New Books Network

Andrea Horbinski's Manga's First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989 (U California Press, 2025) centers the fans and creators who built Japanese comics into a massive global phenomenon. The book traces the history of manga from the art form's distinctly modern emergence in the early 1900s, one that first hybridized the artistic legacy of Japan with the world of Western political satire but very quickly expanded its scope. By the 1920s and 1930s, manga was already beginning to show some of the breadth of genre and style that has become a trademark of Japanese comics and their byproducts today. In the postwar, manga's embrace of new audiences and stylistic conventions, and the embrace of these new forms by audiences of amateur consumer-creators especially since the mid-1970s, led to an explosion in popularity that has made manga a global phenomenon.

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A Volatile Picture: War and the Political Work of Photography in Sri Lanka (U Washington Press, 2026) by Dr. Vindhya Buthpitiya is a groundbreaking ethnography that explores how, in the context of Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war and its turbulent aftermath, photography has become bound to the Tamil political imagination. From state-commissioned images meant to surveil and rebel documentation of armed resistance, to the fragile memorials created from identity photographs of the disappeared, A Volatile Picture traces the making and moving of images across borders, communities, and generations. Studio portraits, passport pictures, family albums, atrocity photography, social media posts, and more act not only as records of loss and horror but also as vital tools for protest, solidarity, and the realization of alternate political futures. Drawing on transnational archival and ethnographic encounters and long-term fieldwork in northern Sri Lanka, Dr. Buthpitiya situates photography as both a volatile medium and a political practice. Photographs emerge here as incendiary agents—simultaneously evidencing and triggering violence, sustaining memory, and inciting new visions of liberation.
This is the first in-depth study of Tamil photographic practices in Sri Lanka, offering a major contribution to the anthropology of war, visual culture, and South Asian studies. Richly researched and deeply humane, A Volatile Picture demonstrates how, amid devastation and displacement, photographs continue to generate truths, solidarities, and hopes that resist erasure.

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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In the Greco-Roman world, gods were known to tame soundscapes, or acoustic landscapes. Zeus, Apollo, Orpheus, and other Classical deities demonstrated their power by bringing order to chaotic sound worlds, replacing cacophony with harmony. In late antiquity, Christians took up this archetype and applied it to Jesus. For many early Christians, the advent of Christ resembled the modern phenomenon of a musical key change, but on a grand scale: Jesus initiated a recalibration of the cosmic soundscape, ushering in a new world. However, according to many Christians in late antiquity, this universal key change was not yet complete. Late ancient Christians believed that they could participate in the ongoing sonic work of Christ by Christianizing the acoustic landscapes of the world.
In Sounds for a New World: The Christianizing Soundscapes of Late Antiquity (Oxford UP, 2026), Dr. Philip Abbott explores how late ancient Christians envisioned themselves as participants in the worldwide retuning effort, harmonizing the Classical world to the new Christian reality. Rejecting the sounds of traditional Greco-Roman and Persian cultures, Christians advocated a variety of sonic practices to realize their grand retuning endeavor, including shouting, singing, silent meditation, chanting, and even belching. From the Latin West to the Syriac East, late ancient Christians formed a polyphonous chorus of diverse voices all joining in the great harmonizing work of Jesus as they Christianized the soundscapes of the world.
For years, scholars have noted the monumental changes that took place in early Christianity during the so-called Constantinian Revolution. But Dr. Abbott turns our attention to an unexplored aspect of this transitional moment, arguing that it was not simply a political or religious revolution - it was a revolution of the senses. Central to this sensorial transformation was sound. As Christianity gained imperial power in the fourth century, Christians began the process of re-tuning the world for Christ.

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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Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown and White (U Minnesota Press, 2026) is an ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West. Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. Rooted in more than a decade of international research, Rhea Rahman’s study on the organization’s projects, methods, and limitations reveals how racial capitalism permeates all aspects of humanitarianism.

Beginning with a counterhistory of Muslims in the United Kingdom following World War II, Rahman analyzes IR’s mission and transnational activities in and across places including the UK, South Africa, and Mali in the broader context of global white supremacy. She shows how IR’s approaches often effectively secularize Islam to evade anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, implicating concepts such as the “good” Muslim aid worker, who complies with War on Terror surveillance while attending to victims of Western colonialism. Meanwhile, Rahman theorizes the tactics of aid workers on the ground, who creatively draw on an Islamic Black radical tradition to drive real change.

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In Embodied Encuentros: Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences (Ohio State UP, 2026), Elena Foulis offers a practical guide for completing ethical fieldwork in Latina/o/e communities, emphasizing equitable and culturally sustaining practices for gathering oral histories. In her critical decolonial model, Foulis centers the agency of the people within these communities while considering the diversity and complexity of their experiences. In doing so, she advocates for the importance of building oral history archives that challenge our understandings of Latina/o/e peoples.

Foulis provides a conceptual framework for building on community knowledge that considers language, cultural practices, gender, and race. She suggests ways to involve students in ethical research; collect evolving oral histories; employ a language justice approach that acknowledges linguistic oppression, translanguaging, and bilingualism as essential aspects of this community; and consider the importance of digital archives for the creation of multimedia projects that foster community pláticas. Grounded in both theoretical approaches and a feminist ethics praxis, Embodied Encuentros ultimately outlines an important model for doing collaborative, ethical research—not only within Latina/o/e communities but within other minoritized communities as well.

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Author and experienced harm reductionist Kenneth Anderson is back on the New Books Network to discuss the three new titles in his series exploring the history of America's addiction treatment industry. We discussed the first two books of his series, Strychnine and Gold, in 2022. Today, Emily and Ken discuss the books he's published since: 

Anderson has produced this series of encyclopedia-like compilations of America's vast network of treatment facilities to satisfy his own curiosity, but his work benefits the reader, too. Serious scholars of American drug and alcohol history will benefit from his thorough mining (and many useful reproductions) of primary sources, as well as the charts and graphs he's compiled. These are both damning and illuminating. 

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Heritage is a hot topic in public debates today. Many politicians invoke it to exclude marginal groups from belonging to the national story. Yet, in the new two-volume resource for educators Creative and Inclusive Heritage Education, contributors explore how heritage can be used for inclusive experiences in the classroom. The open-access Handbook and an Activity Book provide educators--from high school teachers to university professors to museum guides--with the necessary theoretical tools and practical exercises turn heritage into a vehicle for self-awareness, collective meaning-making and conflict resolution. By helping educators to identify and counter exclusionary narratives, by stimulating their interest in their own histories and those of their students, and by using creative performance techniques, the handbook and the activity book allow educators to make the best of the social and educational value of heritage. In this interview with two of the editors, we discuss the ambitions and experiences of REBELAH, the European Union funded project behind these resources, which brought together creative artists, community organizers and academics in Spain, France, the Netherlands and Hungary.

Free, Open Access here.

Ana Fernández-Aballí Altamirano is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen working on environmental education and epistemological diversity.

Todd Weir is professor of the History of Christianity and Modern Culture at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on religion and secularism in modern Europe.

Patricia Salvaia is a psychologist and Research Master’s student at the University of Groningen.

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For more than two centuries, economists and researchers have struggled with the conundrum of reconciling Adam Smith’s views on economics and ethics. While some held that Smith’s capitalism and free markets institutionalized selfishness, greed, inequality and injustice, others focused on his theory of the moral nature of all human persons and the application of conscience and self-restraint in capitalist activities.

Adam Smith and Modern Economics: Reclaiming the Moral High Ground (de Gruyter, 2026) suggests that neither of these two conventional understandings alone is accurate and conducive to human flourishing. Smith put markets in the context of morality, observing that markets serve best when our moral sentiments are followed.

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This week on Democracy Dialogues, host Esam Boraey speaks with Shandana Khan Mohmand and Marjoke Oosterom, democracy experts at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, to unpack the takeaways of the newly released Democracy Report “Where’s the Dēmos in Democracy? Building Democratic Futures and Resisting Autocracy.” At a moment when autocracies outnumber democracies for the first time in twenty years, this report argues that the democratic crisis is not simply an institutional one, it is a crisis of exclusion. For too long, efforts to build democracy have focused on formal institutions like legislatures, courts, and electoral commissions, while neglecting the people those institutions are supposed to serve. The report puts forward eight building blocks for recentering citizens in democratic life, from building active citizenship and supporting informal mobilization, to reclaiming digital agency and strengthening accountability mechanisms. Drawing on decades of research across the Global South, from Pakistan and Zimbabwe to Uganda, Brazil, and beyond, Shandana and Marjoke bring the report's findings to life with vivid examples of how ordinary people fight back against backsliding, reclaim civic space, and keep democratic values alive even under authoritarian pressure. The conversation also addresses the role of inequality in driving democratic decline, the double-edged nature of digital technology, the power of youth movements, and what the dismantling of USAID means for global democracy support.

Transcript here and the report is here.

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What if the most powerful tool in your book marketing strategy isn't social media — it's your local library? In the debut episode of The Publishing Playbook, host Sarah Russo of Page One Media sits down with publishing veteran Erin Cox to unpack one of the industry's most overlooked opportunities: libraries. With a career spanning publicity at Scribner and HarperCollins, agenting, and her current role as publisher of Publishing Perspectives and co-founder of Words and Money, Erin brings rare, 360-degree expertise to the conversation. Together, Sarah and Erin break down how libraries actually buy books, why they're a powerful (and underutilized) marketing channel for authors, and the misconceptions that are costing publishers real money. Whether you're a debut author, a seasoned writer, or publishing-curious, this episode will change how you think about getting your book into readers' hands.

Words & Money: https://www.wordsandmoney.com/

Publishing Perspectives: https://publishingperspectives.com/

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