New Books in Performing Arts
Episodes
David Womersley, "Thinking Through Shakespeare" (Princeton UP, 2026)
28 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson famously argued that Shakespeare is enduringly popular because he “is above all writers, at least above al...
Jes Battis, "It's Only Forever: Labyrinth" (ECW Press, 2026)
25 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Jes Battis' new book, It's Only Forever. Labyrinth (ECW Press, 2026) is a wild, intimate, and political deep dive into Jim Henson’s 1986 classic ...
Michael Lee Nirenberg, "Cinematic Immunity" (Feral House, 2026)
25 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The unbelievable insider stories of how they “got the shot,” Cinematic Immunity tells the story of New York City's movie industry from the crew ...
Laura Horak, "Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds" (U California Press, 2026)
23 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Since the 1990s, a largely underground upwelling of trans creativity has helped new trans identities, communities, and political movements come togeth...
Dybbuks, Golems, S. An-ski, and Jewish Legends in Times of Fear
18 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
S. An-ski’s play The Dybbuk, a story of possession set in a shtetl (think The Exorcist meets Fiddler on the Roof), is the foundation of modern J...
The Shawshank Redemption in China: An Interview with Matti Lehtonen
17 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How can an entirely foreign cast perform the American “The Shawshank Redemption” in the Chinese language across China? In this episode of the Nord...
Daniel Rachel, "This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich" (Akashic Books, 2026)
04 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last seven decades, some of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theater of the Third Reich. From Ke...
Danielle Bainbridge, "Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive" (NYU Press, 2026)
03 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive (NYU Press, 2026) is a bold and incisive reconsideration of the relationship...
John Kuhn, "Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
27 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s guest, John Kuhn, is the author of Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Pr...
Jewface: “Yiddish” Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley
16 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
With his fake beard, putty nose, and thick Yiddish accent, the “stage Jew” was once a common character in vaudeville, part of a genre that mock...
Jessica Clarke, "A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
13 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
"Roman theatre" is a term often used to describe the theatre of ancient Italy during the second and third century BCE. Plautus and Terence are referre...
Karen Schupp and Sherrie Barr eds., "Stories We Dance / Stories We Tell: Essays on Dance in Higher Education" (McFarland, 2025)
15 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Higher education continually mediates long standing traditions while seeking new ways of thinking, creating a quiet tension as institutions respond to...
Lynneth Miller Renberg, "Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)
14 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg pre...
Sourit Bhattacharya, "Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising" (Orient BlackSwan, 2024)
13 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising (Orient BlackSwan, 2024) by Sourit Bhattacharya introduces a new method of decolonial read...
Matti Friedman, "Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai" (Spiegel & Grau, 2022)
09 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on t...
Isaac Butler, "The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
08 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling towar...
Hilary French, "Ballroom: A People’s History of Dancing" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
07 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the early twentieth century, American ragtime and the Parisian tango fuelled a dancing craze in Britain. Public ballrooms were built throughout the...
Polina Dimova, "At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism" (Penn State UP, 2024)
06 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, an...
Jacqueline Riding, "Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London" (Profile Books, 2025)
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charl...
Luis Rechani Agrait, "My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts" (Swan Isle Press, 2025)
30 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts (Swan Isle Press, 2025) by Luis Rechani Agrait was translated into English by William Carlos Williams but not pub...
Luis Rechani Agrait, "My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts" (Swan Isle Press, 2025)
30 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts (Swan Isle Press, 2025) by Luis Rechani Agrait was translated into English by William Carlos Williams but not pub...
Mark Gallagher, "Cosmosexuals: Screen Acting, Stardom, and Male Sex Appeal" (U Texas Press, 2025)
30 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Cosmosexuals: Screen Acting, Stardom, and Male Sex Appeal (U Texas Press, 2025), Dr. Mark Gallagher presents an examination of male screen sex a...
163* The Drama of Celebrity with Sharon Marcus (JP)
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
As Oscar Season rolls around, Recall This Book looks back to John's 2019 discussion with Columbia University professor Sharon Marcus about The Drama ...
Justin Owen Rawlins, "Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance" (U Texas Press, 2024)
26 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, ...
Justin Owen Rawlins, "Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance" (U Texas Press, 2024)
26 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, ...
Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, "Kubrick: An Odyssey" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
24 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The definitive biography of the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, presenting the most in-depth portrait yet o...
Kellen Hoxworth, "Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance (Northwestern UP, 2024) Dr. Kellen Hoxworth presents a sweeping history of racialized performan...
Christopher Lynch, "Formulating Foster: Stephen C. Foster and the Creation of a National Musical Myth" (Oxford UP, 2025)
19 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen C. Foster (1826–1864) was a prolific song composer. A few of his minstrel tunes have become so enmeshed in American musical culture that the...
Leah Lowthorp, "Deep Cosmopolitanism: Kutiyattam, Dynamic Tradition, and Globalizing Heritage in Kerala, India" (Indiana UP, 2025)
14 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Deep Cosmopolitanism: Kutiyattam, Dynamic Tradition, and Globalizing Heritage in Kerala, India explores the extraordinary past and present of Kutiyat...
Matthew Kennedy, "On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide" (Oxford UP, 2024)
11 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the oceans of ink devoted to the monumental movie star/businesswoman/political activist Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (1932-2011), her beauty and not-s...
Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)
10 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How can cultural industries survive in the twenty-first century? In Opera Wars Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future Caitlin Vinc...
Anita Gonzalez, "Shipping Out: Race, Performance, and Labor at Sea" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
09 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Shipping Out: Race, Performance, and Labor at Sea (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Anita Gonzalez provides a rare perspective on performan...
Lesley Nicole Braun, "Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Today I spoke with Lesley Nicole Braun to talk about her new book on Congo's dancers. Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, relig...
Jason Isralowitz, "Nothing to Fear: Alfred Hitchcock and the Wrong Men" (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2023)
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock focused his lens on an issue that cuts to the heart of our criminal justice system: the risk of wrongful conviction. The res...
Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that B...
Susan McCready, "Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
02 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing on memory studies and theatrical history, Commemorative Acts: French Theatre and the Memory of the Great War (University of Toronto Press, ...
J. W. Rinzler and Lee Unkrich, "Stanley Kubrick's The Shining" (Taschen, 2023)
31 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1966 Stanley Kubrick told a friend that he wanted to make “the world’s scariest movie.” A decade later Stephen King’s The Shining landed on...
Agata Fijalkowski, "Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial" (Routledge, 2023)
31 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show...
Michael Newton, "It's a Wonderful Life" (British Film Institute, 2023)
30 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of the best-loved films of Classical Hollywood cinema, a story of despair and redemption in the aftermath...
Eric G. Wilson, "Point Blank" (British Film Institute, 2023)
29 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) has long been recognized as one of the seminal films of the sixties, with its revisionary mix of genres including ...
Sean Minogue, "Prodigals" (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025)
27 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sean Minogue about this play, Prodigals (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025). When a big-city dream...
Liberation & the Literature of the Women’s Movement with Bess Wohl and Honor Moore
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Wednesday, December 17—“The best play I’ve seen this season,” says New York Magazine’s Sara Holdren about Liberation, Bess Wohl’s moving...
Max Brzezinski, "Under Pressure: A Song by David Bowie and Queen" (Duke UP, 2025)
19 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1981, David Bowie and Queen both happened to be in Switzerland: They met and made "Under Pressure." Recorded on a lark, the song broke the path for...
Mark Deuze, "Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick" (Intellect Books, 2025)
14 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The media and creative industries thrive on passion, but that passion often comes at a cost. Behind the glamour of journalism, filmmaking, games, musi...
Jibola Fagbamiye and Conor McCreery, "Fela: Music Is the Weapon" (Amistad Press, 2025)
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A spectacular graphic novel about the life and times of the legendary Fela Kuti—the Pan-African frontman, multi-instrumentalist, sociopolitical powe...
Grace Kessler Overbeke, "First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll" (NYU Press, 2024)
05 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Before Hacks and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, there was the comedienne who started it all. First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll...
Elliott Kalan, "Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
04 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense, Elliott Kalan (U Chicago Press, 2025) explains that it’s easier to write jokes when you ...
Sarah F. Derbew, "Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Derbew’s new book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2022) asks how should articulations of blackness from the fifth ce...
Stefania Marghitu, "Teen TV" (Routledge, 2021)
30 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Stefania Marghitu's Teen TV (Routledge, 2021)explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ...
Chris Yogerst, "The Warner Brothers" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)
28 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formati...
Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
24 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edg...
Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of S...
Christina Lane, "Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock" (Chicago Review Press, 2020)
16 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include t...
Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)
16 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
“We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neig...
Lucy Caplan, "Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera" (Harvard UP, 2025)
15 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Recently, musicologists and others have started writing about Black participation in opera. Lucy Caplan’s Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists T...
Strings of Identity: The Horse-Head Fiddle and Mongolian Identity in China (with Ying Song)
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we trace how the horse-head fiddle has evolved in the People’s Republic of China — from a traditional steppe instrument to a cult...
Jessica Doyle and Jordan Ferguson, "Dance Dance Revolution" (Boss Fight Books, 2025)
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On September 26, 1998, a video game made its debut in Japanese arcades. It was over seven feet tall and weighed just over 900 pounds. It had no charac...
Janice Ross "The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design" (Oxford UP, 2025)
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design (Oxford UP, 2025) explores ...
A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. S...
Julia Fawcett, "Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
25 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In September 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery on Pudding Lane grew until it had destroyed four-fifths of central London. The rebuilding efforts that f...
Julia Fawcett, "Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
25 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In September 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery on Pudding Lane grew until it had destroyed four-fifths of central London. The rebuilding efforts that f...
Delia Casadei, "Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound" (U California Press, 2024)
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound (University of California Press, 2024) explores the forgotten history of laughter, fro...
Peter C. Zimmerman, "The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
20 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it...
Bradley Morgan, "U2: Until the End of the World" (Weldon Owen, 2025)
19 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bradley Morgan’s U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025) celebrates fifty years of U2 with a career-spanning retrospective featuring m...
Whitney Laemmli on Making Movement Modern
13 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Whitney Laemmli, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pra...
Christa Anne Bentley et al, eds., "Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans" (Routledge, 2025)
27 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Only 35 years old, Taylor Swift has already had a long career and is a pop culture icon. Her music and career are reported on by the world’s press, ...
Samer Al-Saber, "A Movement's Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theater" (Stanford UP, 2025)
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Starting in the 1970s, Palestinian theater flourished as part of a Palestinian cultural spring. In the absence of local radio, television, and uncenso...
Mary Beth Willard, "Why It's Ok to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists" (Routledge, 2021)
22 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The #metoo movement has forced many fans to consider what they should do when they learn that a beloved artist has acted immorally. One natural though...
Cary Baker, "Down On The Corner: Adventures in Busking & Street Music" (Jawbone Press, 2025)
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This is the story of music performed on the streets, in subways, in parks, in schoolyards, on the back of flatbed trucks, and beyond, from the 1920s ...
Leon J. Hilton, "Counter-Cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What if we embraced neurodivergent ways of being not as deviations to be corrected but as vital ways of inhabiting the world? What new realities might...
Diana Souhami, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" (Head of Zeus Book, 2020)
31 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This ...
Kathleen Wilson, "Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? In Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces...
Nan Z. Da, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)
21 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors w...
Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)
17 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Roll...
Inna Faliks, "Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage" (Backbeat Books, 2023)
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker) Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks has established herself as one of the most communicative, and poetic...
"Swiz" (Akashic Books, 2025)
11 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Swiz (Akashic Books, 2025). Swiz was a Washington DC hardcore punk band that existed from April of 1987 through August of 1990, cutting their teeth...
Julia Sneeringer, "A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69" (Bloomsbury, 2018)
03 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Beatles’ sojourn in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg during the early 1960s is part of music legend. As Julia Sneeringer reveals in A Social Hi...
Sarah E. K. Smith, "Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America" (UBC Press, 2025)
02 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
hat is the relationship between culture and trade? In Trading on Art: Cultural Diplomacy and Free Trade in North America Sarah E. K. Smith, an Asso...
Martin Shuster, "Critical Theory: The Basics" (Routledge, 2024)
01 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why does critical theory matter today? In Critical Theory: The Basics (Routledge, 2024), Martin Shuster, a Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac...
Jess Reia, "Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities" (Intellect, 2025)
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our ...
Bruce Isaacs, "The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators" (Oxford UP, 2020)
27 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators (Oxford University Press) is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and...
Charlotte Bentley, "New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859" (U of Chicago Press, 2022)
25 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jazz is the music that many people associate with New Orleans. But before there was jazz in New Orleans there was opera. It was the only city in the U...
Lost Women of Disco
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Women have been central to the evolution of dance music culture since its earliest days, yet their contributions have often been overlooked. From Rég...
Kelefa Sanneh, "Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres" (Penguin, 2021)
20 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kelefa Sanneh was born in England, and lived in Ghana and Scotland before moving with his parents to the United States in the early 1980s. He was a po...
Triauna Carey, "The Revolution Will Be Spotified: Music As a Rhetorical Mode of Resistance" (Lexington Books, 2024)
18 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Revolution Will Be Spotified: Music As a Rhetorical Mode of Resistance (Lexington Books, 2024) investigates the rhetorical strategies present in...
Neil Gregor, "The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
12 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new history of how the musical worlds of German towns and cities were transformed during the Nazi era. In the years after the Nazis came to power i...
Nan Z. Da, "The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear" (Princeton UP, 2025)
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters' professions of love, but portions it ou...
Love Saves the Day: On the 1970s New York Club Scene
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Loft was a dance party series organized by DJ David Mancuso in his Manhattan warehouse apartment at 647 Broadway from Valentine’s Day 1970 to Ju...
S1.E2. Wayne County at the Trucks (1974)
02 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the second episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with Tony Zanetta. In the late 1960s, Zanetta worked in Off-Off-Broadway theater ...
Cheryl Thompson, "Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict and Freedom, 1812-1895" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025)
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) traces the origins o...
John DeVore, "Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway" (Applause, 2024)
28 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with John Devore about his phenomenal memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway (Applaus...
Shayna M. Silverstein, "Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria" (Wesleyan UP, 2024)
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A vivid and intricate study of dance music traditions that reveals the many contradictions of being Syrian in the 21st century Dabke, one of Syria...
Maya J. Berry, "Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons" (Duke UP, 2025)
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons (Duke University Press, 2025), anthropologist and dancer Maya J. Berr...
Amin Ghaziani, "Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution" (Princeton UP, 2024)
21 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this exhilarating journey into underground parties, pulsating with life and limitless possibility, acclaimed author Amin Ghaziani unveils the unexp...
Frederick Reece, "Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon" (Oxford University Press, 2025)
17 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We all know about art forgeries, but why write fake classical music? In Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon (Oxford U...
Leah Lax, "Not From Here: the Song of America" (Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie, 2024)
17 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When Leah Lax was asked to write an opera to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to accounts of upheaval, migration, an...
Pamela Karimi, "Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran" (Leuven University Press, 2024)
14 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran offers an insightful look at the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran, sparked by t...
John Trafton, "Movie-Made Los Angeles" (Wayne State UP, 2023)
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Los Angeles was a cinematic city long before the rise of Hollywood. By the dawn of the twentieth century, photography, painting, and tourist promotion...
antonio c. cuyler, "Achieving Creative Justice in the U.S. Creative Sector" (Routledge, 2025)
10 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can cultural organisations better support diversity? In Achieving Creative Justice in the U.S. Creative Sector antonio c. cuyler, Professor of M...
Gwynne Kuhner Brown, "William L. Dawson" (University of Illinois Press, 2024)
08 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
William L. Dawson (University of Illinois Press, 2024) by Gwynne Kuhner Brown is a biography of the Black American composer, conductor and pedagogue....