New Books in Language and Translation

Marshall Poe
  • 4.3 (19)
  • SOCIAL SCIENCES
  • UPDATED SEMIWEEKLY

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

  1. 11H AGO

    Margherita Trento et al., "For the Love of Tamil: Essays in Honor of E. Annamalai" (UnionPress, 2025)

    For the Love of Tamil celebrates the life and work of E. Annamalai (born 1938), the most prominent Tamil linguist of his generation. Spanning six decades and multiple continents, his scholarship ranges from formal analyses of Tamil syntax and semantics to studies of diglossia, pedagogy, language politics and Tamil poetics and literature. This volume collects contributions from leading scholars in various disciplines related to Tamil studies. Together, they reflect the intellectual breadth and disciplinary range of Annamalai’s work, covering classical and modern Tamil literature, grammatical traditions, linguistic analysis, sociolinguistics, and cultural history. They also highlight the lasting importance of Annamalai’s scholarship and demonstrate how his rigorous yet comprehensive approach to Tamil has influenced the study of language, literature, and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

    42 min

  2. 11H AGO

    Margherita Trento et al., "For the Love of Tamil: Essays in Honor of E. Annamalai" (UnionPress, 2025)

    For the Love of Tamil celebrates the life and work of E. Annamalai (born 1938), the most prominent Tamil linguist of his generation. Spanning six decades and multiple continents, his scholarship ranges from formal analyses of Tamil syntax and semantics to studies of diglossia, pedagogy, language politics and Tamil poetics and literature. This volume collects contributions from leading scholars in various disciplines related to Tamil studies. Together, they reflect the intellectual breadth and disciplinary range of Annamalai’s work, covering classical and modern Tamil literature, grammatical traditions, linguistic analysis, sociolinguistics, and cultural history. They also highlight the lasting importance of Annamalai’s scholarship and demonstrate how his rigorous yet comprehensive approach to Tamil has influenced the study of language, literature, and society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

    42 min

  3. 4D AGO

    The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City with Henry Sapoznik

    The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) offers a new look at over a century of Yiddish culture in New York City. Author Henry H. Sapoznik focuses on theater, music, architecture, crime, Black-Jewish cultural interactions, restaurants, real estate, and journalism to tell the history of New York’s Yiddish popular culture from 1880 to the present. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles of the period, and thanks to new research from previously inaccessible materials, the book reveals fresh insights into the influence of Yiddish culture on New York City and showcases the culture’s persistent Join YIVO for a discussion with Sapoznik about this new book, led by Eddy Portnoy. This discussion originally took place on October 23, 2025. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

    1h 4m

  4. 6D AGO

    Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan eds., "Autotheories" (MIT Press, 2025)

    A transdisciplinary array of authors offering a new frame of reference for autotheory and its genre-bending synthesis of autobiography and critical theory. Autotheories (MIT Press, 2025) tells the story of a field in formation. Building on traditions that have long fused life writing, philosophical encounter, embodied theorizing, and cultural critique, autotheory constructs new practices of critical theory. Transgressing generic boundaries and bridging stylistic registers, it crafts language that is intimate, analytic, playful, and insurgent. Editors Alex Brostoff and Vilashini Cooppan underscore autotheory's multiple genealogies and genre-bending forms while situating it within the contemporary political field. In this collection, autotheory emerges as a strut (of style), a straddle (of disciplines), a proliferation (of selves), an axis (of identifications), an index (of attachments), and an archive (of loves).An assemblage and an experience, Autotheories surveys the field's iterations and permutations without settling for classification or bowing to ossification.Contributors:Alex Brostoff, Jessica Bush, Judith Butler, Vilashini Cooppan, Carla Freccero, rl Goldberg, Jan Grue, Emma Lieber, Megan Moodie, Lili Owen Rowlands, John Patterson, Paul B. Preciado, Erica Richardson, Migueltzinta C. Solís, Jamieson Webster, Damon Ross Young, Stacey Young, Arianne ZwartjesMatthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

    1h 10m

  5. MAR 5

    Damion Searls, "The Philosophy of Translation" (Yale UP, 2024)

    The Philosophy of Translation (Yale UP, 2024) is a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what translation really is and what translators actually do. As the translator of sixty books from multiple languages, Damion Searls has spent decades grappling with words on the most granular level: nouns and verbs, accents on people’s names, rhymes, rhythm, “untranslatable” cultural nuances. In this book, he connects a wealth of specific examples to larger philosophical issues of reading and perception. Translation, he argues, is fundamentally a way of reading—but reading is much more than taking in information, and translating is far from a mechanical process of converting one word to another. This sharp and inviting exploration of the theory and practice of translation is for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty, force, and movement of language. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Damion Searls to discuss The Philosophy of Translation, exploring what it truly means to read as a translator, how grammar shapes worldview, and where creativity lives in the space between languages. Damion Searls studied philosophy at Harvard and is a prominent translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, including books by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Proust, Kielland, Jelinek, Schwitters, Mann, Modiano, and Fosse. His own books include the novel Analog Days, the poetry volume The Mariner’s Mirror, and The Inkblots, a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator. Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

    57 min

  6. MAR 2

    Jieun Kiaer, "Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

    Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Jieun Kiaer provides an in-depth discussion of emoji use in a global context, this volume presents the use of emoji as a hugely important facet of computer-mediated communication, leading Dr. Kiaer to coin the term 'emoji speak'. Exploring why and how emojis are born, and the different ways in which people use them, this book highlights the diversity of emoji speak. Presenting the results of empirical investigations with participants of British, Belgian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Jordanian, Korean, Singaporean, and Spanish backgrounds, it raises important questions around the complexity of emoji use. Though emojis have become ubiquitous, their interpretation can be more challenging. What is humorous in one region, for example, might be considered inappropriate or insulting in another. Whilst emoji use can speed up our communication, we might also question whether they convey our emotions sufficiently. Moreover, far from belonging to the youth, people of all ages now use emoji speak, prompting Kiaer to consider the future of our communication in an increasingly digital world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

    42 min

  7. MAR 1

    Sophie Salvo, "Articulating Difference: Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century"(U Chicago Press, 2024)

    Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Sophie Salvo uncovers the prehistory of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors but, rather, the inheritors and adapters of the notion that gender and language are interrelated. Particularly during the long nineteenth century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated “women’s languages” and grammatical gender, and literary Modernists imagined “feminine” sign systems, and in doing so they not only deemed sex-based divisions to be necessary categories of language but also produced a plethora of gendered tropes and fictions, which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines. Articulating Difference: Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century(U Chicago Press, 2024) charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded, highlighting the contributions of understudied nineteenth-century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

    36 min

  8. FEB 26

    Renny Thomas and Sasanka Perera, "Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes" (Columbia UP, 2025)

    Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes (Columbia UP, 2025) presents a set of keywords and concepts embedded in the languages of South Asia and its vast cultural landscape. It reiterates specific attitudes, ways of seeing and methods of doing, which are embedded in the historical and contemporary experiences in the region. The words, concepts, ideas and attitudes in the volume explore the contexts of their production and how their meanings might have changed at different historical moments. The volume also attempts to work out if these words and concepts can infuse a certain intellectual rigor to reinvent social sciences and humanities in the region and beyond. Individual essays, which are creative, imaginative, ethnographic and historical, explore the possibility of South Asian intellectual worlds and words to create a broader crossregional and global social science and humanities. The volume argues that it is important to move away from the intellectual shackles inherited from colonial and neo-colonial experiences while also not succumbing to the traps of local reductionist nativisms and cultural nationalisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

    36 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

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