Show Notes
Featuring personal essay, manifesto, creative nonfiction, and poetry, Tsunami: Women’s Voices From Mexico (Feminist Press, 2025) gathers the multiplicity of voices being raised in Mexico today against patriarchy and its buried structures. Tackling gender violence, community building, #MeToo, Indigenous rights, and more, these writings rock the core of what we know feminism to be, dismantling its Eurocentric roots and directing its critical thrust towards current affairs in Mexico today.
Asserting plurality as a political priority, Tsunami includes trans voices, Indigenous voices, Afro-Latinx voices, voices from within and outside academic institutions, and voices spanning generations. Tsunami is the combined force and critique of the three feminist waves, the marea verde (“green wave”) of protests that have swept through Latin America in recent years, and the tides turned by insurgent feminisms at the margins of public discourse.
Guest: Gabriela Jauregui’s books include Feral, Many Fiestas, and La memoria de las cosas. She edited and coauthored Tsunami and Tsunami 2, published in Spanish in 2018 and 2021 respectively. She is a Soros New American Fellow, a Borchard Fellow, and was part of the Hay Festival's Bogotá 39 best young authors in Latin America. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from USC and teaches at the National Autonomous University in Mexico (UNAM).
Guest: Heather Cleary is an award-winning translator whose work has been recognized by English PEN, the National Book Foundation, the Best Translated Book Award, and the Mellon Foundation. A member of the Cedilla & Co. translation collective, she was a founding editor of the digital, multilingual Buenos Aires Review. She holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian cultures from Columbia University, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is a developmental editor and writing coach for scholars in the humanities. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and the show’s newsletter.
Playlist:
Thanks to Life The Madres de la Plaza de Mayo The Things We Didn't Know In The Garden Behind The Moon The Common The Translators Daughter We Take Our Cities With Us A Calm and Normal Heart The Names of All the Flowers Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 325+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
More from New Books in Women's History
Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down sex discrimination, Dorothy Kenyon drew the legal blueprint. Justice Was Her Calling: The Fierce and Fascinating Life of Dorothy Kenyon (U California Press, 2026) by Jennifer Brinkley is the first full-length biography of the New York judge, lawyer, and civil liberties champion whose litigation strategies helped transform the Equal Protection Clause into a powerful tool for women’s rights. Across decades, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal and into the rise of second-wave feminism, Dorothy Kenyon stood at the forefront of reform.
In Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (Beacon Press, 2022), historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the core of a fresh argument: that the system of mass incarceration was established as protection for the institution of slavery and the profits of enslavers and that this legacy continues today.
For as long as human societies have been telling stories, the patriarchy has felt threatened by women. In this book, Eleanor Johnson provides an engaging cultural history of a figure she calls the “monstrous bitch,” the notorious female who has haunted the patriarchal imagination for centuries, feared for her sexual promiscuity, her exercise of reproductive agency and control, and her outspoken way of contesting patriarchal power.
Born in Florida to a religious family, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) was a white Southern woman living in the Jim Crow South who defied all stereotypes: She lived with her lover, Paula, first running a summer camp in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and then a magazine devoted to creating a new vision of the South, one that passionately championed equality and integration. Smith published Black and white writers, a rare feat in those days, and herself wrote articles instructing white Southerners on why they shouldn’t support segregation—Smith firmly believed racism hurt white Americans, too.
The first full biography of the controversial and complex First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyler--an unjustly scandalized New Yorker, the second wife to President John Tyler, and a savvy and consequential political figure in the age of the Civil War.