Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast New Books in Gender

To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In No! The Art and Activism of Complaining, her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Sara Ahmed attunes her “feminist ear” to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly—how they work, and for whom they work.

Where complaints live, how complaints are made, who receives them, who buries them and where—Sara Ahmed’s accessible, attentive writing brings to life the lessons learned from people knocking at closed doors, teaching us how to collectively resist the glacial weight of institutional power. This book inspires all of us to persist, to say “No!” and to build new collectivities that break down brick walls together.

Guest: Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar. She has published eleven books, including The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. She lives in Cambridgeshire, England.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast and newsletter. 

Playlist for listeners:

• How We Show Up
• Indigenous D.C.
• We Refuse:  A Forceful History of Black Resistance
• What Might Be
• Living Resistance
• Leading Toward Liberation
• Leading From The Margins
• Thanks To Life
• I Have Avenged America
• Black Boy Out Of Time
• Shoutin In The Fire
• The Names Of All the Flowers
• Hands Up, Don't Shoot
• That Librarian
• Book Banning

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 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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What happens to foreign aid (and to women’s status) when the global development landscape shifts away from U.S. dominance? In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey speaks with sociologist Mary-Collier Wilks about her book Reimagining Aid: Foreign Donors, Women’s Health, and New Paths for Development in Cambodia (Stanford UP, 2026). They discuss the contrasting approaches of U.S., Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese donors, the rise of competing regional models of development, and what the changing aid landscape means for gender equality and local actors in Cambodia.

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Lise Shapiro Sanders is the author of Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early 20c Britain, published in October 2026 by Bloomsbury Academic Press. 

Reading for Pleasure analyzes the early 20th-century British romance as a genre directed at young working women, including those employed in factories, shops and department stores, and the service industry. It explores a range of popular romances in the form of novels, films, and periodicals, and thinks about how these texts provided a form of affective pleasure and virtual sensory experience that indulged the sensuality of sexual desire and as well as the glamor of fashionable garments and settings. It suggests that even as popular romance foregrounded the pleasure of fantasy, it was also invested in working women’s social, sexual, and political agency. The first three chapters examine discourses of beauty, fashion, and fantasy that circulated in romance, whereas the last two chapters and the conclusion explore how these discourses came into conflict with working women’s material reality – including the need for access to contraception, sexual knowledge, and control over reproduction. Ultimately, Reading for Pleasure offers important insights into the politics of reading for pleasure, how gender, sexuality, and class shape these politics, and why there are many reasons to not only take pleasure in romance but to also take it seriously.

Lise Shapiro Sanders was employed as a professor of literature and cultural studies at Hampshire College for 27 years. Her previous books include Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920 (Ohio State University Press, 2006); Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female, co-authored with Pamela K. Stone (Routledge, 2020); Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, co-edited with Amy Bingaman and Rebecca Zorach (Routledge, 2002); and a critical edition of Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s 1875 novel Janet Doncaster (Victorian Secrets, 2017). 

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is a professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance.

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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.

In a narrative brimming with insight, Johnson traces the origins of female monstrosity to the demoness Lamashtu of ancient Mesopotamia, showing how this infanticidal, hypersexual, loudmouthed monster appears in different guises throughout history. In classical Greece, she reemerges as the sorceress Medea, the child-devouring monster Lamia, and the vengeful Furies. In the medieval and early modern periods, she is an oversexed, baby-slaying, spellcasting witch; in the Romantic and Victorian eras, a vampiress; and in the modern age of psychoanalysis, a mental patient. After this longue durée history, Johnson shows how monstrous bitchery has been challenged and reinterpreted in contemporary cinematic popular culture, becoming an expression of heroism and resistance in films like Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, and The Witch. She demonstrates how deeply embedded the roots of misogyny have become, and why it is more critical today than ever that we expose and address them.

An irreverent look at a pervasive trope that runs through four thousand years of Western culture, Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women (Princeton UP, 2026) reveals that while representations of the powerful woman have evolved over time, the fear and demonization of her remains the same.

Eleanor Johnson is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her books include Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968–1980); Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England; Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama; and Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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First released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons revolutionized game design and interactive media by allowing players to create and perform their own fictional characters in a fantasy world as expansive as their imaginations would allow. That freedom, and the rules that governed it, weren’t a creative coincidence. In How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play (Duke University Press, 2026), Dr. Aaron Trammell excavates the game as an artifact of a burgeoning counterculture obsessed with individualism as well as quantification. Mapping the world onto a grid, building characters whose every trait is assigned a point value, and advancing the game’s narrative through dice throws—countless core mechanics are tied to numbers.

Putting the game design of D&D into dialogue with the social and political tensions of the 1970s and 80s, Dr. Trammell illuminates how the integrated quantification in the game design led to reductionism, reinforced oppressive gender and racial norms, and accustomed generations of players to the bigoted, xenophobic mores of the Cold War era. He delivers a history of both how games can shape players and how players, united by their own shared values, can shape games in turn.

Aaron Trammell is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, author of The Privilege of Play and Repairing Play, and senior editor of Analog Game Studies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The realist novel, so the story goes, isn’t really an American genre but a European and British one. And what the realist novel does—again, according to conventional wisdom—is entrench a liberal model of the individual: the self as autonomous and perfectible. Pushing back against these and other received ideas, Rafael Walker offers a self-professed “heretical” view of the history of the American novel in Realism after the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel (U Chicago Press, 2025). 

A specialist in American and African American literature as well as gender and sexuality studies, Walker is Associate Professor of English and Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College and the editor of new editions of two essential American novels: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). 

In Realism after the Individual, his first book-length study, Walker shows how realist novels written by US authors from the 1890s to the 1920s transform our understanding of what the novel is and does in the American context. These novels are populated, Walker argues, with “post-individualist” individuals, particularly women, who want new things endlessly and who especially want what other people want—because they've adapted to America's brave new world of capitalist consumption and mass culture.

In this conversation with Alix Beeston, Walker ranges widely and expertly across literary and intellectual history as he shares about women with insatiable desires, men who are killed off for not desiring enough, and the resonances between early twentieth-century literature and the present political moment. He also offers some recommendations for the important but now all-but-forgotten realist novels we should all be reading.

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Immoral Traffic: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their efforts. Through a sequence of interventions prescribed by India's anti-prostitution law, the book follows the experiences of sex workers, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters. It sheds light on the ways in which donor-driven NGOs draw upon this law to implement anti-trafficking agendas, and how these interventions are navigated by women removed from the sex trade. Detailed and eye-opening, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical studies of NGOs and humanitarianism.

Vibhuti Ramachandran is an anthropologist of law, gender and sexuality, and South Asia. She serves as an Associate Professor at University of California-Irvine's Department of Global and International Studies, School of Social Sciences. 

Saumya Dadoo is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS). Her dissertation focuses on the history of policing and punishment in colonial North India. 

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“If whores were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free” (ix). Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory (Duke UP, 2026) opens with a quote from Clara expanding on the Combahee River Collective 1977 statement. Interweaving interviews and writing by sex workers like Clara, Notes from the Sex Worker Left by Heather Berg offers a political theory that critiques family/couple-form, work, and state, envisioning militant community care. Rejecting the pressure to fit into a category of hardworking, respectable workers dominant even in the Left, Heather Berg extends Marxist theorization of lumpenproletariat: the working-class “who were criminalized, itinerant, and otherwise making a living of ‘dubious means’ ” (13). Although lumpenproletariat is not a cohesive category, with sex workers offering different perspectives and experiences, Berg reads lumpenness as a “critical standpoint” (14) to reimagine the world where we are able to not only survive, but also thrive, collectively. Through theorizing, the book invites the readers to think with sex workers on the question of how we can thrive in this increasingly precarious world. This book is a thought-provoking and beautiful read for anyone who is interested in exploring these questions together at the intersections of gender studies, labor studies, and political theory. Beyond academia, anyone who wants to delve deeper into the couple-form, work, and state structure, dreaming of escape and alternatives, would find this to be a rewarding read. 

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Samar Abdel-Rahman's Egyptian Male Film Stars in the Nasser Era: Envisioning a National Identity (American University of Cairo Press, 2026) explores male stardom in Egyptian cinema produced during the early years following the Free Officers' revolution of 1952, through the lives and careers of three key stars: Omar al-Sharif, Ismail Yassin, and Farid Shawqi. In attempting to find a balance between the traditional and the modern, the Nasser era placed an emphasis on education, work, and gender equality. Yet, faithfulness to Egyptian traditions and values remained a key part of the state’s vision of collective identity. Samar illuminates how these stars promoted a civic identity that aligned with the regime’s ambitions, and how each of them—through melodrama, comedy, and action—negotiated a different facet of masculine identity that spoke to the ambivalent constructions of hegemonic masculinity during this critical post-colonial period.

Samar Abdel-Rahman holds a PhD in film studies from King's College London and  is currently a lecturer of World Cinema at the University of Liverpool. Her research, which focuses on stardom and performance in Middle Eastern and North African Cinemas, has been published in edited volumes including The Routledge Companion to European Cinema.

Saman Nasser holds an MA in world history from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff.

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Susan E. Kirtley and Nhora Lucía Serrano's Women in Comics (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) is a richly illustrated, essential guide to the importance of women in the comics space from across time and around the globe.

Comics in the form of editorial cartoons, comic strips, digital comics, comic books, and graphic novels have combined words and images to tell stories of hundreds of years. Though often overlooked, women have played a vital role in shaping this genre, both as creators and characters within the stories themselves.

Through six archetypes frequently found in comics—the patriot, the working woman, the socialite, the fashionista, the reporter, and the spy—Kirtley and Serrano trace some of comics’ most influential women. This insightful exploration of international characters celebrates the feminist role model Wonder Woman, the warrior-maiden Oscar François de Jarjayes in the gender-defying manga tale Berusiyu no Bara (The Rose of Versailles), the real-life groundbreaking journalist Nellie Bly, and many others. Profiles throughout the book highlight the important work of female creators, heralding the bravery of political cartoonists such as Corinne “Coco” Rey and Rayma Suprani, the power of biography as reportage with Marjane Satrapi and Sophia Glock, and the value of visibility with Alison Bechdel and Mariko Tamaki. 

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How Girls Achieve points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Dr. Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender.

Educated women raise healthier families, build stronger communities, and generate economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Yet millions of disadvantaged girls never make it to school—and too many others drop out or fail. Upending decades of advice and billions of dollars in aid, Dr, Nuamah argues that this happens because so many challenges girls confront—from sexual abuse to unequal access to materials and opportunities—go unaddressed. But it isn’t enough just to go to school. What you learn there has to prepare you for the world where you’ll put that knowledge to work.

Dr. Nuamah reveals that developing resilience is not a gender-neutral undertaking. Preaching grit doesn’t help girls; it actively harms them. Drawing on her deep immersion in classrooms in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa, Nuamah calls for a new approach: creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms, and allow them to carve out their own paths to success.

Guest: Dr. Sally A. Nuamah is an associate professor of Urban Politics in Human Development, Social Policy and Political Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. She has received numerous awards; began the TWII Foundation to provide funding for girls striving to be first in their families to go to college; and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a Women and Public Policy fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Host is: Dr. Christina Gessler is the producer of the both Academic Life podcast and the show’s weekly newsletter. She is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics.

Listeners may be interested in:

• Teacher By Teacher
• Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change
• Black Girls and How We Fail Them
• Leading from the Margins
• How We Show Up
• How Schools Make Race
• Black Woman On Board
• Remembering Lucille
• Can I Say That?
• Teaching About Race And Racism

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 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

This episode was originally published Nov 6, 2020

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Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing (Syracuse UP, 2025) explores the legacy of intersectional stereotypes of disability, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion that justified imperial rule in Ireland and the forms of oppression that continued after independence. Marion Quirici identifies models of citizenship and creative autonomy in Irish modernist literature that valorize vulnerability over ability and interdependence over independence. She uncovers a history in which an entire nation, Ireland, was characterized as disabled and therefore “not fit for freedom.” Beyond symbolism, the Famine and decades of emigration led to a perception that Ireland’s racial stocks were depleted, and that those who remained were feeble and few. The fraught relationship between disability and Irishness provides context for Quirici’s analysis of modernist Irish literature. Revivalists such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Pádraic Pearse, and the Gaelic Athletic Association created new mythologies of Irish ability to counter imperial stereotypes, tacitly reinforcing the idea of disability as a disqualification for sovereignty. Certain Irish modernists, however—James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, Brian O’Nolan, and Christy Brown—called the “fitness for freedom” ideology into question. These authors allow us to disentangle disability from unfitness and scrutinize its relationship to liberation. In their work, disability becomes an avenue for exploring the human experience and discovering the inherent creativity and collaborative potential of an interdependent life.

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This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both of the contradictions of our present moment and brief glimmers of what an emancipated world might look like.

Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer, with work appearing in a number of outlets including London Review of Books, The Drift and e-flux. Her previous books are Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now. 

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Across Pakistan's rooftops, pigeon flyers devote enormous care and labor to birds that soar the skies, take part in competitions, and knit together communities otherwise divided by caste, class, language, and ethnicity. Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan (U Washington, 2026) follows these flyers across four provinces, revealing a world of shauq (passionate pursuits) where training, feeding, and flying become affective acts to welcome a more-than-human other into the home.

When cherished birds cross the militarized India-Pakistan border, they are recast as intruders and “spies," exposing the thin line between welcome and suspicion, hospitality and hostility. Through long-term ethnography, Dr. Muhammed Kavesh traces the layered meanings of arrival, both at the home and the homeland, showing how pigeons illuminate political tensions while sustaining bonds of play, care, and enthusiasm. Interweaving anthropology, South Asian studies, and multispecies studies with the Punjabi folktale of Heer Ranjha, Dr. Kavesh offers a conceptually rich account of human-pigeon relatedness. Moving from village lofts and urban rooftops to racing clubs and borderlands, the book demonstrates how animals mediate danger, belonging, and reciprocity across contested lines.

Original and exciting, Spies and Other Pigeons reframes multispecies anthropology through a South Asian lens, revealing how the care and labor of pigeon keeping anchor local worlds and unsettle national borders.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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When the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers appeared in April 2023, few anticipated its impact beyond the screen. Within weeks, survivors in politics, the media, academia and the arts began sharing experiences of sexual harassment and assault, giving momentum to Taiwan’s long-delayed #MeToo movement. 

XinLing Li’s new book, Wave Makers and the Rise of #MeToo in Taiwan: Media, Empathy, and Digital Testimony (Anthem Press, 2026), asks how a fictional series became a cultural catalyst. Li argues that the drama gave form to experiences that had remained unspoken, while social media allowed personal testimony to circulate without institutional permission. 

The book is part of the new short-book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’. 

In this podcast, Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley talks with Dr Li about television, empathy, digital testimony, and the opportunities and inequalities within Taiwan's #MeToo movement. Themes include: 

• Why Taiwan’s #MeToo movement came late - the gap between progressive laws and the cultural conditions that still discourage survivors from speaking.
• The ‘perfect victim’ - how Wave Makers challenges the assumption that only women who conform to conventional ideas of femininity deserve belief and justice.
• The feminist snap - why the line ‘Let’s not just let it go this time’ gave viewers a language for recognising accumulated injustice.
• Empathy and narrative identity - how fictional characters help audiences interpret their own experiences and respond to others.
• Digital testimony and affective publics - how social media weakens traditional gatekeeping while introducing new risks and struggles for attention.
• Women’s solidarity - how the drama examines agency, family relationships and the historical expectation that women define themselves through men.
• The limits of visibility - why migrant domestic workers remain especially vulnerable and often unable to speak without risking their livelihoods or immigration status. 

One of the book’s most compelling arguments is that art can give structure to what Raymond Williams called ‘emergent feelings’: experiences without an accepted public language. Through recognisable characters and an accessible story, Wave Makers transformed a familiar instruction to remain silent – ‘just let it go’ – into a shared refusal.

 The podcast also considers how the hashtag changes testimony. Survivors can now address audiences directly, rather than relying entirely on journalists and other institutional gatekeepers. Yet visibility remains uneven. Stories involving celebrities and senior politicians attract attention more readily than those of migrant domestic workers, who may face dismissal, loss of visa status or deportation if they speak publicly. 

Li is cautious about treating Wave Makers as a formula for political change. No television programme can produce a movement on demand. Popular culture can nevertheless offer language and recognition when audiences are ready to respond. 

The story of Wave Makers is ultimately about the unpredictable movement between fiction and public life: a drama helped people recognise experiences they had been encouraged to dismiss, while digital platforms allowed the words ‘me too’ to become testimony, solidarity and action.

Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley is a Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London, and a host for the New Books Network. She is also a co-editor (with Professor Gary Rawnsley) of the short-book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’. 

Dr Xinling Li is an independent scholar based in New York. He studied at Cambridge University. 

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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!

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Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Ar: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy (ARC Humanities Press, 2026) represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Glenn Peers is Emeritus Professor, Art History at University of Texas Austin and Syracuse University

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Sociology of Gender in India brings together feminist and queer scholarship to chart the changing landscape of gender debates in Indian sociology. Spanning over five decades of disciplinary evolution, this volume interrogates how gender, caste, sexuality, class, and digitalisation intersect in shaping contemporary social life. With chapters by a new generation of scholars, it critically engages with foundational debates in kinship, marriage, labour, media, nationalism, and pedagogy, while foregrounding neglected areas such as femtech, queer infrastructures, and digital precarity. The volume not only reanimates classic concerns of Indian feminist sociology but also aims to intervene in global conversations on intersectionality, decolonial knowledge, and the sociology of everyday life.

Pushpesh Kumar teaches sociology at the University of Hyderabad. He has written extensively on gender and sexuality issues. 

Rituparna Patgiri teaches Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. Her research explores questions of culture, food, media, gender, and pedagogy. 

Deepali Aparajita Dungdung teaches in the Department of Sociology, Ranchi University. Her research examines the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and care work within contemporary capitalism, with her more recent work focusing on language, education, and development.

Priyam Sinha is an Early-Career Fellow at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, where her work sits at the intersection of critical media industry studies, production cultures, disability studies, gender studies, and digital media development in Asia. She previously held a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin, and her doctoral research was awarded by the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Her articles appear in the European Journal of Cultural Studies; Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; and South Asian Diaspora, among others. Committed to public scholarship, she is a regular host on the New Books Network and has written for the Economic and Political Weekly, the Asian Film Archive, and FemAsia. Her work can be found at here and you can follow her on X here

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The clothes we inherit, covet, purchase, borrow, wear, store, destroy, or give away are intricately woven into our ideas about who we are and how we relate to others and the world around us. Clothes are things that can console us or trouble us. They can be objects buoyant with cherished memories and self-affirming associations—or weighed down with loss, disappointment, or other difficult feelings. Sometimes, they can be both at once.

Dressays (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2026) is a new collection of essays about dress just out with Bloomsbury. Edited by the feminist media scholar Dr Rosie Findlay, Senior Lecturer in Media at City, University of London, it’s a rich and idiosyncratic book that carefully attends to everyday practices of dress as they connect to emotion, memory, imagination, and experience.

Diverse in its approach to dress—including clothing as well as jewellery, wigs, prosthetics, and other garments that we wear close to the skin—Dressays also brings together an array of writing styles and voices. These beautifully written essays bridge the personal and the theoretical as they seek to find language to express the complicated meanings we invest (or discover) in our clothes.

For the New Books Network, Rosie chats with Alix Beeston—one clothes-lover to another—about her approach to dress, the practicalities of crafting an anthology of new and existing works, the realities of obsessive, tenacious research practices (which may or may not be slightly “unhinged”!), and the value of scholarship as a form of collective dialogue that invites readers along to the party.

Passionate and insightful at each turn, Rosie also offers some courageous and moving reflections about the influence on her life and work of her mum Sarah, who died shortly before Dressays was published and to whom it's dedicated with love. Dressays emerges as a powerful testament to Sarah’s—and Rosie’s—ability to bring together people as well as they do outfits.

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Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies. 

For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2026) is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Dr. Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren’t only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order. 

But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about—provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity. 

The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Dr. Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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During the interwar years, Vietnamese society witnessed a rapid change in the way women looked. Rejecting the model of a sequestered maiden with blackened teeth and long hair, they embraced a vivid palette of colors—and a colorful lifestyle to match. Before the war, Vietnam would have seemed like an unlikely place for a beauty industry to thrive. Virtuous young women were expected to hide their natural beauty, not manipulate it with makeup or flaunt it at a beauty contest. Yet ordinary women began seeking out the latest fashions—to great public consternation.

In Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia UP, 2025), Christina E. Firpo explores the development of beauty culture in this period, showing how women’s faces and bodies became contested sites for envisioning what it meant to be Vietnamese in the modern world. She considers dress patterns, lip-lining tutorials, hairstyles, physiques, and beauty pageants alongside new technologies of media, transportation, and leisure and the anxieties they provoked. The everyday decisions women made about their appearance, Firpo argues, were ways to stake a claim to the roles they wanted to play in the new society taking shape around them. Drawing on a vast array of sources, Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia University Press, 2026) offers fresh insight into the tumultuous political, economic, social, and cultural changes that swept across Vietnam during this crucial period.


Christina E. Firpo is professor of history at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is the author of Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 (Cornell University Press, 2020) and The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980 (University of Hawai'i Press, 2016).

Camellia (Linh) Pham is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her research focuses on 20th-century Vietnamese literature, socialist realism, and literary translation in Vietnam across French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and English. She can be reached at cpham@g.harvard.edu.

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Women, Gender, and Socialist Ideology in Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2026) examines the place of women in Soviet Russia from the 1917 Revolution through the post-World War II period, discussing how the Soviet construction of gender perpetuated inequality even as it dramatically expanded women’s roles in society.

Chapters of this book explore Bolshevik activists’ ideals of women’s liberation and their failure to realize these ideals; the significance of women’s labor to the Soviet economy, alongside continued workplace discrimination; state reproductive policies and essentialist understandings of femininity; women’s World War II military service and representations of gender in postwar commemorations; and the role of socialist ideology in the formation of the Soviet system and Stalinist culture. Throughout, Hoffmann places Soviet history in its international context, including comparisons of Soviet women’s social positions with those of their counterparts in other countries. The book makes clear the centrality of the Soviet gender order to the country’s social, cultural, and political history, as well as providing an important historical case for understanding the broader struggle for women’s equality.

Intended for students and scholars alike, this book is a valuable resource for all those interested in gender history, Soviet history, labor history, and World War II.

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How can we achieve lasting social and political equality for women? Dr. Leda Pérez tackles this thorny question in Searching for Democracy: Women, Domestic Work, and Social Reproduction in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) by interrogating egalitarianism in Latin America, where nearly 20% of women work in domestic service. She examines how women’s participation in society, labor, and politics continues to be conditioned by their relationship to domestic and care work.

Dr. Pérez argues that women’s relationship to these spheres of life is indicative of a nation’s development and democracy. She provides a comparative focus on the socio-cultural valuation of this labor and the experiences of women in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, among other countries. Pérez asserts that it is only by changing sociocultural views on this “women’s work” that nations can create political change, foster equitable legislation, and ensure implementation of effective policies that benefit women.

Searching for Democracy shows why real and lasting equality cannot be achieved without fully enfranchising women in the lowest tiers of employment and closing the equality gap among women. Dr. Pérez’s models for gender equality are relevant for women around the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican women, children, and men built vibrant residential and business districts—until they were all but eradicated in the 1930s. In her compelling and textured history, Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles, Dr. Isabela Seong Leong Quintana unearths the entwined stories of Chinatown and Sonoratown through the everyday lives of their residents.

In this conversation, we talk about the significance of comparative Latinx and Asian American Studies, the importance of spatial analysis in urban history, and the methodological challenges of locating Mexican and Chinese women and children in the archives.

Dr. Quintana is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with affiliations in Culture & Theory and Chicané/Latiné Studies. Her work explores the interconnected histories of Asian Americans and Chicanés/Latinés, centering women and children within U.S. borderlands and recovering unarchived voices. Quintana also co-directs The Five Chinatowns Project at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, a community-based research initiative documenting Chinese American Los Angeles through oral histories, archival creation, and youth mentorship. She is the author of Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

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Erin Maglaque's new book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body (Astra House, 2026), is a work of early modern history and an account of what it is like to study the past as an embodied person. Having been trained as to disregard the physical self when writing history, Maglaque's worldview completely shifted following the birth of her child. What might it mean to instead, "find a way to write that flowed from the body?" Presence is her answer. The book draws from a vast array of archival and printed sources to illustrate the realities of women's physical experiences in early modern Europe, from eating, pregnancy, abortion, birth, nursing, sleeping, working, and dying. Maglaque intersperses her historical narrative with personal accounts, demonstrating the ways in which studying the past can impact our lives today. For anyone interested in women's history, the history of labor, early modern health and medicine, or simply the purpose and potential of historical study, Presence is the book to read.

Erin Maglaque is a historian of early modern Europe and gender. She teaches at Durham University and writes for publications including the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more here

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In the winter of 1472, the city of Dijon, France, became the stage for a remarkable legal drama. On the mayor’s orders, an investigator named Jaques Borestel went door-to-door questioning his neighbors about an alleged sexual assault—and about the victim’s history and place in the community. At the center of Jaques’s inquiry was a woman named Jehanne, who took the unusual step of making a criminal complaint in an age when victims of sexual violence did so at their own peril. Justice for Jehanne: The Tale of a Medieval Survivor (Princeton UP, 2026) follows Jaques’s investigation as he uncovers one woman’s story of resilience and survival.

Applying forensic analysis to witness testimony and Jaques’s case files, Sara McDougall finds in Jehanne a woman of many lives and many secrets. An outsider on her own in Dijon, Jehanne had every reason to distrust the local authorities, who regularly extorted money from the city’s most vulnerable residents. Separating facts from falsehoods, McDougall challenges preconceptions about the experiences of marginalized women in medieval France, showing how neighbors, clergy, and other residents aided Jehanne throughout her legal struggles—and how justice of a sort was exacted from her attackers.
Richly detailed and powerfully told, Justice for Jehanne paints an unforgettable portrait of a woman who mounted an extraordinary response to a crime that was so difficult to prosecute at the time, and of a community that gave her shelter, protection, and acceptance as she endeavored to survive on her own terms.

Sara McDougall is professor of history at John Jay College of the City University of New York and is on the faculty in Biography and Memoir, French, History, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Royal Bastards: The Birth of Illegitimacy, 800–1230 and Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne. Her fellowships include the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Standardizing Sex: A History of Trans Medicine (U Chicago Press, 2025) traces the emergence of trans medicine in Scandinavia in the twentieth century, exploring the construction and negotiation of medical expertise among medical professionals, patients, and activists in the media and government bureaucracy. The book combines the author’s analysis of medical records and other archival sources with oral history interviews with former patients, activists, doctors, psychologists, and civil servants. Physician-historian Ketil Slagstad uses the Scandinavian story of sex reassignment to anchor not only the role of the state but also bureaucracy and social rights. Scandinavian countries, he shows, played a foundational role in the emergence of trans medicine internationally. As a result, Standardizing Sex tells a transnational history of medicine that sheds light on a set of relations and problems that continue to impact discussions of trans medicine and trans rights around the world.
Slagstad’s sources offer a rare opportunity to explore the emergence of trans medicine in action in the clinic, laboratory, waiting room, and operating room, as well as in the bureaucrat’s office, on the psychologist’s couch, and in the publications and meetings of activist groups. Together, these sources allow for the analysis of the increasingly complex negotiations of nosological criteria, medical knowledge, and medical practices in a formative period for transgender medicine. More generally, the book offers a story about the reshaping of the normal and the pathological in modern societies.

Ketil Slagstad is a research fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at Charité: Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

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American pop culture loves newsies. The children who bawled out headlines and sold newspapers on city streets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been depicted countless times in movies, Broadway shows, books, music, and more, but somehow it’s only ever the stories of newsboys that are told. Scholarly literature too has focused mostly on boy newsies. Yet for nearly as long as there were newspapers in the United States, there were also newsgirls. Girl newsies were photographed, interviewed, studied, argued over, and eventually absorbed into the collective “newsboys” and forgotten.

Extra! Extra! A History of America's Girl Newsies (U Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. Autumn Lorimer Linford offers a corrective, demonstrating the importance of newsgirls as early news workers and as symbols of child labor and gender reform efforts. Sometimes younger than ten years old and from impoverished families, girl newsies were already vulnerable to exploitation from the newspaper publishing industry, which relied heavily on child labor during the “golden age” of journalism. However, the newsgirls of this period contributed much to news labor, and they were important to the discussions concerning childhood, child labor reform, and women’s changing societal roles. Properly integrating newsgirls into the history of newsies dismantles archetypes and enables a deeper understanding of child news labor.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Leah Kim about her powerful book, Mom, Unfiltered: Maternal Mental Health and Finding Freedom Through Motherhood (Bloomsbury, 2026).

A deeply personal examination of the dire state of our maternal and postpartum care for mothers.
For expecting and new parents, too often the care is so focused on a healthy baby that the mother's physical and mental needs are overlooked. Mothers face intense pressure to have the perfect birth plan, breastfeed with ease, and immediately bond with their baby. Unfortunately, these expectations can lead to anxiety, depression, and overwhelm. But it doesn't have to be that way. In Mom, Unfiltered: Maternal Mental Health and Finding Freedom Through Motherhood, Leah Kim explores her own pregnancy and early motherhood experience as a person of the global majority, the ways society fails new mothers, the mental health struggles of expecting and new mothers, the systemic neglect in care for mothers with marginalized identities, and how motherhood can be the inspiration for getting help and healing. Her story, enhanced with expert interviews, valuable resources, and the testimonies of other mothers, not only illuminates the impact of insufficient maternal care but also shows readers what can be done to improve care for mothers.Mom, Unfilteredis profoundly personal and brutally honest, yet it is ultimately deeply hopeful. It is about survival and growth, an invitation to move beyond our current social, cultural, and familial realities to support mothers in a meaningful way-physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Leah 수진 Kim is a storyteller, author, consultant, podcaster, and community organizer. She is a recovering yoga teacher and spent 10 years as Nike's Global Yoga Ambassador. Her first book "Mom, Unfiltered" will be published in April 2026.

About the host:

Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, was released with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Founder of River Street, and the co-chair of the League of Canadian Poets BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. She is also a member of The National Book Critics Circle, The Creative Nonfiction Collective, and The Writers Union of Canada. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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A joke is never just a joke—not even in the eighteenth century. In American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man's Democracy, 1750–1850 (JHU Press, 2025) Eran A. Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally.

Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth. This humor—a category that includes not only jokes but also play, riot, revelry, and mimicry—shaped the democratic and anti-elitist sensibilities of Americans. It also defined the borders of who could participate in politics, notably excluding those who were not white men. While this anti-authoritarian humor transformed the early United States into a country that abhorred elitism and class hierarchies, ultimately the story is one of democratization gone awry: this same humor allowed white men to draw the borders of the new nation exclusively around themselves.

Zelnik analyzes several distinct forms of humor to make his case: tall tales, "Indian play," Black dialect, riot and revelry, revolutionary protests, and blackface minstrelsy. This provocative study seeks to understand the vexing, contradictory interplay among humor, democracy, and violence at the heart of American history and culture that continues today.

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Between 1990 and 2020, women candidates won only 6% of the world’s presidential races. How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) explains the factors, strategies, and perceptions that help (or hinder) women to democratically access their country’s highest political office. Dr. Catherine Reyes-Housholder introduces a theory of gendered incentives and perceived potential to reveal why a political party would break with tradition and nominate a woman. She also shows how citizens respond when women candidates are running in incumbent parties or competing to displace those in power.

Drawing on comparative research on the presidency and gender, How Women Win Presidential Elections in Latin America examines the successful campaigns of Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as why Blanca Ovelar lost her presidential race in Paraguay. Dr. Reyes-Housholder’s findings indicate that voter sexism is not a major factor; however, women do not triumph in these elections in the same ways that men do. Rather, the central unknown factor behind women’s victories is how they become candidates of major parties—and gender profoundly influences who parties nominate.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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For years, LGBTQ+ policies worldwide have been crafted based on heteronormative views, needs, and practices. However, this has gradually changed over the last two decades as LGBTQ+ individuals have become key players in the development of gender-based policies. Diego Galego's Queering Public Policy: A Disruptive Yet Inclusive Framework for Policymaking (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) examines these political and social changes, evaluates how actors have successfully integrated LGBTQ+ needs into the mainstream policy agenda, and provides a comprehensive guide to understanding the policymaking processes from an LGBTQ+ perspective. Drawing on data from Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and the USA, it presents a systematic framework for understanding "queering public policy" as a policy process. The final chapter offers a roadmap for scholars interested in exploring this evolving field further. This book will appeal to anyone interested in public policy, public administration, and queer studies.

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Our recent conversation about Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford UP, 2026), with author Niharika Pandit, covers the journey of how critical methodology meets the weight of lived experience. This book examines the everyday politics of militarized control in Kashmir following the Indian government’s August 5, 2019, decision to de-operationalize Jammu and Kashmir’s nominal autonomy. The core of our reflection centered on how one theorizes through such an intense archive. The book avoids abstract distance, relying instead on a rigorous post-2019 archive built from ethnographic fieldwork and rooted in interdisciplinary feminist studies. It demonstrates that theorizing is not a passive intellectual exercise, instead, it is an active, grounded practice of mapping power where it is felt most directly. Through intersectional analyses of space, home, time, and storytelling, the text reveals how militarized control operates via spatial, embodied, affective, temporal, and discursive capture. Reflecting on this book serves as a vital reminder that critical theorizing must remain tethered to the grounded realities of resistance.

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In the 1970s, as women started to enter the labor force in unprecedented numbers, economists began to examine their roles as economic actors. The result was the rise of gender economics, now a major subfield with powerful data and new methods comparing the economic lives of men and women. Yet despite decades of progress, many of the most consequential questions about gender inequality remain unresolved.

In How Economics Discovered Women: Bringing Gender Economics into the Twenty-First Century (U California Press, 2026), renowned economist and demographer Dr. Shelly Lundberg argues that the problem is not a lack of evidence but a failure to challenge entrenched economic models and outmoded assumptions about markets and gender that have limited what the field can explain.

Why does occupational segregation persist? Why do "women's jobs" pay less? Why are men falling behind in education? And why do policies like paternity leave fail to change behavior? Drawing on more than five decades in the field and integrating insights from other social sciences, Dr. Lundberg explains signs of recent progress and charts a path toward a more realistic, socially grounded economics capable of meeting the challenges of gender inequality today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Fulvia was born into wealth, privilege, and prestige around the year 80 BCE, yet there was nothing inherently special about her—she was not a saint, an empress, or a queen. But during the years leading up to the fall of the Roman Republic, Fulvia was moving in the most powerful social circles, and by her death in 40 BCE she had amassed a degree of political and military power unprecedented for a woman.

Fulvia’s success came at considerable cost, however. None of her three marriages to politically powerful men—most famously to Marc Antony—lasted, and three of her five children died violently. She was repeatedly ridiculed for daring to step outside the confines of the domestic sphere. The deliberate and systematic destruction of her reputation shaped her legacy for two millennia.
Ample literary, documentary, and archaeological sources for Fulvia exist, yet most contemporary depictions of her were extremely negative. In Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome (Yale UP, 2025) historian Jane Draycott, reading between the lines of the ancient evidence, proposes a more nuanced interpretation. Using Fulvia as a guide, she invites readers to visit an unfamiliar Rome, one in which women played a crucial role during Rome’s violent transition from a republic to the dictatorship of the Roman Empire.

Jane Draycott is a historian and archaeologist, and the author of Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen. She is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the university’s Games and Gaming Lab.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Chapal Rani was one of India’s most famous performers of jatra, Bengal’s popular theater. Traditionally, all the roles, including female roles, were played by men—and Chapal Rani was perhaps the most prominent performer of women on the stage.

He’s also the subject of a new book from Sandip Roy, titled Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Roy, who joins us the show today, tells the story of Chapal Rani’s life, from stardom to obscurity and later rediscovery; how Chapal Rani would transform himself every night onstage; and how jatra changes how we talk about gender and performance.

Sandip Roy is a writer, columnist, and podcaster currently living in Kolkata. He is a columnist for Mint Lounge, The Hindu, and the host of the Sandip Roy Show on Indian Express. His work has appeared in The New York Times, BBC, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Huffington Post, Conde Nast Traveller, among other publications. For over a decade, Roy was editor of Trikone, the world’s oldest magazine on LGBTQ+ South Asian issues. He is the author of the novel Don’t Let Him Know.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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The centerpiece of Melodrama as Provocateur (Duke UP, 2026) is an essay by Linda Williams (1946–2025). Williams was Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her highly influential work reframed some of cinema’s most neglected or denigrated genres from a feminist perspective, including documentary, pornography, horror, and melodrama.

Melodrama is the focus of what would become Williams’s final project. In the last few years of her life, she was working on a project that traced melodrama’s divergent fortunes in France and the US—and argued for its enduring relevance in contemporary life and culture.

Williams's work on this project was curtailed when she suffered a stroke, the complications of which led to her death in 2025. In the wake of her passing, some of her friends, collaborators, and admirers joined together to make a book that honors and memorializes her. Not only sharing Williams’s unfinished work with the world, Melodrama as Provocateur also expands on that work through a series of essays by scholars working in melodrama studies across time, place, and media.

For New Books in Film, Alix Beeston sits down with the three editors of Melodrama as Provocateur: Christine Gledhill, an esteemed scholar of film and feminism who is presently a Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Leeds; Laura Horak, Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University; and Elisabeth R. Anker, Professor of American Studies and Political Science and Director of Film Studies at the George Washington University.

Celebrating the model of incisive and generous research, teaching, mentorship, and collaboration Williams provided, the editors of Melodrama as Provocateur discuss the unique shape of a scholarly book generated in response to a colleague’s unfinished labor. They also take up some of Williams's provocations, including the political possibilities of melodrama in contemporary culture—from Trumpian discourse to trans cinema and beyond—and explore the kinds of labor, thought, and feeling necessary for studying melodrama as a form that moves or provokes us.

Like their book, a work forged in grief and loss, Gledhill, Horak, and Anker's conversation casts film and media scholarship as an act of collectivity and love: a bid for a better kind of world.

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In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press, 2026) talks with Yulia Gradskova and Ieva Bisigirskaitė, two of the three authors behind Good Mothers, Nations and Nationalisms: Cases from Lithuania, Russia and Sweden. Together with Soheyla Yazdanpanah, they explore what nationalists mean by "good mothers," demographic anxiety, and maternal activism in Lithuania, Russia and Sweden.

You can purchase a copy here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more:

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Fifty years ago, tennis player Renée Richards made international headlines in her fight to compete in the women’s draw of the 1977 US Open—marking the first time a trans athlete sued to participate in professional sports in the gender category with which they identify. Renée eventually won her case. Though she lost in the first round of the singles tournament, she and her tennis partner made it to the finals in doubles, losing to Martina Navratilova and her partner.

Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer (HarperOne, 2026) chronicles Richards’s extraordinary life, moving from her tumultuous upbringing in Queens, New York, to her career as a successful eye surgeon; her years as a star tennis player to her role as a transgender pioneer. Now in her nineties, Renée remains a complex figure: A person who changed the sports world forever yet questions the place of trans athletes in that world today. GLAAD award-nominated sports journalist Julie Kliegman deftly probes these contradictions, drawing on intimate interviews and offering critical reflections on what is at stake for athletes, fans, and the queer community today, at a time when trans participation in sports is more hotly contested—and condemned—than ever before.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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Queer theory and reproductive justice need each other—now more than ever. As liberals and leftists increasingly frame reproductive justice in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, often adopting the language of “queerness,” it has become difficult to see that their political demands and strategies are often quite conservative. In Reproductive Justice, Queerly (U California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen examines typical reproductive justice issues—including abortion, surrogacy, crisis pregnancy centers, paid parental leave, and parenting—in queer ways. She shows what can happen when we bring queer theory and reproductive justice together: a queerer, more powerful articulation of what we are fighting for.

Your host Yining Pan is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.

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A woman miscarries—and is charged with murder. A new mother tests positive for a drug her hospital administered—and loses custody of her newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia—and spend nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work—and is sentenced to 126 years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but for who they are.

In the United States, nearly three-quarters of all wrongly convicted women were convicted of crimes that never occurred at all. In Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity (New Press, 2026), Dr. Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project and award-winning legal scholar cited by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reveals how ordinary tragedies—a child’s sudden death, a husband who dies in his sleep—are transformed by prosecutors into murders that never happened. These “no crime” convictions disproportionately target women and queer people, whose identities are recast as evidence of guilt through bias, junk science, and entrenched stereotypes.

Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Dr. Beety exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and cultural panic converge—and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood, and queer identity itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, sports scholars, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire. In The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas Press, 2026), Murat Cihan Yıldız tells the story of how Istanbul’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews—gymnastics teachers, football coaches, weightlifters, journalists, athletes, and fans—created a gendered and class-stratified civic project that promoted athletics as a source of fun, beauty, and moral education. Influenced by the emerging global vogue for organized sports, all boys from the expanding middle class of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial capital were expected to exercise and compete on the playing field in order to develop into moral men. Yet even as the embrace of modern athletics transcended ethnoreligious divisions, it did not erase them. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, Yıldız shows that sportsmen created new communal boundaries in team affiliations, fandom, and sports media. Adeptly reconstructing Istanbul’s imperial culture as it was experienced more than a century ago, The Ottoman World of Sports recovers a lived imperial culture whose defining features were shaped by its multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual sportsmen.

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Rahim Thawer and Maryam Khan's new edited volume Queer and Muslim: On Faith, Family and Healing (U Regina Press, 2026) is a powerful anthology that brings together writers, activists, and scholars who meditate, reflect, and share stories of queer Muslim life, that contains the complexity of rage, grief and resilience but also joy, love, and healing. In the process, Thawer and Khan deconstruct the limitations of western centric formulations of mental health and wellness, which is often individualistic and commodified, and invite readers to think through a decolonial approach that honours Muslim spirituality, religiosity, and culture, which can help us shift towards collectivistic and liberatory goals of healing. This anthology is a great resource for those who are mental health practitioners, and relevant to those who think about gender, sexuality, and Islam.

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Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet. And it was through letters that she shared prose reflections–alternately humorous, provocative, affectionate, and philosophical–with her extensive community. While her letters often contain poems, and some letters consist entirely of a single poem, they also constitute a rich genre all their own. Through her correspondence, Dickinson appears in her many facets as a reader, writer, and thinker; social commentator and comedian; friend, neighbor, sister, and daughter.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 2024) is the first collected edition of the poet’s correspondence since 1958. It presents all 1,304 of her extant letters, along with the small number available from her correspondents. Almost 300 are previously uncollected, including letters published after 1958, letters more recently discovered in manuscript, and more than 200 “letter-poems” that Dickinson sent to correspondents without accompanying prose. This edition also redates much of her correspondence, relying on records of Amherst weather patterns, historical events, and details about flora and fauna to locate the letters more precisely in time. Finally, updated annotations place Dickinson’s writing more firmly in relation to national and international events, as well as the rhythms of daily life in her hometown. What emerges is not the reclusive Dickinson of legend but a poet firmly embedded in the political and literary currents of her time.

Dickinson’s letters shed light on the soaring and capacious mind of a great American poet and her vast world of relationships. This edition presents her correspondence anew, in all its complexity and brilliance.

Guest: Dr. Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature, and serves on the advisory board of the Emily Dickinson Archive. Her scholarship on Dickinson includes Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar; Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them; and The Letters of Emily Dickinson, which she co-edited with Domhnall Mitchell.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

• The World She Edited: Katharine S White at the New Yorker
• Once Upon A Tome
• Your Art Will Save Your Life
• Wild Everything
• The Banned Book
• Becoming The Writer You Already Are
• Archival Etiquette What To Know Before You Go

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 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Today I'm speaking with Steven K. Green, Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of History and Religious Studies at Willamette University. We are discussing his book, American Infidelity: The Gilded Age Battle Over Freethought, Free Love, and Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2026). Since the first permanent Protestant settlement in Jamestown in 1607, Protestant Christianity has waxed and waned through a series of revivals, migrations, and challenges from alternative faiths like Catholicism and Mormonism. The Gilded Age, from roughly 1870 to 1900, was a unique period for Protestantism in American history. Most Americans still subscribed to a Protestant faith, though threats began to arise not from other confessions, but rather from philosophical and scientific challengers. The so-called freethinkers represented a broad range of beliefs and ideas, being united by a mutual skepticism of religious conservatism and traditional sexual and gender mores. American Infidelity tells the story of this tug-of-war for the soul of a nation, with Christianity on one side and the legacy of thinkers like Thomas Paine on the other.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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The Woman Question in Jewish Studies (Princeton UP, 2025) is a critical look at the difficulties women face in the field of Jewish studies, drawing on quantitative data, personal stories, and the gendered history of the field.

The field of Jewish studies has expanded significantly in recent years, with increasing numbers of women entering the field. These scholars have brought new perspectives from studies of women, gender, and sexuality. Yet they have also faced institutional and individual obstacles. In this book, Susannah Heschel and Sarah Imhoff examine the place of women and nonbinary people in Jewish studies, arguing that, for both intellectual and ethical reasons, the culture of the field must change. Heschel and Imhoff explore quantitative data regarding women as editors of and contributors to academic journals and anthologies, examine data regarding citations of women's scholarship, and scrutinize women's presence on panels at academic conferences. They analyze the wider context of the contemporary academy, discussing what is distinctive about Jewish studies. They trace the history of the field, its connections to traditional religious studies, and its growth in US institutions, interspersing this with stories of scholars in the field who have experienced harassment and gender discrimination. Finally, they offer suggestions for a reparative path forward.

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Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence - yet their contributions have been all but written out of history. Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, leading historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life in Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024).

From encoding orders and decrypting enemy messages to penning propaganda and infiltrating organisations, the women of British intelligence played a pivotal role in both the First and Second World Wars. Prepare to meet the true custodians of Britain's military secrets, from Kathleen Pettigrew, personal assistant to the Chief of MI6 Stewart Menzies, who late in life declared 'I was Miss Moneypenny, but with more power', to Jane Archer, the very first female MI5 officer who raised suspicions about the Soviet spy Kim Philby long before he was officially unmasked and Winifred Spink, the first female officer ever sent to Russia in 1916. In Her Secret Service, Hubbard-Hall rescues these silenced voices and those of many other fascinating women from obscurity to provide a definitive account of women's contributions to the history of the intelligence services.

The book, now in paperback, includes a postscript based on a new treasure trove of documents.

Her Secret Service won the 2025 Dr Polly Corrigan Book prize. The Prize aims to recognise scholarship within the realm of intelligence and security, written by female scholars and/or about women. It encourages scholars to go beyond traditional lines of inquiry and explore how women contributed to and participated in the making of the ‘Secret World’.

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Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms (Palgrave Macillan, 2026) by Dr. Galina Bogatova unpacks the hidden imperial logic behind Russia’s dominance over its neighbors, revealing how the Kremlin weaponizes "familial system" myths to justify control, including its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From the Tsarist empire to Putin’s digital propaganda, Dr. Bogatova examines how Russia portrays itself as a disciplining “father,” a self-sacrificing “mother,” or an “elder brother” to post-Soviet states, protecting, subjugating, and manipulating them in the name of unity. 

Blending psychology, discourse analysis, and historical inquiry, this groundbreaking book exposes how language sanitizes oppression, legitimizes conquest, and sustains imperial ambitions. A thought-provoking exploration of power, ideology, and resistance, it offers a fresh perspective on Russia’s enduring influence over its former empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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Born in 1102, Empress Matilda combined the blood of two dynasties: the house of Wessex and their conquerors, the dukes of Normandy. As a widowed German empress, she was named as heir successor by her father, Henry I. But, after his death in 1135, Matilda’s place on the English throne was usurped by her cousin, Stephen of Blois. Civil war followed, and she ruled the south-west of England in opposition.

In Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English (Yale University Press, 2026), Professor Elisabeth van Houts explores the remarkable life of medieval England’s only queen regnant. Van Houts examines female rulership in the Middle Ages, from Matilda’s relationships with her husbands, to her self-identification as granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Matilda used her persuasiveness effectively with the men who surrounded her, including her father, husbands, half-brothers and cousins.

This is a fascinating account, which reveals Matilda to be an assertive, if on occasion disappointed, woman who made the best of her position with intelligence and stamina.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Grounded in empirical studies, this book is both a history of the emergence of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India and a model of innovative legal research. The book inaugurates a creative practice of scholarly activism that engages a new way of thinking about law and feminist jurisprudence, one that is geared to acknowledge and take responsibility for the hierarchies in Indian academic practices. Its method of conversation and accountability continues the feminist tradition of taking reciprocity and the time and place of collaboration seriously. It helps make visible the specific ties between post-colonial life and law and joins the work of refusing and reimagining the hierarchical formation of legal knowledge in a caste-based Indian society. A significant contribution to the history and practice of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India, A Jurisprudence of Conversations: Law, Life and Feminism in Post-colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2026) will appeal to both an academic and activist readership.

Debolina Dutta is a Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School's Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (CEVAW)

Saumya Dadoo is a PhD Candidate at MESAAS, Columbia University

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