New Books in Women's History

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• Kenna Neitch, "A Praxis of Persistence: Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism" (SUNY Press, 2026) 01.06.2026 46мин

  A Praxis of Persistence: Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism (SUNY Press, 2026) by Dr. Kenna Neitch establishes persistence as a framework for understanding methods of feminist activism in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Blending literary and ethnographic approaches, Dr. Neitch analyzes texts produced by activist movements from the 1980s to 2020—from collective testimonio to institutional publications (encuentros) to social media—and connects them to the movements' cultural impact and organizing practices, such as generative conflict, horizontal cross-border networks, and what she terms strategic adaptability. What these texts and practices have in common, Dr. Neitch argues, is feminist persistence—a balance of action, preservation, and creation adaptable across contexts. A Praxis of Persistence provides one of the first scholarly accounts of #MeToo in Central America while remaining grounded in the region's lineage of activism against sexual violence. Through the framework of persistence, this book highlights the vitality of Central American women's activism and offers a repertoire of methods for reckoning with the realities of uneven progress in feminist struggle. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Frances Kneupper, "Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400" (Oxford UP, 2025) 28.05.2026 58мин

  The end of the fourteenth century was a time of upheaval and contested authority among the traditional institutions of medieval Europe. In response to these conditions, a number of people began to claim their own authority, as prophets speaking the word of God. They came from outside of the clerical elite and were mostly women and reformers. Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400: Outsiders, Women, and Reformers (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Dr. Frances Kneupper examines the battle over authority which ensued. Prophetic women and other non-elites successfully used prophecy to exert influence and to enter the corridors of power, while educated male clerics insinuated that prophecy was the product of demonic influence and therefore a hazard to the public. Surprisingly, a third faction also emerged—an international network of clerical men who wrote in support of female prophecy. This volume traces the arguments made by these three groups, the clashes that erupted, and the long-term impacts of this battle on ideas of spiritual authority. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Angela Byrne, "Finding Mary: The untold story of an Inishowen murder, 1844" (Four Courts Press, 2025) 26.05.2026 38мин

  During a robbery on 10 March 1844, 14-year-old servant Mary Doherty was murdered in a farmhouse near Culdaff, Co. Donegal. There was no doubt locally about the perpetrator’s identity, but there was insufficient evidence against Daniel McKeeny, and he was eventually transported for a separate offence of sheep-stealing. Based on original research, Finding Mary: The untold story of an Inishowen murder, 1844 (Four Courts Press, 2025) by Dr. Angela Byrne reconstructs the world of a north Donegal village on the eve of the Great Famine to explore the approaches to justice taken by the local community and agents of the state, and examines the survival of the murder in local folklore to reflect on memory, remembrance and whose stories get to be told. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Dalit Feminism with Thenmozhi Soundararajan 25.05.2026 51мин

  This episode features a conversation with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder Equality Labs and author of The Trauma of Caste. We discussed her own coming to consciousness of caste as the child of Dalit parents who were “passing” and how her work as an organizer has involved sustained engagement with anticaste thought, Black feminism, and Indigenous epistemologies. The conversation then turned to the practice of solidarity as the building of meaningful and not just transactional relationships and the importance of recognizing the potential of political alignments that may be foreclosed at one moment, only to be given new life in another. Finally, we addressed the need, in our current moment of dying empires and failing democracies, to both work with and beyond the law in order to open new horizons of political imagination and practice. Guest bio Thenmozhi Soundararajan is founder of the Dalit feminist organization, Equality Labs, and author of The Trauma of Caste. References Thenmozhi Soundararajan, The Trauma of Caste Shramanic faiths: ancient Indian traditions focusing on asceticism, self-reliance, and liberation from the cycle of rebirth that rejected the authority of the Vedas and Brahmanical authority. Ravidassia: religion based on the teachings of Guru Ravidas, a 14th century Indian saint. It was considered a sect within Sikhism until 2009 when it was proclaimed a distinct religion. Bhopal gas tragedy: On 3 December 1984, a leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, resulted in what is considered the world’s worst industrial disaster. Reservation: India’s system of caste-based affirmative action. Linda Burnham: activist and writer who co-founded the Women of Color Resource Center and was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance. Combahee River Collective: pioneering Black lesbian feminist organization formed in Boston in 1974. Gloria Anzaldúa: American philosopher and scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory Iyothee Thass: Tamil anti-caste thinker and writer who converted to Buddhism and called upon members of his own Paraiyar caste to do the same. Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule: anti-caste social reformers and pioneers of women’s education from Maharashtra. Ruth King: Founder of the Mindful of Race Institute Rhonda Magee: Professor Emerita at University of San Francisco and teacher of mindfulness Resmaa Menakem: psychotherapist and creator of Somatic Abolitionism. Eduardo Duran: Native American clinical psychologist, scholar, teacher and healer Collective Future Fund: a philanthropic intermediary fund that works with movements mobilizing toward a collective future free from violence. Kolar Gold Fields: former gold mining region in Karnataka, India Equality Labs: a South Asian Dalit civil rights organization. BAPS: The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Akshardham in Robbinsville, New Jersey is the largest modern Hindu temple outside India. It is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Dalit workers from India accusing the temple of human trafficking and labor exploitation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Mary T. Freeman, "Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026) 23.05.2026 1ч 12мин

  Mary Freeman, associate professor of history at the University of Maine, joins Michael Stauch to discuss her new book Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), about how abolitionists harnessed the power of letter-writing to further their political aims. It highlights everyday Americans’ involvement in abolition, and shows in particular how women and Black Americans used letters to intervene in politics when other avenues were closed to them. Freeman focuses not only on what people wrote but also how they wrote about it: how they manipulated, exploited, and subverted cultural conventions to make political statements and claims. Highlights include: The inspiration behind the book’s striking title; The influence of the “archival turn” on Freeman’s analysis of the materiality of letters; A bold new reading of the lives of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, suggesting how their letter writing influenced their activism; How the abolitionist movement grew alongside the rise of the post office; The role of new forms of technology in shaping social movements, yesterday and today. Guest: Mary Freeman is an associate professor of history at the University of Maine, with a focus on the political, social, and cultural history of slavery and abolition. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic and she is currently developing research projects on nineteenth-century Black activism in Maine and on the history of abolitionist archives. Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Fiona Rogers, "Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage" (Thames & Hudson, 2026) 22.05.2026 30мин

  Female artists have long employed collage to reflect the ways in which identity is often constructed from conflicting, contrasting and contradictory parts. Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage (Thames & Hudson and V&A Publishing, 2026) by Fiona Rogers explores the relationship between photography and feminist collage, foregrounding the use of femmage—a radical reclaiming of craft traditionally associated with women—as a resilient method within feminist and political art. Cut Out presents an expanded definition of collage and cutting techniques to encompass photomontage, assemblage and the photogram. Tracing a lineage from nineteenth-century makers to contemporary practitioners, we encounter Victorian album makers; Modernist, Surrealist and Dadaist innovators; and radical, second-wave feminist artists. Thematic sections include profiles written by expert contributors on key individuals, including Hannah Höch, Dora Maar and Lorna Simpson. Looking to the future as much as the past, Cut Out also reveals how the pioneering work of contemporary and digital artists continues to subvert dominant narratives and foster ever-expanding forms of photographic collage.  At a moment when photography and its history are being actively contested and reappraised, Cut Out is a reminder of its political power.  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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Tara Mulder, "A Womb of One's Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome" (U California Press, 2026) 16.05.2026 56мин

  In the well-trod history of the Roman Empire, a pivotal moment has long gone unnoticed: It was in ancient Rome that medical men first set their sights on childbirth, the traditional domain of female midwives.Taking us to the dawn of Western obstetrics, A Womb of One's Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Tara Mulder offers a feminist account of how, against a long tradition of midwifery, male doctors began claiming authority in reproductive matters, with an emphasis on theoretical rather than practical knowledge. Their intrusion paved the way for the later criminalization of midwives and the cloaking of childbirth in secrecy and shame.Yet communities of Roman women continued to help each other through the journey from preconception to postpartum, guided by their own experience and the expertise of midwives. Tara Mulder recovers stories of ancient women living and resisting as they sought autonomy over their bodies and their health. Recounting their experiences in vivid, intimate detail, she reveals how old our modern conflicts about birth truly are. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos 13.05.2026

  Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland—some still in their teens—helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. These “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town’s water supply. They also nursed the sick and taught children. Judy Batalion's new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (William Morrow, 2021) —already optioned by Steven Spielberg for a major motion picture—brings these largely unknown stories to light. Join us for a conversation with Batalion about this new book led by Andrew Silow-Carroll (New York Jewish Week). This book talk originally took place on April 20, 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Shannon McKenna Schmidt, "You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her" (Sourcebooks, 2026) 10.05.2026 36мин

  From the author of The First Lady of WWII comes You Can't Catch Us: Lady Bird Johnson’s Trailblazing 1964 Campaign Train and the Women Who Rode With Her (Sourcebooks, 2026), the story of Lady Bird Johnson's groundbreaking trip during the 1964 election, and the women who rode with her. "It takes women to have guts." Deemed “the most important campaign effort ever undertaken by the wife of an American president,” the Lady Bird Special was a whistle-stop tour of the South undertaken by Lady Bird Johnson, in a bid for her husband’s reelection in 1964. Never before had a president’s spouse taken to the campaign trail so ambitiously. The 1,682-mile trek through the southern United States, from Washington DC to New Orleans, was a deliberate choice by Lady Bird—many in the southern states resented her husband’s championing of civil rights. But the first lady, proud of her southern heritage, wanted to appeal to her fellow southerners and bridge the divide. Despite the potential danger, she pressed forward, making speeches, shaking hands, and showing herself to be confident, capable, and impressive. You Can't Catch Us is a story of an election campaign, but it is also a story of a women-led operation and an appeal for understanding and civility. Lady Bird Johnson's exciting journey was monumental in expanding the role of women in politics and progressing the fight for women’s rights—a fight we still continue to this day. Hosted by Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College: website here @janescimeca.bsky.social  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Jewish Anarchist Women 1920–1950: The Politics of Sexuality 08.05.2026

  Anarchist theory includes the belief in freedom for all - that no one person, nor group of people, should have power over any others; that individuals can best decide how to live (and love). In this presentation Elaine Leeder will discuss eight Jewish women who identified as anarchists, active during the 1920s to 1950s. Through analysis of in-depth interviews Leeder explores the complete sexual freedom that these women sought at a time when conventionality and conformity was the norm. These women attempted to create equality in the public and private spheres, some living communally and raising their children in progressive schools. They also sought to maintain complete equality of the sexes through economic independence and maintaining non-conformist sexual relationships. This talk will place a particular focus on the way that ethnicity played a role in these women’s identities, emphasizing their atheism, while still maintaining Jewish values and traditions. This lecture originally took place on June 10, 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Lucy Stewart, "The Japanese Garden: Ella Christie and Cowden" (Birlinn, 2026) 07.05.2026 53мин

  As detailed in The Japanese Garden: Ella Christie and Cowden (Birlinn, 2026) by Lucy Stewart, at the turn of the twentieth century, Scottish adventurer Ella Christie returned home from a trip to Japan inspired to build her own Japanese garden. As might be expected from a woman who thought nothing of travelling to the other side of the world in search of the unusual, Ella’s approach to developing the garden was trailblazing. She chose a female designer – the gifted Taki Handa – to create the seven-acre site in the grounds of Cowden Castle, near the Scottish town of Dollar. In doing so, the Japanese Garden at Cowden became the first and only garden of its size and scale to be designed by a woman. It remains a unique and utterly authentic bridge between British and Japanese culture. This book tells the remarkable story of Ella Christie, her travels and the creation of her garden, its gradual decline and triumphant restoration. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Sophie Rose, "Intimacy and Social (Dis)Order in Dutch Colonial Expansion: Regulating Sex, Marriage, and Family Life, 1600–1800" (Brill, 2025) 04.05.2026 51мин

  Explosive sexual scandals, bitter domestic conflicts, and dramatic changes in fortune. Sex, marriage, and family life were matters of enormous consequence in the highly complex societies that formed across the early modern Dutch overseas empire. This was not only true for the colonial authorities that administered settlements on behalf of the Dutch East and West India Companies (VOC and WIC), but also for the people of various backgrounds and statuses that inhabited these places. Focusing primarily on the eighteenth century, this book explores how these disparate and unequally empowered groups contested the norms that governed intimate life in Dutch colonial outposts from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Sophie Rose, Ph.D. (2023), is a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden University. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Samira K. Mehta, "God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion" (UNC Press, 2026) 30.04.2026 1ч 15мин

  Most people today understand contraception as central to women’s liberation, and when the birth control pill arrived in 1960, the media thought it would usher in a sexual revolution. But a surprising number of religious Americans in the mid-twentieth century also saw contraception as part of God’s plan—a tool to create happy, prosperous American families in the post–World War II era.In God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (UNC Press, 2026), Dr. Samira K. Mehta traces the remarkable story of how mid-twentieth-century Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices promoted the use of birth control and made it more accessible for many Americans. They hoped birth control methods would curb divorce rates by encouraging sexually dynamic marriages and families unstrained by “too many” children—thereby creating a postwar upwardly mobile middle class. Religious leaders also promoted this understanding of the family as tied to Cold War capitalism and encouraged neither racial nor gender equity.But then came the backlash, both from the Right—which failed to anticipate the feminist potential of contraception—and from the Left, where women, particularly women of color, sought to ensure that birth control was a tool of liberation rather than one rooted in patriarchal and racial oppression. Ultimately, Dr. Mehta offers compelling new insights into the way religion accommodates itself to social, technological, and medical change. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Mary Lisa Gavenas, "Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay" (Penguin, 2026) 28.04.2026 1ч 4мин

  As detailed in Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay (Penguin, 2026) by Mary Lisa Gavenas, as the only woman in Forbes’ Greatest Business Stories of All Time and the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange, Mary Kay Ash has a life story that reads like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel. Growing up in Depression-era Texas, Mary Kathlyn Wagner is a dutiful daughter and diligent student with ambition aplenty and no place to use it. Married at sixteen, she is a grandmother at thirty-four. When she is not cooking or cleaning or taking care of the kids, she peddles cleaning products to other housewives. The work has no salary and no security but she sticks with it, sure that direct selling will make her dreams come true. In 1963, after she has been divorced three times and widowed twice, she sets up her own company, selling second chance and self-invention for the price of a skin care showcase. Soon millions know her as the little lady in the big wig who gives away pink Cadillacs. From its unpromising start in a 500-square-foot Dallas storefront, Mary Kay Inc. grows into a global phenomenon with 3.5 million reps in over 35 countries. She becomes the most famous saleswoman in the world. Maybe the most famous ever. Based on fifteen years of research, Selling Opportunity gives us a page-turning rags-to-riches story set against the background of direct selling in all its overstated, over-the-top glory. Here, for the first time, is the definitive history of a peculiarly American industry and a mid-century mindset that ennobled extreme self-reliance, sticking to your guns, and blind faith in the American dream. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Vanda Krefft, "Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women" (Algonquin Books, 2026) 24.04.2026 46мин

  It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday in the 1950 and '60s synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 90 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool to assume positions of power on the other side of the desk. And Gibbs graduates did just that, tackling the sexism of the era and paving the way for 21st-century women to succeed in any profession.Katharine Gibbs was one her own success stories. She started her school when, as a 46-year-old widow, she was left near-broke with two young sons. The school taught typing and stenography but Gibbs also hired accomplished professors from elite colleges to teach academic subjects—it was a well-rounded education that produced early feminists ready to tackle the sexism of their era. "Expect great things!" was her motto and her philosophy. Within a decade she’d opened schools in three elegant locations. With nostalgic period photographs throughout, Expect Great Things! takes us back to Katie Gibbs’s life and tells the stories of the women she influenced. We meet Gibbs graduates who worked for the Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe, and Robert F. Kennedy. Others forged pathfinding roles as an Emmy-winning television star, a women’s rights advisor to four U.S. presidents, a writer of Wonder Woman comic books, the head of the Women’s Marines, a best-selling young adult author, and a U.S. Ambassador.For readers of The Barbizon and Come Fly the World, Expect Great Things! reveals the seismic impact the Katharine Gibbs school had on the American workplace—and on women’s opportunities today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Aurore Spiers, "Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978" (U California Press, 2026) 20.04.2026 1ч 4мин

  What happens when we assume women’s presence in film history instead of their absence? This is the question at the heart of Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978, the newest addition to the Feminist Media Histories book series at the University of California Press. The first book by Aurore Spiers, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Texas A&M University, Archiving the Past is a fascinating account of some of the many women in France whose labor had a decisive role in the formation of cinema history across the twentieth century. Aurore shows that the film-historical archive has always been a site of feminist agency and power, even if women’s work in and around the archive has been diminished, interrupted, erased, or ignored. In this conversation with fellow feminist film scholar Alix Beeston, Aurore shares about the historical, methodological, and political stakes of her work, from the archive to the classroom. She describes her process for discerning the traces of women’s archival labor, however fleeting, contingent, or speculative they may be. She reflects on how gendered ideas and norms have defined—and limited—our sense of what counts as film-historical labor. And she ruminates on what it means for feminist scholars, in and beyond film and media studies, to collect and recollect the past—for the sake of the feminist present and its still-possible futures. Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She's the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford UP, 2018) and the co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Eileen G'Sell, "Lipstick" (Bloomsbury, 2026) 20.04.2026 42мин

  From Revlon to Glossier, from Marilyn to Gaga, lipstick is as shape-shifting and unwieldy as femininity itself.Who wears lipstick today – as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or some other reason entirely? Lipstick reconsiders the beauty world's most conspicuous – and contentious – tool of artifice. Tossing expired ideas about femininity like so many tubes of melting wax, Lipstick (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Eileen G’Sell, part of the Object Lessons series, explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation, as well as how lipstick can knock gender norms off balance. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Samuel Clowes Huneke, "I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany" (Aevo UTP, 2026) 18.04.2026 42мин

  I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (Aevo UTP, 2026) brings to life the unrelenting defiance of queer women in fascist Germany. In his latest book, award-winning historian Samuel Clowes Huneke shows how love, queer resistance, and collective action survived in the harrowing circumstances of Nazi rule. Drawing on a decade of archival research, Huneke takes readers into a hidden world, from the wartime balls that lesbian activists continued to organize to the concentration camps where women accused of loving women were imprisoned. Following a diverse cast of characters, Huneke reveals both the oppression that queer women faced and how they resisted fascism in solidarity with one another. Arguing that this solidarity – which transcended race, class, and gender – offers a compelling alternative to today’s fractured identity politics, I Will Not Abandon You is a vital, new history of queer life under fascism and a call to rethink the foundations of progressive politics today. Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Gwyneth Lonergan, "Borders, Citizenship, and Pregnancy: Migrant Women’s Experiences of Pregnancy and Maternity Care in the UK" (Bristol UP, 2025) 16.04.2026 36мин

  Using the analytical framework of reproductive justice, Borders, Citizenship, and Pregnancy: Migrant Women’s Experiences of Pregnancy and Maternity Care in the UK (Bristol UP, 2025) by Dr. Gwyneth Lonergan examines migrant women’s experiences of pregnancy and maternity care within the broader context of gendered and racialised discourses and policies around health, reproduction and citizenship, austerity and an expanding border regime. Based on interviews and focus groups with migrant mothers, third sector workers and NHS staff, this open-access book explores how immigration policies impact reproductive practices and unevenly distribute access to essential resources and support. The book provides valuable insights into the underlying social causes behind migrant women’s relatively poor maternal outcomes and contributes significantly to scholarship on the intersections of citizenship, reproduction and expanding border controls. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
• Andrew Thomas Park, "Sarah Wambaugh and the Plebiscite: The Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War" (Cambridge UP, 2026) 07.04.2026 1ч 3мин

  In Sarah Wambaugh and the Plebiscite: The Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War (Cambridge UP, 2026) Dr. Andrew Park tells the story of the rise and fall of the plebiscite, once seen as a promising democratic solution to international conflict which – more than once – became embroiled in controversy and war in the first half of the twentieth century. The book's central figure is the brilliant but largely forgotten American scholar Sarah Wambaugh, the leading expert on the plebiscite technique whose dramatic career took her to many of the world's political hotspots. The norms she developed for the technique continue to shape how self-determination and popular suffrage in international affairs are thought about and conducted today. In a world where borders are again being redrawn by force and democracy everywhere appears under strain, this book is a timely and compelling reminder that such events are not new. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices