New Books in Museum Studies

New Books Network
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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

  1. Jul 4

    Sadiah Qureshi, "Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction" (Penguin, 2025)

    Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? Extinction, Professor Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept—and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable. Yet Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Penguin, 2025) shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion. Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future. 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

    40 min

  2. Jun 26

    Cleo Nisse, "Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting" (Princeton UP, 2026)

    Between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European painting underwent a profound transformation as artists increasingly painted on canvas instead of wood or walls. Nowhere was more important to this shift than Venice, where painters experimented with canvas with remarkable creativity and innovation. In Venetian Canvas and the Transformation of Painting (Princeton University Press, 2026), Dr. Cleo Nisse investigates why Venetian artists adopted canvas and how it revolutionized their art between 1400 and 1600. Intertwining approaches from art history and art conservation, and featuring stunning new photographs that show details as never before, the book presents groundbreaking research based on close study of Venetian artworks, archival sources, art-making treatises, and early modern art criticism. It sheds new light on the materiality of early modern canvas, its production and supply, and the influence of climate on its use. The book offers fresh interpretations of iconic works and important concepts such as pittura di macchia and non finito, and demonstrates how canvas contributed to the radical new style of painters such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. But above all else, it shows how canvas changed the making and meaning of paintings.  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

    47 min

  3. Jun 23

    Where Harlem Rests at the Woodlawn Cemetery

    A cemetery as open-air museum? Historian and award-winning author of Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal, Eric K. Washington thinks so. In this compelling discussion, Washington talks about his newly-completed project revealing the hidden stories of Harlem Renaissance figures buried at the historic Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York. Funded by a $50,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the initiative was led by Washington, alongside A’Lelia Bundles, journalist, historian, and great-granddaughter of entrepreneur and icon Madam C.J. Walker. While the Harlem Renaissance is often told through a handful of well-known names, Where Harlem Rests (available here) allows for a look beyond the spotlight, uncovering the many voices that helped shape the movement, and the community itself, expanding the historical narrative, and honoring a broader, more inclusive legacy of creativity, resilience, and cultural impact that has long deserved recognition. The Woodlawn Conservancy is the 501c3 not-for-profit support organization for the Woodlawn Cemetery. Woodlawn Cemetery was established in 1863 and spans 400 acres in the Bronx, New York. It is one of the nation’s most distinguished historic cemeteries and a certified Level II Arboretum. In 2011, Woodlawn was designated a National Historic Landmark for its singular importance in the history of the nation and New York City. It is also an active cemetery with ongoing burials and funeral services, and more than 310,000 individuals are memorialized on its grounds. Woodlawn is one of the nation's finest examples of a 19th-century garden cemetery. Its monuments represent some of the best memorial art and architecture in the nation, including nearly 1,300 private mausoleums designed by some of the most prominent architects of the 20th century. The Woodlawn Cemetery is open to the public free of charge 365 days a year from 8:30am - 4:30 pm. You can find Erik at his website, and on at personal Instagram page, as well as @taggingthepast. His recommended reading list is available on the Additions to the Archive Substack. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  4. Jun 5

    Lewis Ryder, "Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain" (Manchester UP, 2026)

    ⁠Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain⁠ (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lewis Ryder examines John Hilditch (1872-1930), a notorious collector of Chinese art who lied, hoaxed and manipulated in his struggle against museum experts to become a cultural authority. Previously overlooked as a pest with a dubious collection, this book uses Hilditch to interrogate how far the monumental social, cultural and political changes of the early twentieth century unsettled social and cultural hierarchies and how these hierarchies were remade. It shows how the cultural elites were forced to engage with the public and re-draw the boundaries of citizenship, expertise and high and low culture in response to unprecedented social mobility, the democratisation of culture and politics, as well as the effects of British imperialism which brought ordinary Britons access to antiquities as well as confidence to claim expertise over foreign cultures. The book will interest social and cultural historians of Modern Britain, museum scholars and art historians. 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

    44 min

  5. Jun 4

    David Cunningham on Contesting Confederate Monuments (JP)

    David Cunningham joins John to speak about his pathbreaking article about visiting each of the 113 communities that removed or relocated Confederate symbols between 2015 and 2023. After discussing his co-authored Social Problems article, “Contesting Commemorative Landscapes” which first got him thinking about monument removal, he posits that “expungement, amplification, and repositioning” are three ways contemporary communities contest the monuments of the past.. The conversation from there ranges onward through various kinds of contested removal, ending with Cesar Chavez and his ongoing de-monumentalization. David is author of There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence and the award-winning Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK,, a member of the City of St. Louis Reparations Commission and recently has been engaged in exploring political signalling in public art and monuments, including a forthcoming article on the political and cultural work of murals in Protestant and Catholic communities and in the interface areas that connect them in Belfast. His earlier Recall This Book episodes include on racialized policing in the US, on January 6th , and also on the 2024 presidential election–and a conversation with Glenn Patterson, author of Lapsed Protestant about the mural culture and politicized spaces of Belfast and Northern Ireland. Read the episode here. Mentioned in the episode By David Cunmningham himself: “What Richmond got Right about taking down Confederate Monuments” and a 2023 article coauthored with Christina Simko, “Montgomery’s Monumental Truths” On place vs space there is wonderful work by Pierre Nora and Henri Lefebvre. Interface zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman. The lucid John Guillory article (mentioned but not discussed) is “Monuments and Documents: On the Object of Study in the Humanities.” Confederate generals whose statues were erected essentially to glorify the KKK famously include Nathaniel Bedford Forrest. Private parks built up to collect Confederate monuments (with an underlying anti-government bias) include North Carolina’s Valor Memorial Park, and in Texas the SS American Memorial Foundation’s military retreat space now adorned with removed Confederate statues. In Bentonville, this park glorifies a Confederate statue that has now been (dubiously) linked to Governor James H. Berry. The MOCA/Brick reimagined MONUMENTS Exhibition includes work by Kara Walker and Bethany Collins. https://www.nps.gov/boaf/learn/historyculture/shaw.htm Sylva North Carolina Confederate plaque debate. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant and the Nietzschean problem of “creative forgetting.” The idea of Productive creative cognitive dissonance is drawn from MLK’s idea of “creative tension.” Hajar Yazdiha, Struggle for the People’s King How long will the Chavez National Monument last? The statue at UC Fresno is already gone…” Is The Trail of Tears a historical site the same way Confederate statues are? Denmark Vescey’s Garden by Ethan J. Kytle and, Blain RobertsZore Neale Hurston Their Eyes were Watching God Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    51 min

  6. Jun 1

    Homes of the Past

    In 1940s New York, immigrant Jewish scholars sought to build a museum to commemorate their lost worlds and people. Among the Jews who arrived in the United States in the early 1940s were a small number of Polish scholars who had devoted their professional lives to the study of Europe's Yiddish-speaking Jews at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Faced with the devastating knowledge that returning to their former homes and resuming their scholarly work there was no longer viable, they sought to address their profound sense of loss by continuing their work, under radically different circumstances, to document the European Jewish lives, places, and ways of living that were being destroyed. In pursuing this daunting agenda, they decided to create a museum to memorialize East European Jewry and educate American Jews about this legacy. YIVO scholars determinedly pursued this undertaking for several years, publicizing the initiative and collecting materials to exhibit. However, the Museum of the Homes of the Past was abandoned shortly after the war ended. Homes of the Past explores this largely unknown episode of modern Jewish history and museum history and demonstrates that the project, even though it was never realized, marked a critical inflection point in the dynamic interrelations between Jews in America and Eastern Europe. Join YIVO for a discussion with author Jeffrey Shandler about this book, led by Deborah Dash Moore. Buy the book: here This book talk originally took place on June 24, 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  7. “You Sound So Australian”: From Being Read to Rewriting the Room with guest Zindzi Okenyo

    May 30

    “You Sound So Australian”: From Being Read to Rewriting the Room with guest Zindzi Okenyo

    Welcome to the first episode of The Cultural Competence Collective podcast! For our first episode, we are joined by the multi-talented actress, musician and director, Zindzi Okenyo! You may recognise her from your TV screen on shows like Fisk, Wakefield and Play School, on stage from her multiple shows with Sydney Theatre Company or maybe you’ve heard her hits like ‘A Woman’s World’ as a solo artist Okenyo, or ‘Love + Kindness’ from her fun, family-friendly kids project Zindzi & the Zillionaires. Tune into our first episode as we chat with Zindzi about the importance of cultural competence, diversity and representation across the arts. Show notes This episode is hosted by Dr. Matthew Tyne, an Academic Facilitator at the National Centre Centre for Cultural Competence. He comes to cultural competence following 20 years of working in international community development, especially in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and sexual health promotion with diverse communities in Australia. Produced by: Adubi Plange, Dr Amy McHugh, Sarah Mashman Podcast Artwork: Zein Arif Featured Music: - A Woman’s World by OKENYO - Anthropology by OKENYO You can find more of Zindzi’s music on her webpage OKENYO: http://www.okenyo.com/ You can find music by Zindzi & the Zillionaires on their webpage: https://www.zindziandthezillionaires.com/about. Resources You can read more about DESTINY, Zindzi’s most recent piece of directorial work through the Melbourne Theatre Company: https://www.mtc.com.au/discover-more/backstage/destiny-programme/. The Sydney Morning Herald article mentioned can be found here: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/actor-musician-and-presenter-zindzi-okenyo-on-taking-risks-and-self-care-20180216-h0w7zu.html If you are interested in developing your knowledge about race and racism, and deepen your understanding of the diversity of the world's cultural histories and identities, you can enrol in the NCCC’s free online course Confident conversations about race and racism: https://www.coursera.org/learn/confident-conversations-about-race-and-racism Participants will learn about the dynamics of cultural difference, and how to increase their knowledge and ability to address inequity, bias and privilege, and to create space for effective dialogue about racism. Mental Health Support Services: For University of Sydney staff: CONVERGE Converge offers multiple dedicated helplines for specialist services: All staff: 1300 687 327 First Nations helpline: 1300 287 432 LGBTQIA+ Helpline: 1300 542 874 Domestic and Family Violence Helpline: 1300 338 465 Aged Care Helpline: 1300 035 337 Disability and Carers Helpline: 1300 243 543 Youth and Student Helpline: 1300 687 399 Spiritual and Pastoral Care Helpline: 1300 772 435 www.convergeinternational.com.au Wellmob – social, emotional and cultural wellbeing resources for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people https://wellmob.org.au/ 24-hour crisis hotlines 13 Yarn Beyond Blue LifeLine: NSW Mental Health Line Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

  8. May 27

    Kanika Singh, "The Story of a Sikh Museum: Heritage, Politics, Popular Culture" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

    The Story of a Sikh Museum: Heritage, Politics, Popular Culture, published by Cambridge University Press in July 2025, is a pioneering study on Sikh museums, a unique phenomenon of contemporary India—for their sheer numbers, distinctive display, malleability and presence in multiple cultural spheres and their political significance. This case study of Bhai Mati Das Museum at Gurdwara Sisganj, Delhi, examines the process of creation of Sikh heritage through history, paintings, and museums, unearths networks of patronage, and analyses the ways in which specific versions of the Sikh past are used to make present-day claims. It is based on interviews with artists and patrons, material from personal and institutional archives, a visual analysis of Sikh popular art and a critical examination of the museum's narrative. This book brings together Sikh history, popular art, politics and museums to discuss some of the most important current debates (of nation, identity and heritage) and reveals new ways in which we may understand museums, especially in a non-Western context. Kanika Singh is a historian, founder of Delhi Heritage Walks and Director at Centre for Writing & Communication at Ashoka University. Harleen Kaur is a historian and urban studies scholar who recently completed her Joint PhD from National University of Singapore and King’s College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    40 min
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About

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

Information

  • Creator
    New Books Network
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    196
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © New Books Network
  • Show Website
    New Books in Museum Studies