Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) explores practical manifestations of sovereignty from antiquity to the Anthropocene. Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of the concept. Shifting Sovereigntie…

Taking readers to the farms and factories, the marae and churches where Māori lived, worked and raised their families, Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Home Front during the Second World War (Auckland University Press, 2024) by Dr. Angela Wanhalla, Dr. Sarah Christie, Dr. Lachy Paterson, Dr. Ross Webb and Dr. Erica Newman tells the story of the profound tr…

Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2025) by Gloria Blizzard is a diasporic collection of essays on music, memory, and motion. In this powerful and deeply personal essay collection, Gloria Blizzard, in an international diasporic quest, moves up and down an urban subway line; between Canada and Trinidad; to and from a hospita…

We Remember Lest the World Forget: Memories of the Minsk Ghetto (JewishGen, 2018) is a collection of memories from child survivors of the Minsk Ghetto, Belarus. These are rare and moving personal testimonies, and this is a book of some significance for it opens a window on the rarely told story of the Holocaust in Belarus, in particular the Minsk G…

Sara Burdorff joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Maternity, Monstrosity and Heroic (Im)mortality from Homer to Shakespeare (Amsterdam University Press, 2025). This work uses an adaptation of monster theory to rethink the foundations of epic-heroic immortality. Rather than focusing on a specific monster or monsters, the author identifies t…

Critical Management Studies and Librarianship: Critical Perspectives on Library Management Education and Practice (Library Juice Press, November 2024) introduces key concepts in the field of critical management studies (CMS) and critiques dominant theories and concepts in the management field. The aim of CMS is to denaturalize dominant theories in …

Early Modern Britain was awash with pamphlets, ballads, woodcuts broadcasting bloodthirsty tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, cunning female poisoning lacing the supper with deadly substances; of child killers and spiteful witches, stories of women wholly and unnaturally wicked. These were printed or sung, tacked the walls of alehouses, …

A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk. As explored by Dr. Yves Rees in Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America (New South, 2024), a century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing c…

China’s Heritage through History employs a longue durée approach to examine China’s heritage through history. From Imperial to contemporary China, it explores the role of practices and material forms of the past in shaping social transformation through knowledge production and transmission. The art of collecting, reproducing, and reinterpreting the…

With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are being championed as forces for good and as solutions to the complex challenges of the aid sector. Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful (Polity, 2024) argues, however, that digital in…

From one of the world’s leading historians comes the first substantial study of environmentalism set in any country outside the Euro-American world. By the canons of orthodox social science, countries like India are not supposed to have an environmental consciousness. They are, as it were, “too poor to be green.” In Speaking with Nature: The Origin…

As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In Gambling Man: The Wild Ride …

What can archives tell us about the film industry? In Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive (Liverpool UP, 2024), James Fenwick, a senior lecturer in cultural and creative industries at the University of Manchester examines the range of possibilities offered by The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of London. The …

The definitive history of Canadian foreign policy since the 1930s, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2024) examines how successive prime ministers have promoted Canada's national interests in a world that has grown increasingly complex and interconnected. Eleven case studies focus on environmental refo…

Artificial Intelligence fuels both enthusiasm and panic. Technologists are inclined to give their creations leeway, pretend they’re animated beings, and consider them efficient. As users, we may complain when these technologies don’t obey, or worry about their influence on our choices and our livelihoods. And yet, we also yearn for their convenienc…

Life Studies in Psychoanalysis: Faces of Love (Routledge, 2023), by Dr. Ahron Friedberg, consists of four psychoanalytic studies each representing a patient's course of treatment over several years. These studies demonstrate how love, in an array of forms, is refracted through the process of psychoanalysis, which unfolds over time and reveals the c…

In the history of Nazi concentration camps, and particularly labor camps, there is probably no place that bears the same stigma of wretchedness as 'Dora-Mittelbau' at Nordhausen. Located in the Harz mountains in central Germany, next to a quarry tunnel system in the Kohnstein mountain, it served to house thousands of slave workers for an undergroun…

Today’s European Union grew out of functional communities set up in the wake of world war in the 1950s. It would shock the new White House intake to learn that the wartime American political class lobbied hard for a postwar United States of Europe. The role of US officials in building Europe’s first community – one for the coal and steel industries…

In this NBN episode, I am joined by anthropologists Eva van Roekel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Fiona Murphy (Dublin City University) to talk about theit edited book, A Collection of Creative Anthropologies: Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories. This beautiful collection brings together a series of creative work of anthropologists who sha…

In Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931 (Princeton UP, 2024), A. G. Hopkins provides the first substantial assessment of the fortunes of African entrepreneurs under colonial rule. Examining the lives and careers of 100 merchants in Lagos, Nigeria, between 1850 and 1931, Hopkins challenges conventional views of the contr…

Adam Franklin-Lyons joins Jana Byars to talk about Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Penn State Press, 2022). In the late fourteenth century, the medieval Crown of Aragon experienced a series of food crises that created conflict and led to widespread starvation. Adam Franklin-Lyons applies contemporary understandings of comp…

Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history …

In this episode, Ismail Patel speaks with Diana Darke about her new book, “Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture shaped Europe”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies…

Art looting is commonly recognized as a central feature of Nazi expropriation, in both the Third Reich and occupied territories. After the war, the famed Monuments Men (and women) recovered several hundred thousand pieces from the Germans' makeshift repositories in churches, castles, and salt mines. Well publicized restitution cases, such as that o…

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. And yet, to Ukrainians, this attack was painfully familiar, the latest episode in a centuries-long Russian campaign to divide and oppress Ukraine. In Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024), political scientist Eugene Finkel un…

Cosmology and cosmic journeys play a significant role in biblical and extra-biblical texts, especially in apocalyptic narratives. What about for the book of Revelation? The answer is yes. Join us as we speak with Joel Rothman about his recent book, The Cosmic Journey in the Book of Revelation: Apocalyptic Cosmology and the Experience of Story-Space…

This revised and extended English edition of Bernd U. Schipper's 2012 German study of Proverbs incorporates the results of his continued research and writings on Proverbs. For nearly a century, many biblical scholars have argued that the main theological traditions, such as the divine law, God's torah, do not appear in the book of Proverbs. In The …

What are numbers, and where do they come from? Based on her groundbreaking study of material devices used for counting in the Ancient Near East, Karenleigh Overmann proposes a novel answer to these timeless questions. Tune in as we talk with Karenleigh Overmann about her book, The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Anc…