New Books in Gender New Books Network

How have women resisted sexism in TV? In Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation (U California Press, 2024), Jennifer S. Clark, an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, explores the people, organisations, TV shows and audiences who all shaped women in and on television during the 1970s. Drawing on a production studies perspective, the book ranges widely from organisational archives, through key programmes and personalities, to specific genres including sport on TV. The analysis also offers a challenge to both contemporary television’s approach to equity and diversity issues, as well as a significant contribution to the history of television too. The book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in television. The book is also available open access here.
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Can capitalism be made ecologically sustainable? Can it be good for women? What theoretical approaches help us to grapple with these questions in ways that offer us strategies for how to proceed? Have we already become lost in some sort of gender essentialism to ask these questions together? 
In Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Johanna Oksala brings the resources of ecofeminism and Marxist feminism to these questions, arguing that capitalism cannot be made sustainable, nor can it do without the expropriation of bodies that produce new laborers and consumers. By attending to the rise of biocapitalism, Oksala further develops analytic resources for diagnosing the fundamental problems of an economic system predicated on profit, consumer choice, and endless growth. She also gives us theoretical tools for discerning strategies that will help us create a world beyond capitalism.
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Friendships can be the foundation of our earliest memories and most formative moments. But why are they often seen as secondary to romantic, or familial connection, something to age out of and take a back seat to other relationships? BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship (404 Ink, 2023) by Dr. Anahit Behrooz is an examination of the power of female friendship, not as something lesser, but as a site of radical intimacy, as told through the cultural touchstones around us.
From coming-of-age tales through physical intimacy and discovering personhood to break ups and parting of ways, Dr. Behrooz considers the vast significance of our friendships through the work of Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, Booksmart and Grey’s Anatomy, Insecure, The Virgin Suicides and beyond.
To have a life rich in love is often viewed through a specific lens; BFFs shows us that friendship can offer a more expansive and emancipatory understanding of female intimacy, and can be the most important, loving relationships in our lives.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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An increasing number of students worldwide attend graduate school while simultaneously navigating a variety of competing responsibilities in their personal lives. For many students, this includes both parenting and working full-time, while maintaining a rigorous graduate course-load. Because academia overwhelmingly defaults to assuming all graduate students’ needs are similar to those of middle-class single white males, PhDing while parenting remains under-explored in the literature, and hidden in plain sight on campus. Graduate students are often reluctant to talk to their supervisors about the strains of juggling a demanding private life while attending school…until they hit a personal crisis or they burn out. But what if supervisors were trained to mentor holistically? What if they tailored support, checking in with students not just about their academic progress, but about their off-campus priorities and problems as well?
In today’s episode, we explore why graduate supervisors need to be trained to connect their students to a variety of necessary resources, to help their student-parents get to PhDone. We explore the new case-study documenting experiences of doctoral students in South Africa juggling both parental and professional roles. And we dive into the findings of the new article “Balanced-Integration: A Dimension of Supervision to Support Students Navigating Parenthood in Pursuit of a PHD,” by Dr. S. Nkoala, which was published in South African Journal of Higher Education Volume 38, Number 1, in March 2024.
Our guest is: Dr. Sisanda Nkoala who is an Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape. She has won numerous awards, and serves as vice-chair of the IAMCR’s media education research section, the African Journalism Educators Network secretary-general, as an associate editor for the Journal of Communication Technology, a public representative on the South African Press Council, a member of the Film & Publication Board’s Appeals Tribunal, and as the vice-president of the South African Communication Association. She is published in many journals, and is the editor of 100 Years of Radio in South Africa, Volume 1: South African Radio Stations and Broadcasters Then & Now, and Community Radio, Digital Radio and the Future of Radio in South Africa.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can help support the show by downloading, assigning, or sharing any of our 200+ episodes.
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Boy Actors in Early Modern England: Skill and Stagecraft in the Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Harry McCarthy provides a new approach to the study of early modern boy actors, offering a historical re-appraisal of these performers' physical skills in order to reassess their wide-reaching contribution to early modern theatrical culture. Ranging across drama performed from the 1580s to the 1630s by all-boy and adult companies alike, the book argues that the exuberant physicality fostered in boy performers across the early modern repertory shaped not only their own performances, but how and why plays were written for them in the first place. Dr. McCarthy's ground-breaking approach to boy performance draws on detailed analysis of a wide range of plays, thorough interrogation of the cultural contexts in which they were written and performed, and present-day practice-based research, offering a critical reimagining of this important and unique facet of early modern theatrical culture.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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Women working in the sciences face obstacles at virtually every step along their career paths. From subtle slights to blatant biases, deep systemic problems block women from advancing or push them out of science and technology entirely.
Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity (Columbia UP, 2023) examines solutions to this persistent gender gap, offering new perspectives on how to make science more equitable and inclusive for all. This book shares stories and insights of women from a range of backgrounds working in various disciplines, illustrating the journeys that brought them to the sciences, the challenges they faced along the way, and the important contributions they have made to their fields. Lisa M. P. Munoz combines these narratives with a wealth of data to illuminate the size and scope of the challenges women scientists face, while highlighting research-based solutions to help overcome these obstacles. She presents groundbreaking studies in social psychology and organizational behavior that are informing novel approaches for combating historic and ongoing inequities.
Through a combined focus on personal experiences and social-science research, this timely book provides both a path toward greater gender equity and an inspiring vision of science and scientists.
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