Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

About Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Interviews with Cambridge UP authors about their new books

Publisher

New Books Network

Category

arts · history · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

7 Feb 2009

Latest episode

12 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1,259 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   12 Oct 2026

   Seniorland: Aging in a Retirement Metropolis with Galit Nimrod (Cambridge UP, 2025)

   Despite the abundance of retirement communities in the US, none compare to The Villages in Central Florida. Home to nearly 150,000 residents and spanning an area larger than Manhattan, it is the world's largest retirement community and the only one that can be considered a city for older adults. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 residents and two months of participant observations, this captivating and insightful book Seniorland: Aging In A Retirement Metropolis (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the aging experience in The Villages. It explores why people move there, their perceptions of its rapid growth, changes in their daily activities upon moving and over time, social involvement and leisure constraints, and their sense of identity and community. In doing so, this book unveils how The Villages' unique characteristics profoundly impact residents' well-being and offers a glance into the future of old age. Host: Renee Garfinkel Guest: Galit Nimrod

2. 

   11 Oct 2026

   Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience with Laurence J. Kirmayer (Cambridge UP, 2025)

   It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. Healing and the Invention of Metaphor: Towards a Poetics of Illness Experience (Cambridge UP, 2025), written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and processes of healing across cultures. It emphasizes how metaphor can open a window to the hidden mechanisms of healing driven by meaning and symbolism, myth and imagination. At the same time, it offers a rigorous critical account of the metaphors embedded in the epistemology and practice of contemporary biomedicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. In doing so, it exposes the sociomoral and political dimensions of these dominant approaches to understanding and treating illness. Laurence J. Kirmayer is Distinguished James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. He directs the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada. Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.

3. 

   10 Oct 2026

   An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa with Elisa Prosperetti (Cambridge UP, 2026)

   In An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge UP, 2026), Elisa Prosperetti argues that while racialized, colonial notions of development saw African bodies as the primary sites of economic value, anticolonial development imagined the minds of Africans as the key to economic productivity. Thus, the broadening of access to Europhone education (that is, using European languages) was a central component of anticolonial and antiracist visions of an emancipated African future. But this educationally-driven vision of the future had deep roots, calling back to other experiences of freedom, however partial, in the Black Atlantic world. Thus, the book further argues that the forms that decolonization took in coastal West Africa are best explained by framing decolonization as a Black Atlantic emancipation, akin to 19th-century slavery abolitions. Although decolonization in West Africa shared parallels with what happened across other parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East after World War II, a Black Atlantic frame accounts for certain regional specificities that the general process/category of decolonization does not. Combining more than sixty interviews with former students, teachers, and school administrators with research in state and institutional archives in West Africa, Europe, and the United States, An Anticolonial Development analyzes the rise and fall of public education as the principal project of anticolonial development in West Africa. Elisa Prosperetti is a historian at the National Institute of Education (part of the Nanyang Technological University) in Singapore. Her research focuses on modern African and global history, particularly histories of diaspora, education, race, development, economic and intellectual history, and decolonization. Her first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, was published in 2026 by Cambridge University Press. She received her MA (2015) and PhD (2019) degrees in History from Princeton University and her BSc in International History and International Relations from the London School of Economics (2008). Prior to graduate school, she worked for several years as a classroom teacher. You can learn more about Dr. Prosperetti’s work here Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana.

Who has been a guest on Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Joseph Darda
• Andrew Tobolowsky
• Kelsea Best
• Kayly Ober
• Robert A McLeman

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

243

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 72 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

82

Social presence

0

YouTube

72

Engagement

81