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  • The Brass Band Story with Trevor Herbert (Yale UP, 2026)

    The Brass Band Story with Trevor Herbert (Yale UP, 2026)
    2026/10/14

    Brass bands have played a unique role in the cultural history of Britain. Amidst the industrial revolution, an increasingly urban population turned to music for mass entertainment. Brass bands became intimately associated with working men and spread across the country at breathtaking speed. At their height in the late Victorian era, there were thousands of them.

    In The Brass Band Story (Yale University Press, 2026), Professor Trevor Herbert reveals the story of these bands, from their working-class origins and the enormous popularity of Victorian contests to their sophistication in modern times. It is a tale of the survival of tradition and the embrace of change. Victorian brass bands solidified communities and promoted shared local identities. As new modes of popular culture posed existential threats in the twentieth century, they reinvented themselves. The model British bands created is now replicated throughout the world.

    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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    46 分
  • Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere with Nsah Mala, Richard Watts and Giulia Champion

    Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere with Nsah Mala, Richard Watts and Giulia Champion
    2026/10/04
    Through a postcolonial lens, Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere (Liverpool, 2025) explores the various ways in which francophone writers, visual artists and activists are responding to the global climate and environmental crises threatening the Earth today.The volume covers most of the francosphere: Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, South America and Polynesia. As well as discussing a range of environmental issues, from soil erosion to nuclear testing, it also considers ways in which francophone writers have become ecological activists. The ecotexts discussed include graphic novels, visual narratives, and zines alongside more conventional literary texts such as novels, short stories and poetry. The book seeks to decentre Belgium and France in francophone ecocritical scholarship while engaging in current debates in the field of ecocriticism, including the afterlives of Belgian and French colonialism and neo-colonialism in relation to climate change and environmental degradation, Blue Humanities, waste and toxicity studies, critical animal and plant studies, Indigenous peoples and their cultures and knowledges, climate-environmental (in)justice, and writerly/textual activism for climate and environment. It aims to widen the geographical scope of francophone ecocriticism by discussing a wide range of eco-themes that go beyond the segmentation and compartmentalisation found in other books in the field.Guest Nsah Mala is a poet, writer, children’s author, consultant, editor and translator, journalist-communicator, futurist and foresight practitioner, and interdisciplinary scholar working in English, French and Mbesa. Nsah currently works for the University of Cologne, Germany, as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Hub Coordinator of the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Coalition.His research interests include comparative literature, anglophone and francophone African literatures, public and environmental humanities, literary activism/artivism, creative writing and foresight and futures thinking. He has published widely in these areas in peer-reviewed volumes and journals, including Ecozon@, Orbis Litterarum, Electronic Green Journal, Humanities, Peripeti and ASAP/J. His ongoing projects on ‘Wetland Time’ and ‘Congo Basin Futures’ are funded by the British Academy and the Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellowship, respectively. Among many distinctions, he has judged the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and won the Dubai Foresight Award in the Foresight for the Planet category.Guest Richard Watts is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian Studies, co-creator of the Environments, Cultures and Values minor, and founding director of the Translation Studies Hub at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (Lexington Books, 2005) as well as a series of articles on the intersections of francophone postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities. He is currently completing a book project titled Reclaimed Waters that considers how the pollution, privatization and manufactured scarcity of water are rapidly altering its ostensibly stable symbolic value in literature, cinema and other forms of cultural production in the Francosphere.Guest Giulia Champion is a Lecturer in Critical Ocean Studies at the University of Southampton. Her main research project is being developed in a monograph entitled The Political Construction of the Seabed: A Political Ethnography of the International Seabed Authority. This project explores the diplomatic processes of the United Nations body of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) and the creation of a regulatory framework it is negotiating about deep-sea mining. The work explores this through a decolonial studies lens given the ISA’s location in Jamaica and its development of regulations about a new extractive frontier on the international seabed. Her work sits across the humanities and social sciences and uses arts-based methods for participatory public and policy engagement. She also collaborates on several projects including one on decarbonisation and electrical grids in Shetland, Orkney UK and Newfoundland, Canada; on Lithium extraction in Chile, and on safe swimming and access to green and blue spaces on the Isle of Wight, UK. She is an Associated Editor for the journal Environmental Humanities. She is the co-founder of the Deep Currents Collective, a group of activists and academics which holds a United Nation observer status at the International Seabed Authority. Her work has been published in (co-)authored articles in Bulletin of Latin American Research, The Journal of Energy History, Ocean and Society, Applied Energy, The Conversation, People and Nature and Comparative Law Journal of The Pacific.Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental ...
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    48 分
  • The Best 100 TV Shows of the 21st Century

    The Best 100 TV Shows of the 21st Century
    2026/10/02

    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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    1 時間 31 分
  • Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies with Yinghui Wu (Brill, 2025)

    Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies with Yinghui Wu (Brill, 2025)
    2026/09/25

    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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    1 時間 9 分
  • Leonhard Emmerling, "The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus" (Seagull Books, 2026)

    Leonhard Emmerling, "The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus" (Seagull Books, 2026)
    2026/09/09

    In a world obsessed with expertise and control, the figure of the idiot illuminates deeper truths about society. In this interview, Morteza Hajizadeh interviews Leonhard Emmerling about his book The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus (Seagull Books, 2026)

    Dostoevsky and Nietzsche wrote about him; Dadaists and punks idolized him; artists like Warhol and Beuys made him their icon. From holy fool to punk rebel, the idiot—a figure that traces its roots back to the Greek idiotes, a person who was alienated from public life—has always challenged society’s norms from the margins. Far from a simple madman, the idiot is a powerful subversive, a person who disregards norms and finds profound insight in a state of unmediated inspiration. Using a cross-disciplinary approach bridging literature, religion, art, and philosophy, this volume traces a rich journey up to the present, where the idiot reemerges in a dramatic twist: a public figure who inverts social norms, confounds the boundary between private and public, and declares a new, paradoxical view of the world.

    Leonhard Emmerling has worked as an art historian in different capacities: as curator and director of art institutions in Germany and New Zealand; as teacher at art academies in Auckland, Düsseldorf, and Munich; and as advisor and director for the Goethe-Institut. His most recent publication is Aesthetics: What For?.

    Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

    YouTube Channel: here

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    1 時間 2 分
  • Erin A. Craig, "Our Strange Duet: Inspired by Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera" (Delacorte Press, 2026)

    Erin A. Craig, "Our Strange Duet: Inspired by Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera" (Delacorte Press, 2026)
    2026/09/01

    Our Strange Duet: Inspired by Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera (Delacorte Press, 2026) is a reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, spotlighting Christine Daaé as she rises to fame while torn between love, ambition, and the haunting secrets of the opera house from #1 New York Times bestselling author Erin A. Craig. This gorgeous hardcover edition of Our Strange Duet features stunning sprayed edges, custom character endpapers, a foil-stamped case, and a ribbon! She was never just the voice he shaped . . . A rising soprano with a gift she is only just learning to embrace, Christine Daaé has moved through the glittering world of the Opera Populaire longing to find her purpose. Instead, she finds herself caught between two men who refuse to let her slip quietly into the chorus. One is Raoul, her childhood friend turned devoted admirer, offering her a future filled with warmth, safety, and a love that feels like sunlight. The other is a mysterious masked figure who lurks beneath the Opera House: The Phantom. His brilliance, obsession, and dangerous devotion to nurturing Christine’s talents ignites a dark and complicated passion in her heart. As Christine’s star ascends, so does the tension between Raoul and the Phantom. She must decide who she is when the curtain falls—and what she’s willing to risk for the life she wants. Set against the sweeping, romantic world of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, Our Strange Duet allows Christine Daaé to take center stage to tell her own story: fierce, emotional, and unforgettable.

    Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts


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    35 分
  • Nancy Yunhwa Rao, "Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth Century California and Beyond" (U Illinois Press, 2025)

    Nancy Yunhwa Rao, "Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth Century California and Beyond" (U Illinois Press, 2025)
    2026/08/31

    The first large number of Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1840s, and Chinese opera troupes were not far behind. In Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth Century California and Beyond (U Illinois Press, 2025), Nancy Yunhwa Rao writes the story of the flourishing and resiliency of Chinese opera in America. Chinese opera troupes brought with them an important cultural reminder of China that helped immigrants to build community and maintain connections with their old home in their new one. At the same time, anti-Chinese violence, legislation, and prejudice was a constant and growing threat to Chinese immigrants and Chinese theater. As Chinese theater became part of California and San Francisco culture, popular Chinese actors advocated for their art alongside appeals for civil rights. Rao draws on personal accounts and artifacts to place theater within the everyday lives of Chinese people. She also describes the costumes, singing, staging, and storytelling that impacted mainstream reception and influenced how Chinese communities saw themselves. Rao makes a convincing argument that more attention to the transpacific connections between the US and Asia is vital to telling the true story of America.

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    1 時間 3 分
  • John Trafton, "Los Angeles and Film: A Cultural History of 20th-Century Hollywood" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

    John Trafton, "Los Angeles and Film: A Cultural History of 20th-Century Hollywood" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
    2026/08/31

    It is impossible to talk about the City of Angels without talking about its movie business. The history of American cinema is so intertwined with Los Angeles that the term “Hollywood” is used interchangeably with “American film” worldwide. From the early 20th-century migration of film pioneers from the East Coast to the emergence of local subcultures and global genres, John Trafton traces how the city has been imagined by insiders and outsiders alike in Los Angeles and Film: A Cultural History of 20th-Century Hollywood (Bloomsbury, 2026).

    Key case studies include the L.A. Rebellion School, disaster cinema, and the intersections of independent cinema with the music scene and VHS culture. The book culminates in an exploration of Los Angeles neorealist cinema—a form that centers marginalized voices and challenges the myth of Hollywood glamour.

    Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts


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    57 分