New Books Network

American democracy is in a period of crisis, so it seems natural to look back to its origins. So here in Episode 10 of Season 5, I interview Professor Josiah Ober. Having previously taught at Princeton University, Ober is a professor of political science, classics, and philosophy at Stanford University, the Director of the Stanford Civics Initiative, as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Instit...

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On May 13, 2026, Princeton’s Center for Human Values hosted a day-long conference titled Audio & Ideas: Exploring the Possibilities for Scholarly Podcasting. It was co-sponsored by Princeton’s Journalism program, and the NYU Podcast Initiative. Over the course of four panels, scholars, podcasters, and journalist...

There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times...

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Frank Stahnisch, Professor of the History of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Calgary in Canada, about his new book Great Minds in Despair – The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989 (2025, McGill-Queen’s University Press). Great Minds in Despair examines the lon...

The connections between Hong Kong and Japan began far earlier than many realise. Yet only recently has Hong Kong’s historic Japanese community received the attention it deserves through Meiji Graves in Happy Valley: Stories of Early Japanese Residents in Hong Kong (Hong Kong UP, 2024). In this compelling book, Dr Yoshiko Nakano and Georgina Challen guide readers into the Meiji era, reconstructing...

There is no shortage of books on music and politics, but Anna Harwell Celenza explores an interesting premise in her book On the Record: Music that Changed America (Norton, 2026). Each of the twelve chapters discusses a different instance when music, as Celenza writes, “sparked debates in the halls of Congress.” Arranged basically chronologically, Celenza tackles some of the most powerful and cont...

The modern relationship between the Vatican and the State of Israel is rooted in a long history of hostility between Judaism and Roman Catholicism. Through the centuries, popes and theologians marginalized the Jewish people, assigning them collective guilt for the death of Jesus Christ and claiming that the sacred territory of Palestine was the true patrimony of the Roman Catholic Church. With the...

I had the privilege of speaking with writer Samantha Ellis about her deeply moving new book, Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture (Pegasus Books, 2026). Our discussion explored not only the story of a disappearing language, but also the broader questions of memory, identity, and what it means to inherit a fragile cultural legacy. At the heart of Ellis’s book is Judeo-Iraq...

Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-rangin...

What does doctoral supervision actually look like in contemporary academia? In this NBN episode, Fredrik Saxegaard discusses the open-access book Doctoral Supervision Across Boundaries: Interdisciplinarity as Process and Practice (Scandinavian UP, 2026), co-edited with Mia Lövheim, and Geir Afdal. The conversation challenges the traditional image of supervision as a private relationship between a...

Jesse Montgomery joins Michael Stauch to discuss It Is Not Enough to Survive: The Young Patriots Story (UNC Press, 2026). They examine how young white migrants from Appalachia and the South fought police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, and displacement through community organizing, and even joined forces with Fred Hampton’s Black Panther Party and the Young Lords to create the original...

Join YIVO for a conversation about the resurgence of interest in Jewish identity and history in Lithuania today. Jonathan Brent will moderate a conversation among Miglė Anušauskaitė, a Lithuanian cartoonist and archivist working on the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project, Anna Avidan, Managing Director of LitvakWorld, Kęstas Pikūnas, publisher of Passport, and former Lithuanian Mini...

Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts (Duke UP, 2026), Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his caree...

In the early twentieth century, as variety shows flooded Canadian stages, new forms of blackface, inspired by modern forms of amusements, changed the theatre. In this era marked by progressive social reforms, the stage embodied the modern ethos of imitation, mimicry, and change. Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919 (Wilfr...

From the mid-nineteenth century through the dust bowl years of the Great Depression, a new kind of migrant worker became a familiar sight in communities across America. The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants (Princeton UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Suits traces the journeys of these homeless men and women, showing how hobo work was an adaptation to energy transitions and a harsh and unp...

New York Times bestselling author Kimberly McCreight delivers a tour de force of character-driven suspense with her latest novel, Someone Else's Husband (Knopf, 2026), the story of two women whose secrets and desires entrap them in a deadly love triangle. You had to rely on the power of love. That he loved you enough not to do the thing that would break your heart. It was paper-thin ice on which t...

Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should o...

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question—what is left of the socialist city?—this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of...

Exploring the work of established and emerging artists in Indonesia’s vibrant art world, Artists and the People: Ideologies of Art in Indonesia (NUS Press, 2022) examines why so many artists in the world’s largest archipelagic nation choose to work directly with people and in the studio. While the social dimension of Indonesian art makes it distinctive in the globalised world of contemporary art,...

In this episode of the New Books Network, we explore Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman (Anthem Press, 2026), with anthropologist Dr Marielle Risse. Drawing on nearly two decades of ethnographic fieldwork, Dr Risse offers a nuanced examination of marriage practices among Sunni Muslim communities in southern Oman, challenging many of the assumptions that often underpin Western di...

Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant “city on a hill,” religion has been central to American life. Even as some found religious freedom—Rhode Island welcomed the Quakers, Jews, and Baptists that Massachusetts expelled as dissenters—indigenous people and Africans forced into slavery struggled to prot...

Karl Whittington joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025). What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art historians typically answer this question by referring to historical evidence about an artist's sexual identity or to particular kinds of imagery. But what about anonymous artis...

Addiction, Accommodation, and Vulnerability in Psychoanalysis: Circles Without a Center (Routledge, 2022) explores the compulsions and trauma that underlie addiction, using an intersubjective approach in seeking to understand the inspirations and challenges arising from the psychoanalytic treatment of addiction, compulsivity, and related dissociative conditions. Drawing on insights from his own an...

Woody Allen has called A Streetcar Named Desire the most well-directed film ever made and its influence on Blue Jasmine (2013) is unmistakable. Both concern a woman whose fantasy life and self-deception break down and both feature incredible performances by the lead actress: in Streetcar, it’s Vivien Leigh and here it’s Cate Blanchett. And if Streetcar is a high point of Eliza Kazan’s filmography,...

Colin Flahive is an American entrepreneur and writer who has spent more than two decades living and running social enterprises in southwestern China. He is best known as one of the founders of Salvador's Coffee House, which is a hub of international exchange in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. In this New Books Network episode, we talk with Colin about his latest book, The Galaxy's Last Ri...