“Scholarship Is a Conversation”: An Interview on Journal of Finnish Studies

Interview with Seth S. Tannenbaum, author of BLEACHER SEATS & LUXURY SUITES

Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark Celebrated as a democratic space for all Americans, the major league ballpark in fact privileged the middle- and upper-class white male fan while tacitly marginalizing poor urban residents and people of color. Seth S. Tannenbaum examines how the game’s economically and socially stratified system reflected changing understandings of urban space, inclusion, and the body politic. Major League Baseball owners and executives masked exclusion and division by touting the game’s accessibility and instituting few overtly discriminatory policies. Affluent white males enjoyed a comfortable, safe space that reinforced their status as the prototypical American citizen. At the same time, ballparks relocated in response to how these favored fans felt about cities. Tannenbaum traces this journey from the urban locales of the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium through the suburban-oriented Dodger Stadium and Houston Astrodome to the cloistered fantasy of city life offered by Camden Yards. As he shows, owners’ pursuit of greater profits incorporated existing barriers that helped shape the structure of modern parks. A revealing social history, Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites revises the persistent myth of the ballpark as an egalitarian melting pot. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p089251 [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p089251]

Interview with Cathryn J. Prince, author of FOR THE LOVE OF LABOR

From her start as one of the youngest activists in US history, Pauline Newman helped shape the International Ladies' Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) into a dominant force in industrial America. Cathryn J. Prince tells the story of a self-educated Jewish immigrant who dedicated herself to a legion of causes and lifelong battles against sexism and classism. Prince follows Newman’s life from a youth split between Lithuania and New York City sweatshops to her work as an advisor to New Deal–era labor secretary Frances Perkins. Newman’s long hours at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory informed her entrée into labor activism. In the following years, she tirelessly advocated for workers, ran for New York Secretary of State as a socialist, and became the first woman to serve as the ILGWU general organizer. Her interest in the health of workers led to service on the Joint Board of Sanitary Control and a decades-long term as education director of the ILGWU health center. Membership in Eleanor Roosevelt’s circle opened doors to government positions and advisory roles that continued into the postwar era. Prince also weaves in the details of Newman’s fifty-year relationship with a woman, her struggles with her sexual identity, and her final years. Engaging and panoramic, For the Love of Labor is the first major biography of an important figure in labor and women’s history. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c049552 [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=c049552]

Interview with Cassandra Shepard, author of SETTLER COLONIALISM IS THE DISASTER

Rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and during the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed perpetual disaster on New Orleans’ Black and Indigenous communities. Neoliberalism masked by the auspices of repair, progress, and inclusion reinforced the plight of the urban poor while exacerbating the racial and class inequalities that existed before the storm. Cassandra Shepard’s analysis draws on ideas of settler colonialism to chart how depriving Black and Indigenous people of critical resources intensified the harm, violence, and death inherent in systems of colonization. As Shepard shows, the rhetoric of improvement allows coloniality to masquerade as rebuilding while white elites consolidate power, profit, and privilege. Displaced and disenfranchised people of color, meanwhile, experience the impact of racial-disaster capitalism, with the chaos surrounding Katrina and COVID-19 obscuring the for-profit economic, political, and social exploitation of non-white New Orleanians. Ambitious and provocative, Settler Colonialism is the Disaster refutes the myth of New Orleans’ presumptive revival by shining new light on the ongoing colonization project at its heart. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p089145 [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p089145]

Interview on “Fathers and Sons”: A Special Issue of Diasporic Italy

In the latest episode of the University of Press podcast, The UPside, Dr. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, editor of Diasporic Italy: Journal of the Italian American Studies Association, [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/?id=di] sat down (virtually) with Guest Editors Dr. Elisa Bordin and Dr. Theodora Patrona to discuss a new special issue of Diasporic Italy on fathers, fathering, and fatherhood in the Italian American narrative.

“Scholarship Is a Conversation”: An Interview on Journal of Finnish Studies

In the latest episode of the University of Press podcast, The UPside, we sat down (virtually) with Editors Dr. Thomas A. DuBois and Dr. Anne Mäntynen to discuss the Journal of Finnish Studies [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/?id=jfs]. You can listen to the podcast here or read a transcript [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/wordpress/?p=39350] of the conversation.