New Books in Communications

Ellen Peters, "Innumeracy in the Wild: Misunderstanding and Misusing Numbers" (Oxford UP, 2020)

31 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

To many mathematicians and math enthusiasts, the word "innumeracy" brings to mind popular writing like that of John Allen Paulos. But inequities in ou...

James Fredal, "The Enthymeme: Syllogism, Reasoning, and Narrative in Ancient Greek Rhetoric" (Penn State UP, 2020)

31 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

James Fredal is Associate Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. The recipient of multiple awards for his work in rhetor...

Dina Fainberg, "Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Frontlines" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

25 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In an age of mutual acrimony and closed borders, journalists were among the few individuals who crossed the Iron Curtain. Their reporting strongly inf...

Ellen Helsper, "The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities" (Sage, 2021)

21 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What are digital inequalities? In The Digital Disconnect: The Social Causes and Consequences of Digital Inequalities (Sage, 2021), Ellen Helsper, a...

L. Ayu Saraswati, "Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie" (NYU Press, 2021)

19 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Social media has become the front-and-center arena for feminist activism. Responding to and enacting the political potential of pain inflicted in acts...

Zoetanya Sujon, "The Social Media Age" (Sage, 2021)

18 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How has social media shaped contemporary society? In The Social Media Age (Sage, 2021), Zoetanya Sujon, a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director i...

Climate Denialism and Propaganda with Catriona McKinnon

18 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Catriona McKinnon is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on climate ethics and environmental justice. Much...

Moya Bailey, "Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance" (NYU Press, 2021)

17 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Where racism and sexism meet—an understanding of anti-Black misogyny. When Moya Bailey first coined the term misogynoir, she defined it as the ways ...

Richard Toye, "Winston Churchill: A Life in the News" (Oxford UP, 2020)

14 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Before Winston Churchill made history, he made news. To a great extent, the news made him too. If it was his own efforts that made him a hero, it was ...

Kathleen Collins, "From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole: A Life with Television" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)

13 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In her new book From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole: A Life with Television (University of Mississippi Press, 2021) TV scholar and fan Kathleen C...

Lucy van de Wiel, "Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging" (NYU Press, 2020)

12 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How does egg freezing reshape our conception of time, aging and fertility? In her new monograph, Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the ...

William G. Acree, "Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay" (U New Mexico Press, 2019)

12 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Swashbuckling tales of valiant gauchos roaming Argentina and Uruguay were nineteenth-century Latin American best sellers. But when these stories jump...

Wazhmah Osman, "Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Local Activists" (U of Illinois Press, 2020)

12 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as pa...

Can we Disagree Online Respectfully?: A Discussion with Ian Leslie

11 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, we are talking to a British writer Ian Leslie, a journalist and author of acclaimed books on human behavior. His latest book, Confl...

T. Sanders et al., "Paying for Sex in a Digital Age: US and UK Perspectives" (Routledge, 2020)

10 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Providing one of the first comprehensive, cross-cultural examinations of the dynamic market for sexual services, this book presents an evidence-based ...

Tetyana Lokot, "Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021)

10 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Tetyana Lokot's new book Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) examines how citizens use digit...

John B. Thompson, "Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing" (Polity, 2021)

07 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to John Thompson, Emeritus Professor, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, about his new book Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Pub...

Pallavi Guha, "Hear #metoo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism" (Rutgers UP, 2021)

07 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Hello Everyone, and welcome to New Books in Gender and Sexuality, a channel on the New Books Network. I’m your host, Jana Byars, and I’m here toda...

Jon Levy, "You're Invited: The Art and Science of Cultivating Influence" (Harper Business, 2021)

06 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Jon Levy about his new book You’re Invited: The Art and Science of Cultivating Influence (Harper Business, 2021). Jon Levy is a...

Jillian C. York, "Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism" (Verso Book, 2021)

06 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond th...

The Work of Editing a Magazine: A Discussion with Chris Lehmann

04 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, we are talking to writer and editor Chris Lehmann, an editor of The Baffler, a former managing editor of The New Republic and a f...

Corey Anton, "How Non-Being Haunts Being: On Possibilities, Morality, and Death Acceptance" (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2020)

04 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How Non-being Haunts Being reveals how the human world is not reducible to “what is.” Human life is an open expanse of “what was” and “what ...

The Politics of Online News in Cambodia

03 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode Astrid Norén-Nilsson of Lund University discusses her latest research about the Cambodian online news outlet Fresh News with Duncan...

Tara T. Green, "Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song" (Ohio State UP, 2018)

30 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

From ships and novels to Mardi Gras, water, and television, how does the legacy of the Middle Passage, the leg of the Atlantic through which African p...

Catherine E. McKinley, "The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Womanhood" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

29 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What does it mean to tie your cloth to that of another person, as in the Ghanaian tradition, or to be in full dress? How is fashion photography in a c...

John Ferris, "Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

28 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For more than a hundred years, Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, has played a central role in the conduct of British statecraft. But the ...

Jack Black, "Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy: A Psychoanalytic Exploration" (Routledge, 2021)

28 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Jack Black, Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy (Routledge 2021). In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically co...

Can Journalism Be Saved?: A Discussion with Nicholas Lemann

27 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There is no better person to start this journey than with journalist Nicholas Lemann, who has been observing the industry, also long-form journalism,...

Alfred L. Martin, Jr., "The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom" (Indiana UP, 2021)

27 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How do race and sexuality intersect in the American sitcom? In The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press...

Steven Capsuto, "Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV" (2020)

23 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Steven Capsuto's book Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV (2020) explores the fight for lesbian and gay visibility on 20th-century A...

Bernadette Barton, "The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture Is Ruining Our Society" (NYU Press, 2021)

23 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Bernadette Barton, Ph.D. exposes the double standard we attach to women’s sexuality in The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining...

Mathew Sweezey, "The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media" (Harvard Business Press, 2020)

22 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Mathew Sweezy about his new book The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media (Harvard...

Joel Waldfogel, "Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture" (Princeton UP, 2020)

21 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Digitization is reshaping creative industries. Old gatekeepers in music, publishing, television, movies, and other industries no longer play such an i...

Richard Jean So, "Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction" (Columbia UP, 2020)

16 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is the story of race in American fiction? In Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia University Pr...

Can We Fix Social Media?: A Discussion with Christopher A. Bail

15 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. We ...

Ralph Keyes, "The Hidden History of Coined Words" (Oxford UP, 2021)

15 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Successful word-coinages--those that stay in currency for a good long time--tend to conceal their beginnings. We take them at face value and rarely wh...

Christopher Thaiss, "Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century" (Broadview Press, 2019)

14 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Listen to this interview of Christopher Thaiss, author of Writing Science in the Twenty-First Century (Broadview Press 2019). We talk about the rese...

Joshua Gunn, "Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering" (U of Chicago Press, 2020)

14 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When Trump became president, much of the country was repelled by what they saw as the vulgar spectacle of his ascent, a perversion of the highest offi...

Maria San Filippo, "Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media" (Indiana UP, 2021)

13 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New dist...

Philip N. Howard, "Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives" (Yale UP, 2020)

12 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Technology is breaking politics - what can be done about it? Artificially intelligent "bot" accounts attack politicians and public figures on social m...

Michael Rosino, "Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and Media in the War on Drugs Debate" (Routledge, 2021)

09 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Since President Nixon coined the phrase, the "War on Drugs" has presented an important change in how people view and discuss criminal justice practice...

Danielle Fuentes Morgan, "Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the 21st Century" (U Illinois Press, 2020)

08 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The election of Barack Obama propelled the idea of a post-racial United States, or that the country had moved beyond race as a defining feature of soc...

Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)

06 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparallel...

Amanda Ann Klein, "Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV's Transition to Reality Programming" (Duke UP, 2021)

05 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV’s Transition to Reality Programming (Duke University Press, 2021), Dr. Amanda Ann Klein examines the ...

Caroline Ritter, "Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire" (UC Press, 2021)

02 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What role did culture play in the British Empire? In Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire Caroline Ritter, an Assistant ...

Joan Turner, "On Writtenness: The Cultural Politics of Academic Writing" (Bloomsbury, 2018)

31 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Listen to this interview of Joan Turner, author of On Writtenness: The Cultural Politics of Academic Writing (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). We talk abo...

D. A. Miller, "Hidden Hitchcock" (U Chicago Press, 2016)

31 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

After decades of criticism about perhaps the most famous director in history, it seems that nothing is left to be said. But maybe critics just haven’...

Laura Moretti, "Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

26 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publish...

John Durham Peters et al., "Action at a Distance" (Meson Press, 2020)

26 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Contemporary media leads us more than ever to an ‘acting at a distance,’ an acting entangled with the materiality of communication and the mediali...

Aaron Tugendhaft, "The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

25 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry....

K. Forkert et al, "How Media and Conflicts Make Migrants" (Manchester UP, 2020)

17 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Has 'migrant' become an unshakeable identity for some people? How does this happen and what role does the media play in classifying individuals as 'mi...

Democracy and Truth with Sophia Rosenfeld

16 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Democracy and Truth: A Short His...

Stephen Pihlaja, "Talk about Faith: How Debate and Conversation Shape Belief" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

16 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Religious people have a range of new media in which they can share their beliefs and reflect on what it means to believe, to act, and to be members of...

Katie Hindmarch-Watson, "Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital" (U California Press, 2020)

15 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How did telecommunications shape Victorian London? In Serving a Wired World London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capi...

Megan Eaton Robb, "Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India" (Oxford UP, 2020)

12 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is the relationship between print culture, religious identity, and formations of social consciousness in the modern period? In her brilliant new ...

Common Ground Scholar: A Discussion with Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

04 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Listen to this interview of Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, creators of the website newlearningonline.com and also professors at the College of Educat...

Teresa Berger, "@Worship: Liturgical Practices in Digital Worlds" (Routledge, 2018)

26 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Digital dualism, or a sharp division between online and offline activity as "virtual" or "real" has long been a feature of liturgical studies and disc...

Ronald J. Deibert, "Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society" (House of Anansi, 2020)

26 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ronald Deibert is a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto and the Director of The Citizen Lab, a public interest research organi...

Debashree Mukherjee, "Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City" (Columbia UP, 2020)

25 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In 1935, the writer Baburao Patel writes the following about Bombay’s film industry: “In India, with financing conditions still precarious, the pr...

Writing in Disciplines: A Discussion with Shyam Sharma

24 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook ...

Suyoung Son, "Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China" (Harvard UP, 2018)

24 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Suyoung Son’s book Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China (Harvard UP, 2018) examines the widesp...

Dean Blackburn, "Penguin Books and Political Change: Britain's Meritocratic Moment, 1937–1988" (Manchester UP, 2020)

24 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Founded in 1935 by a young publisher disillusioned with the class prejudices of the interwar publishing trade, Penguin Books set out to make good book...

Seema Yasmin, "Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)

22 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Can your zip code predict when you will die? Should you space out childhood vaccines? Does talcum powder cause cancer? Why do some doctors recommend e...

Nicole Perlroth, "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

18 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

For years, cybersecurity experts have debated whether cyber-weapons represent a destabilizing new military technology or merely the newest tool in the...

S. Carlsson and J. Leijonhufvud, "The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance" (Diversion Books, 2021)

18 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Fifteen years ago in Stockholm, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon had a big idea. The music industry was playing a desperate game of whack-a-mole with pi...

Hannah Marcus, "Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

16 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today we speak to Hannah Marcus, Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a...

Meenakshi Gigi Durham, "MeToo: How Rape Culture in the Media Impacts Us All" (Polity, 2021)

15 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We are joined today by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa in the writers’...

Nathaniel Greenberg, "How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Egypt and Tunisia" (Edinburgh UP, 2019)

12 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

On January 28 2011 WikiLeaks released documents from a cache of US State Department cables stolen the previous year. The Daily Telegraph in London p...

Wesley C. Robertson, "Scripting Japan: Orthography, Variation, and the Creation of Meaning in Written Japanese" (Routledge, 2020)

29 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine this book was written in Comic Sans. Would this choice impact your image of me as an author, despite causing no literal change to the content ...

Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder, "Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond" (Faber and Faber, 2021)

29 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How can we create a more equal media industry? In Access All Areas: The Diversity Manifesto for TV and Beyond, Marcus Ryder and Sir Lenny Henry, b...

Xenia Zeiler, "Digital Hinduism" (Routledge, 2019)

26 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Digital Religion does not simply refer to religion as it is carried out online, but more broadly studies how digital media interrelate with religious ...

R. A. Woldoff and R. C. Litchfield, "Digital Nomads: In Search of Freedom, Community, and Meaningful Work in the New Economy" (Oxford UP, 2021)

21 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In the space of a few weeks this spring, organizations around the world learned that many traditional, in-person jobs could, in fact, be performed rem...

Becky L. Schulthies, "Channeling Moroccanness: Language and the Media of Sociality" (Fordham UP, 2020)

20 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What does it mean to connect as a people through mass media? This book approaches that question by exploring how Moroccans engage communicative failur...

L. Ferlier and B. Miyamoto, "Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832" (Brill, 2020)

19 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832 (Brill, 2020) explores the printscape – the mental m...

On Writing Well for Trade: A Conversation with author and scholar Donna Freitas

07 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to br...

Jennifer Burek Pierce, "Narratives, Nerdfighters, and New Media" (U Iowa Press, 2020)

05 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Nerdfighteria started over a decade ago by brothers Hank and John Green who decided to provide literacy themed programming on their website and YouTub...

Charles R. Acland, "American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder" (Duke UP, 2020)

29 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Ben-Hur (1959), Jaws (1975), Avatar (2009), Wonder Woman (2017): the blockbuster movie has held a dominant position in American popular culture...

Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, "Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan" (U California Press, 2020)

29 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The name Cancún brings to mind tourism, resorts, beaches, sun, and fun. In her book, Stuck With Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yuc...

The Other Side of the Desk with a UP Editor: A Discussion with Kim Guinta

24 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to br...

Kim T. Gallon, "Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press" (U Illinois Press, 2020)

22 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Dr. Kim Gallon examine...

Richard Ovenden, "Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge" (Harvard UP, 2020)

18 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Living in an age awash with information can sometimes obscure its extraordinary fragility. Indeed, as Richard Ovenden demonstrates in Burning the Boo...

Sharon Marcus, "The Drama of Celebrity" (Princeton UP, 2020)

17 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sharon Marcus’s new book, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton UP, 2020), sets out to help us understand celebrity culture and how it has shifted and...

Waleed F. Mahdi, "Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood and Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation" (Syracuse UP, 2020)

15 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

It comes as little surprise that Hollywood films have traditionally stereotyped Arab Americans, but how are Arab Americans portrayed in Arab films, an...

Edward Wilson-Lee, "The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library" (Scribner, 2019)

11 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Edward Wilson-Lee's book A Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (Scr...

Marissa J. Moorman, "Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002" (Ohio UP, 2019)

10 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Marissa J. Moorman's book Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002 (Ohio University Press, 2019) narrates ...

Gemma Milne, "Smoke and Mirrors: How Hype Obscures the Future and How to See Past It" (Robinson, 2021)

10 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Bombastic headlines about science and technology are nothing new. To cut through the constant stream of information and misinformation on social media...

Leela Prasad, "The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India" (Cornell UP, 2020)

09 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Can a subject be sovereign in a hegemony? Can creativity be reined in by forces of empire? The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Co...

Scholarly Communications: A Discussion with Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of "Nature Communications"

07 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Listen to this interview of Elisa De Ranieri, Editor-in-Chief of Nature Communications. We talk about knowing the research you have done, but communi...

Catharine Abell, "Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis" (Oxford UP, 2020)

04 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2020), Catharine Abell draws our attention to the character of Emma Woodhouse. She ...

Leigh Thompson, "Negotiating the Sweet Spot: The Art of Leaving Nothing on the Table" (HarperCollins, 2020)

03 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Leigh Thompson is a Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. An acclaimed rese...

Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody, "Monstrous Women in Comics" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)

02 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In their new collection, Monstrous Women in Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody put toget...

Keith A. Livers, "Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

02 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Conspiracy theories prove to be popular and widely-spread. As a rule, we do not tend to take them seriously, but it would be wrong to suggest that aud...

D. G. Young, "Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States" (Oxford UP, 2019)

27 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) Dr. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young (s/h) about why liberals love satire and conservativ...

Travis Vogan, "ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television" (U California Press, 2018)

25 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Today we are joined by Travis Vogan, Associate Professor of Journalism and American Studies at the University of Iowa, and the author of ABC Sports: ...

Chris Richardson, "Batman and the Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture" (Routledge, 2020)

25 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender,...

Ani Maitra, "Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital" (Northwestern UP, 2020)

23 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The politics of identity have played center stage in many political debates in the last few years, and is often seen somewhat pejoratively as an epiph...

Shyam Sharma, "Writing Support for International Graduate Students" (Routledge, 2020)

20 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, author of Writing Support for International Graduate Students: Enhancing Transition and Success (Routledge...

Social Media, Grassroots Activism and Disinformation in Southeast Asia: A Discussion with Dr Aim Sinpeng and Dr Ross Tapsell

19 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Social media has become a crucial avenue for political discourse in Southeast Asia, given its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democ...

Emily J. H. Contois, "Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture" (UNC Press, 2020)

19 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture (UNC Press, 2020), Emily Contois argues that the figure of The...

Vanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood" (Duke UP, 2020)

18 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Lat...