New Books in Gender

By New Books NetworkScience Social Sciences

New Books in Gender episodes

July 17 Stacey Copeland, "Lavender Sounds: From Lesbian Radio to Queer Feminist Soundwork" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
Stacey Copeland, Assistant Professor of Cultural Heritage and
Identity at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the
University of Groningen, joins Jana Byars to talk about⁠ Lavender Sounds: From Lesbian Radio to Queer Feminist Soundwork⁠
(University of Michigan Press, 2026) delves into lesbian radio history
and its evolution into queer feminist podcasting today, exploring the
politics, aesthetics, and cultural activism embedded in queer feminist
soundwork. Through deeply personal and archival explorations, Stacey
Copeland traces the emergence of queer feminist soundwork—a unique blend
of community-led storytelling, political resistance, and creative
expression rooted in feminist and LGBTQ+ activism. At the heart of the
book lies a powerful idea: sound is not just heard but felt, connecting
generations through shared voices and struggles. In conversation with
award-winning and cutting-edge queer and feminist podcast producers from
across Canada and the U.S., Lavender Sounds invites us to turn a
feminist embodied ear to the past to uncover the ways gender, race, and
sexual orientations are embedded in our everyday media listening
practices. From pioneering Canadian radio shows like Vancouver's The
Lesbian Show and Montreal's Dykes on Mykes to today's queer chumcasts
and audio documentary, Lavender Sounds is a journey through auditory
landscapes where joy, protest, intimacy, and identity intersect. This
book opens a vibrant conversation about how radio and podcasting are
vital tools for marginalized communities to connect, create, and claim
space in the media world.
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49 min
July 16 Chad S. A. Gibbs "Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance" (U Wisconsin Press, 2026)
On August 2, 1943, prisoners at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, located in occupied Poland, launched an uprising against their captors, during which hundreds successfully escaped while guards killed as many in the process. In this groundbreaking work, Chad S.A. Gibbs draws upon recently discovered sources and novel research methods to fundamentally reassess Jewish resistance at Treblinka—both before and during the revolt.
Using the testimonies of revolt survivors, prior escapees, those who passed through the camp, and a handful of bystander witnesses and former SS guards, Gibbs sheds new light on the events of August 2 as well as many prior acts of resistance in Survival at Treblinka: Geography, Gender, and Social Networks in Jewish Resistance (U Wisconsin Press, 2026). Critical to these new interpretations of the revolt are the actions of women prisoners, who here assume a central place in this story for the first time.
Paul Lerner is Chair of the History Department at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He is the author of The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940. [email protected] @plerner.bsky.social
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1 hr 7 min
July 15 Nora L. Rubel, "Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book" (Columbia UP, 2026)
In
1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes
she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. “I was trying to teach a
group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook
simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we
prepare it in America,” she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining
a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it
became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of
Jewish American culture.
Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book (Columbia University Press, 2026) by Dr. Nora Rubel tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book,
demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn
shaped by generations of Jewish women. Dr. Rubel traces the cookbook’s
evolution across forty editions over several decades, through waves of
immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization,
and rapid changes in Jewish life. She argues that the book celebrates
pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a
repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation.
Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book
is a record of American Jewish women’s history, told through the food
they made and the lives they led. A cultural biography of an iconic
cookbook, this lively and inviting book shares an inclusive vision of
American cuisine.
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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41 min
July 13 Rod Phillips, "Cats: A History" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026)
For
more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life.
But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them
became pets. In Cats: A History
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Rod Phillips shares a
sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting
place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered
hunters to Europe's suspected familiars of witches and from shipboard
rodent controllers to cherished internet icons.
Professor
Phillips illustrates how cats have always occupied spaces both familiar
and mysterious and how their perceived independence and disruptive
nature—and their associations with women, the supernatural, and
outsiders—have shaped humans' attitudes toward these fascinating
creatures. Cats have been lauded as companions and vermin-killers,
reviled as threats to moral and ecological order, and cherished for the
very qualities that make them hard to control. This richly textured
portrait of cats explores their significance in religion, politics,
gender, literature, warfare, and pop culture. It also provides profound
insights into our relationships with other animals, especially dogs and
rodents.
The many roles that cats have played throughout history
illuminate a variety of contradictions in humans' perceptions of them:
as affectionate yet aloof, adorable
and evil, ordinary and exceptional. This book is the definitive story
of the feline presence in human history—an elegant study of how we live
with animals whom we see as living by their own rules.
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/gender-studies

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55 min
July 13 Wednesdae Reim Ifrach, "Queer Expressions: Expressive Art and Somatic Therapy Practices for Healing Body Trauma" (North Atlantic Books, 2026)
A creative, body-based guide to healing for queer, trans, and
gender-expansive readers—somatic tools and expressive arts to feel safer
in your body, rewrite your story, and sustain connection. Queer Expressions: Expressive Art and Somatic Therapy Practices for Healing Body Trauma (North Atlantic Books, 2026) is
a practical, consent-centered guide to healing body trauma through
embodiment and creativity. Drawing on somatic therapy—grounding, breath,
orientation, gentle movement—and expressive arts—collage, drawing,
clay, movement, music, voice—within a harm-reduction frame of pacing,
choice, and safety plans, Wednesdae Reim Ifrach (REAT, ATR-BC, LPC)
shares grounded practices, case vignettes, and simple rituals to help
you move from shut down or on high alert into steadier, more connected
living. The book follows a simple arc: first, feel and steady your
nervous system; next, turn those sensations into art and story; and
finally, build rituals and relationships that help the changes
last—whether you’re navigating dysphoria, ED recovery, chronic stress,
or nervous system dysregulation. Inside you’ll find: Body check-ins
(quick prompts to name sensations and needs), short breath &
movement practices (1–10 minutes), and sensory prompts
(sight/sound/touch/smell/taste) Art invitations (collage, drawing,
movement, sound/voice) with step-by-step guidance and safety notes
Consent & harm-reduction tools (opt-in/out menus, pacing, crisis
planning) to keep the work manageable Community practices & rituals
(altar-making, release-writing, witness circles) to anchor change in
daily lif A queer-centered lens on healing, embodiment, and creativity
Warm, inclusive, and usable on your own or with a therapist, Queer
Expressions helps you build a more livable relationship with your
body—and a story big enough to hold who you are becoming.
Wednesdae Reim Ifrach
is a trans/non-binary art therapist and counselor dedicated to
providing gender-affirming, trauma-informed care that emphasizes
healing-centered engagement, body justice, intersectional social
justice, and equitable access to eating disorder treatment. They co-own
and operate Rainbow Recovery,
offering clinical supervision, consultations, trainings, workshops,
counseling, and art therapy services to clients in Connecticut and
Pennsylvania. As a full-time professor at Moravian University, Wednesdae
teaches mental health counseling, social work, and expressive art
courses, inspiring future professionals. Over the past decade, they have
led trainings and workshops for organizations such as the American Art
Therapy Association, National Alliance for Eating Disorders, and Yale
University, among others. Previously, Wednesdae founded the country’s
first 2sLGBTQIA+ Eating Disorder Program, served on Project HEAL’s
Board, and presided over the Connecticut Art Therapy Association. They
currently co-chair the Health Professionals in Training Program on the
GLMA Board. Their expertise addresses LGBTQ+ concerns and trauma,
honoring each client’s identity.
Helena Vissing,
PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California
and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She
can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).
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51 min
July 11 Diana Cucuz, "Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Diana Cucuz about her book, Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and also asks her for advice to beginner scholars studying gender and the Cold War. A bit about Dr. Cucuz’s book: throughout the Cold War, Soviet citizens had limited access to US life and culture. Amerika, a glossy Russian-language magazine similar to Life, provided a rare exception. Produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA), America’s first peacetime propaganda organization, Amerika was used to influence the Soviet public and convince women in particular that an American-style consumer culture and conservative gender norms could better their lives. Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds relies on USIA archives, issues of Amerika, and American women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal to show how, during the postwar period, USIA officials deployed idealized images of American women as happy, fulfilled, and feminine wives, mothers, and homemakers.
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33 min
July 07 Jay Szpilka, "BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)
In BDSM Practices in Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), cultural anthropologist and cultural
studies scholar Jay Szpilka analyzes the way that BDSM is practiced in
contemporary Poland. Based on extensive field research, she asks what
social, cultural, and political conditions are necessary for BDSM to be possible to practice
in the first place. Through a nuanced analysis of the way that
practitioners navigate conflicting understandings and politics of kink,
this book provides an alternative to Western-centric narratives of BDSM
communities and challenges a number of long-standing notions about the
status kink which circulate in sexuality and queer studies.
Jay Szpilka is a visiting fellow at Edinburgh Napier University and
an assistant professor at SWPS University in Poland. She is the author
of BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland, and her work has been published in the Feminist Review, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Teksty Drugie, and the Australian Feminist Studies.
Atalia Israeli-Nevo is an anthropology PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.
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1 hr 4 min
July 06 Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity
Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity—and the ultimate boundary transgression.
Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this book, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.
Join YIVO for a discussion of Gollance's book with Josh Lambert, professor and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.
Buy the book
This book talk originally took place on October 26, 2023.
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1 hr
July 04 Rachel Silveri, "The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026),
Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life,
an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical
avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw
their own everyday lives—their bodies, identities, and relationships—as a
type of creative material and a central component
to their avant-garde practice. These artists abandoned traditional
forms of artmaking and venues of art viewing, instead aspiring to
integrate art with everyday life, creating an “art of living.”
Considering
Tristan Tzara’s performances of Dadaist identity, Sonia Delaunay’s
simultaneous fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to
open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, Silveri offers a new
narrative about how the artists of interwar Paris developed experiential
life practices that resisted dominant forms of “lifestyle” and
normative discourses surrounding gender, ethnicity, and office work.
This book argues that ethical questions of “How should I live?” and “How
should I relate to others?” were as important to the avant-garde as
politics, and that aspirations to change the world played out in daily
practices of self-making.
Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is the author, most recently, of Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons.
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59 min
July 02 Rosa Campbell, "The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared: Shere Hite and the Hite Report" (Melville House, 2026)
Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her groundbreaking book, The Hite Report, was the first feminist exploration of the link between sex and male power. It sold millions of copies when first published in 1976 and revolutionised the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness?
In The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report (Melville House and New South, 2026), Australian historian Dr. Rosa Campbell combines original research and sharp cultural analysis to explore the complicated life and literary legacy of Shere Hite. Expanding on her ideas about sex – namely, that sex is sexist – the book explores Hite’s fraught childhood, struggles working in the porn industry, and eventual cancellation by the far-right Evangelical movement. All the while, Dr. Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality.
In a post-#MeToo world, with the far-right on the march globally, Dr. Rosa Campbell’s examination of shifting ideological movements is essential to understanding the current feminist movement, as well as how conservative and reactionary efforts can silence even the most successful of women.
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/gender-studies

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42 min

About New Books in Gender

From the publisher's feed

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.