New Books in British Studies
1,231 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Britain about their New Books
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Kimberly Anne Coles, "Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
July 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourKimberly Anne Coles is Professor of English at the University of Maryland; her first book, Religion, Reform and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2008. Her work has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center, the Warburg Institute, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Today, we are discussing Bad Humor: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. In Bad Humo...
Richard Middleton, "Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World" (Yale UP, 2022)
July 29, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourCharles, First Marquis of Cornwallis (1738-1805), was a leading figure in late eighteenth-century Britain. His career spanned the American War of Independence, Irish Union, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the building of the Second British Empire in India--and he has long been associated with the unacceptable face of Britain's colonial past. In Cornwallis: Soldier and Statesman in a Revolutionary World (Yale UP, 2022), Richard Middleton shows that this portrait is far from accurate. Cornwa...
Lachlan Fleetwood, "Science on the Roof of the World: Empire and the Remaking of the Himalaya" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
July 28, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesToday, the idea that the Himalayas have the world’s tallest peaks—by a large margin—is entirely uncontroversial. Just about anyone can name Mount Everest and K2 as the world’s tallest and second-tallest mountains respectively. But the idea that this mountain range had the highest summits used to be quite controversial. Mountaineers claimed that the Himalayas could not be taller than peaks in Europe or South America, like Ecuador’s Chimborazo. Even when it was proven that the Himalayas were ta...
Culturally Competent Health Care, Equality in Health Care: The Case of Muslims and Jews in the UK
July 27, 2022 08:00 - 29 minutesThe health care sector frequently emphasizes “Cultural competence”, an elastic concept that stretches from the simplest recognition of diversity of patient populations, to include policy implications of patients’ overall worldviews re the body, health, and decision-making. The issue, highlighted again in the recent U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision, gained prominence during Covid-19 pandemic, with the challenge of so-called marginal groups’ access to and compliance with vaccination program...
Nic Maclellan, "Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests" (ANU Press, 2017)
July 27, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourNic Maclellan's book Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests (ANU Press, 2017) is a history of Britain’s 1950s program to test the hydrogen bomb, code name Operation Grapple. In 1957–58, nine atmospheric nuclear tests were held at Malden Island and Christmas Island—today, part of the Pacific nation of Kiribati. Nearly 14,000 troops travelled to the central Pacific for the UK nuclear testing program—many are still living with the health and environmental consequences. Based on ...
Maeve Ryan, "Humanitarian Governance and the British Antislavery World System" (Yale UP, 2022)
July 25, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourMaeve Ryan’s new book Humanitarian Governance and the British Antislavery World System (Yale UP, 2022) highlights Britain’s early-nineteenth-century, Royal Navy seizures of slave ships and the processes involved in the “liberation” of these enslaved Africans. Nearly two hundred thousand Africans were resettled throughout the British Empire from Sierra Leone to St Helena, the British West Indies, and by treaties to Cuba and Brazil. From 1808 to the end of the Atlantic slave trade, abolitionist...
David Brown, "Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land During the British Civil Wars" (Manchester UP, 2020)
July 22, 2022 08:00 - 45 minutesIn Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land During the British Civil Wars (Manchester UP, 2020), Dr. David Brown examines the transformation of England's trade and government finances in the mid-seventeenth century, a revolution that destroyed Ireland. In 1642 a small group of merchants, the 'Adventurers for Irish land', raised an army to conquer Ireland but sent it instead to fight for parliament in England. Meeting secretly at Grocers Hall in London from 1642 t...
David D. Dworak, "War of Supply: World War II Allied Logistics in the Mediterranean" (UP of Kentucky Press, 2022)
July 21, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesThe era of modern warfare introduced in World War II presented the Allied Powers with one of the more complicated logistical challenges of the century: how to develop an extensive support network that could supply and maintain a vast military force comprised of multiple services and many different nations thousands of miles away from their home ports. The need to keep tanks rolling, airplanes flying, and food and aid in continuous supply was paramount to defeating the Nazi regime. In War of S...
Melanie Bell, "Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema" (U Illinois Press, 2021)
July 19, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesWhere are the women in the history of British cinema? In Movie Workers: The Women Who Made British Cinema (U Illinois Press, 2021), Melanie Bell, a Professor of Film History at the University of Leeds, answers this question with a fascinating and compelling narrative telling the forgotten history of women as workers in the film industry. Drawing on union records and oral histories, as well as a wealth of historical knowledge and analysis, the book highlights women’s key contributions from the...
Donovan Sherman, "The Philosopher's Toothache: Embodied Stoicism in Early Modern English Drama" (Northwestern UP, 2021)
July 15, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, Leonato says, “I pray thee peace; I will be flesh and blood. / For there was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently, / However they have writ the style of gods / And make a push at chance and sufferance.” These lines serve as the inspiration for the title of a new book from today’s guest, Donovan Sherman. The Philosopher's Toothache: Embodied Stoicism in Early Modern English Drama, was published by Northwestern Univers...
Veronica S. W. Mak, "Milk Craze: Body, Science, and Hope in China" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
July 14, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesVeronika Mak’s Milk Craze: Body, Science, and Hope in China (U of Hawaii Press, 2021) mixes historical and ethnographic research on milk to understand the morality politics of class, labor, and identity in modern Hong Kong and the Shunde area of Guangdong. Beginning with the historical “milkscapes” of ancient China, Mak’s book explores the influence of British colonization on dairy culture in Hong Kong; the role of governments and corporations in making China one of the world’s largest produc...
Jed Esty, "The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits" (Stanford Briefs, 2022)
July 13, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAs the US becomes a second-place nation, can it shed the superpower nostalgia that still haunts the UK? The debate over the US's fading hegemony has raged and sputtered for 50 years, glutting the market with prophecies about American decline. Media experts ask how fast we will fall and how much we will lose, but generally ignore the fundamental question: What does decline mean? What is the significance, in experiential and everyday terms, in feelings and fantasies, of living in a country past...
Niall Whelehan, "Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War" (NYU Press, 2021)
July 13, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesNiall Whelehan is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde, where he focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and themes of migration, political violence, nationalism and radicalism, mainly relating to Ireland and the Irish diapsora. In this interview he discusses his new book Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War (NYU Press, 2021), which examines radical networks in Ireland and Irish migrant communities in Scotland, England, the United States a...
Keith Thomson, "Born to Be Hanged: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates Who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune" (Little Brown, 2022)
July 13, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesThe year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than three hundred daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island. The plan: to wreak havoc on the Pacific coastline, raiding cities, mines, and merchant ships. The booty: the bright gleam of Spanish gold and the chance to become legends. So begins one of the greatest piratical adventures of the era—a story not given its full due until...
Nick Higham, "The Mercenary River: Private Greed, Public Good--A History of London's Water" (Headline, 2022)
July 13, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesNo city can survive without water, and lots of it. Today we take the stuff for granted: turn a tap and it gushes out. But it wasn’t always so. For centuries London, one of the largest and richest cities in the world, struggled to supply its citizens with reliable, clean water. In The Mercenary River: Private Greed, Public Good--A History of London's Water (Headline, 2022), Nick Higham tells the story of that struggle from the middle ages to the present day. Based on new research, Higham tells...
Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones, "Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations and the 1954 Indochina Crisis" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
July 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn the spring of 1954, after eight years of bitter fighting, the war in Vietnam between the French and the communist-led Vietminh came to a head. With French forces reeling, the United States planned to intervene militarily to shore-up the anti-communist position. Turning to its allies for support, first and foremost Great Britain, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to create what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called a "united action" coalition. In the event, Winston...
Colin Copus, "In Defence of Councillors" (Manchester UP, 2021)
July 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Defence of Councillors (Manchester UP, 2021) is an unashamed defence of local representative democracy and of those elected to serve as councillors from the often ill-informed, ill-judged and inaccurate criticism made by the media, government and public, of councillors' personal, political and professional roles. By using qualitative research from a number of related projects, the book examines the roles, functions and responsibilities of councillors and the expectations placed upon them b...
Spenser and Race: A Discussion with Dennis Austin Britton and Kimberly Anne Coles
July 12, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s guests are Dennis Austin Britton and Kimberly Anne Coles who have co-edited a special issue of Spenser Studies in 2021, on “Spenser and Race.” Dennis is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia; his previous book Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance, was published through Fordham University Press in 2014. Dennis is the former board president of the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire. Kim is Professor of English at the U...
Tony Hall, "Great Trees of Britain and Ireland: Over 70 of the Best Ancient Avenues, Forests and Trees to Visit" (Kew Publications, 2022)
July 11, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesBoasting Europe's largest number of ancient oaks and yews, Britain and Ireland are home to forests that can be traced back for centuries, feature amazing avenues lined with trees hundreds of years old, and include some truly majestic individual trees. Tony Hall is Head of the Arboretum at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In Great Trees of Britain and Ireland (Kew Publications, 2022) he profiles over 70 of our amazing ancient trees, avenues and forests, revealing their locations across Britain ...
Alexandra Apolloni, "Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop" (Oxford UP, 2021)
July 11, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourFreedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Alexandra M. Apolloni is about how the vocal performances of girl singers in 1960s Britain defined—and sometimes defied—ideas about what it meant to be a young woman. Apolloni takes a case study approach to tease out many different strands of the nature of femininity in 1960s Britain, but she tackles much more than gender in this book. She also considers larger public conversations about authenticity, ra...
Sarah Fox, "Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England" (U London Press, 2022)
July 07, 2022 08:00 - 39 minutesSarah Fox's fascinating new book Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England (U London Press, 2022) rewrites all that we know about eighteenth-century childbirth by placing women’s voices at the center of the story. Examining childbirth from the perspective of the birthing woman, this research offers new perspectives on the history of the family, the social history of medicine, community and neighborhood studies, and the study of women’s lives in eighteenth-century England. From “quickening” t...
Ricardo A. Herrera, "Feeding Washington's Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778" (UNC Press, 2022)
July 07, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn Feeding Washington's Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Dr. Ricardo Herrera presents a major new history of the Continental Army’s Grand Forage of 1778. Dr. Herrera uncovers what daily life was like for soldiers during the darkest and coldest days of the American Revolution: the Valley Forge winter. Here, the army launched its largest and riskiest operation—not a bloody battle against British forces but a campaign to feed itself and ...
Leila Neti, "Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
July 06, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesSituated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies and post-colonialism, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2021) draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relationship between the shared cultural logic of law and literature, and considers how this inflected colonial sociality. Leila Neti approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances ...
Drew Daniel, "Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
July 06, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourAdvisory: this episode discusses the literary representation of self-harm and suicide, in particular, how writers such as Shakespeare and Milton often treated the subject in unserious or trivializing ways. In 1643, the writer Thomas Browne introduced the word “suicide” into the English language. Eventually, “suicide” would become a monolith in how we think about self-harm and self-killing. “Suicide” has come to represent an individualizing, pathologizing way of looking at people who contempla...
Nick Sharman, "Britain’s Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power| (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
July 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourBased on five years of archival research, Britain's Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power offers a radical reinterpretation of Britain and Spain’s relationship during the growth, apogee and decline of the British Empire. It shows that from the early nineteenth century Britain turned Spain into an ‘informal’ colony, using its economic and military dominance to achieve its strategic and economic ends. Britain’s free trade campaign, which aimed to tear...
Annette G. Aubert and Zachary Purvis, "Transatlantic Religion: Europe, America, and the Making of Modern Christianity" (Brill, 2021)
July 05, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutesAnnette G. Aubert and Zachary Purvis' edited volume Transatlantic Religion: Europe, America, and the Making of Modern Christianity (Brill, 2021) offers a new perspective on nineteenth-century American Christianity that takes into account the century’s major transformations in politics, philosophy, education, and religious doctrine. The book includes previously unexamined material to explain the influences of European ideas on the intellectual diversity and cultural specifics of American Chris...
Nilanjana Paul, "Bengal Muslims and Colonial Education, 1854–1947: A Study of Curriculum, Educational Institutions, and Communal Politics" (Routledge, 2022)
July 05, 2022 08:00 - 44 minutesIn this episode, Dr. Nilanjana Paul of the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley speaks about her new monograph, Bengal Muslims and Colonial Education, 1854-1947: A Study of Curriculum, Educational Institutions and Communal Politics (Routledge, 2022). The book is a micro history of the spread of education among Muslims in Colonial Bengal. Dr. Paul discusses the role played by Muslim leaders such as Abdul Latif and Fazlul Huq in the spread of education and examines how segregation in educatio...
James Stafford, "The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
June 30, 2022 08:00 - 46 minutesJames Stafford teaches at Columbia University, where he specializes in the political and intellectual history of Ireland, Britain and Western Europe since 1750, with a particular interest in questions of political economy and international order. In this interview he discusses his new book The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848 (Cambridge UP, 2022), which offers a fresh account of Ireland’s place in European debates about commerce and empire during a global er...
Claire Bellerjeau and Tiffany Yecke Brooks, "Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth" (Lyons Press, 2021)
June 28, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutesToday I talked to Claire Bellerjeau about her book (co-authored with Tiffany Yecke Brooks) Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth (Lyons Press, 2021). In January 1785, a young African American woman named Elizabeth was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth master in just twenty-two years. Leaving behind a small child she had little hope of ever seeing again, Elizabeth was f...
Seán William Gannon, "The Irish Imperial Service: Policing Palestine and Administering the Empire, 1922–1966" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
June 28, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourSeán William Gannon's book The Irish Imperial Service: Policing Palestine and Administering the Empire, 1922–1966 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores Irish participation in the British imperial project after ‘Southern’ Ireland’s independence in 1922. Building on a detailed study of the Irish contribution to the policing of the Palestine Mandate, it examines Irish imperial servants’ twentieth-century transnational careers and assesses the influence of their Irish identities on their experience...
Alan Lane, "The Club on the Edge of Town: A Pandemic Memoir" (Salamander Street, 2022)
June 24, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesWhat happened to arts organisations during the pandemic? In The Club on the Edge of Town: A Pandemic Memoir (Salamander Street, 2022), Alan Lane, Artistic Director of SlungLow, a theatre company based in Leeds in the North of England, explores this question by telling the story of the theatre company and the community in 2020. Beginning from the decision to partner with Britain’s oldest working men’s club, through the lockdown, to the pivot to serving the local area by becoming ‘a non means t...
Mick Conefrey, "Everest 1922: The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World's Highest Mountain" (Pegasus Books, 2022)
June 23, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesIt can be hard to think of Everest as unknown anymore. While it’s certainly a challenge to climb the world’s tallest mountain, someone–with enough time and money–has a good chance of making it to the summit. A potential mountaineer can fly into Kathmandu, travel to a well-stocked base camp, be escorted up a well-trodden route by expert sherpas. There’s even Wifi at the peak. The relative ease of climbing Everest is born from almost a century of attempted expeditions up the mountain, to determ...
Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri, "European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948: Between Contention and Connection" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
June 22, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourEuropean Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918-1948) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) investigates the transnationally connected history of Arab Christian communities in Palestine during the British Mandate (1918-1948) through the lens of the birth of cultural diplomacy. Relying predominantly on unpublished sources, it examines the relationship between European cultural agendas and local identity formation processes and discusses the social and religious transformations of Arab ...
Moses E. Ochonu, "Emirs in London: Subalteran Travel and Nigeria's Modernity" (Indiana UP, 2022)
June 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourEmirs in London: Subalteran Travel and Nigeria's Modernity (Indiana UP, 2022) recounts how Northern Nigerian Muslim aristocrats who traveled to Britain between 1920 and Nigerian independence in 1960 relayed that experience to the Northern Nigerian people. Moses E. Ochonu shows how rather than simply serving as puppets and mouthpieces of the British Empire, these aristocrats leveraged their travel to the heart of the empire to reinforce their positions as imperial cultural brokers, and to tran...
Sarah Irving et al., "'The House of the Priest': A Palestinian Life (1885-1954)" (Brill, 2022)
June 17, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutes'The House of the Priest': A Palestinian Life (1885-1954) (Brill, 2022) presents and discusses the hitherto unpublished and untranslated memoirs of Niqula Khoury, a senior member of the Orthodox Church and Arab nationalist in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. It discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion, diplomacy and identity in the Middle East in the interwar period. This original annotated translation and accompanying articles provide a thorough explicati...
Rizwaan Sabir, "Shadows of Suspicion: Counterterrorism, Muslims and the British Security State" (Pluto Press, 2022)
June 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWhat impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? In The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State (Pluto Press, 2022), Rizwaan Sabir writes compellingly about his own experiences of wrongful arrest, detention and subsequent surveillance, placing these in the broader context of 21st century British counterterrorism practices and the policing of Muslims. Writing publicly for the first time about the traumatising m...
83* Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz on Zadie Smith
June 16, 2022 08:00 - 27 minutesJohn and Elizabeth look back at Recall This Book’s terrific 2019 conversation with Zadie Smith , so you may want to listen to that again before proceeding Elizabeth and John try their best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, authenticity and human sacredness; the “golden ticket” dirty secret behind our hypocritical academic meritocracy; surveillance capitalism as the “biggest capital grab of human experience in history;” and her genealogy of the novel. If we had to sum the day up with ...
Adam Grener, "Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel" (Ohio State UP, 2020)
June 16, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesIn Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (Ohio State UP, 2020), Adam Grener advances a new approach to evaluating realism in fiction by arguing that nineteenth-century literary realism shifted attention to the historical and social dimensions of probability in the period’s literature. In an era in which probability was increasingly defined by statistical concepts of aggregation and abstraction, the realist writers discussed here turned to chance and improbability to ...
Robert McColl Millar, "Sociolinguistic History of Scotland" (Edinburgh UP, 2020)
June 15, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesIn A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Dr. Robert McColl Millar presents the first sociolinguistic history of all languages spoken in Scotland. The book includes analyses from across the country including coverage of Gaelic, Scots, Pictish, British, Norn, Immigrant languages and Scottish Standard English. It also covers four case studies dealing with the birth of a dialect or variety: North East Scots, Scottish Standard English, Shetland Scots and Glasgow...
82* Zadie Smith in Focus (JP)
June 02, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesIn this 2019 episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. The conversation quickly moves through Brexit (oh, the inhumanity!) and what it means to be a London–no, a Northwest London–writer before arriving at her case against identity politics. That case is bolstered by a discussion of Hannah Arendt on the difference between who and what a person is. Zadie and John also touch on the purpose of criticism and why it gets harder to hate as you (middle) age. She reveals an a...
Laura Clancy, "Running the Family Firm: How the Monarchy Manages Its Image and Our Money" (Manchester UP, 2021)
June 02, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesWhy does the monarchy matter? In Running the Family Firm: How the Monarchy Manages Its Image and Our Money (Manchester UP, 2021), Laura Clancy, a Lecturer in Media and Lancaster University, considers the British monarchy in the context of contemporary financialised capitalism, exposing the tensions and contradictions between the public face of royalty and the reality of the infrastructures, labour relations, financial arrangements, and political economies of Britain’s ‘family firm’. The book...
Mary Franklin and Hannah Burton, "She Being Dead Yet Speaketh: The Franklin Family Papers" (Iter Press, 2019)
June 01, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesOn Black Bartholomew's Day--August 24, 1662--nearly two thousand ministers denied the authority of the Church of England and were subsequently removed from their posts. Mary Franklin was the wife of Presbyterian minister Robert Franklin, one of the dissenting ministers ejected from their pulpits and their livings on that day. She recorded the experience of her persecution in the unused pages of her husband's sermon notebook. In 1782--some hundred years after the composition of her grandmother...
Jonathan Saha, "Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
June 01, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutesColonial Myanmar was teeming with animals, both wild and domesticated. Yet few histories have devoted close attention to the importance of animals to British colonial rule in Myanmar. Jonathan Saha’s new book, Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Cambridge UP, 2021), does exactly this. According to Saha, imperialism was an “interspecies affair”. Colonial empires would have been impossible without the human mobilization and management of various animal species to first conquer, ...
Rashna Darius Nicholson, "The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893)" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
June 01, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutesRashna Darius Nicholson’s The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is the first comprehensive study of the Parsi theatre, colonial South and Southeast Asia’s most influential cultural phenomenon and the precursor of the Indian cinema industry. By providing extensive, unpublished information on its first actors, audiences, production methods, and plays, this book traces how the theatre - which was one of the first in th...
Ray Argyle, "Inventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake" (McFarland, 2021)
May 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourInventing Secularism: The Radical Life of George Jacob Holyoake (McFarland, 2021), by Ray Argyle is the first modern biography of the founder of Secularism, describing a transformative figure whose controversial and conflict-filled life helped shape the modern world. Jailed for atheism and disowned by his family, Holyoake came out of an English prison at the age of 25 determined to bring an end to religion’s control over daily life. Ever on the front lines of social reform, Holyoake has been ...
David Swift, "The Identity Myth: Why We Need to Embrace Our Differences to Beat Inequality" (Constable & Robinson, 2022)
May 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn conversations about polarised political issues, phrases like ‘it’s not about race, it’s about class’ have become the perfect way to induce a stalemate. It seems as though the traditional, materialist critique of inequality has been supplanted by a fast-evolving set of reflections on group identity. Mainstream politics makes fast and loose assumptions about the relationship between class and identity, and economic conditions and culture. These assumptions are fodder for the culture wars. In...
Chiara Bonacchi, "Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data" (UCL Press, 2022)
May 27, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutesWhat are the connections between the past and modern politics? In Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data (UCL Press, 2022), Chiara Bonacchi, a Chancellor's Fellow in Heritage, Text and Data Mining and Senior Lecturer in Heritage at History, Classics & Archaeology and Edinburgh Futures Institute at University of Edinburgh, explores the uses of heritage by contemporary populist politics. Drawing on ‘big data’ sources, including Facebook and Twitter, along with a deep ...
James Clark, "The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History" (Yale UP, 2021)
May 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn a mere four years, England’s monastic tradition—one of the richest in all of Europe—came to an end. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, as it’s come to be known, stands in popular consciousness as a token of religious reformation and muscular government. But the Dissolution is wrapped up in partisan narratives that have obscured the role of the religious in their own day, their perception of events, others’ perceptions of them, and the meaning and impact of their demise. In a searching, co...
Shoko Yamada, "Dignity of Labour for African Leaders: The Formation of Education Policy in the British Colonial Office and Achimota School" (Langaa RPCIG, 2018)
May 26, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe Prince of Wales College, Achimota School, opened in 1927 north of Accra in the Gold Coast (Ghana). Achimota was to be a ‘model’ school—but a model of what, exactly? And for whom? Shoko Yamada’s book 'Dignity of Labour' for African Leaders: The Formation of Education Policy in the British Colonial Office and Achimota School (Langaa RPCIG, 2018) delves into the multiple discourses and contested politics that resulted in Achimota. Her careful analysis pulls apart the different strands of Ame...
Jami Rogers, "British Black and Asian Shakespeareans, 1966-2018: Integrating Shakespeare" (Arden Shakespeare, 2022)
May 25, 2022 08:00 - 51 minutesWhat is the hidden history of performers of colour in in British theatre? In British Black and Asian Shakespeareans: Integrating Shakespeare, 1966–2018 (Arden Shakespeare, 2022), Jami Rogers, an honorary fellow at Department of English at University of Warwick, examines this question with one of the most central parts of British theatre and culture- performances of Shakespeare. The book tells a story of discrimination and barriers to success, whilst celebrating career triumphs and demonstrati...