How was drama experienced in early modern China? It was not tied to a single medium such as the page or the stage, but operated in a media ecology—an environment in which it integrated other arts and media while being refashioned in a variety of arts and media. Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies (Brill, 2025)
explores a wide range of cultural experimentation, collectively termed “playing with plays:” the theatricality embedded in commentary, the poetic and visual imagination arising from drama illustrations, the interactions between reading and singing arias, the imbrication of reading plays and practicing religion, and the ludic act of writing playful essays on drama. Through engaging these disparate phenomena with media studies, the book advances a new model for thinking about drama history, and shows the entwinement of plays and different forms of media in shaping perception, molding experience, and enabling new subject positions to emerge in early modern China.

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Thomas Schatz returns us to an era when a newly enriched movie industry rediscovered its creative energy, and indie went mainstream without losing its edge.

Between 1989 and 2004, all the old studios either merged with other media giants or were swallowed up by even bigger diversified behemoths, leading to an infusion of money and fast-tracking the digital revolution. Yet even as CGI and piles of cash fueled a new breed of blockbusters—Batman and Titanic, Toy Story and The Lord of the Rings—an indie ethos permeated the industry. And at the crossroads of commodification and aesthetic vision, auteurs ranging from Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino to Sofia Coppola and Ang Lee became household names.

Power Surge: Conglomerate Hollywood and the Studio System's Last Hurrah with Thomas Schatz (U California Press, 2026) traces these trajectories, which increasingly clashed and commingled during the 1990s and early 2000s, resulting in nothing short of a new golden age—and perhaps the last gasp of the century-old studio system.

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It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and the New York Times has published its list of the best 100 television shows of the 21st Century. We react to this list, ponder what is underrated, overrated, and completely snubbed, and question the value of grand lists in an age of micro-cultures.

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In our increasingly distrusting and polarized world, accusations of hypocrisy are everywhere. But our attempts to stamp out hypocrisy may backfire, creating what Michael Hallsworth calls The Hypocrisy Trap. In his book The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives (MIT Press, 2026) Hallsworth shows how our relentless drive to expose inconsistency between words and deeds can actually breed more hypocrisy and cynicism that corrodes our institutions. Through engaging stories and original research, he argues that while some forms of hypocrisy destroy trust and create harm, others reflect the inevitable compromises of human nature and complex societies. This book offers practical solutions for increasing consistency, navigating accusations wisely, and changing how we judge others’ actions.

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When the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers appeared in April 2023, few anticipated its impact beyond the screen. Within weeks, survivors in politics, the media, academia and the arts began sharing experiences of sexual harassment and assault, giving momentum to Taiwan’s long-delayed #MeToo movement.

XinLing Li’s new book, Wave Makers and the Rise of #MeToo in Taiwan: Media, Empathy, and Digital Testimony (Anthem Press, 2026), asks how a fictional series became a cultural catalyst. Li argues that the drama gave form to experiences that had remained unspoken, while social media allowed personal testimony to circulate without institutional permission.

The book is part of the new short-book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’.

In this podcast, Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley talks with Dr Li about television, empathy, digital testimony, and the opportunities and inequalities within Taiwan's #MeToo movement. Themes include:

• Why Taiwan’s #MeToo movement came late - the gap between progressive laws and the cultural conditions that still discourage survivors from speaking.
• The ‘perfect victim’ - how Wave Makers challenges the assumption that only women who conform to conventional ideas of femininity deserve belief and justice.
• The feminist snap - why the line ‘Let’s not just let it go this time’ gave viewers a language for recognising accumulated injustice.
• Empathy and narrative identity - how fictional characters help audiences interpret their own experiences and respond to others.
• Digital testimony and affective publics - how social media weakens traditional gatekeeping while introducing new risks and struggles for attention.
• Women’s solidarity - how the drama examines agency, family relationships and the historical expectation that women define themselves through men.
• The limits of visibility - why migrant domestic workers remain especially vulnerable and often unable to speak without risking their livelihoods or immigration status.

One of the book’s most compelling arguments is that art can give structure to what Raymond Williams called ‘emergent feelings’: experiences without an accepted public language. Through recognisable characters and an accessible story, Wave Makers transformed a familiar instruction to remain silent – ‘just let it go’ – into a shared refusal.

The podcast also considers how the hashtag changes testimony. Survivors can now address audiences directly, rather than relying entirely on journalists and other institutional gatekeepers. Yet visibility remains uneven. Stories involving celebrities and senior politicians attract attention more readily than those of migrant domestic workers, who may face dismissal, loss of visa status or deportation if they speak publicly.

Li is cautious about treating Wave Makers as a formula for political change. No television programme can produce a movement on demand. Popular culture can nevertheless offer language and recognition when audiences are ready to respond.

The story of Wave Makers is ultimately about the unpredictable movement between fiction and public life: a drama helped people recognise experiences they had been encouraged to dismiss, while digital platforms allowed the words ‘me too’ to become testimony, solidarity and action.

Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley is a Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London, and a host for the New Books Network. She is also a co-editor (with Professor Gary Rawnsley) of the short-book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’.

Dr Xinling Li is an independent scholar based in New York. He studied at Cambridge University.

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The United States has no hate speech laws; hate speech is generally considered to be free speech under the First Amendment. In Hate Speech: The Legal and Cultural History of an American Dilemma (U California Press, 2026), acclaimed legal historian Samantha Barbas chronicles the country’s legal and cultural battles over the regulation of hate speech in the last hundred years. Charting the historical context for current debates, she ultimately argues that, however emotionally appealing they may seem, hate speech laws undermine civil rights and democracy.
The American policy on hate speech evolved from influences such as the civil rights movement, which contended that the most effective way to combat hate speech wasn’t through proposed laws. Rather than imposing restrictions, the US has developed an array of mechanisms other than law, including counterspeech and public education, that have been relatively effective at dealing with hate speakers and hate groups. Though not perfect, our method of addressing hate is less dangerous than government censorship and less likely to be weaponized against the powerless.

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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Kahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style – which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music – challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generate various contradictions and tensions because they are themselves products situated within an economic framework of neoliberal capitalism, at once offering alternative ways of being while, simultaneously, participating in and thereby sustaining the social structures that they otherwise seek to subvert and dismantle.

Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic (Bloomsbury, 2024) generates ground-breaking new dialogues between a range of audial and visual theories that are shaped by Paul Gilroy's conceptualisation of The Black Atlantic (1993). The book analyzes Joseph's work through intersections of emergent music video and new media concepts as well as film theories from African, American and European perspectives. Vitally, it argues that such an interdisciplinary and transcontinental approach to film, music and new media scholarship enriches the possibilities of their respective and, simultaneously, entwined branches of knowledge

In the episode, we discuss Joe Jackson's pathway into studying Joseph's scholarship, his work's dialogue with Paul Gilroy (alongside a host of other vital scholars of the audiovisual and race) - and make the case for greater focus on the music video as a distinctive field of study.

Follow this link for a sample of Joseph's work here 

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Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Ar: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy (ARC Humanities Press, 2026) represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Glenn Peers is Emeritus Professor, Art History at University of Texas Austin and Syracuse University

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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