New Books Network

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New Books Network episodes

June 03 Weipin Tsai, "The Making of China's Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation" (Harvard UP, 2024)
How did a vast, nationwide institution like a modern postal system
come into being in Qing China—right at the very end of the empire?
In The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), Weipin Tsai
takes up this question by tracing the origins and early development of
China’s postal system. The book asks not only how such an institution
was built, but why it emerged when it did and in the particular form it
took. In doing so, Tsai situates the post office within the Qing’s
broader efforts to modernize, showing how its development intersected
with political maneuvering, imperial pressures, and changing ideas about
the nature of the state.
The Making of China’s Post Office examines both the
high-level decisions and the ground-level operations that shaped the
system’s creation and expansion. Tsai pays particular attention to the
economic and social pressures that drove its growth, as well as the
everyday work of postal employees, including the nitty-gritty of routes,
logistics, and administration. This dual focus allows Tsai to show how
the circulation of mail depended on the interplay between central
ambitions and local realities, while also uncovering the work that
happened at the local level.
Tsai’s book offers a new perspective on China’s encounters with
imperialism, efforts at centralization, and changing conceptions of
governance. In following the routes and emerging and routines of the
post, The Making of China’s Post Office delivers a rich account
of how a modern communications network took shape. This book will be of
interest to readers of modern Chinese history, as well as those working
on global histories of infrastructure, communication, and the state.
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59 min
June 03 Romani Grassroots Language Learning
In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Dr Santiago Betancor Falcón (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) about his 2025 paper, Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. The conversation focuses on minoritised languages, autonomous language learning, and language activism.
Reference:
Betancor-Falcon, S. (2025). Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 44(6), 647-662. DOI here
For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.
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30 min
June 03 A Divine Comedy: On Hollywood, Creativity, and Religion with Rob Long
Here in Episode 9 of Season 5, I interview Mr. Rob Long. A longtime Hollywood professional, he was a writer and producer for the classic sitcom Cheers as well as for over a dozen other shows. A National Review contributor and columnist for both Commentary and Washington Examiner magazine, he has authored two books, Conversations With My Agent (1998) and Set-Up, Joke, Set-Up, Joke (2005), and edited one, Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse (2017). As the co-founder of Ricochet, a media network, he hosts “Martini Shot,” a long-running, bite-size showbiz podcast, as well as cohosts “GLoP Culture.”
Drawing on his two comic memoirs—alongside his religious studies as a Master of Divinity student at Princeton Theological Seminary—we discuss his life in Hollywood, religious journey, and current training to become an Episcopal priest. Along the way we dig into the nature of humor, the rise and fall of the TV sitcom, the lost formation of the writer’s room, what it is like to be a Hollywood conservative, how technology like streaming and AI has changed show business, the strategy for the perfect sermon, and the spiritual calling of the creative arts.
Among the shows that are discussed include the Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Andy Griffith Show, plus films like Twentieth Century, A Night at the Opera, The In-Laws, and Midnight Run; along with guest appearances by Michaelangelo’s Pieta, Aristotle’s Poetics, Moliere, P.G. Wodehouse, P.J. O’Rourke, plus the wit of Jesus of Nazareth.
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1 hr 4 min
June 03 Lauren Duval, "The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence" (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025)
Prior to the American Revolution, the urban centers of colonial North America had little direct experience of war. With the outbreak of
violence, British forces occupied every major city, invading the most
private of spaces: the home. By closely considering the dynamics of the
household—how people moved within it, thought about it, and wielded
power over it—The Home Front reveals the ways in which occupation
fundamentally upended the structures of colonial society and created
opportunities for unprecedented economic and social mobility. In
occupied cities, British officers usurped male authority to quarter
themselves with families, patriot wives governed households in their
husbands' absence, daughters flirted with officers, domestic servants
disappeared with soldiers, and enslaved kin absconded to British lines
in pursuit of freedom. As Lauren Duval shows, the unique conditions of
occupation produced an aggrieved American population bound by shared
emotional distress and domestic disorder. In the wake of this deeply
disorienting experience, elite Americans deliberately reconsecrated the
private home as a national symbol that epitomized masculine authority.
Building on a stunning wealth of primary sources, Duval vividly captures daily life during the Revolution through the eyes and ears of those who intimately experienced it, showing how men and women of all races, statuses, and states of freedom understood its implications for their
lives, families, and the nascent American Republic.
In this episode Dr. Lauren Duval (University of Oklahoma) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal of Women’s History) discuss The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025). We begin the episode by discussing what the home meant to men and women in the revolutionary era. Next, we discuss revisionist histories and how violence has often been obscured from the revolutionary narrative. I commend Duval for her extensive archival research and she shares about the satisfying feeling of finding sources that speak to one another from across the Atlantic. Last, Duval gives us a sneak peek at her next project!
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1 hr
June 03 Geraldine Fela, "Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia's AIDS Crisis" (UNSW Press, 2024)
The claim that real change is enabled by grassroots, community-based movements might seem a distant ideal, but Dr Geraldine Fela shows such assertions are far from hypothetical. Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia's AIDS Crisis (UNSW Press, 2024) shows that grassroots movements were what made Australia’s response to the AIDS epidemic better than elsewhere.
HIV and AIDS devastated communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. In the midst of this profound health crisis, nurses provided crucial care to those living with and dying from the virus. They negotiated homophobia and complex family dynamics as well as defending the rights of their patients. Bringing together stories from across the country, historian Geraldine Fela documents the extraordinary care, compassion and solidarity shown by HIV and AIDS nurses. Critical Care unearths the important and unexamined history of nurses and nursing unions as caregivers and political agents who helped shape Australia's response to HIV and AIDS.
In addition to this NBN interview Geraldine Fela has a podcast episode on the ABC Rewind series, 'Blood Prejudice and Nursing'
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39 min
June 03 Rivka Weinberg, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time" (Oxford UP, 2026)
You can stock your life with important work, relationships, activities, and art, and yet, you can still ask: what's the point of it all? Almost every thinking person has had that question—many more than once. Granted, you're more likely to worry about the point of life when things are not going well, but you're also likely to still ask this question when you've finally received that promotion, achieved a goal, or raised your children—exactly when it seems like the question shouldn't arise.
In The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time (Oxford University Press, 2026), Rivka Weinberg argues this is because there are different kinds of meaning, and some of them, sadly, are impossible to achieve. She explains what they are, illuminates which types of meaning are possible, which are impossible, and shows us how we might orient our lives in light of these bittersweet truths. Although we all die in the end, Weinberg explains why death doesn't make life more or less meaningful. Instead, it is time that is necessary for meaning, even as it also undermines it by wearing away the fruits of our efforts and commitments. Weinberg shows that most advice on how to reduce the agony of time's erosions cannot work. However, she also shows how we can tease out some insights from failed attempts to escape time's wounds and thereby make progress toward coping with things as they are. A meaningful life is one lived in the fullness of time, accepting suffering, acknowledging our tragic losses and limitations, and making the most of Everyday Meaning.
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50 min
June 03 Lawrence Douglas, "The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice" (Princeton UP, 2026)
The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026) offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine.
At its heart is Lawrence Douglas’s fresh interpretation of the law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—while leaving unresolved the
legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations
of human rights.
Providing rare historical perspective on the dilemmas facing international courts, The Criminal State is a sweeping, provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice.
Our guest is Professor Lawrence Douglas, who is the James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Amherst College.
Our host is Eleonora Mattiacci, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. She is the author of "Volatile States in International Politics" (Oxford University Press, 2023).
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53 min
June 02 On The State of Black Men's Studies and Black Masculinist Thought Scholarship
Wide ranging interview with Dr. Ronald L. Jackson II, Professor and Department Chair of Communication Studies, the University of Miami. Interview explores Dr. Jackson's pioneering scholarship in Black Masculinist Thought, its contribution to Black Studies, its intercultural conversations with Black Feminist Thought, the State of Black Men's Studies and its relationship to Black Women's Studies, its interface with the public spheres of Manosphere and Womanosphere, as well as the future of Black Masculinist Thought Scholarship and Black Gender Studies.
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1 hr 12 min
June 02 Steven Nadler, "Spinoza, Atheist" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In 1656, a young Amsterdam merchant was excommunicated by his
Portuguese-Jewish community in the harshest terms it had ever used. Baruch Spinoza was accused of unspecified “horrifying heresies,” but the precise reasons for his expulsion remain a mystery. When he published his Theological-Political Treatise in 1670, which was condemned as “the most atheistic book ever written,” he began to reveal to the world what his heresies may have been. Yet ever since the eighteenth century, most readers and scholars have assumed that Spinoza was a pantheist—even a “God-intoxicated man,” as the poet Novalis put it. After all, how could a person whose books are suffused with talk of God be an atheist? In Spinoza, Atheist (Princeton University Press, 2026), Steven Nadler, one of the world’s leading authorities on the philosopher, aims to settle the question and show that that’s exactly what he was.
Nadler makes a powerful case that there is no real divinity for Spinoza. God is Nature, and isn’t an object of worshipful awe or religious reverence but can only be understood through philosophy and science. There is nothing supernatural—no mystery, ineffability, or sublimity. Spinoza does speak of “blessedness” and “salvation,” but these, too, are to be understood in natural and rational terms, as the peace of mind and happiness that come from understanding ourselves and the world.
Whether Spinoza believed in God is a fascinating and enduring controversy. Spinoza, Atheist promises to transform our understanding of his views and to make clear just how radical a thinker he was and remains.
Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His many books include Rembrandt’s Jews, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Spinoza: A Life, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die, and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age.
Abe Silberstein is a Ph.D. student in the joint doctoral program in History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.
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41 min
June 02 Alex Law, "The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process" (Routledge, 2026)
The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed
for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were
sociologists, or at the very least precursors to the subject? Does it,
for example, mean that intellectuals of 18th Century Scotland
had the same concerns as we do today? Alternatively, does it mean we
should think of sociology as an elite discipline, developed by men who
were attached to power, albeit with some often critical insights? In
turn, if we accept these thinkers as doing something distinct, how can
this sociologically be explained? These are the questions which animate
Alex Law’s The Roots of Sociology: Scottish Enlightenment and the Civilising Process (Routledge, 2026). Structured around two sections, Sociology and the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as Sociology of the
Scottish Enlightenment, Law sees these thinkers as thinking through
what Elias would later call the civilising process. He so doing he
explores how questions of state formation, violence and emerging
commercial society structured their interest and how the particular
position of Scotland, a stateless nation experiencing rebellion,
provided the space for what he calls their ‘pre-sociology’.
In our podcast we discuss how Law’s attempt to see the Scottish
Enlightenment thinks as concerned with the civilising process differs
from other attempts to claim them for sociology, the legacy of the Act
of Union for these writers and how one became a thinker in these times.
We also discuss why Adam Smith is, for Law, an ‘ambivalent’ figure for
sociology and what we can learn from these writers about the scope and
historical insight sociology should have.
Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.
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1 hr 35 min