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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1601
Antony G. Hopkins, “American Empire: A Global H...
In an expansive, engrossing, voluminously in depth analysis of the subject, Professor A. G. Hopkins, Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, one of the foremost historians of the 19th- and 20th-century British Empire,...
70 min
1602
Daniel Livesay, “Children of Uncertain Fortune:...
Many were wealthy, but others were destitute. Many traveled to Britain to be educated, some returned to Jamaica, others went to India to seek careers and fortunes. They were members of families, with all of the struggle, drama,
50 min
1603
Sadek Hamid, “Sufis, Salafis and Islamists: The...
In Sufis, Salafis and Islamists: The Contested Grounds of British Islamic Activism (I.B. Tauris, 2016), Sadek Hamid explores the contours of “Islamic activism”—and indeed the meaning of this key term—in the context of the UK.
66 min
1604
Jean R. Freedman, “Peggy Seeger: A Life of Musi...
When folklorist Jean Freedman first met Peggy Seeger in 1979, Freedman was an undergraduate on her junior year abroad in London, while her American compatriot had been living in the UK for two decades. Their encounter took place in the Singers’ Club,
64 min
1605
Anthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and...
On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the significant efforts of the field’s founder,
50 min
1606
John Broich, “Squadron: Ending the African Slav...
Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activities in the Atlantic World.
30 min
1607
Taisu Zhang, “The Laws and Economics of Confuci...
Taisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press,
56 min
1608
David Narrett, “Adventurism and Empire” (UNC Pr...
In his new book, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), David Narrett explores the international political and diplomatic competition for control of t...
55 min
1609
Timothy J. Shannon, “Indian Captive, Indian Kin...
In 1758, Peter Williamson appeared on the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, dressed as a Native American and telling a remarkable tale. He claimed that as a young boy he had been kidnapped from the city and sold into slavery in America.
58 min
1610
Mark G. Hanna, “Pirate Nests and the Rise of th...
Mark G. Hanna offers a unique perspective on the roles played by piracy in the formation of the British colonial project. In Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570 to 1740 (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute o...
55 min
1611
James Delbourgo, “Collecting the World: The Lif...
James Delbourgo‘s new book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Allen Lane, 2017) tells the fascinatingly complex and controversial story of Hans Sloane, the man whose collection and last will laid the foundation for the British...
90 min
1612
Brian Jenkins, “Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Ag...
Described upon his death in 1887 as the ideal diplomatist, Richard Lyons served Great Britain in a variety of roles over the course of a long and distinguished career. In Lord Lyons: A Diplomat in an Age of Nationalism and War (McGill-Queen’s Universit...
54 min
1613
Sasha Turner, “Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Chi...
Sasha Turner’s Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Child-Rearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) reveals enslaved women’s contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children in plantation-era Jamaica. Turner argues that,
41 min
1614
Emily C. Nacol, “An Age of Risk: Politics and E...
Emily C. Nacol has written a fascinating interrogation of the idea of risk, the concept of vulnerability, and the evolution of probabilistic thinking as conceived of and explored by four of the preeminent British thinkers of the seventeenth and eightee...
39 min
1615
David Cannadine, “Victorious Century: The Unite...
Sir David Cannadine, Professor of History at Princeton University, president of the British Academy, and the general editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, narrates the century of Pax Britannica in the Victorious Century: The United Kin...
41 min
1616
Angus McLaren, “Playboys and Mayfair Men: Crime...
In December of 1937, four men robbed a representative of the diamond company Cartier of eight diamond rings in the Hyde Park Hotel. What made this crime unique was the identity of the perpetrators: all four men were from well-respected,
41 min
1617
Monica Mattfeld, “Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-...
Monica Mattfeld’s Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Penn State University Press, 2017) explores the complex relationship between men and their horses, and reflects upon how these interactions defined a man’s gen...
30 min
1618
Ray Cashman, “Packy Jim: Folklore and Worldview...
How do individuals on national or societal peripheries make use of tradition and to what ends? How can narratives discursively construct a complex worldview? These are some of the questions Ray Cashman seeks to answer in his new book Packy Jim: Folklor...
68 min
1619
Randy M. Browne, “Surviving Slavery in the Brit...
Randy M. Browne in Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) uses the overlooked archives of the fiscal, a legal legacy from Dutch colonialism, and protector of slaves to reveal the political dynamics of slaver...
48 min
1620
Crawford Gribben, “John Owen and English Purita...
Though the preeminent English theologian of the 17th century, there is much about John Owen’s life which remains obscured to us today. One of the achievements of Crawford Gribben‘s new book John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxfor...
48 min
1621
Sheshalatha Reddy, “British Empire and the Lite...
Sheshalatha Reddy’s British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellions in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Sep...
36 min
1622
David G. Morgan-Owen, “The Fear of Invasion: St...
David Morgan-Owen‘s The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2017) tells a complex story clearly and concisely. In the decades prior to the Great War,
49 min
1623
Padraic Scanlan, “Freedom’s Debtors: British An...
What was the British abolition of the slave trade like in practice? Padraic Scanlan, in his beautifully-written first book, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2017),
74 min
1624
Jenny Natasha and Tom Boniface-Webb, “I Was Bri...
I Was Britpopped: The A-Z of Britpop (Valley Press, 2017) is a comprehensive guide to the people, the bands, the places, and the events that shaped British music in the mid-to-late 1990s. Taking on the form of a A-Z guide,
60 min
1625
Jack Greene, “Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A S...
Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is the most recent work from distinguished historian Jack Greene. Using a treasure trove of records from the middle of the eighteenth century,
55 min