New Books Network

Episoade

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  Bryant Simon, "For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality" (U Chicago Press, 2026) 17.09.2026 38min

  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.
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  Sandra Rozental, "The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft" (Duke UP, 2026) 17.09.2026 41min

  Where and to whom do ancient things belong? What happens when they are stolen—not by a colonial power, but by a national museum claiming them as state patrimony? What kinds of healing and restitution can follow? In The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Sandra Rozental tells the story of the Piedra de los Tecomates, the largest stone monument in the Americas, popularly identified as the pre-Hispanic rain deity Tlaloc. In 1964, the Mexican state called in the military to forcefully relocate this 167-ton carving from the town of Coatlinchan to Mexico City’s National Anthropology Museum. Using in-depth historical and ethnographic research, Rozental traces how the stone’s absence continues to affect and unsettle Coatlinchan and its residents decades later, revealing the tensions between patrimony, nationalism, territory, memory, and materiality in Mexico. 
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  Andrew Seth Meyer, "To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China, from Confucius to the First Emperor" (Oxford UP, 2026) 17.09.2026 52min

  The Warring States Period is one of the most important times in China’s history. It marked the end of one dynasty–the Zhou–and the beginning of a new imperial era, under the Qin. It’s an era that historian Andrew Seth Meyer describes as one of the most important revolutions in world history: The fall of the old aristocratic order, the birth of Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism, and the creation of the imperial system that would shape China for over two thousand years. Andrew has put together one of the first English comprehensive histories of the Warring States period in his new book To Rule All Under Heaven: A History of Classical China from Confucius to the First Emperor (Oxford UP, 2026)
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  Laura Portwood-Stacer, "The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors" (Princeton UP, 2021) 17.09.2026 55min

  Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us your suggestion on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: what a book proposal is and isn’t, why you have to write one, the importance of seeking the right “fit” for your manuscript, how to pitch a quirky book, the difference between a book’s topic and its argument, how to summarize your project in just one sentence, and a discussion of The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors (Princeton UP, 2021)
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  John Gilbert McCurdy, "Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh" (JHU Press, 2024) 17.09.2026 28min

  The fascinating story of a British army chaplain's buggery trial in 1774 reveals surprising truths about early America. On the eve of the American Revolution, the British army considered the case of a chaplain, Robert Newburgh, who had been accused of having sex with a man. Newburgh's enemies cited his flamboyant appearance, defiance of military authority, and seduction of soldiers as proof of his low character. Consumed by fears that the British Empire would soon be torn asunder, his opponents claimed that these supposed crimes against nature translated to crimes against the king. In Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh (JHU Press, 2024) historian John McCurdy tells this compelling story of male intimacy and provides an unparalleled glimpse inside eighteenth-century perceptions of queerness. By demanding to have his case heard, Newburgh invoked Enlightenment ideals of equality, arguing passionately that his style of dress and manner should not affect his place in the army or society. His accusers equated queer behavior with rebellion, and his defenders would go on to join the American cause. Newburgh's trial offers some clues to understanding a peculiarity of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: while gay acts were prohibited by law in much of the British empire, the newly formed United States was comparatively uninterested in legislating against same-sex intimacy.
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  James D. Ryan, "The Upanisads as They Are: Brhadaranyaka, Chandogya, Aitareya, Taittiriya, Kausitaki" (Bloomsbury, 2026) 17.09.2026 43min

  These Upanisads (c. 800-300 BCE) are almost always read from the point of view of the later Vedantins, but they do not share in the neatly tailored characteristics of the mature Vedantic philosophies, representing, instead, divergent, variegated and even conflicting narratives. In The Upanisads as They Are (Bloomsbury, 2026) the author focuses on the earliest of these Upanisads: Brhadaranyaka, Chandogya, Aitareya, Taittiriya, Kausitaki. These Upanisads are read “as they are,” emphasizing aspects of these texts that are often completely overlooked, among them: their Vedic approach to contradiction, their frequent acceptance of means other than gnostic knowledge of or veneration of atman/brahman as a means for liberation, their positing of entities/realities other than atman or brahman as totalistic, and their frequent depiction of the human body or embodied human as a microcosm of or in identity with the universe. In course, the interpretations of the Upani?adic view, the Vedantic view, for each of these Upani?ads, of Sa?karacarya (c. 800 CE) and Ramanujacarya (c. 1100 CE), as primary examples in the range of Upani?adic interpreters, will be examined and often refuted.
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  Sarah Meehan O'Callaghan, "Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body" (Routledge, 2026) 17.09.2026 46min

  Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body (Routledge, 2026) provides an epistemology of the body as it relates to subjectivity through an analysis of selected works of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett. Presented in three parts, the book explores a fundamental premise: that there is a traumatic and alienating dimension to embodiment that resists expression within representational systems and is core to the being of any subject. In Part One, The Epistemology of the Body, Meehan O'Callaghan approaches a theory of the body as traumatic by framing it as a question, a gap in knowledge through the lens of psychoanalysis and theatre studies. Part Two, The Body of Drama, is devoted to a study of the body in the works of Beckett and Artaud from the perspective of psychoanalysis. Part Three, The Body Between Being and Non-Being, provides a deeper exploration of how the interrogation of the body opens onto a question of being and uses the insights gained from the dialectical encounter of psychoanalysis with the specific works of Beckett and Artaud to apply them to contemporary and scholarly issues of the body. Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives through Beckett and Artaud will be essential reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and for academics and scholars of Lacanian studies, psychoanalytic studies, the body, disability studies, and literary and theatre studies.
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  What does the Pope have to teach us about AI? (JP, from Public Books) 17.09.2026 29min

  When I heard that Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” was about “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” my first reaction was dread. Turns out I was wrong; always something new out of Chicago..... This is an experiment (akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side and to JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles) in soliloquy. You can consult footnotes and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original form here.
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  Lily Geismer on the Democratic Party in the 1990s 16.09.2026 1h 23min

  In this episode, hosts Lee Vinsel and Ben Waterhouse, along with producer Joe Forte, chat with historian Lily Geismer. Their conversation covers the evolution of the Democratic party, what it means to study political science as history, and a bit about how a scholar’s work can emerge from their personal experience and identity. Lily is Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College and the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (2015) and Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality (2022). She teaches contemporary history and is a key participant in a group of scholars working to rethink and revitalize our approach to political history of the United States. One product of those collaborations has been her edited volume, with Brent Cebul, Mastery and Drift: Professional Class Liberals since the 1960s (2025). This conversation was recorded in July of 2026.
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  Christina E. Firpo, "Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam" (Columbia UP, 2025) 16.09.2026 53min

  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.
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  Giuseppe Motta, "Jewish Refugees and the International Community Between the Two World Wars: Beyond the State" (Routledge, 2026) 16.09.2026 32min
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  William R. Handley, "Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West" (U Nebraska Press, 2026) 16.09.2026 44min

  Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. William R. Handley contributes to discussions in the environmental humanities and western U.S. studies about how we read past cultural history in the light of our determined yet unknown future under climate catastrophe. 
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  Sheila L. Macrine and Jennifer M.B. Fugate, "Embodied Intelligence: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Natural, Artificial, and Hybrid Systems" (MIT Press, 2026) 16.09.2026 48min

  Embodied Intelligence: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Natural, Artificial, and Hybrid Systems (MIT Press, 2026) explores a radical transformation taking place in intelligence research. Rather than focusing exclusively on brains and computer code, the book examines the important role that embodiment plays in producing intelligent, goal-directed behavior.
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  Billionaire Backlash 16.09.2026 30min

  In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey sits with Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University of Oxford, to explore the core thesis of his recent book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy (co-authored with Taeku Lee).
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  Writing Against the Machine: On Artistic Culture in the AI Age with Matthew Gasda 16.09.2026 51min

  Debates about AI typically deal with its immediate material consequences, from cybersecurity and infrastructure to plagiarism and copyright. Yet most people deal with AI as a generative consumer product that raises longer-term questions about its cultural effects on American society, human art, and ultimately, our souls. What is the role of the artist, for example, when a bot can crank out the same thing more quickly and efficiently? To help answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest the playwright, novelist, and essayist Matthew Gasda. The author of the novels The Sleepers (2025) and Stranger Beauty (2026), he has written, produced, and directed over thirty plays, including Dimes Square, Zoomers, and Doomers, with his former production company, The Center for Theatre Research.
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  Darinee Alagirisamy, "Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 16.09.2026 57min

  What happens when a democratic state—still in the process of formation—commits to banning a substance, especially one as controversial as alcohol? Sober State: Origins of Alcohol Prohibition in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) traces the origins and evolution of alcohol prohibition in India, drawing on extensive archival research and rich vernacular sources to explain its surprising resilience over time. Since its inception, prohibition has served both as an ideal and a tool of state power—a dual role that has worked to shape its shifting trajectories. Each phase of enforcement has served to reaffirm prohibition's founding logic, thereby further embedding it in the machinery of governance—even as it has constrained its future implementation. Foregrounding intersections with caste and gender, the book illuminates how diverse social responses have made prohibition a deeply contested—sobering—yet enduring project. While prohibition may be a thing of the past in the West, history helps to keep it alive in India.
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  Rachel Eliza Griffiths, "The Flower Bearers" (Random House, 2026) 15.09.2026 47min

  On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day. In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures. In The Flower Bearers (Random House, 2026), Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love. This is a conversation not to be missed.
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  Anthony Julius, "Abraham: The First Jew" (Yale UP, 2025) 15.09.2026 28min
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  Patrick Griffin, "The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World" (Yale UP, 2023) 10.09.2026 58min

  David Gellman interviews Patrick Griffin on The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The Fall and Rise of a Connected World The Age of Atlantic Revolution was a defining moment in western history. Our understanding of rights, of what makes the individual an individual, of how to define a citizen versus a subject, of what states should or should not do, of how labor, politics, and trade would be organized, of the relationship between the church and the state, and of our attachment to the nation all derive from this period (c. 1750–1850). Historian Patrick Griffin shows that the Age of Atlantic Revolution was rooted in how people in an interconnected world struggled through violence, liberation, and war to reimagine themselves and sovereignty. Tying together the revolutions, crises, and conflicts that undid British North America, transformed France, created Haiti, overturned Latin America, challenged Britain and Europe, vexed Ireland, and marginalized West Africa, Griffin tells a transnational tale of how empires became nations and how our world came into being.
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  Mubanga Kalimamukwento, "The Shipikisha Club" (Cassava Republic Press, 2026) 09.09.2026 38min

  Kabwe, Zambia: Sali, a working mother of three, stands trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. The prosecutor claims Sali shot him after a heated fight in their bedroom. There are no witnesses. Sali pleads not guilty. But her story does not begin with a gun. It begins fourteen years earlier--with her rebellion against the pressure to find a husband, her affair with a wealthy married man called Doc, and her discovery that she's pregnant on the same day of Doc's unexpected death.To avoid the shame of being an unwed mother, Sali accepts Kasunga's proposal, and finds herself suddenly thrust into the shipikisha club: her society's expectations that it is a wife's duty to endure. Over the years, Sali navigates her husband's infidelities and alcohol-filled nights, their money troubles, and her postpartum depression in silence. Until the day she speaks her mind, and Kasunga puts a gun in her face. The trial is a national scandal. Many are called to testify--the maid, Kasunga's mother, and Ntashé, Sali's fifteen-year-old daughter. Even after Sali's diary is dissected and laid bare for all to see, Sali calls no witnesses to her defense. With Kasunga gone, only Sali will ever know the truth. But is the truth enough? Told through the rotating perspectives of Sali, Ntashé, and Sali's mother Peggy, The Shipikisha Club (Cassava Republic Press, 2026) is a riveting story of gender politics in Zambia and the world at large--a must-read for fans of Peace Adzo Medie, Abi Daré, and Tayari P. Jones. Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and award-winning editor and writer, known for her novel The Mourning Bird and her collection of short stories titled Obligations to the Wounded. She holds a bachelor's and master's degree in law, as well as a master's in fine arts. She is currently pursuing a PhD in gender, women and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota. Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in African History. She is the Editor-In-Chief of the New Books Network. Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network