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Interviews with Authors about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

  1. 17H AGO

    Claire Morelon, "Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague, 1914–1920" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Prague entered the First World War as the third city of the Habsburg empire, but emerged in 1918 as the capital of a brand new nation-state, Czechoslovakia. In Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague, 1914–1920 (Cambridge UP, 2024), Dr. Claire Morelon explores what this transition looked, sounded and felt like at street level. Through deep archival research, she has carefully reconstructed the sensorial texture of the city, from the posters plastered on walls, to the shop windows' displays, the badges worn by passers-by, and the crowds gathering for protest or celebration. The result is both an atmospheric account of life amid war and regime change, and a fresh interpretation of imperial collapse from below, in which the experience of life on the Habsburg home-front is essential to understanding the post-Versailles world order that followed. Prague is the perfect case study for examining the transition from empire to nation-statehood, hinging on revolutionary dreams of fairer distribution and new forms of political participation. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

    43 min

  2. 17H AGO

    Competing Visions for International Order

    Are we living in an era of competing international orders? A new book, entitled Competing Visions for International Order: Challenges for a Shared Direction in an Age of Global Contestation (Routledge, 2025) edited by Ville Sinkkonen, Veera Laine, Matti Puranen addresses the ultimate question. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Prof. Julie Yu-Wen Chen from the University of Helsinki talks to Ville Sinkkonen (Finnish Institute of International Affairs), Matti Puranen (Finnish National Defense University and University of Helsinki), and Bart Gaens (Finnish Institute of International Affairs and the International Centre for Defense and Security) about the ambition of this new book and several key takeaways concerning particularly the US, China, and India from this book. The book’s analysis also offers normative prescriptions on how to avoid a tragic race to the bottom – a fragmented world of competing orders where states are unable to address shared global crises and challenges such as pandemics, cross-border crime, climate tragedies, and armed conflict. With this, it concludes by recognising the importance of agency as well as political imagination in navigating the crisis-ridden ordering moment of the international system. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students in global order studies and governance, geopolitics, regional studies, foreign policy analysis as well as more broadly to international relations and security, political history, human geography, and policymakers. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian studies coordinator at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway). We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

    29 min

  3. 17H AGO

    Digestive Belonging, Trans-Species Sensing & Care in America’s Dairyland

    In this episode, we speak with Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katy Overstreet. Katy is coordinator for the Landscapes, Senses, and Ecological Research Cluster as well as a core-member of the Centre for Sustainable Futures – both located at the University of Copenhagen. Katy’s core fields of research include multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, feminist STS, and agrarian political economy, and she has written on themes such as farm animal welfare, foodways, bioindustrialisation, technoscience, trans-species sensory worlds, and care. Her main ethnographic fieldsites include the midwestern dairy worlds of the United States, and various sites in Denmark including pig farms, an insect farm, and a former brown coal mine. Across these sites, Katy has worked with a lot of different co-species social formations and technoscientifically modulated ways of living and dying in agriculture, and in today’s episode, she will speak to some of these, focusing on the relations between microbes, cows, and humans in raw milk consumption, production, and politics. The basis for our conversation is a talk that Katy gave on the day before we recorded the podcast as part of the BSAS seminar series. Her talk was titled ‘Digestive belonging: a microbial ethnography of raw milk in America’s Dairyland’. In the podcast, Katy unravels the notion of ‘digestive belonging’ in this ethnographic context, connecting it to farmlife, microbes, social landscapes, pasteurization politics, and rural nostalgia among other things. We further discuss different modes of care in animal farming practices, the cultivation of trans-species sensing, and the idea of ‘positive animal welfare’. The podcast was recorded in October 2025 when Katy was in Bergen to give a presentation as part of the Bergen Social Anthropology Seminar series. Resources: Katy Overstreet’s research profile Articles mentioned, authored by Katy: Digestive Belonging: A Microbial Ethnography of Raw Milk in America’s Dairyland (2026) Be the boar: sex, sows, and courtship on a Danish pig farm (2022) How to Taste Like a Cow: Cultivating Shared Sense in Wisconsin Dairy Worlds (2021) EU funded Cost Action project LIFT aimed at ‘Lifting farm animal lives’ that Katy participates in: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

    58 min

  4. 17H AGO

    Leila Sales, "The Museum of Lost and Found" (Harry N. Abrams, 2023)

    Leila Sales wears many hats. She is the author of eight critically acclaimed novels for children and young adults, including This Song Will Save Your Life and Once Was a Time. Leila is also the editor of award-winning and bestselling fiction and nonfiction books for readers of all ages. Most recently, she is Editorial Director at Kar-Ben Publishing, an imprint of Lerner Publishing Group. Leila has also managed classic children’s publishing properties including Corduroy, Angelina Ballerina, Ferdinand, The Snowy Day, and others. In our wonderfully candid interview we discuss her new role at Kar-Ben and her wish list, her own career as an author, and what makes a great picture book. We also discuss her recent book, The Museum of Lost and Found (illustrated by Jacqueline Li, Abrams, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

    50 min

  5. 17H AGO

    Lys Kulamadayil, "Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law" (Bloomsbury 2025)

    In Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law (Bloomsbury 2025), Lys Kulamadayil offers a crucial examination of how international law shapes the exploitation of natural resources in post-colonial States. Kulamadayil reveals how international legal rules can be constitutive, punitive, remedial in creating the paradox of plenty in resource-rich States. The book revisits the making of foundational principles like sovereignty over natural resources and economic self-determination as applied during decolonisation; explores how humanitarian frameworks have justified extraction of public natural resources; and traces the proliferation of international treaties that protect foreign property rights. The book also zooms in on legal paradigms ranging from contract law to anti-corruption, human rights, and criminal law, arguing that these frameworks often work together to create the pathology of plenty. Through this interrogation, the book points to proposals to escape siloed ways of thinking about natural resources and embrace an intersectoral and anti-carceral thinking instead. Lys Kulamadayil is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and the Principal Investigator of the project Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law. Raghavi Viswanath is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, examines how pastoralists claim grazing rights under India’s Forest Rights Act 2006 and how the everyday processes of staking such claims has been impacted by the authoritarian turn in India. LinkedIn. Email:rv13@soas.ac.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

    1h 6m

  6. 17H AGO

    Marc James Carpenter, "The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest" (Yale UP, 2025)

    The War on Illahee: Genocide, Complicity, and Cover-Ups in the Pioneer Northwest (Yale UP, 2025) by Marc James Carpenter is a history book about history. More specifically, it's a book about how history gets subsumed in myth, and why the truth often matters less than the story that ends up being told. In the 1850s across the Pacific Northwest, settlers engaged in bloody wars with several Indgienous tribes to seize their homelands - Illahee - for incorporation into the United States. Yet, when those same settlers sat down to write about their experiences, the bloodshed, danger, and trauma was transmuted via memory and a multi-generational game of telephone into a triumphant story of peaceful pioneers fairly trading Native people for their land. The War on Illahee is thus not just a history of Native and settler warfare in what is today Oregon and Washingotn, but also an argument for the power of history, and the insidiousness of choosing to forget the past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

    54 min

  7. 17H AGO

    Sourit Bhattacharya, "Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising" (Orient BlackSwan, 2024)

    Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising (Orient BlackSwan, 2024) by Sourit Bhattacharya introduces a new method of decolonial reading and criticism. It critically examines the history and ongoing influence of colonialism and imperialism in postcolonial cultures and texts. The volume seeks to address the crucial question of how to read postcolonial literatures closely and comparatively, particularly through the lenses of decolonisation and anticolonialism. Through rubrics such as migration, ecology, trauma, minorities and futurity, Postcolonialism Now engages with close readings of films, graphic novels, fiction, theatre and poetry from across the globe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

    58 min

  8. 17H AGO

    Howard Alan Israel, "Nazi Anatomy Lessons: A Dissection of Evil" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2026)

    What if the tools that shaped your life’s work were rooted in unimaginable evil? In this haunting episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with Dr. Howard Alan Israel to discuss Nazi Anatomy Lessons: A Dissection of Evil, a book born from a single, shattering moment in an operating room. For over twenty years, Dr. Israel had prepared for surgeries using the same anatomy atlas—methodically studying each illustration, planning for every variation, and building a career marked by innovation, research, and the training of future surgeons. Then a colleague changed everything with one sentence: the atlas had been created by Nazi doctors. That revelation launched a thirty-year journey into the moral abyss—an investigation into who these anatomists were, who their “subjects” had been, and how healers became murderers. Dr. Israel began to confront terrifying questions: Was his career built, in part, on the suffering of victims? How could such knowledge remain hidden in plain sight for decades? And how does a profession devoted to healing become an instrument of genocide? Together, Rabbi Katz and Dr. Israel explore not only the historical horror of Nazi medicine, but the urgent bioethical questions it raises today. As genocide remains a recurring human reality, this conversation asks what must change in our moral frameworks, institutions, and education to prevent the transformation of healers into agents of destruction—and how we might instead build a society committed to healing rather than harm. Rabbi Marc Katz is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

    48 min
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Interviews with Authors about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

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  • Creator
    New Books
  • Years Active
    2011 - 2026
  • Episodes
    749
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © New Books Network
  • Show Website
    New Books Network

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