New Books Network

When young people began disappearing in Argentina, their mothers searched for answers. Despite laws prohibiting protests and political gatherings, the women still met to walk the Plaza de Mayo, a central square in Buenos Aires near the president’s residence. The government worked to deny their reports of the missing, to discredit the women, and to erode their standing among their peers. But the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo persisted.

Dr. Laura Tedesco joins us to share about her own childhood in Argentina during the military junta of the 1970s, her expertise on the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, and what authoritarianism then and now looks like, as we take a deep dive into her article “How Government Killings and Kidnappings in Argentina drove mothers to resist and revolt – and eventually win,” published in The Conversation on January 27, 2026.

This episode explores: features of authoritarianism, liberation theology, the death flights, Nunca Mas, human rights, fear, mothers’ activism, and how a society can react to state terrorism.

Our guest is: Dr. Laura Tedesco, who is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations. She specializes in Latin American Politics, Political Leadership, Political Corruption, and the dynamics of Authoritarianism and Democracy. From 2016 to 2024, she led a research grant funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), focusing on the political role of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR) in Cuba. Additionally, from 2009 to 2021, she directed a research project sponsored by the Open Society Institute, examining political leadership in Latin America. Since 2024, Dr. Tedesco has served as the Associate Dean for Humanities and Social Sciences at Saint Louis University's Madrid campus.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics. She is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Political Theorist Laura Field has written an insightful and detailed exploration of the people and the ideas that have shaped the second Trump Administration (and some contributed, as well, to the first Trump Administration.) While Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton UP, 2025) is about quite a few scholars and academics, it is written like a propulsive page-turner of a book. And Field takes us through all the of the ins and outs of the individuals who have pursued a path to power and policy development, often from positions in the Ivory Tower. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is truly fascinating, since it is not simply about egg-headed academics writing up white papers or books, or simply about presidential advisors and the way they have worked to influence the president or put particular policies into place. Instead, Field interrogates the construction of the ideas that have come to dominate this New Right, seeking their genesis and how these ideas, which are divided into three distinct but overlapping intellectual camps, have made their way to the Trump Administration, through Trump himself, Vice President J.D. Vance, and so many of the advisors and cabinet members who surround Trump.

Field’s training in political theory, especially Straussian political theory, contributes to her understanding and analysis of the individuals at the heart of the story in Furious Minds—and how these particular academics think, but in particular how they think about politics and political projects. The substance of Furious Minds is focused on the past decade or so of engagement between these various schools of thought and the Trump Administration—both while in elected office as well as during the out of office interregnum. At the same time, Field traces the deep origins of some of these schools of thought through the longer conservative tradition in the United States. In our discussion, we explore the Claremonters, the Postliberals, and the National Conservatives. Each group is populated by well-educated (PhDs, published authors, etc.) individuals (mostly men) who are urging a concept of the common good, as they define it, on to the American people, through the Trump Administration’s rhetoric, policies, institutional dispositions, cultural approaches, and general demeanor. Field takes all of these thinkers and ideas seriously, making the case for understanding both the ideas themselves and their origins, while also critiquing much of this by exposing the more extremist bases behind these paths of thinking as well as the people who are purveying them.

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is a tour de force of the intellectual and political landscape that has brought us to the midst of the second Trump Administration and provides the reader with deep insight into the radical origins of the myths and concepts that are the backbone of the current Trump Administration and the current Republican Party.

Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She studied political theory at Kenyon College and Boston College. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga (University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social

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Not too long ago, in the 2000s and 2010s, many felt that the internet–even one behind the Great Firewall–would bring about a more open China. As President Bill Clinton famously quipped in 2000, Beijing trying to control the internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.”

Things don’t look quite so certain now. China’s internet is now more controlled than it was a decade ago, with platforms, content creators, and tech companies now firmly guided by rules and signals from Beijing.

Yi-Ling Liu charts the story of the Chinese internet in her book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet (Knopf, 2026), with profiles of creators like Ma Baoli, the founder of one of China’s, and the world’s, largest gay dating apps, or Chinese hip hop pioneer Kafe Hu.

Yi-Ling’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, and The New York Review of Books. She has been a New America Fellow, a recipient of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, and an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Wall Dancers . 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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In this masterful, groundbreaking work Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage (Pantheon, 2026), Pulitzer Prize-winning author Heather Ann Thompson shines surprising new light on an infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments and would lead, in unexpected ways, to a fractured future and a new era of rage and violence.

On December 22, 1984, in a graffiti-covered New York City subway car, passengers looked on in horror as a white loner named Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teens, Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty, and James Ramseur, at point-blank range. He then disappeared into a dark tunnel. After an intense manhunt, and his eventual surrender in New Hampshire, the man the tabloid media had dubbed the “Death Wish Vigilante” would become a celebrity and a hero to countless ordinary Americans who had been frustrated with the economic fallout of the Reagan 80s. Overnight, Goetz’s young victims would become villains.

Out of this dramatic moment would emerge an angry nation, in which Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and later Fox News Network stoked the fear and the fury of a stunning number of Americans.

Drawing from never-before-seen archival materials, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson narrates the Bernie Goetz Subway shootings and their decades-long reverberations, while deftly recovering the lives of the boys whom too many decided didn’t matter. Fear and Fury is the remarkable account and a searing indictment of a crucial turning point in American history.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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Studying Chinese media has never been a stable intellectual enterprise. As Professor Yuezhi Zhao once observed, it often resembles aiming at a target that appears clear from a distance but becomes elusive on closer inspection. Over the past decade, that target has grown even more fragmented and mobile. Media systems across the Chinese-speaking world—including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and transnational Chinese communities—have been reshaped by rapid technological transformation, intensifying geopolitical rivalry, and profound political change.

It is against this backdrop that the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media has been published. Rather than simply updating a reference work, this edition reflects a field fundamentally reconfigured. Assumptions formed before the full societal penetration of digital platforms and social media now require serious reconsideration. The digital is no longer one topic among many; it is central to understanding contemporary political, cultural, and economic life.

In this podcast conversation, co-editors Dr Ming-yeh Rawnsley and Dr Yiben Ma reflect on the making of the new volume. Dr Ma contributed to the first edition (2015) and joined the editorial team for the second edition, also authoring a new chapter. After introducing the book and outlining its scope, they share seven key reflections as editors and scholars of Chinese media:

The second edition comprises 29 chapters, in addition to an extensive introduction. Despite striving for breadth and balance, the editors recognise that many areas remain underexplored and warrant sustained attention. They hope the volume will stimulate further research and dialogue.

As global uncertainty deepens and information politics become increasingly consequential, the study of Chinese media can no longer be regarded as a specialised regional concern. It is central to understanding how power, technology, and communication interact in the contemporary world. In this sense, the handbook contributes not only to Chinese media studies but also to the broader field of media and communications.

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This open access book offers the first in-depth appraisal of the photographic archive of Frank Scholten (1881–1942), a queer Dutch photographer and Catholic convert whose work in Palestine between 1921 and 1923 provides a remarkable lens on the intersecting dynamics of modernity, religion, colonialism, and visual culture. Drawing on over 26,000 photographs, it situates Scholten's work within transnational religious, colonial, and nationalist networks.

Employing a relational methodology, Photographing Biblical Modernity: Frank Scholten in British Mandate Palestine (I.B. Tauris, 2026) treats photography not merely as visual documentation but as a site of layered cultural encounters shaped by the movements of people, ideas, and ideologies. It interrogates biblical visuality, the performance of indigeneity, intercommunal relations, and the gendered politics of labour and nationalism.
Through interdisciplinary engagement with visual culture, Middle East studies, and gender theory, this book considers how Scholten's positionality offers insights into both the granular details of Palestinian society and broader macro-historical shifts during a period of profound transition.

Rather than framing Palestine as a biblical relic, Scholten's photographs reveal a socially and politically complex society under early British Mandate rule. Ultimately, this book positions Scholten's archive as a vital historical source for understanding the layered and contested narratives that have defined Palestine's modern history.

Access the book here: here

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Host Jun Wei Lee speaks with Hélène Landemore about her book, Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule (Penguin, 2026). An acclaimed political theorist, Professor Landemore has spent her career trying to understand the advantages of democracy, what makes it function, and how to make it work better. In her most recent book, Landemore puts forward a radical proposal. Democracy doesn’t need politicians: ordinary people can govern much better.

In this NBN episode, Landemore analyzes how a lottery system designed to select everyday people to govern—not as career politicians but as temporary stewards of the common good. Drawing from ancient Athenian practices of democracy and her firsthand experience in contemporary citizens’ assemblies, Landemore explains that when regular citizens come together to make important political decisions, they make better decisions, develop meaningful bonds of community, and even convince experts that self-governing assemblies are viable ways of doing politics.

This is not a book about what’s wrong—it’s a manifesto for what’s possible. If you’ve ever felt powerless, Politics Without Politicians will show you how “We the People” take back democracy.

Hélène Landemore is a political theorist and the Damon Wells '58 Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

Jun Wei Lee is a 4th-year undergraduate student of History and Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He works on the international legal regulation of migrant labor in the nineteenth-century British Empire.

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Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German, and branches spanning the world, from Australia and India to North America.

But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic.

In Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape (Chelsea Green, 2026) Manchán Magan explores the enchantment, sublime beauty and sheer oddness of a 3000-year-old lexicon. Imbuing the natural world with meaning and magic, it evokes a time-honoured way of life, from its 32 separate words for a field, to terms like loisideach (a place with a lot of kneading troughs), bróis (whiskey for a horseman at a wedding), and iarmhaireacht (the loneliness you feel when you are the only person awake at cockcrow).

Told through stories collected from Magan’s own life and travels, Thirty-Two Words for Field is an enthralling celebration of Irish words, and a testament to the indelible relationship between landscape, culture and language.

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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The United Kingdom has sixteen nuclear power stations. Most go under the radar, but their presence is enormous, both physically and culturally. They divide opinion like nothing else. Are they relics of a past era, or a crucial part of our futures? Are they cathedrals of science or temples of doom?

Atomic Albion: Journeys Around Britain’s Nuclear Power Stations (Strange Attractor, 2025) by Dr. Tom Bolton is a journey around Britain’s nuclear power stations and the country itself. From the Essex marshes to the Anglesey coast, from the Dungeness shingle to the far north of Scotland, Tom Bolton explores how nuclear sites shape the places around them, and enters the awesome world of nuclear power and weapons.

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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China's approach to digital governance has gained global influence, often evoking Orwellian 'Big Brother' comparisons. Governing Digital China (Cambridge UP, 2025) challenges this perception, arguing that China's approach is radically different in practice. This book explores the logic of popular corporatism, highlighting the bottom-up influences of China's largest platform firms and its citizens. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and nationally representative surveys, the authors track governance of social media and commercial social credit ratings during both the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras. Their findings reveal how Chinese tech companies such as Tencent, Sina, Baidu, and Alibaba, have become consultants and insiders to the state, thus forming a state-company partnership. Meanwhile, citizens voluntarily produce data, incentivizing platform firms to cater to their needs and motivating resistance by platforms. Authors Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo unveil the intricate mechanisms linking the state, platform firms, and citizens in the digital governance of authoritarian states.

Daniela Stockmann is Director of the Centre for Digital Governance and Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School.

Ting Luo is an Associate Professor in Government and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an associate professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads the Master's program in International and Development Economics.

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