New Books in Higher Education

How do academic books get published? How do scholars turn dissertations and articles into the books we love? How does academic publishing compare to the world of trade publishing? This week, we speak with Robert Dreesen, a seasoned publishing professional with over 30 years of experience in the industry. Dreesen has worked in trade publishing at Penguin and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and for nearl...

"Golden Age” by Heidi Landecker appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education on 4 September 2024. The article discusses the scholarship of Jean H. Baker, Samuel Jay Keyser, and Lucy Freeman Sandler, three scholars who produce significant work in their nineties. Landecker highlights their enduring passion for scholarship and addresses broader societal conversations about the academy, age, and the...

A coalition of educators and allies has come together to push back against a variety of different kinds of attacks on higher education and students at colleges and universities, particularly in the United States. This group is driven by the belief that a democracy is only as strong as its commitments to academic freedom, intellectual integrity, human diversity, and individual dignity. The impetus...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr Agi Bodis and Dr Jing Fang about international tertiary students in Australia. They discuss how these students can make connections between their university experiences, their curriculum, and the professional industries they hope to one day be a part of. They also discuss how international students bring rich linguisti...

The presidents of the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians join the podcast to talk about the effects of historical censorship, data shredding, meaningful public education – and what everyone can do to fight back. After being sworn in as the 47th president, Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders. The order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Ex...

Uncovers what Christian seminaries taught about Islam in their formative years Throughout the nineteenth century, Islam appeared regularly in the curricula of American Protestant seminaries. Islam was not only the focus of Christian missions, but was studied as part of the history of the Church as well as in the new field of comparative religions. Moreover, Arabic was taught as a cognate biblical...

Our book is: Project Management for Researchers: A Practical, Stress-Free Guide to Getting Organized (U Michigan Press, 2025), by Dr. Shiri Noy, which tackles the how, what, and why of project management. It offers step-by-step guidance on choosing tools and developing a personalized system that will help the reader manage and organize their research so that steps and decisions are documented for...

In Well Worth Saving (Yale University Press, 2019), Professor Laurel Leff explores how American universities responded to the sudden and urgent appeals for help from scholars trapped in Nazi-dominated Europe. Although many scholars were welcomed into faculty or research positions in the US, thousands more tried to find a way over and failed. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horr...

Over the past two decades, natural things—especially those collected, exchanged, studied, and displayed in museums, such as animals, plants, minerals, and rocks—have emerged as fascinating protagonists for historical research. Nature on Paper: Documenting Science in Prussia, 1770-1850 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024) follows a different, humbler set of objects that make it possible to trace the global r...

Studies show that students who have a positive outlook on their lives outperform students who don’t. Is positive thinking a skill? Can it be taught? Our article is: “Teaching Positive Psychology Skills at school may be one way to help student mental health and happiness,” by Dr. Kai Zhuang Shum, published in The Conversation, which explores how the components of happiness and connection can be app...

Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education (MIT Press, 2024) is an imaginative tour of the contemporary university as it could be: a place to discover self-knowledge, meaning, and purpose. What if college were not just a means of acquiring credentials, but a place to pursue our formation as whole persons striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose? In Undeclared, Chris Higgins confro...

Good workplaces require both autonomy--giving employees a sense of ownership over how and where they work--and collaboration in pursuit of common goals. They see employees for who they are and support them, pay them enough money to live comfortably, and provide the resources, training, and support they need to be successful. Innovative Library Workplaces: Transformative Human Resource Strategies (...

While full- and part-time college faculty and lecturers go about their jobs—doing all that is seen (teaching and publishing) and unseen (class prep, grading, and researching)—little, if any time is given to the uncomfortable acknowledgment that those acts have legal ramifications. Navigating Choppy Waters: Key Legal Issues College Faculty Need to Know (2025, Rowman & Littlefield) thoughtfully addr...

In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Prashneel Ravisan Goundar about his new book, English Language-Mediated Settings and Educational Inequality: Language Policy Agendas in the South Pacific published by Routledge in 2025. In this book, Goundar explores how educational inequalities are responsible for the way students perform in English language-mediat...

In The Woman Question in Islamic Studies (Princeton UP, 2024), the Introduction of which is available at the publisher's website, Kecia Ali delves into the deeply entrenched ways sexism continues to shape the academic landscape of Islamic Studies. Despite the growing presence of women scholars in the field, Ali finds that women’s work remains marginalized, relegated to the periphery while male-aut...

Exchange of Ideas: The Economy of Higher Education in Early America (U Chicago Press, 2023) launches a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. In this volume, Adam R. Nelson focuses on the early republic, explaining how knowledge itself became a commodity, as useful ideas became salable goods and American colleges were drawn into transatlantic commercial relatio...

Political Scientists Lauren C. Bell, Allison Rank, and Carah Ong Whaley have a new edited volume, Civic Pedagogies: Teaching Civic Engagement in an Era of Divisive Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). This book has four separate sections that guide the reader through different dimensions of teaching civic engagement and the many aspects of this important pedagogical capacity that often falls on th...

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey speaks with Steven Brint, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Riverside, about the early days of the second Trump administration and its impact on higher education. Brint discusses the administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape federal governance, including its attacks on DEI programs, proposals to tax...

As of 2018, only about one in ten Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx (MMAX) students graduate with a college degree. Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observations, pláticas, document analyses, and literature on race, space, and racism in higher education, Why you always so political?: The Experiences and Resiliencies of Mexican/Mexican American/Xicanx Students in Higher Education (Viva Oxn...

Critical Management Studies and Librarianship: Critical Perspectives on Library Management Education and Practice (Library Juice Press, November 2024) introduces key concepts in the field of critical management studies (CMS) and critiques dominant theories and concepts in the management field. The aim of CMS is to denaturalize dominant theories in the management field by introducing works and rese...

Resistance to feminist, queer, and antiracist pedagogies can take many forms in the composition class: silence during class discussion; tepid, bland writing that fails to engage with course content; refusal to engage with feminist and queer ideas; open and direct challenges to professors’ authority. According to Wilton Wright, Rewriting Resistance to Social Justice Pedagogies (Lexington Books, 202...

How did the research universities of the Enlightenment come into being? And what debt do they owe to scholars of the previous era? Focusing on the career of German polymath Johann Daniel Major (1634–93), Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Vera Keller uncovers how late seventeenth-century scholars crafted the resear...

Peoples and Things host, Lee Vinsel, is joined by guest host and Peoples & Things producer, Joe Forte, Media Projects Manager with Virginia Tech Publishing, in interviewing Marshall Poe, the founder and editor of the New Books Network, the largest academic podcasting platform in the world. The trio discuss how the New Books Network came to be; how digital technologies open up new tools for academi...

How do Black women experience education in Britain? Within British educational research about Black students, gender distinctions have been largely absent, male-dominated or American-centric. Due to the lack of attention paid to Black female students, relatively little is known about how they understand and engage with the education system, or the influences which shape their long-term strategies...

Arts graduate education is uniquely positioned to deliver many of the public good needs of contemporary Canada. For the Public Good: Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities (U Alberta, 2024) argues, however, that graduate programs must fundamentally change if they are to achieve this potential. Drawing on deep experience and research, the authors outline how reformed programs t...