamid Dabashi. This book articulates a bold new idea of the Persian Prince—a metaphor of political authority, a figurative ideal deeply rooted in the collective memories of multiple nations, and a literary construct that connected Muslim empires across time and space.

Alessandra Russo's A New Antiquity

2024/09/16

In episode six of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights A New Antiquity: Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400–1600 by Alessandra Russo. Original and convincing, A New Antiquity is a pathbreaking study that disrupts existing conceptions of Renaissance art and early modern humanity.

Ana Fernández-Cebrián's Fables of Development

2024/09/09

In episode five of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, our host highlights Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967) by Ana Fernández-Cebrián. This book examines cultural fictions and social life at the time when Spain turned from autarchy to the project of industrial and tourist development.

Anoordha Iyer Siddiqi's Architecture of Migration

2024/08/26

In episode four of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives.

Ellen Morris's Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt

2024/08/19

In episode three of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Famine and Feast in Ancient Egypt by Ellen Morris. This work covers the creation and curation of social memory in pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt. Ancient, Classical, Medieval, and Ottoman sources attest to the horror that characterized catastrophic famines.

Ryan Carr's Samson Occom

2024/08/12

In episode two of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast by Ryan Carr. In this groundbreaking book, Ryan Carr argues that Occom’s writings were deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions of hospitality, diplomacy, and openness to strangers

Eleanor Johnson's Waste and the Wasters

2024/08/05

In episode one of the 2024 season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Eleanor Johnson's Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England. The latest from the new SOF/Heyman board member is a groundbreaking examination of ecological thought in medieval England.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee's The Evening Hero

2023/09/11

In episode nine of the second season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Marie Myung-Ok Lee's The Evening Hero. This sweeping, lyrical novel follows a Korean immigrant pursuing the American dream who must confront the secrets of the past or risk watching the world he’s worked so hard to build come crumbling down.

Sarah Zukerman Daly's Violent Victors

2023/09/05

In episode eight of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights Sarah Zukerman Daly's Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections. Proposing actionable interventions that can help to moderate these trade-offs, Violent Victors links war outcomes with democratic outcomes to shed essential new light on political life after war.

Annie Pfeifer's To The Collector Belong The Spoils

2023/08/28

In episode seven of the new season of the SOF/Heyman Bookshelf, host highlights To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation by Annie Pfeifer. Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past.