The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico. It is a destination boasting the “happiest Carnival in the world,” nightly live music, and public dancing. It is also where Blackness is an integral and celebrated part of local culture and history, but not of the individual self. In Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz (University of California Press, 2025), anthropologist Karma F. Frierson follows Veracruzanos as they reckon with the Afro-Caribbean roots of their distinctive history, traditions, and culture. As residents learn to be more jarocho, or more local to Veracruz, Frierson examines how people both internalize and externalize the centrality of Blackness in their regional identity. Frierson provocatively asks readers to consider a manifestation of Mexican Blackness unconcerned with self-identification as Black in favor of the active pursuit and cultivation of a collective and regionalized Blackness. Karma F. Frierson is Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

In Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street (U California Press, 2022) Megan Tobias Neely, a former hedge fund worker takes an ethnographic approach to hedge funds. Manager? A greedy fraudster, a visionary entrepreneur, a wolf of Wall Street? She gives readers an insider perspective on the phenomenon. Facing an unpredictable and risky stock market, hedge fund workers work long hours and build tight-knit networks with people who look and behave like them. Neely shows how the system of elite power and privilege sustains and builds over time as the beneficiaries concentrate their resources.

Ministries of Song: Women’s Voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity (U California Press, 2025) is an open access tour-de-force study of the power of women's liturgical singing in late antique Syriac Christianity. Extending women's religious participation beyond the familiar roles of female saints and nobles, Syriac churches cultivated a flourishing but often-overlooked tradition of women's sacred song. Susan Ashbrook Harvey brings this music to life as she uncovers the ways these now-nameless women performed a boldly sung teaching ministry and invited congregations to respond aloud. By exploring their ritual agency, Harvey demonstrates how these choirs helped to shape the formative ethical and moral ideals of their congregations and communities. Women's voices, both real and imagined, enriched the ritual and devotional lives of Syriac Christians daily and weekly, on ecclesial and civic special occasions, in sorrow or joy, with authoritative theological significance and social and political resonance. Arguing for the importance of liturgy as social history, Harvey shows us how and why women's voices mattered for ancient Syriac Christianity and why they matter still. New books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review Susan Ashbrook Harvey is Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion Michael Motia teaches Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

Dr. Andrea Flores’ most recent book, The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America (University of California Press, 2021), is a detailed account of how immigrant youth in Nashville, Tennessee negotiated the stakes of academic achievement by reproducing terms of belonging while at the same time recasting what it means to belong in the United States. By focusing on a nonprofit college access program for Latino youth from which the title of the book is derived, Flores argues that Succeeders’ educational achievements were viewed “as positive moral proof against deficit constructions of Latinos while also maintaining a link to educación’s [emphasis in original] personal, cultural, and familial value” (16). The hybridity of assigning moral value to book learning while also hinging their striving to familial networks is what Flores believes to be critical to the Succeeders’ perception of self. By offering a radically different route to belonging through the vehicle of family and care, the Succeeders hoped to earn not just their own national membership, but also the membership of those near and dear. Flores conducted ethnographic research for twelve months while also serving as a volunteer for the Succeeders program of southern Nashville across four campuses for the academic year 2012 - 2013. She observed effective communication skits, field trips, organizational meetings, community service activities, musical performances, athletic games, scholarship selection committees, and graduation ceremonies to best understand the lived experiences of Succeeders within and outside of their educational institutions. Flores also conducted thirty-one semistructured interviews with Succeeders whose families were primarily from Mexican and Central America. Further, half of the interviews included undocumented youth, and students from all levels of academic achievement were selected. Strategic selecting of Succeeders allowed Flores to examine how students across a variety of academic preparations and immigrant backgrounds perceived themselves within larger conceptions of Latindidad and educational achievement. Interviews with the program’s leaders, teachers, and admissions officers revealed the internal dialogues of those most tasked with the Succeeders’ success. A robust textual archive in the form of college admissions handouts, college entrance essays, and Succeeders curricular materials were collected by the author. These mixed methods allowed Flores to provide detailed and rich accounts of how Latino youth navigated the college application process, the end of high school, and their personal lives. Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz

I’m excited to talk to Carlo Rotella today. Carlo is Professor of English at Boston College. His books include The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); and October Cities (University of California Press, 1998). He has written for the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and Harper's. Today, we discuss Carlo’s new book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (University of California Press, 2025). The book does two things. It directly reports what happened in a class Carlo taught in the spring of 2020. Carlo interviews students in the semesters after the class ended, learning what students were going through while they were taking your class, and also what stood out in their memories years later. The second thing the book does is offer hands-on lessons from a life of teaching. Throughout the book, Carlo discusses how to deal with a class that hates the novel that you assigned, how to reach out to a student who falls silent, and how to introduce the multitude of ways of being enthusiastic about literature to skeptical students.

By the end of the twentieth century, the tomato—indigenous to the Americas—had become Egypt's top horticultural crop and a staple of Egyptian cuisine. The tomato brought together domestic consumers, cookbook readers, and home cooks through a shared culinary culture that sometimes transcended differences of class, region, gender, and ethnicity—and sometimes reinforced them. In Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato (U California Press, 2025), Dr. Anny Gaul shows how Egyptians' embrace of the tomato and the emergence of Egypt's modern national identity were both driven by the modernization of the country's food system. Drawing from cookbooks, archival materials, oral histories, and vernacular culture, Dr. Gaul follows this commonplace food into the realms of domestic policy and labor through the hands of Egypt's overwhelmingly female home cooks. As they wrote recipes and cooked meals, these women forged key aspects of public culture that defined how Egyptians recognized themselves and one another as Egyptian. 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.

Drag: A British History (University of California Press, 2023) is a groundbreaking study of the sustained popularity and changing forms of male drag performance in modern Britain. With this book, Jacob Bloomfield provides fresh perspectives on drag and recovers previously neglected episodes in the history of the art form. Despite its transgressive associations, drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture--drag artists have consistently asserted themselves as some of the most renowned and significant entertainers of their day. As Bloomfield demonstrates, drag was also at the center of public discussions around gender and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Victorian sex scandals to the "permissive society" of the 1960s. This compelling new history demythologizes drag, stressing its ordinariness while affirming its important place in British cultural heritage. Jacob Bloomfield is a Zukunftskolleg Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Konstanz and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent. His research is situated primarily in the fields of cultural history, the history of sexuality, and gender history. Jacob is the author of Drag: A British History (2023). His second monograph will be about the historical reception to, and cultural impact of, musician Little Richard. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries.

Activists utilize digital technologies to communicate, coordinate, and organize for social change. In Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist Imaginaries and the Politics of Digital Technologies (U California Press, 2024) Elisabetta Ferrari examines both the politics of Silicon Valley's technological imaginary and how leftist activists appropriate, negotiate, and challenge Silicon Valley's vision of technology. Researching movements in Italy, Hungary, and the United States, Ferrari shows how activists construct their own activist technological imaginaries that reflect and shape the politics of social movement how activists think about their political possibilities. Ultimately, Ferrari centers the political and imaginative work that activists need to perform in order to navigate the politics of mainstream digital technologies. 

The aging of America will reshape how we live and will transform nearly every aspect of contemporary society. Renowned life course sociologist Deborah Carr provides a lively, nuanced, and timely portrait of aging in the United States. The US population is older than ever before, raising new challenges for families, caregivers, health care systems, and social programs like Social Security and Medicare. Organized in seven chapters, Aging in America (U California Press, 2023) covers these topics: the history of aging and the development of theoretical approaches how cultural changes shape our views on aging the demographic characteristics of older adults today older adults' family lives and social relationships the health of older adults and social disparities in who gets sick how public policies affect the well-being of older adults and their families how baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials will experience old age Drawing on state-of-the-art data, current events, and pop culture, this portrait of an aging population challenges outdated myths and vividly shows how future cohorts of older adults will differ from the generations before them. Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author based in Cambridge, England.

In 1924, the Al-A‘waj, also known as the Crooked, set sail from Kuwait on a trading journey around the Persian Gulf, through the Strait of Hormuz, to Western India and, eventually, back to the Gulf. Dhows had sailed this route for centuries—and would continue to sail it for a few more decades still. Fahad Ahmad Bishara talks about this specific 1924 journey in his book Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (U California Press, 2025). As the Crooked travels the waters of the Indian Ocean, Fahad covers topics like international law, the importance of debt, piracy, how information spread from port to port, and the Arab diaspora (among many other topics) Fahad is Associate Professor of History and Rouhollah Ramazani Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He is also the author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Monsoon Voyagers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

At a time when college students and their parents often question the "return on investment" from humanities courses, accomplished feature writer and English professor Carlo Rotella invites us into the minds of a group of skeptical first-year students who are ultimately transformed by a required literature class. In What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (University of California Press, 2025) he follows thirty-three students through his class to provide an intimate look at teaching and learning from their perspectives as well as his own. The students' reluctance--"How does this get me a job?"--transforms into insight as they wrestle with challenging books, share ideas, discover how to think critically, and form a community. In all these ways, they learn how to extract meaning from the world around them, an essential life skill. Confronting skeptics of higher education, this compassionate and inspiring book reveals the truth of what students actually experience in college. Carlo Rotella is Professor of English at Boston College. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

How are influencers changing the arts? In Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture (U California Press, 2025) Sophie Bishop, an Associate Professor in the University of Leeds’ School of Media and Communication analyses the lives of artists and influencers to understand the working and living conditions shaping modern culture. The book draws a comparison between the two sets of workers, showing how artists are having to engage with influencer’s techniques to be successful in the online economy, and how both groups struggle with the inequalities of the platform economy. Rich with fascinating case studies, alongside a range of theoretical insights that can be applied across many other aspects of the modern world, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in art, culture and contemporary social life.

How do you know the nature of another person: who she is, or what she is capable of? In four exploratory essays, a seasoned historian examines the mechanisms by which ancient people came to have knowledge—not of the world and its myriad processes but about something more intimate, namely the individuals they encountered in close quarters, those they knew in everyday life. Tracing previously unfathomed structures beneath the surface of late ancient Christianity, Ellen Muehlberger reveals surprising insights about the ancient world and, by extension, the modern. Things Unseen holds treasures for scholars of early Christian studies, for historians in general, and for all those who wonder about how we know what we seem to know. The book is open access. Ellen Muehlberger is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. You can find many of the other essays mentioned in the show here. She is also the editor of The Journal of Early Christian Studies. Michael Motia teaches in the department of Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

Explores forgotten solidarity with African liberation struggles through the life of Black Chicagoan Prexy Nesbitt. For many civil rights activists, the Vietnam War brought the dangers of US imperialism and the global nature of antiracist struggle into sharp relief. Martha Biondi tells the story of one such group of activists who built an internationalist movement in Chicago committed to liberation everywhere but especially to ending colonialism and apartheid in Africa. Among their leaders was Prexy Nesbitt. Steeped from an early age in stories of Garveyism and labor militancy, Nesbitt was powerfully influenced by his encounters with the exiled African radicals he met in Dar es Salaam, London, and across the United States. Operating domestically and abroad, Nesbitt's cohort worked closely with opponents of Portuguese and white minority rule in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. Rather than promoting a US conception of Black self-determination, they took ideas from African anticolonial leaders and injected them into US foreign policy debates. The biography of a man but even more so of a movement, We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation (U California Press, 2025) reveals the underappreciated influence of a transformative Black solidarity project.

How do we know through atmospheres? How can being affected by an atmosphere give rise to knowledge? What role does somatic, nonverbal knowledge play in how we belong to places? Atmospheric Knowledge takes up these questions through detailed analyses of practices that generate atmospheres and in which knowledge emerges through visceral intermingling with atmospheres. From combined musicological and anthropological perspectives, Birgit Abels and Patrick Eisenlohr investigate atmospheres as a compelling alternative to better-known analytics of affect by way of performative and sonic practices across a range of ethnographic settings. With particular focus on oceanic relations and sonic affectedness, Atmospheric Knowledge centers the rich affordances of sonic connections for knowing our environments. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants utilized the technologies of colonial capitalism — banks, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and more — to transform their own regional bazaar economy. In the process, they remade the Gulf itself. Drawing on the Crooked's first-person logbooks, along with letters, notes, and business accounts from a range of port cities, Monsoon Voyagers narrates the still-untold connected histories of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Gulf's past, it suggests, played out across the sea as much as it did the land. Monsoon Voyagers doesn’t just tell a vivid, imaginative narrative—it teaches. Each port-of-call chapter can work as a stand-alone module. And the brief “Inscription” interludes double as turn-key primary-source labs—perfect for document analysis, quick mapping, and mini-quant work with weights, measures, and credit instruments. It invites undergraduates into a connected oceanic world and the big questions of world history, while graduate students get a method—how to read vernacular archives across scales and languages to design their own transregional, archive-driven projects. A quick heads-up: Traditional local musical interludes (see below for credits and links) will punctuate our voyage as chapter markers you can use to pause and reflect—as we sail from Kuwait to the Shatt al-Arab, then out across the Gulf to Oman, Karachi, Gujarat, Bombay, and the Malabar coast. We’ll return via Muscat and Bahrain, dropping anchor once more in Kuwait. Music Credits and Links: Prologue: The Logbook1. KuwaitInscription: Debts2. The Shatt Al-ʿArabInscription: Freightage3. The GulfInscription: Passage4. The Sea of OmanInscription: Guides5. Karachi to KathiawarInscription: Letters6. BombayInscription: Transfers7. MalabarInscription: Conversions8. CrossingsInscription: Maps9. MuscatInscription: Poems10. BahrainInscription: Accounts11. ReturnsEpilogue: Triumph and Loss

Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination (University of California Press, 2025) by Dr. Jennifer Barry confronts the violent ideological frameworks underpinning the early Christian imagination, arguing that gender-based violence is not peripheral but is fundamental to understanding early Christian history. By analyzing hagiographical and doctrinal writings, Dr. Barry reveals how male authors used portrayals of feminized suffering to shape ideals of sanctity and power, exploiting themes of domestic abuse, martyrdom, and sexualized violence to reinforce their visions of piety. The study first traces the roots of gendered violence within the Greco-Roman and early Christian imagination, and then explores the disturbing role of male fantasies and dreams in hagiographical traditions. Dr. Barry draws on womanist scholarship and engages with trauma studies and feminist horror theory in order to challenge traditional readings of Christian texts, offering new perspectives for understanding how narratives of violence continue to shape contemporary interpretations of gender and power. 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.

The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century's history of war, destruction, and cruelty. This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project--uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world's largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany's machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak's film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout. Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak's and Agfa's global empires, Alice Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling, Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today. Alice Lovejoy is author of the award-winning Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military. A former editor at Film Comment, she is Professor of film and media studies at the University of Minnesota. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

Food consumers are demanding a healthier and more sustainable food system. Yet labor is rarely part of the discussion. In Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain (U California Press, 2025), Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa Mares chronicle labor across the food chain, connecting the entire food system--from fields to stores, restaurants, home kitchens, and even garbage dumps. Using a political economy framework, the authors argue that improving labor standards and building solidarity among frontline workers across sectors is necessary for creating a more just food system. What would it take, they ask, to move toward a food system that is devoid of human exploitation? Combining insights from food systems and labor justice scholarship with actionable recommendations for policy makers, the book is a call to action for labor activists, food studies students and scholars, and anyone interested in food justice.

Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound (University of California Press, 2024) explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter re-emerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy-era rise of prerecorded laugh tracks, Casadei convincingly demonstrates how laughter was central to the twentieth century’s development of the very category of sound as not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible, and contagious. A free e-book version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit here to learn more.​ Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University nathan.smith@yale.edu