New Books in British Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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1576
David Edgerton, “The Rise and Fall of the Briti...
David Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History (Allen Lane, 2018) argues the United Kingdom had a distinctive national moment characterized by a strong state, powerful military armed with advanced weapons,
59 min
1577
Elizabeth M. Sanders, “Genres of Doubt: Science...
The Victorians left an indelible stamp on culture that continues to be in evidence today, not least of which is their refinement of the realist fiction medium known as the novel and their innovations, which led to the birth of fantasy and science ficti...
76 min
1578
Stacey Pierson, “Private Collecting, Exhibition...
In her latest book, Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club (Routledge, 2017), Stacey J. Pierson reveals the fascinating history of one of the most refined and influential fine art clubs ...
42 min
1579
Steve R. Dunn, “Bayly’s War: The Battle for the...
Though Great Britain’s warships ruled the waves throughout the First World War, their greatest challenge came from just underneath them. Nowhere was this better demonstrated in the Western Approaches, where, as Steve R.
37 min
1580
Michael Belgrave, “Dancing with the King: The R...
In his new book, Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864–1885 (Auckland University Press, 2017), Michael Belgrave, Professor of History at Massey University, tells the story of the negotiations, or diplomatic “dance,
15 min
1581
Simon Kerry, “Lansdowne: The Last Great Whig” (...
Despite having been Foreign Secretary, Secretary of State for War, Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India, Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne is one of the least well known political figures of the 1st rank in...
39 min
1582
Sumita Mukherjee, “Indian Suffragettes: Female ...
In her new book, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford University Press, 2018), Sumita Mukherjee highlights the centrality of Indian women in the fight for the vote in the first half of the twentieth century.
40 min
1583
Adam Kuper, “Anthropology and Anthropologists: ...
Adam Kuper‘s Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth-Century (Fourth Edition; Routledge, 2014) is an excellent, comprehensive tour through one of the most important and influential schools of anthropological theory,
53 min
1584
Lisa Walters, “Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Scie...
As a 17th-century noblewoman who became the first duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish has often been viewed as a royalist and a conservative within the context of the social and political issues of her time.
48 min
1585
James Cook, “Memory Songs: A Personal Journey i...
Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry fr...
44 min
1586
Andre Magnan, “When Wheat Was King: The Rise an...
In When Wheat Was King: The Rise and Fall of the Canada-UK Grain Trade (University of British Columbia Press, 2016), André Magnan connects the cultivation of wheat on the Canadian prairies to the consumption of bread in Britain.
59 min
1587
Tarak Barkawi, “Soldiers of Empire: Indian and ...
Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to rethink the way we understand the relationships between armies and societies.
37 min
1588
Kate Skinner, “The Fruits of Freedom in British...
In her book, The Fruits of Freedom in British Togoland: Literacy, Politics and Nationalism, 1914-2014 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Kate Skinner examines the history behind the failed project that sought the reunification of Togoland.
59 min
1589
John Nathaniel Clarke, “British Media and the R...
It seems safe to assume that media coverage changes the behavior of politicians and voters. And it seems safe to assume this happens in cases of humanitarian crisis. But it’s really hard to go beyond these platitudes to determine exactly how this feed...
70 min
1590
Leah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu, “Minority Women...
What is the impact of austerity on minority women? How has this impacted on already long standing forms of social inequality across England, France and Scotland? These questions are the subject of Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance i...
39 min
1591
Catherine Layton, “The Life and Times of Mary, ...
As the thrice-married widow of one of the richest dukes in Victorian Britain, Mary Mitchell lived a life often at variance with the expectations of propriety for her time. In The Life and Times of Mary, Dowager Duchess of Sutherland (Cambridge Scholars...
57 min
1592
Aidan Forth, “Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’...
In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global network of camps established by Britain in the late nin...
66 min
1593
Lisa Ze Winters, “The Mulatta Concubine: Terror...
Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions o...
36 min
1594
David Atkinson, “The Burden of White Supremacy:...
Recent historical scholarship stresses the transnational linkages between movements to restrict Asian migration in the Anglophone world. David Atkinson’s The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United Sta...
69 min
1595
Karen Teoh, “Schooling Diaspora: Women, Educati...
In Schooling Diaspora: Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s to 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2018), Karen Teoh relates the history of English and Chinese girls’ schools that overseas Chinese founded and at...
33 min
1596
Steven Gray, “Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, ...
In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal role of coal in the Royal Navy, during the short-lived but crucial “age of steam.
67 min
1597
Carolyn Day, “Consumptive Chic: A History of Be...
In her new book, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (Bloomsbury, 2017), Carolyn Day tracks the relationship between dress, appearance, and tuberculosis in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
50 min
1598
June Purvis, “Christabel Pankhurst: A Biography...
Despite her prominent role in the women’s suffrage movement in Great Britain, Christabel Pankhurst has not received the same degree of attention from scholars that had been given to her mother Emmeline or her sister Sylvia.
37 min
1599
Alex Wade, “Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s Brit...
In his book Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Alex Wade examines the culture of bedroom coding, arcades, and format wars in 1980s Britain. Wade interviews gamers,
48 min
1600
Marcus Rediker, “The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The...
In the annals of abolitionist history, names like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the Grimke sisters, and Harriet Tubman are well known. Dr. Marcus Rediker‘s new book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolut...
59 min