New Books in British Studies
1,231 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 2 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Britain about their New Books
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Episodes
Kirsty Sedgman, “Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales” (Intellect Books 2016)
November 19, 2016 19:26 - 41 minutesThe value of the arts is a constant and vital question in contemporary culture. In Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (Intellect Books, 2016) Kirsty Sedgman, British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, approaches this question from the point of view of the audience. The book offers an introduction to the question of what an audience is, as well as thinking through the best methods to study the audience, before turning to the story of Nati...
Colin Holmes, “Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce” (Routledge, 2016)
November 18, 2016 22:29 - 51 minutesDuring the Second World War millions of Britons tuned in nightly to hear the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw coming from Nazi Germany. Though the label was broadly applied to a number of English-speaking broadcasters, it was most famously associated with William Joyce. In Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce (Routledge, 2016), Colin Holmes provides a study of Joyce’s life that unravels many of the mysteries and misconceptions surrounding it. He chronicles Joyce’s early ...
Marc Steinberg, “England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution” (U. of Chicago Press, 2016)
November 14, 2016 11:05 - 51 minutesMarc Steinberg is a professor of sociology at Smith College. His latest book, England’s Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a response to Karl Polyani’s vision of an emerging modern labor market in The Great Transformation. Steinberg complicates our understanding of changing power relations by examining how workers were contracted to their employers. The book is centered around three case studies of employers using draconian m...
John Bew, “Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain” (Oxford UP, 2017)
October 28, 2016 17:32 - 1 hourAs Labour Party leader, member of Winston Churchill’s governing coalition during the Second World War, and prime minister of the epochal postwar government that established the welfare state, Clement Attlee played a decisive role in the history of modern Britain. In Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 2017; published in the UK as Citizen Clem), John Bew recounts the life and career of this modest yet deeply patriotic individual who dedicated his life to i...
Jack Hamilton, “Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination” (Harvard UP, 2016)
October 11, 2016 22:00 - 1 hourIn Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2016), Jack Hamilton examines major American and British recording artists of the 1960s to explain what happened during the decade to turn rock-n-roll white. By pairing musicians such as Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan or The Beatles and Motown, Hamilton explores the connections among artists and how artists influenced each other across racial and musical distinctions. Hamilton’s well-researched text seeks to...
Carina E. Ray, “Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana” (Ohio UP, 2015)
October 07, 2016 21:36 - 59 minutesIn Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015), Carina E. Ray interrogates the intersections of race, marriage, gender and empire in this thought-provoking study that challenges the notion of identity and the politics that surround it. Ray plumbs the depth of an array of archival material, which includes travel narratives, visual sources, administrative records, wills, and personal and official correspondence. She also c...
Christopher Woolgar, “The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500” (Yale UP, 2016)
September 30, 2016 18:40 - 57 minutesFood was central to the lives of people in England during the Middle Ages in ways different than it is today. As Christopher Woolgar reveals in his book The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (Yale University Press, 2016), it had a cultural significance that permeated nearly aspect of their society. Using a vast range of legal, archaeological, and literary sources, he explains what the English ate during the late Middle Ages, how they ate it, and what their food meant to them. The choices ...
Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, “Consumption and the Country House” (Oxford UP, 2016)
September 11, 2016 21:37 - 58 minutesDuring the 18th century English country houses served an important function in their society as stages for the display of the status and power of the landed aristocracy. As Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery demonstrate in Consumption and the Country House(Oxford University Press, 2016), though, they also played a revealing role as centers of consumption. Using three aristocratic families from the Midlands as case studies, Stobart and Rothery survey their patterns of spending over several generatio...
Marc-William Palen, “The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
August 30, 2016 19:21 - 41 minutesAccounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Marc-William Palen challenges this commonplace. Instead, he notes, American adherents to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy faced off against and ultimately lost to a powerful version of pr...
William Cavert, “The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
August 29, 2016 18:29 - 53 minutesAir pollution may seem to be a problem uniquely of the modern age, but in fact it is one that has bedeviled people throughout history. In his book The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016), William Cavert examines how Londoners first grappled with the problem of air pollution created by the burning of coal. With concerns expressed for the dwindling supply of wood in England, Londoners in the 16th and 17th centuries increasingly tur...
Anne Mac Lellan, “Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor” (Irish Academic Press, 2014)
August 25, 2016 09:45 - 58 minutesAmong the achievements of Irish medicine in the twentieth century was ending the persistent epidemic of tuberculosis throughout the island, and one of the central figures in that effort was Dorothy Stopford Price. In her book Dorothy Stopford Price: Rebel Doctor (Irish Academic Press, 2014), Anne Mac Lellan provides readers with an account of the life of a pioneering MD and medical researcher. The daughter of an Anglo-Irish family, she trained as a doctor while Ireland participated in a world...
Anders Ingram, “Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England” (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015)
August 22, 2016 14:29 - 57 minutesYou read a lot about “Orientalism,” that is, the often odd ways in which Westerners tried to understand predominantly Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. You don’t read a lot about good Western scholarship on predominately Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. All of which is to say we tend to focus on how Europeans got the Middle East wrong, not how the got it right. But, as Anders Ingram points out in his excellent new book Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England (Palg...
Robert O’Kell, “Disraeli: The Romance of Politics” (U. of Toronto Press, 2014)
August 11, 2016 21:40 - 1 hourBenjamin Disraeli was unique among British prime ministers in the 19th century in many ways, but perhaps none more so than for his career as a novelist. Whereas many scholars have treated Disraeli’s literary endeavors as an aberration born of financial necessity, in his book Disraeli: The Romance of Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2014), Robert O’Kell presents the novels as key to understanding his inner life and how he conceptualized his political career. Beginning with his participat...
Patricia McCarthy, “Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland” (Paul Mellon Centre, 2016)
July 16, 2016 20:58 - 1 hourIn the early 18th century, country houses in Ireland underwent a dramatic physical transformation. In her book Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland (Paul Mellon Centre, 2016), Patricia McCarthy describes the course of this evolution, as the Palladian style turned aristocratic domiciles in rural Ireland from fortified buildings into elegant structures with columns, porticos, and other classically-influenced touches. From there she goes on to describe the interiors of the homes, the fu...
Dermot Meleady, “John Redmond: The National Leader” (Merrion Press, 2014)
July 08, 2016 10:00 - 1 hourThough in many ways the forgotten man of Irish politics, John Redmond came closer to achieving the long-sought goal of Home Rule for Ireland than had his more illustrious predecessors Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. In John Redmond: The National Leader (Merrion Press, 2014), Dermot Meleady describes how Redmond led the Irish Parliamentary Party to the cusp of this political victory and how it came apart for him. Picking up where his previous volume, Redmond: The Parnellite left ...
Adam Mendelsohn, “The Rag Race” (NYU Press, 2015)
July 05, 2016 00:00 - 30 minutesIn The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York University Press, 2015), Adam Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape Town, embarks on a comparative exploration of Jews in the rag (or clothing) trade in the British Empire and the U.S. Differences within the garment industries in, for example, London and New York, explain the divergence in social and economic outcomes for Jews in each setting. Mendelsohn’s narrative ...
Les Back, “Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters” (Goldsmiths Press, 2016)
June 23, 2016 18:05 - 40 minutesWhy does higher education still matter? In Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters, Les Back, a professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, offers a series of reflections framed by the time of the academic year. The first book from Goldsmiths Press, Academic Diary consists of short entries that think through the problems of university management, defend the idea of scholarship, and consider what ideas of being ‘honored’ as an academic might mean. Other ...
Steve Kemper, “A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham” (W. W. Norton, 2016)
June 13, 2016 12:41 - 32 minutesIn A Splendid Savage: The Restless Life of Frederick Russell Burnham (W. W. Norton, 2016), freelance journalist Steve Kemper details the adventurous, wandering life of the man who later inspired the creation of the Boy Scouts. Tracking Burnham’s journeys from the American frontier all the way to Africa, Kemper vividly unpacks this story of this exciting life, setting it in historical context and analyzing its ambiguities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ...
Daniel Tilles, “British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-1940” (Bloomsburg, 2015)
June 06, 2016 00:00 - 33 minutesIn British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-1940 (Bloomsbury, 2015), Daniel Tilles, Assistant Professor of History at the Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland, examines the use of antisemitism by Britain’s interwar fascists and the ways in which the country’s Jews reacted to this. Tilles challenges existing conceptions of the antisemitism of the British Union of Fascists, demonstrating that it was a far more central aspect of the party’s ideology than has previously been as...
Douglas Clark, “Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943)” (Earnshaw Books, 2016)
April 11, 2016 18:11 - 1 hourDouglas Clark’s new Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943) (Earnshaw Books Limited, 2016) is a three-volume study of extraterritoriality and its transnational histories as it shaped modern China and Japan. Clark is both historian and master storyteller in this work, crafting a study moves readers chronologically through a story of extraterritoriality from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, while introducing some a...
Emma Jackson, “Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility” (Routledge, 2015)
April 08, 2016 14:00 - 36 minutesWhat is the experience of young homeless people? What does this experience tell us about space, place and society? In Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility (Routledge, 2015), Dr. Emma Jackson, a lecturer in the Sociology Department of Goldsmith’s College, University of London, employs an ethnographic approach to understand young people’s experience of homelessness in contemporary London. The book is rich with the stories and experiences of young people, based around a day c...
James Nott, “Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960” (Oxford UP, 2016)
March 02, 2016 16:57 - 1 hourIn his new book Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960 (Oxford University Press, 2016), cultural historian James Nott charts the untold history of dancing and dance halls in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. This exploration reveals the transformations of working-class communities, and of the changing notions of femininity, masculinity and leisure that occur in this period. To do so, Nott navigates us skillfully be...
Kennetta H. Perry, “London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford UP, 2015)
March 02, 2016 16:28 - 1 hourBetween the late 1940s and the early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of people from the British Commonwealth migrated the United Kingdom with plans to settle and find work. Kennetta Hammond Perry‘s new book, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015), is a political history of postwar Caribbean migration. Perry shifts our attention away from the response of white Britons and focuses it instead on the politics of black Caribbea...
Nicola Rollock et al. “The Colour of Class: The Educational Strategies of the Black Middle Classes” (Routledge, 2014)
February 22, 2016 15:01 - 53 minutesThe experience of the African American middle class has been an important area of research in the USA. However, the British experience has, by comparison, not been subject to the same amount of attention, particularly with regard to the middle class experience of education. Dr. Nicola Rollock, Deputy Director, Centre for Research in Race & Education and Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham’s School of Education, along with her co-authors, explores this under researched area in The ...
Jessica Parr, “Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon” (UP of Mississippi, 2015)
February 22, 2016 14:01 - 56 minutesGeorge Whitefield was a complex man driven by a simple idea, the new birth that brought salvation. Because of such passion, Whitefield received both enthusiastic support, preaching to audiences numbering in the thousands, and bitter criticism for violating religious doctrine or political convention. As such, Whitefield remains someone who continues to stir debate and devotion even to this day. In her fascinating new book, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Reli...
Caroline Shaw, “Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief” (Oxford UP, 2015)
February 16, 2016 13:38 - 1 hourPublished in October 2015, Caroline Shaw‘s timely new book, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford University Press, 2015), traces the intertwined development of the category of refugee and of the moral commitment of Britons to providing refuge for persecuted foreigners. By confidently working across a range of methods and geopolitical contexts, Shaw shows how the refugee category became “potentially universal in scope,” thanks to the de...
Carin Berkowitz, “Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform” (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
February 16, 2016 11:18 - 1 hourCarin Berkowitz‘s new book takes readers into the world of nineteenth century London to explore the landscape of medicine and surgery along with Charles Bell, artist-anatomist-teacher-natural philosopher. Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2015) looks closely at the involvement of Bell and others in a project of conservative reform in nineteenth century British medical education. We follow Berkowitz not only into the pages of the works that made Bell famous, ...
Ellen Boucher, “Empire’s Children” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
May 01, 2015 11:41 - 55 minutesFor almost 100 years, it seemed like a good, even wholesome and optimistic idea to take young, working-class and poor British children and resettle them, quite on their own and apart from their families, in Canada, Australia, and southern Rhodesia. The impulse behind this program was philanthropic: to bring disadvantaged children living in crowded cities a better future by settling them in pristine, wide-open spaces, introducing them to nature, and letting them feel the sun on their backs. Ye...
Richard Yeo, “Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
May 14, 2014 10:42 - 1 hourDuring the Great Fire of London in September 1666, Samuel Pepys went out to the garden and dug some holes. There he placed his documents, some wine, and “my parmezan cheese” for safekeeping as the buildings and streets of his city were licked and then consumed by flames. We know this thanks to a diary in which he recorded these burnings and burials. In his new book, Richard Yeo contextualizes the diary-keeping and document-organizing practices of men like Pepys within a rich, detailed account...
Deborah Cohen, “Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain” (Oxford UP, 2013)
February 14, 2014 13:37 - 53 minutesIn her previous book, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Yale University Press, 2006), Deborah Cohen took us into the homes of Britons and examined their relation to their habitat and its artifacts from 1830 onwards. In her new book, Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (Oxford... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
Jonathan Green, “Green’s Dictionary of Slang” (Hodder Education, 2010)
January 26, 2012 15:55 - 57 minutesOver the last thirty years, Jonathon Green has established himself as a major figure in lexicography, specialising in English slang. During this time he has accumulated a database of over half a million citations for more than 100,000 words and phrases, and these are the basis for the vast, authoritative and widely acclaimed Green’s Dictionary of Slang (Hodder Education, 2010), winner of the Dartmouth Medal as the American Library Association’s ‘outstanding reference work of the year’. Slang...