The University Press of Colorado Podcast

By: New Books Network
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with authors of the University Press of Colorado, University of Alaska Press, Utah State University Press, and University of Wyoming Press books.
    New Books Network
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Art Literary History & Criticism World
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Episodes
  • Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America's Biggest Retail Stores

    Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America's Biggest Retail Stores
    Feb 27 2025
    Our book is: Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (UP of Colorado, 2024) which presents a new look at how the big box retail store has dramatically reshaped the US economy and its ecosystems in the last half century. From the rural South to the frigid North, from inside stores to ecologies far beyond, this book examines the relationships that make up one of the most visible features of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century American life. The rise of big box retail since the 1960s has transformed environments on both local and global scales. Almost everyone has explored the aisles of big box stores. The allure of “everyday low prices” and brightly colored products of every kind connect shoppers with a global marketplace. Contributors join a growing conversation between business and environmental history, addressing the ways American retail institutions have affected physical and cultural ecologies around the world. Essays on Walmart, Target, Cabela’s, REI, and Bass Pro Shops assess the “bigness” of these superstores from “smokestacks to coat racks” and contend that their ecological impacts are not limited to the footprints of parking lots and manufacturing but also play a didactic role in educating consumers about their relationships with the environment. A model for historians seeking to bring business and environmental histories together in their analyses of merchant capital’s role in the landscapes of everyday life and how it has remade human relationships with nature, Big Box USA is a must-read for students and scholars of the environment, business, sustainability, retail professionals, and a general audience. Our guest is: Dr. Rachel Gross, who is assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver, where she teaches US environmental, business, and public history. She works with university and community partners to bring history into the public realm. She is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America, and the co-editor of Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She uses her PhD in history to explore what stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: Disabled Ecologies The Killer Whale Journals Stylish Academic Writing A Conversation with the editor of University of Wyoming Press The Peer Review At Every Depth Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Audun Kjus et al., "Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum" (Utah State UP, 2024)

    Audun Kjus et al., "Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum" (Utah State UP, 2024)
    Feb 21 2025
    Audun Kjus joins Jana Byars to talk about Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum (Utah State Press, 2025), eds. Audun Kjus, Jakob Löfgren, Cliona O’Carroll, Simon Poole & Ida Tolgensbakk. Utah State Press, 2025). The junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious respect for rules. Rituals involve nearly endless varieties of social arrangements and can truly transform people, but they also include improvisation, testing, and pretending. Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum explores the connectivity between the playful and the ritualized through a fresh theoretical perspective, highlighting the creative messiness and the cultural paradoxes such intersections allow. The chapters span topics such as hen parties, marriage proposals, ash scatterings, extreme sports races, football fans, computer game festivals, celebrations of fandom, migration heritages, and antiracist protests. While the case studies are selected to show a range of diversity with various mergings of play, game, ritual, ceremony, rite, and ritualizing, the introductory and concluding discussions offer sharpened perspectives on common aspects. Following these excursions through the play-ritual continuum will be enjoyable for readers interested in how people make sense of their own existence and profitable for scholars in folklore, anthropology, religion, pedagogy, cultural studies, and social sciences and humanities more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    51 mins
  • Marriner Eccles: Reform “may not have happened in 1935 if Eccles hadn't been there”

    Marriner Eccles: Reform “may not have happened in 1935 if Eccles hadn't been there”
    Aug 6 2024
    More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors. In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker. In this first episode, he interviews Mark Nelson - author of Jumping the Abyss: Marriner S. Eccles and the New Deal, 1933-1940 (University of Utah Press, 2017). Eccles chaired the Fed from 1934 to 1948, turned it into a Washington power centre, and centralised policymaking with the Board of Governors. The US might have been better served if Eccles and his nemesis Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary from 1934-1945, had swapped roles, says Nelson. "That's true except for the fact that Eccles did do something very important at the Fed and that is the Banking Act of 1935, which really changed the Fed in an enormously important way and Morgenthau would not have done that ... I think it would have happened at some point. You could make the argument, though, that it may not have happened in 1935 if Eccles hadn't been there because Eccles took the job at the Fed on the understanding that these changes would be made”. An actor-turned-historian, Mark Nelson was educated at Pepperdine University and Claremont Graduate University and today teaches at Greenville Technical College, South Carolina. His next book will be Race and Recovery: James F. Byrnes and the New Deal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 4 mins

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