New Books in British Studies

By Marshall PoeSociety & Culture History

New Books in British Studies episodes

August 03 Elizabeth Darling, "Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–32" (Lund Humphries, 2026)
Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–1932
(Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth Darling is about the
architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s,
examining the buildings which the BBC occupied in its founding decades,
with a particular focus on Broadcasting House in London. It argues that
these environments were as constitutive of the Corporation’s identity as
the programmes and people that they housed. Borrowing from the
architectural writer Christopher Hussey’s characterisation of
Broadcasting House as a ‘palace of the ether’ Dr. Darling asks how the
immaterial medium of the broadcast was given material and spatial form
by the BBC, and the engineers, architects and designers whom they commissioned.
The
book traces the development of the BBC both technologically and
organisationally, and the changing demands it had of the spaces which
accommodated it. It shows how associational networks and personal
affiliations affected who was commissioned to work on what became
Broadcasting House and offers a detailed account of the work of Val
Myer, who designed the exterior and shell of the new building, and the
team of architects who designed the studio interiors (Serge Chermayeff,
Wells Coates, Edward Maufe, Raymond McGrath and Dorothy Warren). In
documenting the design of Broadcasting House, and the responses to it, Palace of the Ether offers new insights into British architectural culture at a pivotal moment in the profession’s history.
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.
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1 hr 2 min
July 31 Nabi Sahak, "Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
In
this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Nabi Sahak about his
book, Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).
Anglo-Afghan
Power and Politics revisits one of the most contested borders in the
modern world. The roughly 2,640-kilometre line drawn in 1893 by Mortimer
Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman
Khan, which today divides Pashtun communities between Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Sahak's central argument is that the historical purpose of the
Durand Line has never been settled: was it a temporary
sphere-of-influence arrangement, a frontier meant to manage dissent, or a
genuine international border? The book contends that answering this
question by using long-neglected Afghan-language sources alongside the
familiar British colonial record. Anchored chronologically in the period
from Abdur Rahman
Khan's rise to Afghan independence in 1919, with earlier and later
chapters extending the frame back to 1761 and forward to 1947, the book
draws on original correspondence between the Afghan Amir and British
viceroys, the writings of Afghan historians such as Ghubar, Kakar, and
Habibi, the accounts of colonial officials like Holdich and Caroe, and a
set of original interviews with contemporary Afghan and Pakistani
scholars and politicians. What distinguishes the book is its explicit
reframing of the dispute as a matter of missing perspective. Sahak
argues that decades of scholarship on the Durand Line have been built
almost entirely
on British and Pakistani positions, leaving the Afghan and Pashtun view
including the lived experience of communities split by the line is
largely absent
from the international debate. Writing partly from personal history as
someone who grew up in Kabul during the Soviet occupation and civil war,
Sahak situates the technical and diplomatic history of the boundary
within its human cost. The author treats
the line not only as a nineteenth-century colonial artefact but as an
unresolved question still shaping Afghanistan-Pakistan relations,
Pashtun identity, and regional security today.
Qaseem
Ahmadzai holds a master's degree in intellectual history from Södertörn
University, Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory,
historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular
attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persephone worlds.
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28 min
July 28 Meredith Gamer, "City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London" (Yale UP, 2026)
City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London (Yale UP, 2026) uncovers the complex and often unexpected connections between eighteenth-century London’s sites of punishment and its spaces of art-making, instruction, and display. Drawing together a wide range of images, objects, and texts – from popular woodcuts and anatomical sculptures to moral tracts and dictionaries of slang – it offers new readings of works by major artists, such as William Hogarth, Johan Zoffany, and Joseph Wright of Derby, and shines a light on others that traditional accounts of the period have overlooked or ignored. In doing so, this book shows how state violence shaped the art and visual culture of this era, whose legacies persist to this day.
Kelsey Brosnan is an art historian specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. Her book on the still-life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster was published by Lund Humphries and Getty Publications in 2026. [email protected]
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1 hr 8 min
July 27 Claire Hubbard-Hall, "Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence" (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024)
Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence - yet their contributions have been all but written out of history. Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, leading historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life in Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024).
From encoding orders and decrypting enemy messages to penning propaganda and infiltrating organisations, the women of British intelligence played a pivotal role in both the First and Second World Wars. Prepare to meet the true custodians of Britain's military secrets, from Kathleen Pettigrew, personal assistant to the Chief of MI6 Stewart Menzies, who late in life declared 'I was Miss Moneypenny, but with more power', to Jane Archer, the very first female MI5 officer who raised suspicions about the Soviet spy Kim Philby long before he was officially unmasked and Winifred Spink, the first female officer ever sent to Russia in 1916. In Her Secret Service, Hubbard-Hall rescues these silenced voices and those of many other fascinating women from obscurity to provide a definitive account of women's contributions to the history of the intelligence services.
The book, now in paperback, includes a postscript based on a new treasure trove of documents.
Her Secret Service won the 2025 Dr Polly Corrigan Book prize. The Prize aims to recognise scholarship within the realm of intelligence and security, written by female scholars and/or about women. It encourages scholars to go beyond traditional lines of inquiry and explore how women contributed to and participated in the making of the ‘Secret World’.
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1 hr 20 min
July 27 Matthew Ritger, "Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
Today’s guest, Matthew Ritger, is the author of Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026). This book delves into the archival records of Bridewell, Europe’s first house of correction, which was overseen by the humanist reformer Richard Grafton. It makes the case that the Bridewell prison and workhouse were central to the history of humanism in ways that both challenge idealized notions of European humanism and illustrate its commitments to civic and Christian reform. The book explores Bridewell’s mission to discipline the poor and the “idle” through hard labor, vocational training, and basic education, while also exposing its coercive and exploitative practices, which included whippings, forced labor, and the infliction of fear.
Houses of Correction also explores how Bridewell contributed to a broader humanist culture of correction, which united textual methods with practical forms of knowledge, and which extended to rhetorical and textual forms, as well as literary productions. The book’s five chapters connect the history and influence of Bridewell to a range of literary texts, including Thomas More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest, and Milton’s Of Educationand Samson Agonistes.
Through its interrogation of the logic of carceral humanism, Houses of Correction demonstrates the crucial role that Bridewell played in cultivating a culture of correction that pervaded humanist education, textual practices, and literary representations.
Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance.
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51 min
July 26 Leah Pope Parker, "Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
From disability metaphors to narratives structured around bodies presented as aberrant, early medieval English thoughtworlds conveyed the promise of resurrection and the hope of salvation through crip and disabled bodies. Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature (U Michigan Press, 2025) argues that early medieval Christian eschatology, as manifested in Old English literary texts, was a crip eschatology: a theology of the afterlife that relied upon disabled bodies and concepts related to disability in order to convey promises of resurrection and salvation. In addition to demonstrating how literature manifested theological approaches to the afterlife, Leah Pope Parker articulates the ways of thinking about bodies and disability that were available to ordinary early medieval people, many of whom experienced their bodies in ways that resonate with what we call disability today, but who rarely appear in the historical record.
By analyzing Old English texts, including Alfredian translations, Ælfric's saints' lives, and poetry from the Exeter and Vercelli Books, Parker introduces novel ways of characterizing disability's effects in literature. "Spiritual prosthesis" reveals rhetorical, narrative, and theological reliance upon disability to convey the promise of a Christian afterlife. "Systems of aberrance" emerge as a result, in which bodies marked as deviant--including disabled, monstrous, heroic, saintly, and dead bodies--form a network of embodiments that reinforce the narratives they inhabit and that of Christian salvation history. Locating crip eschatology in early medieval literature, Light of the Everlasting Life rewrites standard histories of disability, of the body, and of medieval Christian eschatology.
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35 min
July 26 Patrick Nunn, "Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe" (Reaktion, 2026)
What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and
sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe (Reaktion Books, 2026) by Professor Patrick Nunn at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, showing how they preserve memories of dramatic environmental change—floods, land loss and shifting shorelines—carried forward through oral storytelling for generations. Drawing on cutting-edge geological and archaeological research, this book recasts these tales not as fantasy, but as historical testimony grounded in lived experience. With clarity and insight, it also brings to life the tellers and collectors of these stories, tracing how oral knowledge endured even as literacy spread. A compelling invitation to listen again to old stories, and to hear what the land and sea remember.
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.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

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51 min
July 25 Mitra Sharafi, "Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia" (Cornell UP, 2026)
Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia
(Cornell University Press, 2026) uncovers colonial South Asia's
critical role in the development of forensic science. Around 1900, the
government of British India created a web of institutions for the
scientific detection of crime. Driven by anxieties about "native
mendacity," newly minted forensic analysts focused on uncovering faked
evidence planted by South Asians. These experts, joining toxicologists
known as "chemical examiners," were supposed to extract objective,
scientific truth in the service of British justice. But in trying to
counteract the presumed tendency of colonized peoples to lie, the system
enabled widespread misconduct by state experts, increasing the risk of
wrongful convictions of South Asian defendants. Through scrupulously
documented legal cases, Mitra Sharafi reveals that colonial dynamics put
special pressure on the relationship between truth and justice.
Examining falsity on both sides of the law through the use of testing to
(mis)identify poisons, blood, and spermatozoa, as well as debates over
adversarialism and inquisitorialism in the colonial courtroom, Fear of
the False explores advances in forensic science and shortcuts in
criminal procedure against the backdrop of colonial mistrust. Thanks
to generous funding from the University of Wisconsin Law School, the
ebook editions of this book are available as open access volumes through
the Cornell Open initiative.
Mitra Sharafi
is a legal historian whose research focuses on South Asia. She is the
Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin-Madison and
currently serves as the president of the American Society for Legal
History. She has been the host of the South Asian Legal History Resources website since 2010.
Saumya Dadoo is a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS).
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53 min
July 25 Elisabeth van Houts, "Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English" (Yale UP, 2026)
Born in 1102, Empress Matilda combined the blood of two dynasties: the house of Wessex and their conquerors, the dukes of Normandy. As a widowed German empress, she was named as heir successor by her father, Henry I. But, after his death in 1135, Matilda’s place on the English throne was usurped by her cousin, Stephen of Blois. Civil war followed, and she ruled the south-west of England in opposition.
In Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English (Yale University Press, 2026), Professor Elisabeth van Houts explores the remarkable life of medieval England’s only queen regnant. Van Houts examines female rulership in the Middle Ages, from Matilda’s relationships with her husbands, to her self-identification as granddaughter of William the Conqueror. Matilda used her persuasiveness effectively with the men who surrounded her, including her father, husbands, half-brothers and cousins.
This is a fascinating account, which reveals Matilda to be an assertive, if on occasion disappointed, woman who made the best of her position with intelligence and stamina.
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.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

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1 hr 1 min
July 23 Eamonn Gearon, "The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit" (Hurst, 2026)
Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalized work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War.
But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region as Britain fought the Ottoman Empire for control of the Middle East. Chastened by their intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara, the British tried to do something unthinkable: Actually learn how local communities operated, and ensure that propaganda was culturally authentic.
It’s the subject of The Arab Bureau: The Story of Britain's Most Ingenious Intelligence Unit (Hurst, 2026), a new book from Eamonn Gearon which he calls the first in-depth investigation into what this intelligence agency did.
Eamonn is a global historian, specialising in the Middle East and North Africa and the history of intelligence, whose books also include The Arab Revolt. His doctoral research uncovered previously unknown Arabic documents which shed new light on British intelligence work in the region.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Arab Bureau. 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.
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49 min

About New Books in British Studies

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.