Interviews with Authors about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
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Nordic Style on Chinese Social Media: Misinformation, Consumerism, and Digital Discourse
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17:24How does social media shape perceptions of global cultural trends? On Chinese platforms like WeChat, the concept of Nordic Style (北欧风) has been widely adopted—but often in an oversimplified and commercialized form. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Dr. Heidi Hui Shi discusses her research on digital misinformation and the portrayal of Nor…
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In “The Beast,” AI Puts Limits on Human Emotion
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1:16:31It’s the UConn Popcast, and “The Beast” is a 2023 sci fi / romance movie by French director Bertrand Bonello, in which artificial intelligence has determined that human emotions are a danger, and must be surgically controlled. In this deep dive, we ask whether this is really a film about AI, a transhistorical love story, a narrative of societal dec…
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Peter Ramey, "The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation with Commentary" (Angelico Press, 2023)
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57:05Beowulf is the product of a profoundly religious imagination, but the significance of the poem’s Christianity has been downplayed or denied altogether. The Word-Hoard Beowulf: A Translation with Commentary (Angelico Press, 2023) is the first translation and popular commentary to take seriously the religious dimension of this venerable text. While g…
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Rhiannon Stephens, "Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History" (Duke UP, 2022)
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49:53In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke UP, 2022), Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did n…
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Shay A. Pilnik, "The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War" (Purdue UP, 2025)
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1:30:54The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War (Purdue UP, 2025) starts when the travesty ends, te…
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TrumpWorld: Canada, South Africa, Germany, and the Global Far-Right
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38:18In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey talks with Heribert Adam, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, to unpack the global ripple effects of Donald Trump's return to power. From his startling proposal to make Canada the 51st state to his controversial foreign aid cuts targeting South Afric…
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Ethan Tapper, "How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World" (Broadleaf Books, 2024)
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48:12For more than a decade, Ethan Tapper has been recognized as a thought-leader and a disruptor in the worlds of forestry, conservation, and ecosystem stewardship. He has many years of experience managing private and public forestlands. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including Forester-of-the-Year, by the Northeast-Midwest Foresters…
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Ilan Stavans, "Latino USA: A Cartoon History" (Basic Books, 2024)
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1:34:14This interview includes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M); Annette Martínez-Iñesta, Instructor of Italian, UPR-M; and Baruch Vergara, Artist and Professor of Plastic Arts, UPR-M. This episode has been sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, the Department of Humanities at the UPR-M, and the Insti…
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Mary Flannery, "Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
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1:03:22For over six centuries, Chaucer has epitomized poetic greatness, though more recent treatments of The Canterbury Tales’ lively and often risqué style have made his name more synonymous with bawdy humor. But beyond his poetic achievements, Chaucer assumed various roles including those of royal attendant, soldier, customs official, justice of the pea…
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Tabish Khair, "Literature Against Fundamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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1:18:51Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism. Literature is a mode of thinking, stories being one of the oldest thinking 'devices' known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships betwee…
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Peter D. Hershock, "Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
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1:12:16Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence. In Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future (Bloomsbury, 2021), Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously found…
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Noa Shashar, "The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850" (Brandeis UP, 2024)
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42:42In The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648 - 1850 (Brandeis UP, 2024), Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early modern era and on the activity of rabbis whose Jewish legal rulings determined the fate of agunot, literally "chained women," who were often considered a marginal group. Who were these men and women? How di…
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Kecia Ali, "The Woman Question in Islamic Studies" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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1:25:43In 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 margi…
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Amit Levy, "A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel" (Brandeis UP, 2024)
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1:10:52A New Orient: From German Scholarship to Middle Eastern Studies in Israel (Brandeis UP, 2024) explores the fascinating history of Zionist and Israeli "Oriental Studies" (mizrahanut), particularly the study of Islam, Arabic, and the Middle East, as a field deeply rooted in the academic traditions of early 20th-century German universities. Drawing on…
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Martyn Percy, "The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England" (Hurst, 2025)
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49:48The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England (Hurst, 2025) by Dr. Martyn Percy offers a bold and unsettling truth: the British Empire and Great Britain are primarily English constructions, and the Church of England benefited from English enterprise and exploitation, serving as the spiritual arm of the impe…
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Preetha Mani, "The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
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55:40Indian literature is not a corpus of texts or literary concepts from India, argues Preetha Mani, but a provocation that seeks to resolve the relationship between language and literature. In this episode, we discuss Mani’s 2022 publication, The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method, which won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scagli…
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Lindsay O'Neill, "The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey Into and Out of Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
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49:27In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—convinced a lawye…
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Audun Kjus et al., "Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum" (Utah State UP, 2024)
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51:07Audun Kjus joins Jana Byars to talk about Adventures in the Play-Ritual Continuum (Utah State Press, 2025), eds. Audun Kjus, Jakob Löfgren, Cliona O’Carroll, Simon Poole & Ida Tolgensbakk. Utah State Press, 2025). The junctions between play and ritual are many and complex. Play is for fun and joy, but it also demands a total commitment and serious …
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Andrew Jotischky, "The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History" (Yale UP, 2024)
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29:25From the late Roman Empire onwards, monasteries and convents were a common sight throughout Europe. But who were monasteries for? What kind of people founded and maintained them? And how did monasticism change over the thousand years or so of the Middle Ages? Andrew Jotischky traces the history of monastic life from its origins in the fourth centur…
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Eugene W. Holland, "Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism" (SUNY Press, 2024)
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1:49:29Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism (SUNY Press, 2024) argues that capitalism fosters sadism and masochism--not as individual psychological proclivities but as widespread institutionalized patterns of behavior. The book is divided into two parts: one historical and the other theoretical. In the first, Eugene …
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Adnan Husain on Reorienting History
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1:19:05In this episode, Chella Ward and Salman Sayyid talked to Adnan Husain about some of the challenges involved in reorienting history. We spoke about the opportunities and limitations of the idea of ‘the global’ as a way of organising history, and explored the relationship between the global and the decolonial. Adnan Husain is a Medieval European and …
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Tahir Kamran, "Chequered Past, Uncertain Future: The History of Pakistan" (Reaktion Books, 2024)
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1:00:53Pakistan’s history since independence is…complicated. Partition wrecked the economy, leaving all the economic infrastructure in India. Democracy was weak, as the military launched multiple coups to overthrow the civilian government. The country was split into an unsustainable two halves–with one declaring independence as Bangladesh by the Seventies…
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Violent Majorities 2.2: Subir Sinha on Hindutva as Long-Distance Ethnonationalism
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56:36Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the…
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Patrick Riordan, "Human Dignity and Liberal Politics: Catholic Possibilities for the Common Good" (Georgetown UP, 2023)
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49:50A deeply considered examination of the “common good” reconciling Catholic Social Thought with secular politics and philosophy. The Second Vatican Council invites dialogue about the common good as the set of economic, political, legal, and cultural conditions for human flourishing, whether as individuals or as communities. However, some contemporary…
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William M. Paris, "Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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1:12:17How does time figure in racial domination? What is the relationship between the capitalist organization of time and racial domination? Could utopian thinking give us ways of understanding our own time and its dominations? In Race, Time, and Utopia: Critical Theory and the Process of Emancipation (Oxford University Press, 2025), William Paris uses t…
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In this episode of High Theory, Ryan Ruby talks to us about Poetry. Our standard definition of poetry today is an institutional one, much like contemporary art: if art is what artists and museums and collectors call art, poetry is what poets and professors and publishers say is poetry. Ruby argues that this indefinable thing humans have been doing …
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