New Books in British Studies

In the ninth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell traces the trans-Atlantic movement of artists associated with punk culture in New York and London. In conversation with British cultural historian Matt Worley, we follow New York-based artists like Jayne (née Wayne) County, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, and others to the U.K. where they embedded themselves in a growing music-based subculture. As the punk aesthetic expanded internationally it diversified in form incorporating elements of fashion, literature, and cinema like Derek Jarman's apocalyptic masterpiece JUBILEE (1978).  Matt Worley is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading and author of numerous books that cover modern British history with a special focus on music and the British Labor movement. His book No Future: Punk, Politics and British Your Culture, 1976-1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) explores the evolution of punk as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude, and an overall aesthetic. Setting punk culture against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment, and socio-economic change, Worley recaptures punk's anarchic force as a medium through which the frustrated and the disaffected could reject, revolt, and re-invent. Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In the second half of the eighteenth century, several British East India Company servants published accounts of what they deemed to be the original and ancient religion of India. Drawing on what are recognised today as the texts and traditions of Hinduism, these works fed into a booming enlightenment interest in Eastern philosophy. At the same time, the Company's aggressive conquest of Bengal was facing a crisis of legitimacy and many of the prominent political minds of the day were turning their attention to the question of empire. In this original study, Jessica Patterson situates these Company works on the ‘Hindu religion' in the twin contexts of enlightenment and empire. In doing so, she uncovers the central role of heterodox religious approaches to Indian religions for enlightenment thought, East India Company policy and contemporary ideas of empire. Dr Jessica Patterson is an Assistant Professor in History and Politics at the University of Cambridge. The host, Shruti Jain, is a PhD candidate at SUNY Binghamton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy: Beautiful Mechanism (Oxford UP, 2025) by Dr. Meegan Kennedy examines a revolutionary period in microscopical technology and practice. At first considered a mere toy, by 1900 the microscope rivaled the railway and telegraph as an emblem of modernity and enjoyed an astonishing diversity of applications. This technology could drive scientific debates on subjects like cell theory, vitalism, and bacteriology; guide workers in classrooms, laboratories, and businesses; and inspire a personal hobby or a mass entertainment. Victorian microscopy productively cuts across the ostensibly separate domains of science, religion, commerce, art, education, entertainment, and domestic life.Writing Embodiment in Victorian Microscopy reads nineteenth-century microscopy across scientific, literary, religious, and popular texts. It argues that Victorian microscopists saw their vision and cognition as fully embodied experiences, the images emerging through a material entanglement of bodies (observer, instrument, apparatus, object) in a dynamic, unstable system. These ideas echo the work of physiological psychologists, who proposed mind as a system of embodied, distributed, and dynamic processes shaped by automatic or unconscious reflex action, attention, mental training, and fatigue. Striving to regulate this complex system, microscopists circulated tropes of embodiment through the varied forms of nineteenth-century print culture. They adapted existing concepts (such as beauty, the sublime, natural theology, and fairylands), or coined new phrases (such as many-sided comprehension), to promote favored forms of embodiment and enculturate microscopy as a difficult but valuable pursuit. Writing Embodiment draws on important work in book history and periodical studies by emphasizing the circulation of these tropes in intermedial conversations across diverse print forms.Victorians understood wonder and skepticism not as incommensurate approaches to scientific observation but rather as complementary forms of embodiment. Romantic tropes of wonder solicit affective flows from observer to wriggling animalcule and back; while skeptical, realist tropes offer to train the reader's eye, hand, body, and judgment and to formalize microscopical practice. Microscopical narratives may manipulate wonder and skepticism in productive tension or create virtual storyspaces that enlist the reader in virtual witnessing. These tropes shape every level of microscopical interest and proficiency. By analyzing their use and circulation, Writing Embodiment illuminates wider patterns of Victorian thought on embodiment, scientific practice, and community. 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/british-studies

Body Count: The War on Terror and Civilian Deaths in Iraq (Bristol University Press, 2021), Lily Hamourtziadou's investigation into civilian victims during the conflicts that followed the US-led coalition's 2003 invasion of Iraq provides important new perspectives on the human cost of the War on Terror. From early fighting to the withdrawal and return of coalition troops, the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, the book explores the scale and causes of deaths and places them in the contexts of power struggles, US foreign policy and radicalisation. Casting fresh light on not just the conflict but international geopolitics and the history of Iraq, it constructs a unique and insightful human security approach to war. Lily Hamourtziadou is Senior Lecturer in Criminology with Security Studies and Deputy Course Director at Birmingham City University, and Principal Researcher of Iraq Body Count, which maintains the largest public database of violent civilian deaths. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Before the Greeks and Romans, the Celts ruled the ancient world. They sacked Rome, invaded Greece, and conquered much of Europe, from Ireland to Turkey. Celts registered deeply on the classical imagination for a thousand years and were variously described by writers like Caesar and Livy as unruly barbarians, fearless warriors, and gracious hosts. But then, in the early Middle Ages, they vanished. In The Celts, Ian Stewart tells the story of their rediscovery during the Renaissance and their transformation over the next few centuries into one of the most popular European ancestral peoples.The Celts shows how the idea of this ancient people was recovered by scholars, honed by intellectuals, politicians, and other thinkers of various stripes, and adopted by cultural revivalists and activists as they tried to build European nations and nationalisms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Long-forgotten, the Celts improbably came to be seen as the ancestors of most western Europeans—and as a pillar of modern national identity in Britain, Ireland, and France.Based on new research conducted across Europe and in the United States, The Celts reveals when and how we came to call much of Europe “Celtic,” why this idea mattered in the past, and why it still matters today, as the tide of nationalism is once again on the rise. Ian Stewart is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His work has focused particularly on ideas of language, nation, and race in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and Europe. He has also written at length on the late Scottish Enlightenment and is the co-editor of Adam Ferguson's Later Writings: New Letters and an Essay on the French Revolution (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Book Recomendations: Modern Ireland 1600-1972 by Roy Foster British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 by Colin Kidd The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress by Silvia Sebastiani Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Ordinary items take on new meanings when you cast them in different light. The origins of tea, coffee and sugar are well known, but when you discover that gym treadmills were pioneered on plantations or that denim jeans were once clothing for enslaved people, you can't help but ask where else the legacy of slavery hides in plain sight. Through the stories of thirty-nine everyday places and objects, in Human Resources: Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain – in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things (Profile, 2025) Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba unpick the threads of the history that we never learned in school, revealing the truth of how Britain's present is bound to a darker past. Taking us from art galleries to football stands, banks to hospitals, from grand country houses to the backs of our kitchen cupboards, Human Resources is an eye-opening inquiry that gives a voice to the enslaved people who built modern Britain. 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/british-studies

No-one can fail to notice how many statues of Great Men there are around London: stern politicians, military generals, imperial adventurers . . . But what about women? As shown by Juliet Rix in London's Statues of Women (SafeHaven Books, 2025), women are surprisingly well represented amongst London's statues. Recent years have seen new statues of Virginia Woolf in Richmond, Mary Wollstonecraft in Stoke Newington, even boxer Nicola Adams in Brent. But there are also groundbreaking statues commemorating the Black community, notably the two of Brixton resident Joy Battick on its railway station platforms. And you'll find historical figures from Florence Nightingale to Joan of Arc and Edith Cavell – as well as Twiggy. And how many ballet dancers are commemorated, and where? And which famous tennis player was the unlikely model for the young girl with dolphin by Tower Bridge? This is a book that really will make you see London in a new way. 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/british-studies

No-one can fail to notice how many statues of Great Men there are around London: stern politicians, military generals, imperial adventurers . . . But what about women? As shown by Juliet Rix in London's Statues of Women (SafeHaven Books, 2025), women are surprisingly well represented amongst London's statues. Recent years have seen new statues of Virginia Woolf in Richmond, Mary Wollstonecraft in Stoke Newington, even boxer Nicola Adams in Brent. But there are also groundbreaking statues commemorating the Black community, notably the two of Brixton resident Joy Battick on its railway station platforms. And you'll find historical figures from Florence Nightingale to Joan of Arc and Edith Cavell – as well as Twiggy. And how many ballet dancers are commemorated, and where? And which famous tennis player was the unlikely model for the young girl with dolphin by Tower Bridge? This is a book that really will make you see London in a new way. 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/british-studies

From the moment Mary, Queen of Scots set foot on English soil in 1568 until her execution at Fotheringhay Castle on 8 February 1587, she was the prisoner of her cousin, Elizabeth I. Unlike Mary's time on the Scottish throne, the dramatic events of these years – almost half her life – took place while she was a captive. But while trouble was perpetually simmering beyond her prison walls, within them Mary was constantly plotting. Only towards the end did she lose faith in returning to her homeland as rightful ruler. Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots (Birlinn, 2025) by Rosemary Goring is the story of Mary's tumultuous later years, told through the many atmospheric locations where she was confined. Drawing on the latest research, including a treasure trove of recently decoded letters, Exile sheds fascinating new light on her captivity and the charged political climate of the period. Reading like a 16th-century thriller, this account of treachery, deceit, hope and despair is a penetrating and enthralling psychological portrait of one of history's endlessly fascinating queens. 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/british-studies

The first edited collection dedicated to the historical specifics of Irish shame Offers an anatomy of Irish shame as a cultural predicament Combines theoretical reading with historical and institutional context Includes essays by some of Ireland's leading researchers on trauma and sexuality studies Shame has haunted Ireland since the inception of Irishness itself. As such, it has come to seem an ineluctable modality of Irish life. In fact, the contours of Irish shame have evolved over time, shifting with alterations in their colonial predicament, and in their response, whether complicit or resistant, to economic, political, and cultural dispossession. Irish Shame offers an anatomy of that condition. In twelve essays, it traces the ethnic, religious, biopolitical, psychosocial and neurodiverse parameters of shame as a force in Irish life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy and its Manuscript Contexts by John Eldevik During the Middle Ages, many Europeans imagined that there existed a powerful and marvel-filled Christian realm beyond the lands of Islam ruled by a devout emperor they called “Priest John,” or “Prester John.” Spurred by a forged letter that mysteriously appeared around 1165 and quickly “went viral” in hundreds of manuscripts across Western Europe, the legend of Prester John and his exotic kingdom was not just a utopian fantasy, but a way to bring contemporary political and theological questions into sharper focus. In this new study, John Eldevik shows how the manuscripts that transmitted the story of Prester John reflect the ways contemporary audiences processed ideas about religious conflict and helped them imagine a new, global dimension of Christianity. It includes an appendix with a new translation of the B recension of The Letter of Prester John. John Eldevik is Professor of History at Hamilton College in Clinton (New York State), and has previously published on medieval social and religious history. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.   YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Rainbow Trap: Queer Lives, Classifications and the Dangers of Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Kevin Guyan reveals how the fight for LGBTQ equalities in the UK is shaped – and constrained – by the classifications we encounter every day. Looking across six systems – the police and the recording of hate crimes; dating apps and digital desire; outness in the film and television industry; borders and LGBTQ asylum seekers; health and fitness activities; and DEI initiatives in the workplace – Rainbow Trap documents how inclusive interventions – such as new legislation, revamped diversity policies and tech fixes – have attempted to bring historically marginalized communities out of the shadows.Yet, as part of the bargain, LGBTQ people need to locate themselves in an ever-growing list of classifications, categories and labels to 'make sense' to the very systems they are seeking to access. This requirement to be classified catches LGBTQ communities in a rainbow trap. Because when we look beyond the welcoming veneer of inclusive interventions, we uncover sorting processes that determine what LGBTQ lives are valued and what queer futures are possible. 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/british-studies

Who are 'gifted' children? In ‘Gifted Children' in Britain and the World: Elitism and Equality since 1945 Jennifer Crane, a senior lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol (Oxford UP, 2025) tells the social and cultural history of this category of young people. The book charts the individuals, organisations, policymakers, and media activities that aimed to identify children as ‘gifted', lobbying for their social status and the potential benefit they might bring to both the UK and the rest of the world. At the same time, the book critically assesses the idea of 'gifted' children being closely intertwined with a range of social inequalities, reflecting Britain's broader class, race, gender and disability hierarchies. Most crucially, the book draws on children's voices, foregrounding their experiences of understanding, embracing, and resisting the 'gifted' label. At a time of renewed public debates over social and cultural hierarchies, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. It is available open access here. Jennifer Crane is lecturer in health geographies at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, working at the intersection of history, geography, and sociologies of health. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the ‘Indian Empire', or more simply as the Raj. It was the British Empire's crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world's population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire', and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandeb to the Himalayas. And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division. Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins and HarperCollins India, 2025) by Sam Dalrymple, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches. Its legacies include civil war in Burma and ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made. Dalrymple's stunning history is based on deep archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best. 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/british-studies

The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer (Routledge, 2024) offers 40 chapters by leading scholars working with contemporary, theoretical, and textual approaches to the poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) in a global context. This volume provides post-pandemic, twenty-first century readers a way to teach, learn, and write about Chaucer's works complete with awareness of their reach, their limitations, and occlusions on a global field of culture. Interviewees: Craig E. Bertolet is Hollifield Professor of English at Auburn University. Susan Nakley is Professor and Associate Chair of English at St. Joseph's University, New York. Shoshana Adler is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Shazia Jagot is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature at the University of York. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

What is the relationship between medicine and commerce? In Selling Sexual Knowledge: Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Sarah Bull, an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, explores the relationships between doctors, sexual reform campaigners, publishers and pornography in the Victorian era. The book charts the struggle to differentiate and define medicine from ‘quackery', in the context of the rise of commercial forms of publishing and demands for access to contraception. The book uses richly detailed materials, including books and newspapers, court cases, and case studies of the key players who defined the era, and the years that would follow. Challenging myths of sex and Victorian society, and offering a compelling picture of conflicts over key issues such as free speech, contraception, and professional identity, the book will be of wide interest across the arts and humanities, as well as for medicine and science, and is available open access here Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Sarah Kenny Growing up and going out: Youth culture, commerce and leisure space in post-war Britain Manchester University Press 2025 How did young people spend their time in the post-war era? In Growing up and going out: Youth culture, commerce and leisure space in post-war Britain Sarah Kenny, a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Birmingham, explores changing spaces and places of young people's leisure. The book uses the case study of Sheffield, a city in the North of England that has often been overlooked in histories of youth culture, to examine how young people's leisure was provided, commodified, and regulated. At the same time, the book has powerful stories of young people's experiences, challenging perceptions of attitudes and activities, as well as subcultures and styles. A fascinating history, as well as an agenda setting analysis, the book should be widely read across the humanities and social sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The nineteenth-century spread of democracy in Britain and its colonies coincided with an increase in alcohol consumption and in celebratory public dinners with rounds of toasts. British colonists raised their glasses to salute the Crown in rituals that asserted fraternal equality and political authority. Yet these ceremonies were reserved for gentlemen, leaving others – notably women and Indigenous people – on the political margins. Drink and Democracy: Alcohol and the Political Imaginary in Colonial Australia (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025) by Dr. Matthew Allen traces the development of democratic ideas in New South Wales through the history of public drinking and temperance. As the colony transformed from a convict autocracy to a liberal democracy, Dr. Allen argues, public drinking practices shaped the character of the emerging political order. The ritual of toasting was a symbolic display of restraint – drunkenness without loss of self-control – that embodied the claim to citizenship of white male settlers. Yet the performative sobriety of the temperance movement was also democratic, a display of respectability that politicized its supporters around a rival vision of responsible citizenship. Drink was a way to police the limits of the political realm. The stigma of female drunkenness worked to exclude women from the public sphere, while perceptions of heavy drinking among Aboriginal people cast them as lacking self-control and hence unworthy of political rights. Drink and Democracy reveals that long before the introduction of the franchise, colonists in Australia imagined themselves as citizens. Yet even as democracy expanded, drink marked its limits. 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/british-studies

What does it mean to be British? To answer this, Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910–45 (Cambridge UP, 2023) by Dr. Vivian Kong takes us to an underexplored site of Britishness – the former British colony of Hong Kong. Vivian Kong asks how colonial hierarchies, the racial and cultural diversity of the British Empire, and global ideologies complicate the meaning of being British. Using multi-lingual sources and oral history, Dr. Kong traces the experiences of multiracial residents in 1910-45 Hong Kong. Guiding us through Hong Kong's global networks, and the colony's co-existing exclusive and cosmopolitan social spaces, this book uncovers the long history of multiracial Britishness. Dr. Kong argues that Britishness existed in the colony in multiple, hyphenated forms – as a racial category, but also as privileges, a means of survival, and a form of cultural and national belonging. This book offers us an important reminder that multiracial inhabitants of the British Empire were just as active in the making of Britishness as the British state and white Britons. 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/british-studies

In this exhilarating journey into underground parties, pulsating with life and limitless possibility, acclaimed author Amin Ghaziani unveils the unexpected revolution revitalizing urban nightlife. Drawing on Ghaziani's immersive encounters at underground parties in London and more than one hundred riveting interviews with everyone from bar owners to party producers, revelers to rabble-rousers, Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2024) showcases a spectacular, if seldom-seen, vision of a queer world shimmering with self-empowerment, inventiveness, and joy. Amin Ghaziani is Professor of Sociology who has taught at Northwestern, Princeton, University of British Columbia, and UC Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The 1960s continue to hold an almost mythical place in Western culture, particularly in Britain, where change was widespread and infiltrated many aspects of life. This included architecture, whose role in a modern democracy and the form it should take were hotly debated. 1960s University Buildings: The Golden Age of British Modern Architecture (Lund Humphries, 2025) by John Barr discusses the architectural thinking of the time through an examination of the design of university buildings. While there were notable buildings being built in other spheres, no other field of architecture provided the opportunity to express those ideas as freely, while also reflecting innovative new thinking about education and society. Somehow, the university buildings of the 1960s seemed to represent the cutting edge of modern architecture in the UK. This book provides the first critical analysis and overview of these buildings, designed by some of the leading British architects of the period including Basil Spence, Leslie Martin, Alison and Peter Smithson, Denys Lasdun, Powell and Moya and James Stirling. By placing the buildings in a wider social, cultural and political context, it examines the combination of circumstances and attitudes that produced results that are equally admired and detested and allows us to understand how we might replicate or avoid them in the 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

How do feminist movements develop and organise in ethno-nationally divided societies? How does this challenge our understandings of contemporary fourth wave feminism? Women's Troubles: Gender and Feminist Politics in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Claire Pierson sets out to answer these questions using rich empirical data and analysis in an examination of feminist activism after the Northern Irish peace agreement. Utilising feminist frameworks and debates on movement building, policymaking, abortion rights, gender-based violence and the UN women, peace and security agenda, Dr. Pierson interrogates the opportunities and challenges in articulating a feminist voice and creating feminist spaces in the conflict transformational politics and society. Capturing the complexities of contemporary feminist movement building in a divided society, Women's Troubles contributes to ongoing analysis of contemporary global feminisms. 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/british-studies

The story of the last generation of British miners: fathers and sons, brothers and comrades, big hitters and broken men, strikers and scabs. Mining Men: Britain's Last Kings of the Coalface (Penguin, 2025) by Dr. Emily P. Webber explores how these men felt when the pits were closed and what happened next, including former miners who became factory workers, detectives, driving instructors, counsellors, the local mayor and one who even ended up working on Fleet Street. Featuring accounts from Ayrshire to the South Wales Valleys, from the ‘People's Republic of South Yorkshire', to the ‘Sunshine Corner Coalfields' of Kent, each chapter offers a different perspective of the industry. Britain's last deep coalmine closed in 2015, yet just fifty years ago the mining industry was a juggernaut, employing over 250,000 workers. Combining new personal interviews with extensive archival research, Dr. Webber illuminates the extraordinary history of the industry once considered the backbone of Britain. By situating the miners' strike of 1984–85 in a longer history of the coalfields, we can understand why miners and their families fought so hard against pit closures, and what happened after the pit wheels stopped turning. Vivid, evocative and richly alive with minute detail, Mining Men uncovers what the mining industry once meant to its workers and their communities, and what Britain lost when it was gone. 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/british-studies

Alice Hunt's Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade 1649-1650 (Faber and Faber, 2024) takes a chronological look at the current events, personalities, political struggles and cultural highlights of Britain's short-lived but intense experiment in republicanism. From the deeply controversial execution of Charles I in January 1649 to the similarly contentious restoration of his son in 1660, Professor Hunt explores a complex and unique decade in English, Scottish and Irish history, when the unexpected truly reigned. Alice Hunt is Professor of Early Modern Literature and History at the University of Southampton, UK. She is currently co-investigator on a major AHRC research project, ‘The Visible Crown: Elizabeth II and the Caribbean, 1952-present' (visiblecrown.com). Host: Matt Fraser is a freelance writer and podcaster based in Berlin, Germany. He is currently working on a blogcast project aimed at empowering readers to discover and discuss great fiction creatively and confidently. Email: illreadmillennial@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In 1818, a curious root arrived in a small English village, tucked—seemingly by accident—in a packing case mailed from Brazil. The amateur botanist who cultivated it soon realized that he had something remarkable on his hands: an exceptionally rare orchid never before seen on British shores. It arrived just as “orchid mania” was sweeping across Europe and North America, driving a vast plant trade that catered to wealthy private patrons as well as the fast-growing middle classes eager to display exotic flowers at home. Dubbed Cattleya labiata, the striking purple-and-crimson bloom quickly became one of the most coveted flowers on both continents. As tales of the flower's beauty spread through scientific journals and the popular press, orchid dealers and enthusiasts initiated a massive search to recover it in its natural habitat. In The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession (Harvard University Press, 2025) Dr. Sarah Bilston illuminates the story of this international quest, introducing the collectors and nurserymen who funded expeditions, the working-class plant hunters who set out to find the flower, the South American laborers and specialists with whom they contracted, the botanists who used the latest science to study orchids in all their varieties, and the writers and artists who established the near-mythic status of the “lost orchid.” The dark side of this global frenzy was the social and environmental harm it wrought, damaging fragile ecologies on which both humans and plants depended. Following the human ambitions and dramas that drove an international obsession, The Lost Orchid is a story of consumer desire, scientific curiosity, and the devastating power of colonial overreach. 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/british-studies

• Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated. The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2023), by. • Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Penguin, 2023). Adam Smith wrote that, “Political economy belongs to no nation; it is of no country: it is the science of the rules for the production, the accumulation, the distribution, and the consumption of wealth.” However Adam Smith regarded the science of political economy, in practical terms, one is quite hard pressed to find a case where governments—be it an empire, republic, or nation—were completely left out of the picture. At least, that is how it's been historically. Questions about how people and other types of entities organize and generate capital, AND the role that governments play in all of this, fill libraries. The ramifications of the dynamics and rules surrounding money have proved so consequential—and increasingly so, in our increasingly technologized world—that it is no surprise that historians have devoted much energy to the study of political economy. Political economy, in the broadest terms, is the subject of our conversation today. Today on History Ex we put two recent books that bring important perspectives to these questions in conversation with each other. Today's books both deal with entrepreneurial endeavors, usually “abroad”, or beyond the Metropole. While Philip Stern's examination of early modern British corporations explains the myriad ways private initiatives sought government legitimacy and became entangled in the business of governance during the age of empires, Quinn Slobodian trenchantly reveals how some entrepreneurs and ideologues seek to escape governments in the age of nation-states. Our authors find points of convergence as well as divergence in aims, methods, and outcomes of the people at the center of their books. Stern and Slobodian discuss methodologies and chronologies, the ideologies that animated their actors, how memory and history were mobilized in promoting various visions; they probe the historian's perennial challenges of disentangling ideologies from interest, explain how similar actions in different historical contexts can demand different interpretations; and more. Listen in! Philip Stern is an associate professor of History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. His work focuses on various aspects of the legal, political, intellectual, and business histories that shaped the British Empire. He is also the author of The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2011) and many other scholarly works. Quinn Slobodian is a professor of the history at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He is also the author of the award-winning Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), which has been translated into six languages, and a frequent contributor to the Guardian, New Statesman, The New York, Times, Foreign Policy, Dissent and the Nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

How are working class women represented in contemporary culture? In Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture (Routledge, 2025), Katie Beswick, a Senior Lecturer in Arts Management at Goldsmiths, University of London, examines this question by analysing the figure of the ‘slag' across a range of cultural forms, including theatre and television. Alongside a history of the idea of the ‘slag', the book draws on deep case studies of key artists, including Tracey Emin, Cash Carraway and Michaela Coel to understand both the meaning of ‘slags' in British culture and how class, race and gender all intersect in Britain's unequal society. Blending memoir, poetry, close reading, and history, the book is essential reading across the arts and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in culture today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In the season finale of Ctrl Alt Deceit, Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones dig into the tangled web of media ownership, foreign influence and the future of free press. With a new UK government potentially greenlighting a UAE-backed bid for a stake in The Daily Telegraph, the hosts ask: does it matter who owns the news anymore? From Silicon Valley billionaires to Gulf state investors, the press is no longer just the fourth estate; it's a business, a weapon and a mirror of global power shifts. Is editorial independence a thing of the past? And can democracy survive in a world where outrage sells and facts struggle to pay the bills? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Why did Scots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries know so little about their past and even less about those who controlled their history? Is the historical narrative the only legitimate medium through which the past can be made known? Are novelists and historians as far apart as convention has it? In an age when history grounds any claims to national status, these are important questions and they have implications for how Scottish history has evolved, and how Scottish identity has been understood up to the present day. Scottish history is not simply the distillation of Scotland's past: authors shape what we know and how we judge our forebears. The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History (John Donald, 2024) by Dr. Catriona MacDonald investigates who decided which Scottish voices of the past would be heard in history's pages and which would ultimately be silenced. It sketches a picture of a narrow and privileged cultural elite that responded belatedly to a more democratic age and only slowly embraced women writers and the interests of ‘average' Scots. Integrating historical fiction and popular histories in its appreciation of the Scottish historical imaginary, it most importantly tells the story of why, despite the interests of politicians and others, a truly British history has never emerged. 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/british-studies

In Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England (University of London Press, 2025), Hannah Jeans explores the reading habits of early modern women and the ways in which their reading became a site of identity formation and promotion. Jeans studies both contemporary prescriptions around women's reading, particularly their consumption of religious and romance texts, as well the actual activity of women. Additionally, Reading, Gender and Identity covers some less-well known genres with which women engaged, such as news media and scientific texts. Drawing on a range of sources, like annotations, inscriptions, commonplace books, and self-writing, Jeans presents a fascinating account of the broad range of readings that early modern women participated in, and the multifaceted identities they crafted from these activities. It is an excellent read for anyone interested in the history of reading, print and manuscript culture, self-fashioning, or gender in early modern England. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women's intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland explores the interaction of human populations with land, waters, forests and wildlife. A Land Won From Waste: Scotland AD 400–1400 (John Donald/Birlinn, 2025) by Professor Richard Oram takes the reader from the climatic highs of the Late Iron Age to the depths of the war-torn and plague-ravaged fourteenth century. Departing from traditional frameworks that divide Scotland's history into periods based on kings' reigns or major political events, discussion instead follows the major shifts in climate that divide these fourteen centuries into epochs, each with its own distinct characteristics. Starting amidst the fields and forests shaped across the eight millennia of Scotland's prehistory, where we encounter the imprint of past generations of hunters and gatherers, farmers and fishermen, as well as the legacies of climate impacts and pathogens, the book explores the depths of the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the long climb back to the ‘Golden Age' of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Medieval Climate Anomaly, to end with the slide through crop-failure, famine, war and disease of what is reputed to be the ‘worst century in human history'. Also listen to Dr. Oram's previous New Books Network interview on the “sequel” to this book, covering the period 1400-1850: Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age.  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/british-studies

In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight's devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.  In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland's place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland's overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire's laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland's wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire's embrace of modern capitalism. Uncovering the disaster's roots in Britain's deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy. Our guest is: Dr. Padraic X. Scanlan, who is an associate professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Inquiry. The author of two previous books, he lives in Toronto. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance editor. She the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: The Social Construction of Race Climate Change We Refuse Where Does Research Really Begin? The First and Last King of Haiti Finishing Your Book When Life Is A Disaster Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Satire is a funny, aggressive, and largely oppositional literature which is typically created by people who refuse to participate in a given regime's perception of itself. Although satire has always been a primary literature of state affairs, and although it has always been used to intervene in ongoing discussions about political theory and practice, there has been no attempt to examine this fascinating and unusual literature across the full chronological horizon. In State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Dan Sperrin provides the first ever longue durée history of political satire in British literature. He traces satire's many extended and discontinuous trajectories through time while also chronicling some of the most inflamed and challenging political contexts within which it has been written.Dr. Sperrin begins by describing the Roman foundations and substructures of British satire, paying particularly close attention to the core Roman canon: Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. He then proceeds chronologically, populating the branches of satire's family tree with such figures as Chaucer, Jonson, Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Dickens, as well as a whole series of writers who are now largely forgotten. Satire, Dr. Sperrin shows, can be a literature of explicit statements and overt provocation—but it can also be notoriously indirect, oblique, suggestive, and covert, complicated by an author's anonymity or pseudonymity. Dr. Sperrin meticulously analyses the references to transient political events that may mystify the contemporary reader. He also presents vivid and intriguing pen portraits of the satirists themselves along the way. Dr. Sperrin argues that if satire is to be contended with and reflected upon in all its provocative complexity—and if it is to be seen as anything more than a literature of political vandalism—then we must explore the full depth and intrigue of its past. This book offers a new starting point for our intellectual and imaginative contact with an important and fascinating kind of literature. 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/british-studies

What does liberty entail? How have concepts of liberty changed over time? And what are the global consequences? Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal (Cambridge UP, 2025) surveys the history of rival views of liberty from antiquity to modern times. Quentin Skinner traces the understanding of liberty as independence from the classical ideal to early modern Britain, culminating in the claims of the Whig oligarchy to have transformed this idea into reality. Yet, with the Whig vision of a free state and civil society undermined by the American Revolution of 1776, Skinner explores how claims that liberty was fulfilled by an absence of physical or coercive restraint came to prominence. Liberty as Independence examines new dimensions of these rival views, considering the connections between debates on liberty and debates on slavery, and demonstrating how these ideas were harnessed in feminist discussions surrounding limitations on the liberty of women. The concept of liberty is inherently global, and Skinner argues strongly for the reinstatement of the understanding of liberty as independence. Illustrates the connections between philosophical debates surrounding liberty and the sociopolitical contexts in which they took place Provides a comprehensive analysis and bibliography of rival ways of thinking about liberty Explores the contribution of the American Revolution to discussions on the idea of liberty Quentin Skinner is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton between 1974 and 1979, and was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge between 1996 and 2008. He is the author and editor of numerous books on Renaissance and Modern Intellectual History, and the recipient of many awards including the Wolfson Prize for History and a Balzan Prize. Previous publications include the two-volume study, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998) and, most recently, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Back in 2019, John spoke with the celebrated comic novelist Stephen McCauley. Nobody knows more about the comic novel than Steve--his latest is You Only Call When You're in Trouble, but John still holds a candle for his 1987 debut, Object of My Affection, made into a charming Jennifer Aniston Paul Rudd movie. And there is no comic novelist Steve loves better than Barbara Pym, a mid-century British comic genius who found herself forgotten and unpublishable in middle age, only to roar back into print in her sixties with A Quartet in Autumn. Steve and John's friendship over the years has been sealed by the favorite Pym lines they text back and forth to one another, so they are particularly keen to investigate why her career went in this way. In the episode, they talk about some of these favorite sentences from Pym, and then turn to the comic novel as a genre. They talk about the difference between humorous and comic writing, the earthiness of comedy, whether comic novels should have happy or sad endings, and whether the comic novel is a precursor to, or an amoral relief from, the sitcom. They also discuss some of Steve's fiction, including his Rain Mitchell yoga novels. In Recallable Books John recommends Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell and Steve recommends After Claude by Iris Owens. Discussed in this episode: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy “The Beast in the Jungle,” Henry James The Thurber Carnival, James Thurber The Group, Mary McCarthy After Claude, Iris Owens Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym Less than Angels, Barbara Pym The Sweet Dove Died, Barbara Pym Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth The Sellout, Paul Beatty My Ex-Life, Stephen McCauley You can listen here or read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Hosts Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones explore the mounting political and financial pressures confronting higher education on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., it unpacks the unprecedented clash between the Trump administration and Harvard, raising broader questions about academic freedom, ideological conformity, and the role of government oversight. In the U.K., the conversation turns to the sector's growing reliance on international students and foreign funding—particularly from China—and the implications for institutional independence and research integrity. Together, the episodes chart the uneasy intersection of education, economics, and geopolitics in today's universities.Guests:-Tyler Coward is the lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).-Rose Stephenson is Director of Policy and Advocacy at Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI)Producer: Pearse LynchExecutive Producer: Lucinda Knight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Elton John is not only "still standing," he is a living superlative, the ultimate record-breaking, award-winning survivor of the great era of pop and rock music that he helped to shape during his six decades in the music industry. Yet few of his numerous biographies and song guides take him as a historical subject worthy of scholarly study.In contrast, On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide (Oxford University Press, 2025) approaches the artist seriously and analytically, while still couched in a highly accessible style. Author Matthew Restall offers a new way to explore Sir Elton's career and music within the contexts of other artists and of sweeping shifts in popular culture during his lifetime. Each of the ten chapters is anchored to an Elton song, rooted in its pop culture history, and advances a clear argument, pairing him with figures ranging from Bernie (Bernie Taupin, his lyricist) to Bennie (of the Jets), from "frenemy" David Bowie to artists like Rod Stewart, Aretha Franklin, and Dua Lipa, from Diana (the princess) to Jesus (yes, that one). Restall contends that Sir Elton's career offers us a novel way to see and understand the last half century of pop music and culture history--whether we call the era that of the album, of rock, of postmodernism, or of something else. The yellow brick road of Sir Elton's career has been long, winding, and bumpy, but, as Restall argues, his success has come not just despite but because of those challenges. The artist's transformations from Reg to Elton to Sir Elton to Uncle Elton, from ugly duckling to bedazzled swan, from the world's biggest rock star to creator of the world's largest AIDS fundraising organization, from tabloid punching bag to pop royalty, have all served as survival strategies that illuminate the era he has thereby navigated. Matthew Restall teaches at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Anthropology, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Director of Latin American Studies. Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Aviva Briefel argues that Victorians turned to the dead to understand the material culture of their present. With the rise of spiritualism in Britain in the early 1850s, séances invited participants to contact ghosts using material things, from ordinary household furniture to specialized technologies invented to register the presence of spirits. In its supernatural object lessons, Victorian spiritualism was not just a mystical movement centered on the dead but also a practical resource for learning how to negotiate the uncanniness of life under capitalism. Dr. Briefel explores how spiritualism compelled séance participants to speculate on the manufacture of spectral clothing; ponder the hidden histories and energies of parlor furniture; confront the humiliations of consumerism as summoned spirits pelted them with exotic fruits; and comprehend modes of mechanical reproduction, like photography and electrotyping, that had the power to shape identities. Dr. Briefel argues that spiritualist practices and the objects they employed offered both believers and skeptics unexpected frameworks for grappling with the often-invisible forces of labor, consumption, exploitation, and exchange that haunted their everyday lives. Ghosts and Things reveals how spiritualism's explorations of the borderland between life and death, matter and spirit, produced a strange and seductive combination of wonder and discomfort that allowed participants to experience the possibilities and precarities of industrial modernity in novel ways. 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/british-studies

How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez. Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers. 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/british-studies

Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Ben Jackson examines the material and consumer practices of over 1000 men from the middling and upper ranks of eighteenth-century society, c.1650-1850. It draws upon evidence from over 35 archives and museum collections to detail how material objects were integral for men in forming identities and shaping experiences. For men of all social ranks, ages, and geographic locations, material knowledge was imperative for masculine social identities to operate in a commercial society. Before the centralised factory and widespread mass-produced goods, men personalised and repaired their goods; products were shaped by men's attitudes and concerns. Objects were tools in men's identity formation and the exercise of social and gendered power. There was a reciprocal relationship between men and goods in this period; men were active agents of material and commercial change driving product and aesthetic innovation. 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/british-studies

Edinburgh's Unruly Women: Gender, Discipline, and Power, 1560-1660 (Routledge, 2024) examines experiences of church discipline across parish communities through Edinburgh and its environs. The book argues that experiences of discipline were not universal, varying according to any number of factors such as age, gender, marital status, and social rank. Adopting a case study approach, the book illuminates the voices of ordinary women as they appeared before their local kirk session (church court) where they navigated the church court system to settle neighbourly disputes, negotiate marriage contracts, or free their husbands from allegations of adultery. Edinburgh's Unruly Women argues that in the context of a deeply patriarchal society, experiences of discipline could not have been universal, but that in creating this strict culture of self-monitoring, the Church created opportunities for women to express power over one another, and indeed, over their male contemporaries. By placing female parishioners at the heart of the book, filled with individual case studies, Edinburgh's Unruly Women appeals to students and scholars of early modern women, religion, and gender more broadly, and to those with more specialist interest in both ecclesiastical discipline and the history of early modern Scotland in the localities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was transformed by what was known as the Radio Craze. Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home (Bodleian Library, 2025) expresses what the radio's arrival signified at a personal level. This narrative history recounts the perspective of listeners who adopted the then radical form of communication technology, invested in their first-ever gadgets, and tuned in by their firesides to outside voices, music, SOS calls, the Pips, news, sports, royalty, and innovative radiogenic comedy. Listen In also traces how radio affected family life by exploring whether it altered dynamics between children and adults, changed relationships between women and men, as well as affected class and a wider sense of nationhood. Packed with touching stories and anecdotes, Listen In comes at a timely moment when traditional linear radio is shifting, and the experience of how people consume audio is once again transforming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies