The award-winning author Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History at the University of Texas. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (Basic Books, 2017) is a biography of the riveting life of Lu...

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.

With the rise of the #MeToo movement following dozens of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and assault by professional men against women colleagues, gender equality has become a popular topic of discussion and a policy goal.

In Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (University of California Press, 2018), Nicole Von Germeten explains the most important changes, in both ideas and practices, over three centuries of commercial sex in New Spain.

Beginning with a discussion about Black Lives Matter may seem like an unlikely place to start a book about nineteenth century science and culture. However, by contrasting Black lives with White feelings, Kyla Schuller sets up the central conflict of he...

What sort of inequalities characterize classical music today? In Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work: The Classical Music Profession (Routledge, 2018), Christina Scharff, a senior lecturer in culture, media and creative industries in the department...

In her new book, Polly Plum: A Firm and Earnest Woman’s Advocate, Mary Ann Colclough, 1836–1885 (Otago University Press, 2017), Jenny Coleman, a senior lecturer and Director of Academic Programmes in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Mas...

Labeled in history as “mad,” Juana of Castile was in fact a complex figure whose sometimes emotional nature was exploited by the men around her as a way of limiting her ability to exercise her power as queen. Gillian B.

Veiled Superheroes: Islam, Feminism, and Popular Culture (Lexington Books, 2017) by Sophia Rose Arjana (with Kim Fox), takes us on a riveting journey through the world of superheroes and villains from the streets of New York to Pakistan.

In Schoolhouse Wreck: The Betsy DeVos Story (Strong Arm Press, 2018), Jason Linkins delivers a searing critique of controversial Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The book tracks the DeVos family’s accumulation of wealth through ...

In her book, Ugly Prey: An Innocent Woman and the Death Sentence That Scandalized Jazz Age Chicago (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi presents the story of Sabella Nitti, an Italian immigrant arrested in 1923 an accused of murdering ...

How can war change women’s political mobilization? Using Rwanda and Bosnia as case studies Marie E. Berry answers these questions and more in her powerful new book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia Herzegovina (...

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...

Keisha N. Blain teaches African American and gender and women’s history at the University of Pittsburg. Her book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press,

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...

In Germany, beginning in the 1960s, a major population shift took place. The reason for it was the German guest worker program. Due to the German ‘economic miracle,’ the country was in growing need of cheap labor,

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...

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, her work was dismissed as derivate and was eras...

Modeled on Bad Girls of Japan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Bad Girls of the Arab World (University of Texas Press, 2017), edited by Nadia Yaqub and the late Rula Quawas stands apart from the edited volume crowd. It includes, not only academic entries,

Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytical and editorial voice when he was writing some of his ...

In her new book, Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (SUNY Press, 2017), Debarati Sen analyzes the paradoxes and promises of Fair Trade-organic tea production in Darjeeling, India.

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.

As a believer in free thought, a campaigner for women’s rights, and as a supporter of abolition, Ernestine Rose had no shortage of causes to advocate. In The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (Oxford University Pr...

Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, in its numerous manifestations, continues to exert profound influence on the Jewish world, even as it undergoes pressure to change from both within and without. In Jewish Radical Ultra-Orthodoxy Confronts Modernity, Zionism,

Today we talked to Dr. Anna Muller about her latest book, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University Press, 2017). Using archival research as well as oral interviews with many of the women in her book,