Claim OwnershipWhat Wellesley's Reading
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Listen as Wellesley College faculty introduce you each week during the fall and spring semesters to a book that they're passionate about in their field, and then read a brief passage to whet your appetite.
The books might be little-known literary gems, beloved classics, scenes from plays, recent provocative essays, poems, thought-provoking analyses of current social issues, biographies, or many other literary forms.
Take a few minutes to explore the books that captivate Wellesley faculty.
The books might be little-known literary gems, beloved classics, scenes from plays, recent provocative essays, poems, thought-provoking analyses of current social issues, biographies, or many other literary forms.
Take a few minutes to explore the books that captivate Wellesley faculty.
194 Episodes
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Cassandra Pattanayak reads from Who Counts: The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America, by Margo Anderson and Stephen Fienberg, published by Russell Sage Foundation in 2001.
"American census takers have ... confronted counting problems since 1790 and have [produced] a count of the population each decade despite wars, shipwrecked schedules, and the confusion of respondents."
1Liza Oliver reads from White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th Century India, by William Dalrymple, published by Penguin Books in 2002.
"Ideas of racial and ethnic hierarchy were beginning to be aired for the first time in the late 1870s, and it was the ... mixed-blood Anglo-Indian[s] which felt the brunt of the new intolerance."
Charlene Galarneau reads from Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, by Emilie Townes, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006.
"It is what we do every day that shapes us...It is...these acts that we do that say more about us than those grand moments of righteous indignation and action..."
Inela Selimovic reads from Talking to Ourselves, by Andres Neumann, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2012.
"Someone had to call the funeral home to buy the coffin. And the newspapers to dictate the death notice. Two simple, inconceivable tasks. So intimate, so remote."
Octavio Gonzalez reads from Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, by Amber Jamilla Musser, published by NYU Press in 2014.
"[Lorde] enacts the argument that black women are discursively outside of sexuality and individuality."
Nadya Hajj reads from Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg, published by Shambhala in 1986.
"When you are writing, if you write a question, that is fine. But immediately go to a deeper level inside yourself and answer it in the next line."
Yui Suzuki reads from Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin, published by Pantheon in 2008.
"This fish doesn't just tell us about fish; it also contains a piece of us. The search for this connection is what led me to the Arctic in the first place."
Erich Matthes reads from H Is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald, published by Grove Press in 2015.
"Trained hawks have a peculiar ability to conjure history...You take a hawk onto your fist. You imagine the falconer of the past doing the same. It is hard not to feel it is the same hawk."
Kartini Shastry reads from Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, published by Public Affairs in 2011.
"One issue that ... arises when we think about fertility choice ... is whose choice? Fertility decisions are made by a couple, but women end up paying most of the physical costs of bearing children."
Susan Ellison reads from Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson, published by Duke University Press in 2014.
“The Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke … insist on being and acting as peoples who belong to a nation other than the United States or Canada.”
Francesca Southerden reads from For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression by Adriana Cavarero, published by Stanford University Press in 2005.
"The voice is sound, not speech. But speech constitutes its essential destination."
Catherine Masson reads from Gabriel by George Sand, translated by Kathleen Robin Hart and Paul Fenouillet and published by Modern Language Association of America.
"Gabriel, you are a woman! Oh, dear God!"
Marcy Thomas reads from The Secret Language of Color by Joann Eckstut and Arielle Eckstut, published by Black Dog & Leventhal.
"Our world is color-coded so that all living creatures know what or whom to attract, what to eat, when to be afraid, and how to behave."
Kimberly Cassibry reads from The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, by Mary Beard, published by Belknap Press.
"It is easy to get the impression of a town crammed full of fast-food joints serving wine and filling stews to a hungry populace – albeit in an atmosphere less ‘family-friendly’ than the modern McDonald’s."
Igor Logvinenko reads from Parting With Illusions, by Vladimir Pozner, published by The Atlantic Monthly Press.
"I certainly believed Stalin was a great man...But Father of the People? Of all the people? The infallible judge of all things, from linguistics and cybernetics to genetics and the most complex questions of nationality?"
George Caplan reads from Hydrogen: The Essential Element, by John Rigden published by Harvard University Press.
"The evolving spectrum of hydrogen demonstrates the way experiment and theory goad each other and...provides a telling example of how great science advances..."
Corinne Gartner reads from Lucretius' On the Nature of Things from The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume 1, by A.A. Long and D.N. Sedately, published by Cambridge University Press.
"...When immortal death snatches away a mortal life it is no different from never having been born."
Kyung Park reads from The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, by Khalili Gibran Muhammad, published by Harvard University Press.
"...Between 1890 and 1940, how and why did racial crime statistics become...a subject of dialogue and debate about blacks' fitness for modern life?"
Vanja Klepac-Ceraj reads from Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable by Paul Falkowski, published by Princeton University Press.
"If we don’t see things, we tend to overlook them. Microbes were long overlooked, especially in the story of the history of evolution."
Brenna Greer reads from The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, published by The Dial Press.
“They are...still trapped in a history which they do not understand...They have had to believe for many years...that black men are inferior to white men.”
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