Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Melissa Osborne, "Polished: College, Class, a...

Up next

Tom Hulme, "Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life Before Gay Liberation" (Cornell UP, 2026)

Professor Tom Hulme's second book reconstructs the erotic and romantic lives of queer men in Belfast across roughly seventy years, from the recriminalisation of sex between men in the 1880s to the emergence of a mainstream public debate about homosexuality in the 1950s. It follow ...  Show more

John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian, "Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026)

In John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian’s Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the authors put forward a comprehensive new theoretical approach to understanding laughter and the humour we use to inspire it. ...  Show more

Recommended Episodes

Anthony Abraham Jack, "Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price" (Princeton UP, 2024)
New Books in Public Policy

Elite colleges are boasting unprecedented numbers with respect to diversity, with some schools admitting their first majority-minority classes. But when the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial unrest gripped the world, schools scrambled to figure out what to do with the diversi ...  Show more

Melissa Wilde on Conducting Comparative Historical Research
Give Methods A Chance

In this episode, we talk to Melissa J. Wilde, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Melissa joins us to discuss her use of comparative historical methods in researching and writing her forthcoming book Birth of the Culture Wars.  During our ...  Show more

Margaret Price, "Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life" (Duke UP, 2024)
New Books in Public Policy

In Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life (Duke University Press, 2024), Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Drawing on more than three hundre ...  Show more