Ohio State UP Podcast

Elena Foulis, "Embodied Encuentros: Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences" (Ohio State UP, 2026)

In Embodied Encuentros: Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences  [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780814216125](Ohio State UP, 2026), Elena Foulis offers a practical guide for completing ethical fieldwork in Latina/o/e communities, emphasizing equitable and culturally sustaining practices for gathering oral histories. In her critical decolonial model, Foulis centers the agency of the people within these communities while considering the diversity and complexity of their experiences. In doing so, she advocates for the importance of building oral history archives that challenge our understandings of Latina/o/e peoples. Foulis provides a conceptual framework for building on community knowledge that considers language, cultural practices, gender, and race. She suggests ways to involve students in ethical research; collect evolving oral histories; employ a language justice approach that acknowledges linguistic oppression, translanguaging, and bilingualism as essential aspects of this community; and consider the importance of digital archives for the creation of multimedia projects that foster community pláticas. Grounded in both theoretical approaches and a feminist ethics praxis, Embodied Encuentros ultimately outlines an important model for doing collaborative, ethical research—not only within Latina/o/e communities but within other minoritized communities as well.

Michelle Bumatay, "On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power" (Ohio State UP, 2025)

On Black Bandes Dessinées  [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780814259375]and Transcolonial Power [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780814259375] (The Ohio State UP, 2025) is the first book-length study in English about Black francophone cartoonists and their work. Author Michelle Bumatay decenters Eurocentric conceptions of francophone comic art and foregrounds the ubiquity of Western racial stereotypes encoded in mainstream French and Belgian bandes dessinées as well as the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South carried over from the colonial era. By examining a diversity of Black cartoonists’ aesthetic and material responses to the colonially inherited medium of bandes dessinées, she argues that their innovations constitute important reparative work that combats racial stereotypes and challenges transcolonial power imbalances. Bumatay demonstrates how Barly Baruti, Papa Mfumu’eto, Marguerite Abouet, Japhet Miagotar, and other Black cartoonists throughout the francophone world employ a range of tactics to tell their own stories. Through a balance of historical context and close readings, she shows how these artists represent and comment on their everyday lives in a postcolonial reality, expose and critique racial capitalism and exploitation, and provide new ways of seeing and understanding Black francophone peoples and cultures.

Seulghee Lee, "Other Lovings: An Afroasian American Theory of Life" (Ohio State UP, 2025)

Join me for a conversation with Dr. Seulghee Lee [https://www.sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/artsandsciences/english_language_and_literature/our_people/directory/lee_seulghee.php] (Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, University of South Carolina) about his recently published book, Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (Ohio State UP, 2025). Some topics of our discussion include Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings (2007), Gayl Jones' novella Corregidora (1975), and the cultural phenomenon of "Linsanity" and the lasting impact of NBA player Jeremy Lin's rise to fame. In Other Lovings, Seulghee Lee traces the presence and plenitude of love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures and cultures to reveal their irreducible power to cohere minoritarian social life. Bringing together Black studies, Asian American studies, affect theory, critical theory, and queer of color critique, Lee examines the bonds of love in works by Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, David Henry Hwang, Gayl Jones, Fred Moten, Adrian Tomine, and Charles Yu. He attends to the ontological force of love in popular culture, investigating Asian American hip-hop and sport through readings of G Yamazawa, Year of the Ox, and Jeremy Lin, as well as in Black public culture through bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West. By assessing love’s positive function in these works, Lee argues against critical regimes, such as Afropessimism and racial melancholia, that center negativity. In revealing what Black and Asian American traditions share in their positive configurations of being and collectivity, and in their responses to the overarching logic of white supremacy, Other Lovings suggests possibilities for thinking beyond sociological opposition and historical difference and toward political coalition and cultural affinity. Ultimately, Other Lovings argues for a counter-ontology of love—its felt presence, its relational possibilities, and its lived practices. This episode was hosted by Asia Adomanis [https://history-of-art.osu.edu/people/adomanis.1], a PhD student in the Department of History of Art at Ohio State.

Jennifer Domino Rudolph, "Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity" (Ohio State UP, 2020)

In her incisive study Baseball as Mediated Latinidad: Race, Masculinity, Nationalism, and Performances of Identity [https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214312.html] (Ohio State University Press, 2020), Jennifer Domino Rudolph [https://www.conncoll.edu/directories/faculty-profiles/jennifer-rudolph/] analyzes major league baseball’s Latin/o American players—who now make up more than twenty-five percent of MLB—as sites of undesirable surveillance due to the historical, political, and sociological weight placed on them via stereotypes around immigration, crime, masculinity, aggression, and violence. Rudolph examines the perception by media and fans of Latino baseball players and the consumption of these athletes as both social and political stand-ins for an entire culture, showing how these participants in the nationalist game of baseball exemplify tensions over race, nation, and language for some while simultaneously revealing baseball as a practice of latinidad, or pan-Latina/o/x identity, for others. By simultaneously exploring the ways in which Latino baseball players can appear both as threats to American values and the embodiment of the American Dream, and engaging with both archival research and new media representations of MLB players, Rudolph sheds new light on the current ambivalence of mainstream American media and fans towards Latin/o culture. David-James Gonzales (DJ) [https://fhssfaculty.byu.edu/FacultyPage/djgonzo] is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD [https://twitter.com/djgonzophd?lang=en].

Sorayya Khan, "We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir" (Ohio State UP, 2022)

Today’s book is: We Take Our Cities With Us [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780814258484] (Ohio State UP, 2022), by Sorayya Khan. After her mother’s death, Sorayya Khan confronts her grief by revisiting their relationship, her parents’ lives, and her own Pakistani-Dutch heritage in a multicultural memoir that unfolds over seven cities and three continents. We Take Our Cities with Us ushers us from Khan’s childhood independence forged at her grandparents’ home in Lahore; to her adolescence in Pakistan’s new capital, Islamabad; to Syracuse and Ithaca, New York, where she finds her footing as the mother of young, brown sons in post-9/11 America; to her birthplace, Vienna, where her parents die; and finally to Amsterdam and Maastricht, the cities of her mother’s conflicted youth. In Khan’s gripping telling of her immigrant experience, she shows us what it is to raise children and lose parents in worlds other than your own. Drawing on family history, geopolitics, and art in this stunning story of loss, identity, and rediscovery, Khan illuminates the complexities of our evolving global world and its most important constant: love. Our guest is: Sorayya Khan, who is the author of the novels City of Spies, Five Queen’s Road, and Noor. The daughter of a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother, she was born in Europe, grew up in Pakistan, and now lives in Ithaca, New York, with her family. She is a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University. Find her at sorayyakhan.com [https://sorayyakhan.com/]. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler [https://christinagessler.com/], who is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history which she uses to explore which stories we tell (and why), and what happens to those we never tell. Listeners may also enjoy discussions of these memoirs: * The Translator's Daughter [https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-translators-daughter#entry:308821@1:url] * The Things We Didn't Know [https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-things-we-didnt-know#entry:305222@1:url] * Secret Harvests [https://newbooksnetwork.com/secret-harvests#entry:297964@1:url] * Whiskey Tender [https://newbooksnetwork.com/whiskey-tender#entry:290442@1:url] Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can help support our show by sharing episodes of the Academic Life. [https://newbooksnetwork.com/category/academic-partners/academic-life]